Clearly the first step towards a decently reliable and efficient corps in Gungapur was the abolition of the present one, and, with unformulated intentions towards its abolition, Mr. Ross-Ellison, by the kind influence of Mrs. Dearman, joined as a Second Lieutenant and speedily rose to the rank of Captain and the command of a Company. A year's indefatigable work convinced him that he might as well endeavour to fashion sword-blades from leaden pipes as to make a fighting unit of his gang of essentially cowardly, peaceful, unreliable, feeble nondescripts. That their bodies were contemptible he would have regarded as merely deplorable, but there was no spirit, no soul, no tradition—nothing upon which he could work. "Broken-down tapsters and serving-men" indeed, in Cromwell's bitter words, and to be replaced by "men of a spirit".
They must go—and make way for men—if indeed men could be found, men who realized that even an Englishman owes something to the community when he goes abroad, in spite of his having grown up in a land where honourable and manly National Service is not, and those who keep him safe are cheap hirelings, cheaply held….
On the arrival of General Miltiades Murger he sat at his feet as soon as, and whenever, possible; only to discover that he was not only uninterested in, but obviously contemptuous of, volunteers and volunteering. When, at the Dearmans' dinner-table, he endeavoured to talk with the General on the subject he was profoundly discouraged, and on his asking what was to happen when the white troops went home and the Indian troops went to the Border, or even to Europe, as soon as England's inevitable and final war broke out, he was also profoundly snubbed.
When, after that dinner, General Miltiades Murger made love to Mrs.
Dearman on the verandah, he also made an enemy, a bitter, cruel, and
vindictive enemy of Mr. Ross-Ellison (or rather of Mir Ilderim Dost
Mahommed Mir Hafiz Ullah Khan).
Nor did his subsequent victory at the Horse Show lessen the enmity, inasmuch as Mrs. Dearman (whom Ross-Ellison loved with the respectful platonic devotion of an English gentleman and the fierce intensity of a Pathan) took General Miltiades Murger at his own valuation, when that hero described himself and his career to her by the hour. For the General had succumbed at a glance, and confided to his Brigade-Major that Mrs. Dearman was a dooced fine woman and the Brigade-Major might say that he said so, damme.
As the General's infatuation increased he told everybody else also—everybody except Colonel Dearman—who, of course, knew it already.
He even told Jobler, his soldier-servant, promoted butler, as that sympathetic and admiring functionary endeavoured to induce him to go to bed without his uniform.
At last he told Mrs. Dearman herself, as he saw her in the rosy light that emanated from the fine old Madeira that fittingly capped a noble luncheon given by him in her honour.
He also told her that he loved her as a father—and she besought him not to be absurd. Later he loved her as an uncle, later still as a cousin, later yet as a brother, and then as a man.
She had laughed deprecatingly at the paternal affection, doubtfully at the avuncular, nervously at the cousinly, angrily at the brotherly,—and not at all at the manly.