His Honour, and a Lady

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

CHAPTER XXII.

Calcutta, when the Doyles came down from Darjiling, chased by the early rains, was prepared to find the marriage ridiculous. Calcutta counted on its fingers the years that lay between Mr. and Mrs. Doyle, and mentioned, as a condoning fact, that Philip Doyle’s chances for the next High Court Judgeship were very good indeed. Following up this line of fancy, Calcutta pictured a matron growing younger and younger and a dignitary of the Bench growing older and older, added the usual accessories of jewels and balls and Hill captains and the private entrée, and figured out the net result, which was regrettably vulgar and even more regrettably common. It is perhaps due to Calcutta rather than to the Doyles to say that six weeks after their arrival these prophecies had been forgotten and people went about calling it an ideal match. One or two ladies went so far as to declare that Rhoda Daye had become a great deal more tolerable since her marriage; her husband was so much cleverer than she was, and that was what she needed, you know. In which statement might occasionally be discerned a gleam of satisfaction.

It shortly became an item of gossip that very few engagements were permitted to interfere with Mrs. Philip Doyle’s habit of driving to her husband’s office to pick him up at five o’clock in the afternoon, and that very few clients were permitted to keep him there after she had arrived. People smiled in indulgent comment on it, as the slender, light, tasteful figure in the cabriolet drove among the thronging carriages in the Red Road towards Old Post-Office Street, and looked again, with that paramount interest in individuals which is almost the only one where Britons congregate in exile. Mrs. Doyle, in the picturesque exercise of the domestic virtues, was generally conceded to be even more piquant than Miss Daye in the temporary possession of a Chief Secretary.

I have no doubt that on one special Wednesday afternoon she was noted to look absent and a trifle grave, as the Waler made his own pace to bring his master. There was no reason for this in particular, except that His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor was leaving for England by the mail train for Bombay that evening. Perhaps this in itself would hardly have sufficed to make Mrs. Doyle meditative, but there had been a great clamour of inquiry and suggestion as to why Sir Lewis Ancram was straining a point to obtain three months’ leave under no apparent emergency: people said he had never looked better—and Mrs. Doyle believed she knew precisely why. The little cloud of her secret knowledge was before her eyes as the crows pecked hoarsely at the street offal under the Waler’s deliberate feet, and she was somewhat impatient at being burdened with any acquaintance with Sir Lewis Ancram’s private intentions. Also she remembered her liking for the woman he was going home to marry; and, measuring in fancy Judith Church’s capacity for happiness, she came to the belief that it was likely to be meagrely filled. It was the overflowing measure of her own, perhaps, that gave its liveliness to her very real pang of regret. She knew Lewis Ancram so much better than Mrs. Church did, she assured herself; was it not proof enough, that the other woman loved him while she (Rhoda) bowed to him? As at that moment, when he passed her on horseback, looking young and vigorous and elate. Rhoda fancied a certain significance in his smile; it spoke of good-fellowship and the prospect of an equality of bliss and the general expediency of things as they were rather than as they might have been. She coloured hotly under it, and gathered up the reins and astonished the Waler with the whip.

As she turned into Old Post-Office Street, a flanking battalion of the rains—riding up dark and thunderous behind the red-brick turrets of the High Court—whipped down upon the Maidan, and drove her, glad of a refuge, up the dingy stairs to her husband’s office. Her custom was to sit in the cabriolet and despatch the syce with a message. The syce would deliver it in his own tongue—“The memsahib sends a salutation”—and Doyle would presently appear. But to-day it was raining and there was no alternative.

A little flutter of consideration greeted her entrance. Two or three native clerks shuffled to their feet and salaamed, and one ran to open the door into Doyle’s private room for her. Her husband sat writing against time at a large desk littered thick with papers. At another table a native youth in white cotton draperies sat making quill pens, with absorbed precision. The punkah swung a slow discoloured petticoat above them both. The tall wide windows were open. Through them little damp gusts came in and lifted the papers about the room; and beyond them the grey rain slanted down, and sobered the vivid green of everything, and turned the tilted palms into the likeness of draggled plumes waving against the sky.

“You have just escaped the shower,” said Doyle, looking up with quick pleasure at her step. “I’ll be another twenty minutes, I’m afraid. And I have nothing for you to play with,” he added, glancing round the dusty room—“not even a novel. You must just sit down and be good.”

“Mail letters?” asked Rhoda, with her hand on his shoulder.

The clerk was looking another way, and she dropped a foolish, quick little kiss on the top of his head.

“Yes. It’s this business of the memorial to Church. I’ve got the newspaper reports of the unveiling together, and the Committee have drafted a formal letter to Mrs. Church, and there’s a good deal of private correspondence—letters from big natives sending subscriptions, and all that—that I thought she would like to see. As Secretary to the Committee, it of course devolves upon me to forward everything. And at this moment,” Doyle went on, glancing ruefully at the page under his hand, “I am trying to write to her privately, poor thing.”