And then there was that disgraceful story about Miss Oglander's brother. It was indeed a pity Hew Lingard hadn't waited a bit! He might marry anybody now—a girl, for instance, whose people were connected with the Government, someone who could help on dear Tom, and get him promotion. Jane Oglander was very nice, thoroughly nice, but she would never be of any use to the Pache family.
Such were the troubled and disconnected thoughts which hurried through Mrs. Pache's mind while she listened with apparent attention to her odd, but now celebrated kinsman. General Lingard was trying to make himself pleasant to his cousin Annie by telling her of a missionary expedition to Tibet.
Mrs. Pache had always been interested in missionaries; she was a subscriber to the S.P.C.K. The Society's publications satisfied that passion for romance which sometimes survives in the most commonplace human being, especially if that human being be a woman.
Just now General Lingard was speaking with kindling enthusiasm of a certain medical missionary's fine work in West Africa. But Mrs. Pache's face clouded distrustfully. She had suddenly remembered a scene in her school-room, her children, Tom and his sister, together with two little friends, sitting round Hew Lingard listening with breathless interest to the adventures of another missionary.
This divine had sent home as relics the clothes he had worn when he had succeeded in converting a whole village in Africa, and Mrs. Pache vividly recalled the foolish verses which Lingard had declaimed to her young people with solemn face and twinkling eyes—verses which cruelly misinterpreted the missionary's intention.
Against her will the jingling lines ran in her head—
"He preached—and did not bore them;
Their chief, a hoary man,
Replied, 'We are converted,
But, to turn to other topics,
Betrousered and beshirted,
You're outré in the Tropics.'
The preacher is convinced in turn
And dresses—like his flock...."
She remembered with irritation how the children had insisted on making a copy of these absurd, most unbecoming, rhymes, and how they had continually sung them to the beautiful old tune of "She Wore a Wreath of Roses."
Mrs. Pache allowed her eyes to wander round the table. How wizened and old Dick Wantele was beginning to look! If poor Mr. Maule lasted much longer, Wantele would be quite middle-aged before he came into this fine property.