The Flag of the Adventurer

by Sydney C. Grier

Those many, many years of waiting! Eveleen could not look back on them dispassionately even now. She was again the girl who watched feverishly for the ramshackle “ass’s cart” which conveyed the rural post-woman on her rounds, who manœuvred for the privilege of asking for letters at the post-office when the family drove into town. And there never were any letters. Deeply in love as he was, Richard Ambrose had been cut to the quick by General Delany’s contemptuous dismissal, and registered a vow that he would never return until he could confront the old man with abundant proof that he could keep Eveleen in proper comfort. That time did not come. Things were bitterly hard for the Company’s Army in time of peace. Its officers were the unfailing victims of the constant demands from home for economy and retrenchment, until no man remained with his regiment who had influence to obtain civil employ. Richard Ambrose was uniformly unfortunate. He had no influence, and a malign fate seemed to shut him out of the little wars of the period—often lucrative enough. Once he had been mauled out tiger shooting, and was in hospital; once, after several unusually obstinate bouts of fever, he was an invalid in Australia. But his was not one of the crack regiments, and the greater part of his time was spent in one dull station or another, doing the work of two or three seconded men as well as his own. Faithful alike to his self-imposed vow and to General Delany’s commands, he never wrote to Eveleen.

Eveleen gave no sign of resenting his silence. When she refused one or two good matches, her relatives were loud in scorn of her folly, but by-and-by they arrived at the comfortable conviction that all was for the best. Her cousins were marrying off or setting up homes of their own, and the General was becoming increasingly difficult to live with. It was really providential that the niece who owed him so much should be available to ride with him, to keep house for him in the scrambling style from which neither of them dreamed of departing, and in the long evenings to take a hand at whist if other players were available, join him in chess or backgammon if they were not, and at all times turn away his wrath with cheerful—if not invariably soft—answers. If her recompense seemed inadequate, there was Brian to be thought of—the young brother for whose sake Eveleen would sometimes even attempt that hardest of all tasks, saving money. “I would rob the mail for Brian!” she declared once defiantly to her uncle, and thanks to her unceasing efforts, Brian was given—and, urged tearfully by her, submitted to receive—some sort of education, sufficient at any rate to enable him to take advantage of the offer of an old comrade of the General’s to attach him to his staff as a Volunteer, until he could obtain a commission. It was a difficult business to supply the young gentleman’s needs while he was expected to live as an officer on the pay of a private, and the habits he picked up on the staff were not exactly such as would conduce to his efficiency in a marching regiment, but the day she first saw her boy in the uniform of the 990th Foot, Eveleen felt she could die happy.

Perhaps the attainment of this ardent desire made her feel more like Brian’s mother or aunt than his sister, but it was about this time that Eveleen became aware she was growing old. Not in mind—she was one of those who, far from growing old, never even really grow up—nor in body, for she could last out a long day with the hounds as well as most men, and skin and hair and eyes showed slight trace of the process of time, but in the estimation of her little world. Nowadays she would have been considered a girl still, but in her day to pass the thirtieth birthday unmarried was to be stamped irrevocably as an old maid, and she had done this five years ago. Other girls were coming forward—real girls—and she found herself confronted with the choice of ceding her place to them or holding it by mingled assurance and main force, becoming in course of time “Old Miss Evie”—one of those determined middle aged sportswomen whom English people regarded as an eccentric and scandalous feature of Irish hunts. Eveleen laughed and withdrew. Her choice was made easier by the complication of diseases and old wounds which incapacitated the General, for ladies did not hunt without male escort, and she would not tack herself to any of his friends; but it was a bitter moment. Nor was it made easier by the discovery that she was becoming an object of suspicion—or at least mistrust—to her cousins and her cousins’ wives. To them, as to all their class, money as money was nothing, but family possessions were something to be clutched and held by fair means or foul. The idea that Eveleen might be providing for herself—or her uncle providing for her—at their future expense worked like poison in their brains, leading them to lay ingenious conversational traps in the hope of surprising the admission that the General had added a codicil to his will, and to conduct furtive searches for household treasures which they imagined to have disappeared. It was inevitable that when Eveleen realised what was in their minds, she should resent it violently, and for a whole day such a battle-royal raged as was spoken of with respect among the servants ever after. Alone against the cousinhood, she held her ground victoriously, swearing to leave the house there and then unless all imputations were withdrawn and an ample apology offered. Where she could have gone she knew no more than her cousins, but she would have done it; and they realised the fact, and having no desire to take up her burden, listened to the moderating counsels of brothers and husbands, hovering in the background with insistent murmurs of “Ah, well, then——” and “Sure, the creature——” But her future was still a cause for anxiety, if not for suspicion. “Sure I see ‘What’ll we do with poor Evie?’ in every eye that looks at me!” she said once.

And then Richard Ambrose came back. He had found his opportunity at last. The Ethiopian adventure, which was the grave of so many reputations, made his. He went into it an undistinguished captain, and he came out a major and a C.B., whose resolute defence early in the war of an all-important post on the line of communications had even been heard of at home. He was wounded—but the present generation would have hailed his wound as a “Blighty one”; it was just sufficiently severe to induce the surgeons to advise a voyage home and back before he took up the new post of Assistant Resident in Khemistan which Colonel Bayard promised to keep open for him. Eveleen could never quite decide whether she had been expecting him to return or not. So many years had passed, and he had never sent her word or sign. But one morning, as she sat in her saddle at the covert-side, a little removed from the throng of cheery riders, watching the meet in which she no longer took part, one figure detached itself from the rest. A gentleman dismounted, and throwing the bridle to his servant, approached her—a tall bronzed man, wearing the frogged blue coat which was the recognised dress of officers in mufti, or as they called it, “coloured clothes.” He raised his hat, and the years fell from Eveleen. She was the girl of seventeen again, glowing with youth.

“You have waited for me, Eveleen?” he asked, without any conventional greeting, and she dropped the reins on her horse’s neck and held out both hands to him.

“All these years. Ah, but I knew you’d come!” she answered. For that moment, at least, she had no doubt. Richard had justified himself, had come back, famous and successful, to the woman whose welcome would have been no less warm had he been broken and penniless, and to that woman earth was heaven from henceforth. That the Richard who had come back would not be the Richard who had gone forth was unlikely to occur to her at that moment, or to commend itself to her belief when it did occur. She had not changed; why should he?

Everything was so natural, so simple. Richard never even asked her again to marry him. Why should he? he had come back for nothing else. It was necessary to ask the General for her, of course, and the General resented the request so vehemently that all his children and their respective husbands and wives had to be summoned to bear down his opposition by sheer weight of eloquence. Such ingenuity was displayed in devising schemes for his future, such amazement lavished on his selfishness in wishing to retain poor Evie, who had given herself up to him for so long, that he was dinned at last into acquiescence. He gave his consent with tolerable grace, and presented his niece with the turquoise disc, which had come into his possession after the fall of Seringapatam. It was too large even for Early Victorian taste, which liked its jewellery to be of substantial size, but the daughters and daughters-in-law agreed that it was a very handsome present, and most appropriate, as Evie was going to India. Unfortunately, the first time she wished to wear it at Bombay she learned that to wear Indian ornaments in India was to incur irretrievably the stigma of being “country-born,” but the cousins did not know this. Some sort of outfit was got together for her, the cousinhood eking out an impossibly small sum of money with great goodwill and much contrivance, that she not disgrace the family; but the bride herself would have sailed for India cheerfully with what one plain-spoken “in-law” called cruelly her usual ragbag of clothes.

Had the shadow fallen even then? Eveleen asked herself the question this evening, as often before. One night—it was at a dance—she had surprised on Richard’s face, as he met her in a blaze of wax-lights, a look in which she read cold criticism, even dislike. It struck her to the heart, stripping her in one moment of her new found youth and joy. They thought she was going to faint, and it was Richard himself, all compunction and anxiety, who took her out and fussed about her with water and borrowed smelling-salts and a glass of wine; and when she sobbed out something of her sudden terror, admitted that his wound had been paining him horribly all day, and cursed himself for spoiling her evening by letting her see that he was suffering. He refused angrily to let her sit out the dances with him, and happy and satisfied, she entered the ballroom again on his arm, never dreaming of doubting his assurance. But now the doubts had crept in once more, and refused to be silenced.

If the shadow had not been there before, it had certainly made itself felt on the voyage. Eveleen was not shy—she did not know what shyness was,—and in the intervals of sea-sickness she enjoyed herself like a schoolgirl. She bobbed up and down like a cork; nothing could keep her under the weather long—such was the admiring dictum of one of the youths drawn to her by her delight in new experiences, and the unfailing gusto with which she found interest and excitement in things which other people considered deadly dull. The rest of the ladies on board eyed her askance. There was something not quite ladylike about “that Mrs Ambrose”; one did not wish to be uncharitable, but really one was almost afraid she might be called just a little bit fast. No one was more surprised both by her popularity and her unpopularity than her husband, and he resented both—or rather, the personality which was their common root. That, without any effort on her part, his wife could keep every one within sound of her voice amused and interested, gave him no pleasure—it was as though a modest violet had turned into a flaunting poppy on his hands. He had had little to do with women in his hard life, but the few ladies with whom he had come in contact did not trouble themselves to amuse the men around; they left it to the men to amuse them. Richard Ambrose had never been particularly successful in this respect, but he felt the attitude was the right one. As Eveleen told herself bitterly one day on catching sight of his disapproving face on the outskirts of the circle which her hunting stories had set in a roar, it really seemed that the only person who didn’t like Mrs Ambrose was Mrs Ambrose’s husband!

Far worse was the trouble that arose at Bombay. Eveleen had naturally taken it for granted that she would accompany her husband to the scene of his duties, but he told her curtly that Khemistan was not a place to which one could take ladies, and not knowing that Mrs Bayard was heroically attempting to defy the dangers of the climate, she accepted his dictum perforce. With Richard’s old butler to guide her inexperienced feet, she found herself established in a small hired bungalow—its ramshackle condition and shabby furniture made it feel really homelike,—mistress of what seemed to her huge sums of money, and pledged to keep accounts strictly. The result was what might have been expected. It was all very well for Ambrose to impress upon her that, apart from his political appointment, which might come to an end at any moment, he was still a poor man; her conception of poverty differed radically from his. He had inured himself to living on rice and chapatis in his comfortless bungalow—dinner at mess the one good meal of the day—that he might pay the subscriptions expected of him, and maintain a creditable appearance in public. The people of Eveleen’s world had cared nothing whatever about appearances, but had lived in a rude plenty, supported by contributions in kind from tenants whose rents were paid or not as the fancy took them—generally not. To Richard money was a regular institution, to be doled out with punctual care according to a plan carefully considered and rigidly fixed beforehand; to her it was a surprising windfall, affording delicious opportunities for the almost unknown joy of spending, and to be used accordingly. Her efforts at keeping accounts shared the fate of poor Dora Copperfield’s. The entries began by being rigorously minute, but they ceased with startling suddenness, unless the butler’s demands sent Eveleen flying to the book in horror, to put down what she could remember spending—which was very little in comparison with what she had spent. The extraordinary thing was that in these spasms of economy—which occurred periodically—she could find so dreadfully little to show for the vanished money. She might declare proudly that she had not bought a single thing for herself, and it was true, but the money was gone—how, she could not say. She was popular and hospitable, her possessions were all at the service of her friends and her friends’ servants, and her modest stable was a constant source of expense—even before she lit upon the half-starved, under-sized little Arab which she rescued from cruel treatment and named Bajazet because it sounded Eastern and imposing, and reconstructed her outbuildings to accommodate him properly. Then there was Brian, who was quartered at Poonah, and being a youth of keen affections, seized every opportunity of taking a little jaunt to Bombay to see his sister, who welcomed him on each occasion as if he were the Prodigal Son. Brian must be fed on the fat of the land—Eveleen had a wholly unjustified conviction that “sure the poor boys must be starved, without a woman to see after them,”—and his ever-recurring money troubles assuaged as far as possible. To do her justice—perhaps love made her clear-sighted, or in this one case she was able to see through Richard’s eyes—Eveleen did realise the danger of Brian’s living regularly beyond his income, and lecture him on the absolute need of pulling up. Brian listened meekly, promised to comply, accepted with almost tearful gratitude whatever his sister could scrape together to placate his most pressing creditors—and returned to duty, as often as not, to spend the money on something else.