“Yes, we saw him. What is the matter with him?” cried Lady Haigh and Penelope together.
“Well, it’s a good thing you ladies didn’t run across him just now. You’ve defeated one of his most cherished schemes. He meant to blow up the fort and use the materials for housebuilding, but he was kind enough to remember that either tents or mud huts would be fairly uncomfortable for you, so he spared the old place until we could get a roof over our heads. But meanwhile the Government heard of his intention, and forbade him to destroy such an interesting relic, so the new canal has to make a big bend, and all his plans are thrown out. And as if that wasn’t enough, in comes a cossid [messenger] this morning with letters from Sir Henry, hinting that his differences with the Government are so acute that he feels he’ll be forced to resign, and then we are safe to have a wretched civilian over us. Of course the Chief feels it, and we’ve felt it too.”
“Poor Major Keeling! I feel quite guilty,” said Lady Haigh.
“Oh, you needn’t. You’ll have a crow to pluck with him when I tell you why he sent me that order to hurry on from the river. It was simply and solely to test you—to see if you would keep your promise. If you had protested and raised a storm, Tarleton had orders to pack you both down-stream again immediately.”
“Really! To lay traps for one in that way!” Indignation choked Lady Haigh’s utterance, and she rode on in wrathful silence while her husband pointed out to Penelope the line of the projected roads and canals, now only indicated by rows of stakes, the young trees just planted in sheltered spots, and carefully fenced in against goats and firewood-seekers, and the rising walls or mere foundations of various large buildings. Crossing an open space, dotted with the dark tents and squabbling children of a wandering tribe of gipsy origin, they rode in at the gateway of the fort, where the great doors hung idly against the wall, unguarded even by a sentry. Sir Dugald helped the ladies to dismount, and led them into the first of a range of lofty, thick-walled rooms, freshly white-washed.
“You’ll be in clover here,” he said. “The heat in the tents is like nothing on earth. The Chief is a perfect salamander; but your brother, Miss Ross, has been living under his table with a wet quilt over it, and I have scooped out a burrow for myself in the ground under my tent. Porter” (the Engineer officer already mentioned) “makes his boy pour water over him every night when he goes to bed, so as to get an hour or so of coolness. By the bye, Elma, the Chief and Ross and Tarleton are coming to dine with us to-night.”
“Dugald!” cried Lady Haigh, in justifiable indignation. “That man will be the death of me! To dine, when there is no time to get any food, and the servants haven’t come up, and there isn’t any furniture!”
“Well, perhaps I ought to say that we are to dine with him up here. He provides the food, and we are to have it in the durbar-room over there. It’s a sort of festivity to celebrate your coming up. He really means it well, you know.”
Lady Haigh was perceptibly mollified, but she took time to thaw.
“It is a pretty idea of Major Keeling’s,” she said, in a less chilly tone. “At least, if—— Dugald, tell me: he hasn’t asked Ferrers?”