Now the wife sat opposite him and smiled at him—a slow, unending smile which might have pointed to a mind deranged by grief if she had not been so eminently practical and calm. She was dressed girlishly in white, with a red rose stuck gaily in her belt. The grey fluffy hair had been carefully yet loosely dressed, and there was a faint tinge of artificial colour on her cheeks. Her restless fingers glittered with valuable rings. It was still early in the day, and Dr. Martin had pronounced a sentence which was practically one of death, and he felt that the whole situation was horrid—a kind of danse macabre. The only person who gave him the remotest sensation of preserved decency was the daughter. She sat apart from her mother with her head bowed, her hands tight clasped in her lap, and he had seen a tear fall. He thought her rather pretty and feminine. With the rapid, constructive reasoning of his sex, he placed her in the catalogue of good daughters of adoring fathers and heartless mothers.
"And so," said Mrs. Boucicault, summing up, "you don't think that there is much hope. He may live a long time of course—but like that—quite conscious, but helpless. On the other hand, the end might come suddenly. Isn't that what you mean?"
Dr. Martin fidgeted. He felt tact was wasted on her.
"Those are the two extremes of the case," he admitted. "But there are intermediary possibilities. He might get back a certain amount of activity—speech, for instance. It all depends on the treatment. All that I can advise for the present is that he should not be worried or alarmed. Get him a long leave—don't talk of retirement—keep him here, at any rate, for the present. That's the best you can do."
"It is what I intended," Mrs. Boucicault returned deliberately.
Again the little doctor felt himself vaguely upset. It was as though just as he was bowling smoothly along a familiar road, some one came and madly jolted him into an uncomfortable rut. He clung obstinately to his course.
"I can't say how I sympathize with you," he said. "No one can appreciate more than I do the courage of our women here in India. Literally we all go more or less with our lives in our hands. Of course, the vast majority of the natives are loyal, but in so many millions there are bound to be one or two degenerate fanatics with a grievance. I understand there has been some question of sedition in the native regiment—at least, a good deal of discontent. We had rumours of it even in Lucknow."
Anne Boucicault looked up. She had certainly been crying, but now her brown eyes were bright, and her lips straight and firm.
"It wasn't any of father's men," she said on a low note of defiance. "I'm sure it wasn't. Father is a fine soldier. When he was captain they used to call him the Bagh Sahib because of his fearlessness. They worshipped him. One of the older men told me—I know they wouldn't have touched him."
Dr. Martin smiled. He felt relieved and pleasantly moved by the quick and passionate championship of the hulk he had just condemned. He had, moreover, heard something of Colonel Boucicault's past and something of his present. For the latter he was prepared to find some explanation in the grey-haired, bedizened figure of indifference opposite him.