“Indeed!” drily. “And is there any likelihood that you would fall in with ’em?”
“Not the slightest! But I’m doing it now.”
CHAPTER VI.
ENTER THE ADVENTURER.
Bab-us-Sahel had the advantage over Qadirabad that its natural torridity was tempered by the sea breeze in the daytime and the land breeze at night, but that was all. After the shady gardens which had at least looked cool, though they were not so, the staring bareness of the coast town was the more horrible. No trees, no vegetation even—save the unsightly milk-bush and the grey-brown thorn which was supposed to provide the camel with adequate nourishment—neutral tints everywhere, from glaring white to every possible dull hue that sand or dust or rock could assume. It was like Egypt without the Nile—the Egypt of those days, with half-starved donkeys, ragged children, diseased beggars, and mud-heap houses complete. That was in and around the native town, which at least had patches of shade here and there, where the mud hovels nestled up close to the side of a mosque or sought the shelter of the city wall. But the European houses, strung out along their sun-baked road, received no shelter either from one another or from anything else. Each grilled alone in its own compound, like a mud-built oven subjected to furnace heat from above and on all sides. Merely to look out from the hot shade of the verandah made the eyes ache as though they had been exposed to burning flame. The very wind was hot, and it lifted the all-surrounding dust and whirled it about in maddeningly confusing shapes—“playing at waterspouts,” Eveleen once said bitterly—so that you didn’t know whether you were standing on your head or your heels till you found a thick coating of grit on your hair. Nor was the place even healthy. The stagnant marsh remained a marsh when it seemed as though any water in it must evaporate by boiling—since it was fed by sea-water percolating through the sand, and the wells apparently drew their supplies from it, to judge by the taste of the liquid. Experts had reported that there ought to be an abundant supply of good water in the hills to the west of the town, but Colonel Bayard felt a delicacy in undertaking large engineering works. It would look as though the British occupation of Bab-us-Sahel on the coast, as of Sahar high up the river, was intended to be permanent, and his aim in life was to prove that it was not. There were few of the Bab-us-Sahel Europeans who did not adore Colonel Bayard, but in the hot weather the adoration was tinged with resentment.
Eveleen lived through the dreadful weeks by dint of her consuming interest in her neighbours’ affairs. All unconsciously her husband had hit upon the very place for her. It would never have occurred to him that the impulse to have a finger in every pie, which he called meddling, could be turned to uses of friendly helpfulness such as suggested the old neighbourly life at home, where everyone knew and discussed every one else’s business, and furthered it as opportunity offered. Mrs Gibbons, as the Agency surgeon’s wife, might be supposed to have acquired by contiguity a certain amount of professional knowledge, but if so, it was the merest surface polish, for the good lady would in any circumstances have physicked and nursed any community in which she found herself. “Gumption” was the word most frequently on her lips, and the quality most evident in her actions. When Colonel Bayard declined again to give an appearance of permanence to the occupation by establishing an experimental garden—such as all new stations were equipped with—for determining what the soil would produce, it was Mrs Gibbons who stepped into the breach in default of the public authorities, and under inconceivable difficulties, grew successive crops of vegetables which did much to preserve the health of her fellow-exiles. She kept fowls which actually produced eggs, a flock of sheep—a small one, of course, but they were really sheep, not goats,—and several cows, and woe be to the cowherd who sought to increase the apparent output of milk by surreptitiously introducing into the pail some of the water in which a portion of his scanty attire had been previously soaked. The products of her farm were eagerly bought up—when there were any to sell, for regardless of such base details as heavy expense and rightful profit, Mrs Gibbons rejoiced with her whole heart in giving things away. Eveleen accused her of standing in rapt contemplation of an unconscious sheep, and cold bloodedly apportioning its joints in her mind to the various people in whose needs she was most interested at the moment, but her whole manner of life was after Eveleen’s own heart.
Theoretically, that is, for if there was one quality of the possession of which Mrs Ambrose’s worst enemy could not accuse her, it was the all-important “gumption.” She delighted in distributing gifts of milk or eggs, but of the minute care and watchfulness required for their production she was wholly incapable. Mrs Gibbons shook her wise head over her a dozen times a day, and wondered how a married woman could possibly be so heedless. The normal Early Victorian married woman, however young, was staid with a staidness that would be improbable in a grandmother at the present day. She laid down the law to other women with the assurance naturally conferred by her position on a dazzling eminence attained by sheer merit, and she made—or professed to make—her husband’s comfort and satisfaction her one object in life. Mrs Ambrose fell lamentably below this standard. Like Richard, Mrs Gibbons was compelled sorrowfully to believe that she had never really grown up. She coaxed when she should have commanded, received with ingenuous pleasure attentions she ought to have demanded as a right, and would forsake at any time the lofty society of her sister-matrons to advise a subaltern as to the proper treatment of a sick pony. But, as her hostess once said indignantly to a detractor, she would give the gown from her back to any one that needed it, and run herself off her legs to help a sick person; and if this did not necessarily show gumption, it showed something better. There were no professional nurses in India, not even Mrs Gamp and Mrs Prig, and a woman’s character was soon gauged by her readiness to nurse her friends in time of need—and not her friends only, but the veriest stranger, who had, as Europe would have said, no sort of claim upon her. Naturally Mrs Gibbons’s services were in constant, demand when the inevitable “low fever” made its appearance towards the end of the hot weather, but could she have multiplied herself by twenty, they would not have gone round, so that she was glad to be able to turn over some of the slighter cases to her guest. She did so not without misgiving, and with an impressive warning as to the size of doses, and the distinction to be observed between internal and external application; but no tragedies occurred. As a matter of fact, the medicine was generally forgotten, unless the patient or a servant remembered it, while the nurse brightened the sick-room with anecdote and comment, until the victims declared reproachfully that they would die of laughing, if of nothing else. She herself found the torments of prickly heat easier to bear when her mind was thus occupied, and was beginning to pride herself on having got through the hot weather remarkably well, when, just as all properly constituted people were counting the days to the breaking of the monsoon, she also went down with the fever. It was not a very severe attack, but it was characteristic of Eveleen to be convinced she would not recover, and with bitter tears to entreat Mrs Gibbons to let her see Ambrose just once more. Mrs Gibbons had been surprised, and a little scandalised, by the apparent brevity of the communications passing between the pair, and the obviously appalling difficulty Eveleen found in writing to her husband, and it is possible that she heightened the colours a little in her own letter. At any rate, when Eveleen awoke one day from a refreshing sleep, to the welcome sound of rain pouring down outside, she found Richard sitting looking at her. She smiled at him happily.
“That’s nice, now!” she said in her soft crooning voice. “It’s a pleasure to see you there, Ambrose. If you knew how good y’are to look at, you’d maybe be too proud.”
Richard Ambrose—buttoned up and strapped down as all official Britons were in those days, even in the tropics—smiled with some embarrassment. “I fear you are joking, my dear. Ought I to return the compliment?”
“Y’ought, then!” with energy. “I may be a washed-out doll, but my hair is smooth. You see that?”
She held out in a feeble hand a limp tress, which he scrutinised doubtfully. Eveleen’s hair was as ill regulated as her character. It would not curl, but neither would it lie flat, since it was possessed of a rebellious crispness which defied brushing and all known pomades. Hence the sportive ringlet and the sleek band—the two styles alone possible to the normal woman of the day—were both out of the question. But Richard did not look pleased.