The Lieutenant-Governor had been looking forward to this: it was so seldom, he said, that he found an opportunity of combining a duty and a pleasure. Judith Church remembered other Art Exhibitions she had seen in India, and thought that one category was enough.
At the farther end of the room a native gentleman stood transfixed with admiration before a portrait of himself by his own son. Two or three ladies with catalogues darted hurriedly, like humming-birds, from water-colour to water-colour. A cadaverous planter from the Terai, who turned out sixty thousand pounds of good tea and six yards of bad pictures annually, talked with conviction to an assenting broker with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, about the points of his “Sunset View of Kinchinjunga,” that hung among the oils on the other wall. There was no one else in the room but Mr. Lewis Ancram, who wore a straw hat and an air of non-expectancy, and looked a sophisticated twenty-five.
For a moment, although John Church was the soul of punctuality, it did not seem remarkable to Mrs. Church that her husband had failed to turn up. Ancram had begun to explain, indeed, before it occurred to her to ask; and this, when she remembered it, brought a delicate flush to her cheeks which stayed there, and suggested to the Chief Secretary the pleasant recollection of a certain dewy little translucent flower that grew among the Himalayan mosses very high up.
“It was a matter His Honour thought really required looking into—clear evidence, you know, that the cholera was actually being communicated inside the gaol—and when I offered to bring his apologies on to you I honestly believe he was delighted to secure another hour of investigation.”
“John works atrociously hard,” she replied; and when he weighed this afterward, as he had begun to weigh the things she said, he found in it appreciably more concern for John’s regrettable habit of working atrociously hard than vexation at his failure to keep their engagement.
They walked about for five minutes and looked at the aspirations. Ancram remembered Rhoda Daye’s hard little sayings on the opening day, and reflected that some women could laugh with a difference. Mrs. Church did it with greatest freedom, he noticed, at the prize pictures. For the others she had compunction, and she regarded the “Sunset View of Kinchinjunga” with a smile that she plainly atoned for by an inward tear. “Don’t!” she said, looking round the walls, as he invested that peak with the character of a strawberry ice. “It means all the bloom of their lives, poor things. At all events it’s ideality, it isn’t——”
“Pig-sticking!”
“Yes,” she said softly. “If I knew what in the world to do with it, I would buy that ‘Kinchin.’ But its ultimate disposal does present difficulties.”
“I don’t think you would have any right to do that, you know. You couldn’t be so dishonest with the artist. Who would sell the work of his hand to be burned!”
He was successful in provoking her appreciation. “You are quite right,” she said. “The patronage of my pity! You always see!”