“Three hours’ steaming—certainly no more. We should have met you sooner if we could have got on in the dark. Here’s the General’s letter.” He held it out, and Brian, making a long arm from the Asteroid’s paddle-box, took it from him.
“Thanks. Come to breakfast, won’t you?” said Colonel Bayard shortly, and withdrew a pace or two—there was no possible privacy in the crowded ship—to read the despatch. Presently he beckoned to Richard.
“He is bent on fighting,” he said with a sigh. “Look here—this was written after receiving mine sent after our return from the durbar, when I said I feared we might be besieged, and asked for supplies. You see he bids me point-blank break off negotiations, and make no further efforts for peace.”
“Possibly he thought you had done all that could be done in that line——” with great seriousness. “That was the letter in which you urged him to send away the army and come to Qadirabad himself—eh?”
“Yes, I urged it most strongly. And what does he do? Destroys the last hope of accommodation—orders me to leave the Agency at once and rejoin him, or if that’s impossible, put up a good defence and wait for him there.”
“But what else could he have done?” asked Richard curiously.
“Waited—shown some patience, some forbearance, instead of hurrying things like this. The old man knows nothing of Oriental ways—that’s the sole excuse for him.”
“I shall begin to think the General ain’t so far wrong in his estimate of old Indians, when he says they have got more Oriental than the Orientals themselves!” grumbled Richard to himself as Colonel Bayard turned away from him abruptly to greet Captain Crosse as he came on board.
“And I have a special message for Mrs Ambrose,” the visitor was saying. “Sir Henry was highly displeased when he heard where she was, and is sharpening his tongue to give her the scolding she deserves.”
“Sharpening his tongue, is it?” cried Eveleen in high scorn. “Sure it’s hardening his heart he means—or trying to.”