“Sir Dugald can’t do everything. He can’t render the Um-ul-Pasha and the other ladies at the Palace the civilities which are imperatively due to them, and he can’t conciliate or madden the ladies of the European colony by delicately adjusted hospitalities as she can. If I may say so, Cousin Elma represents the social half of her most gracious Majesty, and Sir Dugald, the Balio Bey as they call him, the administrative half.”
“And which is the more important?” asked Cecil.
“Too hard. Ask me another,” said Charlie.
“Well, which of them rules the other?” asked Cecil.
“That is a delicate point,” returned Charlie, “and opinions naturally differ; but if you ask me, I should say that Sir Dugald does it in reality, but that Cousin Elma thinks she does, and so both are satisfied.”
“Well, I think I should prefer it the other way,” said Cecil, meditatively, and Charlie laughed.
“That is exactly what I should have imagined,” he said. “But, joking apart, you can see that others consider that Cousin Elma has a right to think a good deal of herself. Look at the people here, for instance. Happily, we have no very big-wigs on board, or there might be trouble. In any case, Cousin Elma, as the wife of a major-general, would carry things with a pretty high hand among the army set, but there would be difficulty with the wives of the bigger civilians. But it’s all right with them too now, because Sir Dugald is a political. They know their duty too well to be unpleasant, and besides, it is quite on the cards that Sir Dugald might be useful to any of them any day, if it was desired to find a nice out-of-the-way berth for some unfortunate relative who had fooled away his chances, as Sir Dugald sympathetically remarked to me was my case, the only time I saw him.”
If Charlie expected an indignant contradiction, he was disappointed. Cecil looked away over the sea, and smiled involuntarily.
“I was wondering whether you had talked away your chances,” she said, for they were on sufficiently intimate terms now to allow of little hits like this.
“That’s exactly what I did do,” he said. “You may be surprised to hear it, Miss Anstruther, but I have a very inconvenient conscience, especially with regard to the things which other people leave undone. They say that in England abuses are good things on the whole, because people get up a separate society for the removal of each one, and this affords occupation to many deserving persons; but in the East they’re good for a man to come to grief over, and nothing more. If you will only let things alone you’re all right, but if you make a fuss it’s like fretting your heart out against a stone wall. Why, in my last district—my last failure, if you please—I found there was cholera brewing. I have studied the subject particularly, as I think I have mentioned to you before, but because I could see a little further than the rest of them they called me faddy and an alarmist. I told them what measures ought to be taken, but the man above me, pig-headed old brute! squashed all my representations. If ever a man deserved to be carried off by cholera, that fellow did. At last the cholera came, and I wrote him a letter that he had to attend to. The precautions I had recommended were taken—it was too late, naturally, but we checked the thing before it had gone very far—and I was recommended to resign. Insubordination and so on, of course.”