"If you send me to Darwan, sir, I shall go."
"I am not going to order you to Darwan. There is another post, by the bye, that you can have if you choose, with less responsibility and an easier life. Old Sadiq Ali of Habshiabad has been plaguing me for an officer to help him to train his army and pull the state together generally. He is a stiff-necked old ruffian, but it is a soft berth compared with Darwan. You are at liberty to choose that if you please, but if you are the man I take you for you will select Darwan and carry on the work that Charteris began. I leave it in your hands."
"I will take Darwan, sir. I don't expect to succeed, but I will do my best."
[1] Office, study.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL.
The secretary came in with his hands full of papers, and Gerrard left the office, hardly knowing whither he went. James Antony, sitting in his shirt-sleeves among the records of his interrupted labours in another room, took a huge cheroot out of his mouth and called to him as he passed, but he muttered something unintelligible and hurried on. Up and down the stone-paved courtyard he paced, much to the perturbation of the sentry at the gateway, who found the form of madness with which the Sahib must be afflicted difficult to classify. Gerrard was wrestling with himself and with the impulse to throw up political employment altogether and go back to the routine work of his profession. When he and Charteris left Ranjitgarh together, he had envied his friend, and wished that his work also lay in the open air and among unsophisticated children of nature. But now the environment in which he had spent the past year had left its traces on him, heightening his natural tendency to proceed by sap and mine rather than by direct assault, and rendering him still less ready than before to cut Gordian knots when by any conceivable expenditure of time and patience they might ultimately be undone. In other words, his Agpur training had improved his fitness for work of the same kind, but left him worse adapted than before for the rough and ready methods necessary for the ruler of Darwan. And he was to succeed Charteris, whose success in these very rough and ready methods had been pre-eminent, and who would much have preferred to do the wrong thing at once rather than the right thing after a lengthy pause.
So much engrossed was Gerrard in his meditations that the jingling and clanking that told of the arrival of a party of horsemen at the gate of the Residency failed to attract his notice, and it was not until, as he turned in his backward and forward march, he came face to face with Bob Charteris sitting on his horse in the moonlight and solemnly regarding him, that he realised he was no longer alone. He stood speechless.
"Thought I'd wait and see how long you could keep it up—brown study as usual!" cried Charteris. "Why, I believe the beggar takes me for a ghost! Hal, old boy!" bending from the saddle he bestowed on Gerrard a most unghostly clap on the shoulder. "I'm come back to plague you; do you twig—eh?"
"Bob!" cried Gerrard, shaking hands with him rapturously. "My dear old fellow, I never was so glad in my life!"