“And there was a cross officer—oh, and his name was Crosse!” she laughed delightedly—“said that ladies had no business on board ship. There’s a nasty wretch for you!”
“Poor Crosse was uncommonly riled—had no cabin all the voyage,” explained her husband. “But he got precious little compassion from Mrs Ambrose.”
“And he deserved none—did he, ma’am?” said Colonel Bayard heartily. “Now I know why Crosse chose to go on at once and catch the steamer starting for Qadirabad to-morrow evening. He was afraid he’d be hooted out of decent society if it was known he had said such an atrocious thing. But talking of steamers, Mrs Ambrose, don’t use up all your adjectives too soon, or you’ll have none left for the river craft, and the Bombay boats are palaces to ’em!” Precise people still talked about “steamboats” in the early ’forties, but the word steamer had established itself in familiar use, and Eveleen took it up promptly.
“But what I want to know is, why wouldn’t you have better steamers, if that’s your only way of getting about?” she demanded. “And tell me, why wouldn’t you have a better landing-place here?”
“Why should we?” Colonel Bayard bristled up unaccountably. “The place ain’t ours.”
“But sure it’s as good as ours!”
“Not a bit of it. It’s entirely our own fault that we are here, and if we set to work to improve the place, the people to whom it belongs would suspect us of wanting to land more troops and take possession of it—most naturally, in my opinion. Therefore I won’t have it touched. It’s the same with the steamers. The people here don’t want ’em—don’t share our craze for getting about quickly—and the landowners swear the wash damages the river banks.”
“That old codger Gul Ali Khan making bobbery about his shikargah again?” asked Richard Ambrose sympathetically, and thereafter the talk became local and technical in the extreme, while Eveleen listened fascinated. This was what she loved—and her husband would never talk to her about his work, and was chary of affording information even when she asked for it. Now he forgot her intrusive presence, and talked simply and naturally, while she sat with her head a little on one side and drank in admiringly what he said.
Presently they were speaking of public affairs, and of the Governor-General’s tardy permission to the punitive expedition against Ethiopia to take—at its commander’s pleasure and on his responsibility—a return route which might serve to bring home the abiding nature of British power to a people hugging delicious memories of a disaster which had shaken the white man’s prestige throughout Asia.
“They were saying at Bombay that Lord Maryport consulted old Lennox before he consented—or at any rate that Lennox had given him the advice,” said Richard.