The remark was very characteristic of Colonel Trevor, who was a man who dreaded responsibility and whose sole object in life was to reach safely the time when, his period of command being finished, he could retire on his full pension. He was always haunted by the dread that some carelessness or mistake on his part or that of any of his subordinates might involve him in trouble with his superiors and prevent that happy consummation of his thirty years of Indian service. This fear made him merciless to anyone under him whose conduct might bring the censure of the higher authorities on the innocent head of the Commanding Officer who was in theory responsible for the behaviour of his juniors. It was commonly said in the regiment that he would cheerfully give up his own brother to be hanged to save himself the mildest official reprimand. Perhaps he was not altogether to blame; for he was not his own master in private life. It was hinted that Colonel Trevor commanded the battalion but that Mrs. Trevor commanded him. And unfortunately there was no doubt that this lady interfered privately a good deal in regimental matters, much to the annoyance of the other officers.
Now, relieved of the incubus that had hitherto spoiled his enjoyment of the evening, the Colonel gratefully drank the whiskey and soda brought him by Ross's order and sat down cheerfully to play bridge. He always liked dining in the Mess, where he was a far more important person than he was in his own house.
It did not take Wargrave long to settle down again into the routine of regimental life and the humdrum existence of a small Indian station. But he had never before been quartered in so remote and dull a spot as Rohar. The only distractions it offered besides the shooting and pigsticking were two tennis afternoons weekly, one at the Residency, the other at the Mess. Here the dozen or so Europeans, who knew every line of each other's faces by heart gathered regularly from sheer boredom whether the game amused them or not. Neither Mrs. Trevor nor her bosom-friend Mrs. Baird, the regimental surgeon's better half, ever attempted it; but they invariably attended and sat together, usually talking scandal of Mrs. Norton as she played or chatted with the men. Mrs. Trevor's chief grievance against her was that the General Commanding the Division, when he came to inspect the battalion, took the younger woman in to dinner, for, as her husband the Resident was the Viceroy's representative, she could claim precedence over the wife of a mere regimental commandant. No English village is so full of petty squabbles and malicious gossip as a small Indian station.
Like everyone else in the land Wargrave hated most those terrible hours of the hot weather between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. He and Raymond passed them, like so many thousands of their kind elsewhere, shut up in their comfortless bungalow, which was darkened and closely shuttered to exclude the awful heat and the blinding glare outside. Too hot to read or write, almost to smoke, they lay in long cane chairs, gasping and perspiring freely, while the whining punkah overhead barely stirred the heated air. One exterior window on the windward side of the bungalow was filled with a thick mat of dried and odorous kuskus grass, against which every quarter of an hour the bheestie threw water to wet it thoroughly so that the hot breeze that swept over the burning sand outside might enter cooled by the evaporation of the water.
But Frank found alleviation and comfort in frequent visits to the Residency, where Mrs. Norton and he spent the baking hours of the afternoon absorbed in making music or singing duets. For Violet had a well-trained voice which harmonised well with his. No thought of sex seemed to obtrude itself on them. They were just playmates, comrades, nothing more.
Yet it was only natural that the woman's vanity should be flattered by the man's eagerness to seek her society and by his evident pleasure in it. And it was delightful to have at last a sympathetic listener to all her little grievances, one who seemed as interested in her petty household worries or the delinquencies of her London milliner in failing to execute her orders properly as in her greater complaint against the fate that condemned a woman of her artistic and gaiety-loving nature to existence in the wilds and to the society of persons so uncongenial to her as were the majority of the white folk of Rohar.
To a man the rôle of confidant to a pretty woman is pleasant and flattering; and Wargrave felt that he was highly favoured by being made the recipient of her confidences. It never occurred to him that there might be danger in the situation. He regarded her only as a friend in need of sympathy and help. His chivalry was up in arms at the thought that she was not properly appreciated by her husband, who, he began to suspect, was inclined to neglect her and treat her as a mere chattel. The suspicion angered him. True, Violet had never definitely told him so; but he gathered as much from her unconscious admissions and revered her all the more for her bravery in endeavouring to keep silent on the subject.
Certainly Major Norton did not seem to him to be a man capable of understanding and valuing so sweet and rare a woman as this. After their introduction in the Mess Frank's next meeting with him was at his own table at the Residency, when in due course Wargrave was invited to dinner after his duty call. Raymond was asked as well; and the two subalterns were the only guests.
Their hostess looked very lovely in a Paris-made gown of a green shade that suited her colouring admirably. England did not seem to the young soldiers so very far away when this charming and exquisitely-dressed woman received them in her large drawing-room from which all trace of the East in furniture and decoration was carefully excluded. For the English in India try to avoid in their homes all that would remind them of the Land of Exile in which their lot is cast.
Major Norton came into the room after his guests, muttering an unintelligible apology. He shook hands with them with an abstracted air and failed to recall Wargrave's name. At table he asked Frank a few perfunctory questions and then wandered off into his inevitable subject, entomology, but finding him ignorant of and uninterested in it he engaged in a desultory conversation with Raymond. He soon tired of this and for the most part ate his dinner in silence. He never addressed his wife; and Wargrave, watching them, pitied her if her husband was as little companionable at meal-times when they were alone. He pictured her sitting at table every day with this abstracted and uncommunicative man, whose thoughts seemed far from his present company and surroundings and who was scarcely likely to exert himself to talk to and entertain his wife when he made so little effort to do so to his guests.