“Talk! you should hear her chattering to Tarleton and me, or to her favourites in the regiment. But she doesn’t wear her heart upon her sleeve with strangers. If she takes a liking to you, it’ll be different presently.”
“Do you let her run about among the men?”
“She runs nowhere out of my sight or Tarleton’s or Dulya’s. But the whole regiment are her humble slaves, and the man she deigns to favour is set up for life, in his own opinion. What would happen if she took a dislike to a man I don’t know, but I hardly think his skin would be safe. Commendation from me is nothing compared with the honour conferred by the Missy Baba when she allows a stiff-necked old Ressaldar to take her up in his arms, and is good enough to pull his beard.”
“She is absurdly like you, General,” said Sir Dugald, disapproval of what he had just heard making itself felt in his tone, in spite of himself, while Missy rubbed her rough head against her father’s sleeve like a young colt.
“Horribly like me,” returned General Keeling emphatically. “Run away and play, Missy. I can scarcely see a trace of her mother in her,” he went on, with something of apology in his voice. “You know what my wife was—that she couldn’t bear me out of her sight. I changed the arrangement of this room, you remember, because she liked to be able to see me through the open doors from where she sat, so that I could look up and nod to her now and then. But Missy is almost like a doll, that you can put away when you don’t want it, she’s so quiet in that corner of hers. No; there is one thing in which she is like her mother. If you say a hasty word to her, she will go away and break her heart over it in her corner, instead of flaring up as I should do——”
“Or writing furious letters?” suggested Sir Dugald slily.
General Keeling smiled, but refused to be turned from his own train of thought. “Haigh,” he said earnestly, “take care of your wife while you have her. Mine took half my life with her when she went. If you could imagine for one moment the difference—the awful difference—it makes, you would go down on your knees and implore your wife’s pardon for everything you had ever done or said that could possibly have hurt her, and beg her not to leave you.”
“Oh, we rub along all right,” said Sir Dugald hastily, in mortal fear that the Chief was going to be sentimental. “Elma takes everything in good part. She understands things almost as well as a man.”
General Keeling smiled again, rather pityingly. Perhaps he had some idea of the lofty tolerance with which Lady Haigh would have heard the utterance of this handsome testimony. “My little Missy and I understand one another better than that,” he said.
“Do you think of taking her home soon?” asked Sir Dugald.