John Church walked steadily on, with his near-sighted eyes fixed always upon the wide space of sunlit road, its red dust thick-printed with bare feet and hoofs, that lay in front of him—seeing nothing, literally, but the way home. He met no one who knew him except people from the bazar, who regarded their vizier with serious wonder as they salaamed, the men who sat upon low bamboo carts and urged, hand upon flank, the peaceful-eyed cattle yoked to them, turning to stare as they jogged indolently past. A brown pariah, curled up in the middle of the road, lifted his long snout in lazy apology as Church stepped round him, trusting the sense that told him it would not be necessary to get out of the way. As he passed the last low wall, mossy and discoloured, that divided its brilliantly tangled garden from the highway, and turned in at its own gate, he caught himself out of his abstraction and threw up his head. He entered his wife’s drawing-room considerately, and a ray of light, slipping through the curtains and past the azaleas and across the cool duskness of the place, fell on his spectacles and exaggerated the triumph in his face.
The lady, who sat at the other end of the room writing, rose as her husband came into it, and stepped forward softly to meet him. If you had known her you would have noticed a slight elation in her step that was not usual, and made it more graceful, if anything, than it commonly was.
“I think I know what you have come to tell me,” she said. Her voice matched her personality so perfectly that it might have suggested her, to a few people, in her darkened drawing-room, as its perfume would betray some sweet-smelling thing in the evening. Not to John Church. “I think I know,” she said, as he hesitated for words that would not show extravagant or undignified gratification. “But tell me yourself. It will be a pleasure.”
“That Sir Griffiths Spence goes on eighteen months’ sick leave, and——”
“And that you are appointed to officiate for him. Yes.”
“Somebody has written?”
“Yes—Mr. Ancram.”
His wife had come close to him, and he noticed that she was holding out her hands in her impulse of congratulation. He took one of them—it was all he felt the occasion required—and shook it lamely. She dropped the other with a little quick turn of her head and a dash of amusement at her own expense in the gentle gravity of her expression. “Do sit down,” she said, almost as if he had been a visitor, “and tell me all about it.” She dragged a comfortable chair forward out of its relation with a Burmese carved table, some pots of ferns and a screen, and sat down herself opposite, leaning forward in a little pose of expectancy. Church placed himself on the edge of it, grasping his hat with both hands between his knees.
“I must apologise for my boots,” he said, looking down: “I walked over. I am very dusty.”
“What does it matter? You are King of Bengal!”