“Sure y’are very ready to belittle the poor fellow!” Eveleen turned upon her husband. “I suppose that’s the measure of the value you set upon your wife—the way you treat the man who’s just saved her life?”
“You had not told me the extent of the obligation, my dear. But the greater it is, the more careful you had better be to maintain the distance he has fixed between himself and us. The fellow is undoubtedly a deserter from our artillery—whether from the Bengal side or this I don’t know; the native princes are always ready to entertain ’em to instruct their troops. I have told you he passes himself off as a Yankee—that’s to prevent our making enquiries, of course, and perhaps also to evade the suspicions of his present employers. They would smell a rat at once did he show any desire for intercourse with the Agency. There’s no manner of doubt he’s a deserter.”
“Ambrose, you wouldn’t contemplate laying information against him?” anxiously.
“What do you take me for, my dear? No doubt it’s my duty, but as you have reminded me, the fellow has placed me under a profound obligation. If you’ll remember the fact yourself, and be content to pass him without acknowledgment should you meet, so much the better for him.”
Eveleen did not agree with this at all. The tone in which Richard spoke of the “profound obligation” was disagreeable, and the thought of cutting her rescuer dead was more so. But she was too much subdued and dispirited to embark on further wordy warfare just now, though she made her own resolutions privately. Richard, observing her unwonted meekness, drew flattering deductions from it, and improved the occasion by intimating that she would do well to relieve the Resident’s mind by promising to confine her rides within orthodox limits in future. But this was too much to ask, and when Colonel Bayard came out anxiously to meet the rescue expedition and enquire how it had sped, his solicitude did not meet with the gratitude it deserved, since he incautiously expressed the same hope. What was to happen if she felt she must go out for a gallop when she was bound by a promise not to? Eveleen demanded indignantly; and thus faced by the old problem of the immovable object and the irresistible force, Colonel Bayard wisely confined himself to laying it down, in the hearing of his staff, that in no case was she to leave the compound in future without either an escort or European attendance. This was galling, and she sought her own rooms in much depression of spirit. But the misfortunes of this unfortunate day were not yet at an end. Richard, who had accompanied her in a considerate silence which she would certainly not have maintained had their cases been reversed, suddenly found his tongue.
“There was a letter for you in the dâk—here it is. That brother of yours is honouring you, I presume. Why don’t the fellow learn to write? Such a fist I never saw—nor anybody else neither. Here this letter has been up to Sahar and down to Bab-us-Sahel again—and all his fault.”
“The Delanys think more of fighting than of writing,” said Eveleen succinctly. It sounded so neat that she felt quite cheered.
“No doubt. I’ll wager anything the fellow wants more money, or he wouldn’t have written now. If he does, you had better leave it to me to answer him.”
“I’ll not do anything of the sort. He don’t want money, I’m certain, and if he did, he wouldn’t take yours.”
“H’m!” said Richard Ambrose infuriatingly.