“Ah!” said Richard quickly.
“Yes—to make a long story short, I am remanded to my regiment.”
They stopped in climbing the path, and looked at him incredulously. Colonel Bayard, the prince of Politicals, deprived of his acting rank and sent back to do duty with native infantry! The man who had ruled kingdoms and dispensed lakhs was to return to a despised calling and its scanty pay. He read their horrified amazement in their eyes, and raised his hand brusquely.
“No, don’t pity me too much; keep a little for yourselves. I wish I were the only person affected, but the fact is—the Political Establishment is dissolved.”
“Dissolved?” echoed Richard hoarsely.
“Destroyed, broken up, cast aside, kicked out. By the fiat of my Lord Maryport, without the ghost of a reason given.”
“Lennox!” the word sounded like a curse. Colonel Bayard saw Eveleen’s mute gesture of protest, and smiled at her.
“No, Mrs Ambrose, you are right. Old Harry had nothing to do with it—was as much taken aback as I was. He told me frankly he had been on the point of writing to recommend the reduction of the Agency, but certainly not its abolition. Like all those bustling energetic people just out from home, he thinks we do nothing for our money. Let him wait till he has had two or three hot weathers in Khemistan! At any rate, his view of it is that we spend our time drinking beer and smoking cheroots”—with a rather conscious laugh, for his friends would hardly have recognised him without a fat cigar in his mouth,—“and occasionally signing the papers our black clerks bring us, and he is going to work without any clerks at all. You will be the victim of his economy, Richard. Even he acknowledges that he must have some sort of political officer to consult when he’s quite out of his depth, so I put in a word for you.”
“As though I would stay here a day without you!”
“My dear fellow, you must. You are married, you have your wife here——” he smiled again at Eveleen as she looked back at him from the verandah steps with brimming eyes. “You can’t take her back to your regiment. The life would kill her. It ain’t as if she were a young girl,” he added in a whisper before he followed.