Molyneux, at the Foreign Office, was not at all pleased at Brentham's appointment: one of those things that Lord Wiltshire was wont to do without consulting the permanent officials. Molyneux had not long been in the new African Department (hitherto disparagingly connected with the Slave Trade section); and as Africa had barely entered world-politics, British Ministers of State showed themselves usually indifferent as to how the necessary appointments were filled up, adopting generally names suggested by Molyneux, so that he was accustomed to nominating his poor relations—he had a reserve of wastrel nephews and cousins—or the friends of his friends—such as Spencer Bazzard (q.v., as they say in Encyclopædias). If they were "rotters," the climate generally killed them off in a few months; if they made good, they established in time a claim on the Foreign Office regard and got transferred to Consular posts in South America, the Mediterranean, and Western Europe.
But Lord Wiltshire was not always asleep or uninformed, as he sometimes appeared to be. So his Private Secretary countered Bennet Molyneux's querulous Memo on Captain Brentham's lack of qualification for such a responsible East African post by reminding him that the gentleman in question was well versed in Arabic through having accompanied a Political Mission to the Persian Gulf, that he had served in Aden and Somaliland and had conducted an expedition to the Snow Mountains of East Africa for the Intelligence Division, had contributed papers to the Royal Geographical Society, was a silver medallist of the Zoological Society, and was personally vouched for by a colleague of Lord Wiltshire's: all of which information for the African Department was summed up by the Private Secretary to Molyneux in a few words: "See here, Molly; take this and look pleasant. You can't have all the African appointments in your gift. You must leave a few to the Old Man. He generally knows what he's about." So Molyneux asked Brentham to dine with him and apparently made the best of a bad job ... as he said with a grin to his colleague, Sir Mulberry Hawk.
CHAPTER IV
LUCY HESITATES
When the school holidays supervened, Lucy spent her vacation quietly at Aldermaston working at her African outfit—material and mental—in a desultory way. She supposed she would have to leave in the following April to join her betrothed. April seemed a long while ahead. She had not even given notice to the school managers yet of her intention to give up teaching. It would not be necessary to do so or to brace her mind for the agony of separation from her home until John had announced that all was in readiness and she had received the formal intimation of his Missionary Society that they approved of her going out to join him and would make the necessary arrangements for a steamer passage.
Meantime she gave herself up to the delight of reading such books about African exploration or mission life in Africa as she could obtain from the Reading libraries. They served to strengthen her determination to keep faith with John; while other ties and loves were pulling the other way. She had in her veins that imaginational longing to see strange lands and travel which is such an English trait; yet this longing alternated with fits of absolute horror at her foolishness in having consented to such an engagement. Why could she not have recognized when she was well off? Could any one in her station of life have a more delightful home?
The farmstead stood on a slope about a hundred feet above the Kennet Valley. The river was a mile away, though little subsidiary brooks and channels permeated the meadows in between, and in spring, summer and autumn produced miracles of loveliness in flower shows: purple loosestrife, magenta-coloured willow herb, mauve-tinted valerian, cream-coloured meadow-sweet, yellow flags, golden king-cups, yellow and white water-lilies, water-crowsfoot and flowering rush. Lucy was an unexpressed, undeveloped artist, with an exceptional appreciation (for a country girl) of the beauty in colour and form of flowers and herbage of the velvety, blue-green, black-green cedars which rose above the wall of the Park and overshadowed the churchyard, of the superb elms, oaks, horse-chestnuts, ashes and hawthorns studding the grassy slopes between the house and the water meadows. She loved the rich crimson colour of the high old brick walls of the Park and the same tint in the farm buildings, varied with scarlet and orange and the lemon and grey of lichen and weather-stain. The old farm-house in which she had been born and had passed all her twenty-four years of placid life, save when she was at boarding-school, seemed to her just perfect in its picturesque ancientry and its stored smells of preserved good things to eat and drink. Their garden was carelessly ordered, but from March to October had a wealth of flowers, the spicy odours of box borders, the pungent scent of briar and honeysuckle.
She did take much interest in the details of farming—a trifle of self-conceit made her think herself superior in her bookishness and feeble water-colour painting to her younger sisters, who were already experts in poultry-tending, butter-making, and bread-baking. But she accepted as a matter of course the delicious results (as we should think them now) of living at a well-furnished, well-managed farm: the milk and cream, the fresh butter and new-laid eggs, the home-cured bacon, the occasional roast duck and chicken; the smell of the new-mown hay, the sight of ripe wheat or wheat neatly grouped in its golden sheaves in chessboard pattern; the September charms of the glinting stubble with its whirring coveys of partridges, its revived flower shows—scarlet and blue, bright yellow, dead white, lavender, russet, and mauve; the walnuts in the autumn from their own trees; the Spanish chestnuts from the Park; impromptu Christmas dances in the big barn; an occasional visit to a theatre or a magic-lantern-illustrated lecture in Reading. On one such occasion she saw for the first time Captain Roger Brentham, the explorer, who whilst staying with Lord and Lady Silchester gave a lecture on his recent travels and some wonderful snow mountain he had visited in East Africa.... Why should she seek to leave such surroundings? She could read and hear about all that was most interesting in the world without leaving her parents and her home. Yet, to disappoint poor John, who counted on her coming out to share his work—and if she threw him over she might never get another offer of marriage and grow stout and florid like Bessie Rayner, ten years older than she was, up at the Grange farm....
But was marriage after all, with its children and illnesses and house drudgery, so very attractive to a dreamer? Might she not be happier if she passed all the rest of her life at Aldermaston, saving up her salary as a school-mistress against old age and a possible leaving of the farm if—ever so far ahead—dear father died? She had often thought, with a little encouragement she might write ... write stories! ... and she thrilled at the idea. But then, what experience had she of the world—the great world beyond southern Berkshire—which she could set down on paper?
So far, no one had proposed to her—even John had hardly asked her definitely to marry him. He had always taken it for granted, since he was eighteen, that she would, and from that age herself she had tacitly accepted the position of his fiancée. Why had she acquiesced? There was a weakness of fibre about her and John's stronger will had impressed itself on her smiling compliance. Her mother had rather pursed her lips at the alliance, having her doubts as to John being good enough, and John's mother being even bearable as a mother-in-law. This faint opposition had made Lucy determined to persevere with the engagement. She had a distaste for a farmer type of husband; it seemed too earthy. And she wanted to travel. A missionary ought to make a refined spouse and be able to show her the strange places of the earth.