“It was cruel,” said Penelope, still unreconciled, and venting on him the anger she felt for herself. “It was unkind,” she repeated feebly.
“What a blundering fool I am!” he cried furiously. “Why, you are trembling all over. Dear girl, don’t cry; I shall never forgive myself. It was only a—a sort of joke. The fact was, I have asked you to marry me twice already, you see, and I was so unlucky each time that it made me rather shy of doing it again. I thought I’d see if I couldn’t get it settled without exactly saying the words, you know. Tell me I’m a fool, Penelope; call me anything you like—but not cruel. Cruel to you! I deserve to be shot. Yes, I was cruel; I must have been, if you say so.”
“You weren’t. I was silly,” came in a muffled voice. “I only thought—it would break my heart—to leave—Alibad.”
“Only Alibad? Is it the bricks and mortar you are so fond of?”
“I love every brick in the place, because you built it.”
Thus it happened that the journey to Bab-us-Sahel, the suggestion of which had caused so much distress to Penelope, was duly undertaken, and Mr Crayne insisted that the wedding should take place from Government House. He said it was because there was some hope now that Keeling might get a little common-sense knocked into him at last, which might have sounded alarming to any one who did not know that the bride’s head barely reached the bridegroom’s shoulder. But Penelope had a secret conviction that the old man had not forgotten the morning at Alibad when he welcomed her as his future niece, and that he had penetrated her true feelings more nearly than she knew at the time. Held under such auspices, the wedding was graced by the presence of all the rank and fashion of Bab-us-Sahel; but Lady Haigh, who had received a box from home just in time, raised evil passions in the heart of every lady there by displaying the first crinoline ever seen in Khemistan. The bride was quite a secondary figure, for not only had she refused the loan of the coveted garment, but she defied public opinion by wearing an embroidered “country muslin” instead of the stiff white watered silk which her aunt and Colin had insisted she should take out with her three years before.
It must be confessed that Penelope was not a success when she returned to Alibad as the Commandant’s wife, and therefore the burra memsahib of the place. The town is still famous in legend as the only station in India where the ladies squabble over giving, instead of taking, precedence. Long afterwards Lady Haigh congratulated herself on having been the means of averting bloodshed on one occasion, when a visiting official, finding himself placed between two ladies of equally retiring disposition, decided to offer his arm to the baronet’s wife. “I saw thunder in Colonel Keeling’s eye,” said Lady Haigh (Major Keeling had received the news of his promotion shortly before the wedding), “so I just curtsied to the General, and said, ‘Mrs Keeling is the chief lady present, sir,’ and he accepted the hint like a lamb.” But at the time, or rather, in the privacy of a call the next morning, she had taken Penelope to task.
“You don’t put yourself forward enough, Pen,” she said. “Do you think that if I had been burra mem, the poor General would have had a moment’s doubt as to the person he was to take in to dinner? You make yourself a sort of shadow of your husband—never do anything on your own responsibility, in fact. Why, when the history of the province comes to be written, people will dispute whether Colonel Keeling ever had a wife at all!”
“Will they?” said Penelope, momentarily distressed. “Oh, I hope not, Elma. I should like them to say that there was one part of his life when he got on better with the Government, and left off writing furious letters even when he was unjustly treated, and was more patient with people who were stupid. Then if they ask what made the difference, I should like to think that they will say, ‘Oh, that was when his wife was alive.’”
“My dear Pen, you are not allowing yourself a very long life.”