THE BETTER PART
When Jack Raymond left Jerry painting the map red, he was in that curiously ill-used frame of mind which comes to most of us, when a good action--which we have steadily refused to do--becomes imperative, and ceases therefore to have any virtue save the virtue of necessity; when, briefly, we have neither eaten our cake nor have it. He knew perfectly well that sooner or later that day--the later the better to his ill-humour--he would go down to the city, make inquiries concerning that letter, pay for its possession--here the remembrance of those bank-notes, ready for use even on a Sunday, in his pocket-book, came to make him swear inwardly at a coincidence that was too much like fate for freedom--if needful, and then send it to Lady Arbuthnot, he supposed, with a polite little note!
And all because a boy who reminded him of his own boyhood, had made him feel that no other course was open to him--that he was bound to do this thing--or shoot himself for not doing it!
The church-bells had just finished chiming as, on his way to the club, he walked down the Mall; for the main entrance to Government House gave on it, and not on the Garden Mound. In his present evil temper even this triviality annoyed him. Why, in heaven's name, could not Lady Arbuthnot have let him go as he had come? go back to his own life?--to the philosophic peace which had been so pleasant! And now----
What cursed nonsense it was for him to put himself within the reach of disturbing elements!--for they were disturbing. If it could even be of any real use to her--here something in his own thought of her, so beautiful, so good, made him realise his position in regard to her still more clearly. No! despite his respect, and her goodness, it would not take much to make him passionately in love with her again. And would she----?
That was another question; but she had not forgotten!
As he told himself this, she and Lesley Drummond came by in the Government House carriage, and he paused to let it turn in to the church compound.
'We are dreadfully late, I'm afraid,' called the former concernedly. 'Are you coming?'
Was he coming? And she could fret herself over being two minutes late! Good women were really quite incomprehensible, especially in India, where they did so little to deserve the name. The hundred or so, for instance, in church at that present moment--did they do an atom more--no! not half so much as he did--for the good of the world around them, or the Empire--except perhaps in supplying it with sons! Yet there they would be, quite satisfied with themselves. The thought attracted him. He was in no hurry himself to do the thing he knew he must do--in fact, any delay was welcome--so he turned into the church compound also, and stood decorously at the door till the Absolution, which was being given, was over, before slipping into the nearest seat, next to a very stout old lady whose only claim to be considered even a Eurasian was her bonnet. But as he had stood for those brief moments looking over the heads of the bowed congregation, he had noticed, with a sense of the humour of the thing, that the percentage of dark blood in the worshippers could be very fairly gauged by their distance from the white robes of the choir boys! The good lady beside him, however, ended the scale of colour, for the native Christian, pur et simple, was, of course, absorbed by the Mission churches.
And the non-Christian native? There was no sign of him either. No sound of him, no thought even of him from beginning to end! Jack Raymond stood up decorously, and sat down decorously, knelt decorously, and listened decorously, with a sense of unreality, a sense of dislocation from his surroundings, that was not much less keen than Chris Davenant's had been when he listened to the 'Society for the General Good of Peoples' at Hâfiz Ahmad's house. The sermon--a good one in its way--might have been preached in a London suburb, save for this, that beyond a little perfunctory solacing of Eurasian paupers, there was none of the active attempt to carry words into deeds which would have existed in the listeners of a suburban congregation. Absolutely, utterly, none. Not one woman there knew as much as he, the idler, of the hard poverty-stricken lives of the people. Yet these very women, when they went home, would feel themselves accursed as worldlings if they did not district-visit or join the Charity Organisation!