Sara Duncan - His Honour, and a Lady

The native smiled uncomfortably, puzzled at her audacity. His membership of the Bengal Legislative Council was a new toy, and he was not sure that he liked any one else to play with it.

“His Highness of Pattore,” said Ancram, slipping a hand under the fat elbow in its pink-and-gold brocade, “would be the very last fellow to get me into a scrape. Wouldn’t you, Maharaj!”

His Highness beamed affectionately upon Ancram. There was, at all events, nothing but flattery in being taken by the elbow by a Chief Secretary. “Certainlie,” he replied – “the verrie last”; and he laughed the unctuous, irresponsible laugh of a maharajah, which is accompanied by the twinkling of pendant emeralds and the shaking of personal rotundities which cannot be indicated.

Sir William Scott folded his arms and refolded them, balanced himself once or twice on the soles of his shoes, pushed out his under-lip, and retreated in the gradual and surprised way which would naturally be adopted by the Foreign Department when it felt itself left out of the conversation. The Maharajah stood about uneasily on one leg for a moment, and then with a hasty double salaam he too waddled away. Mrs. Church glanced after his retreating figure – it was almost a perfect oval – with lips prettily composed to seemly gravity. Then, as her eyes met Ancram’s, she laughed like a schoolgirl.

“Oh,” she said, “go away! I mustn’t talk to you. I shall be forgetting my part.”

“You are doing it well. Lady Spence, at this stage of the proceedings, was always surrounded by bank-clerks and policemen. I do not observe a member of either of those interesting species,” he said, glancing round through his eyeglass, “within twenty yards. On the contrary, an expectant Member of Council on the nearest sofa, the Commander-in-Chief hovering in the middle distance, and a fringe of Departmental Heads on the horizon.”

“I do not see any of them,” she laughed, looking directly at Ancram. “We are going to sit down, you and I, and talk for four or six minutes, as the last baboo said who implored an interview with my husband”; and Mrs. Church sank, with just a perceptible turning of her shoulder upon the world, into the nearest armchair. It was a wide gilded arm-chair, cushioned in deep yellow silk. Ancram thought, as she crossed her feet and leaned her head against the back of it, that the effect was delicious.

“And you really think I am doing it well!” she said. “I have been dying to know. I really dallied for a time with the idea of asking one of the aides-de-camp. But as a matter of fact,” she said confidentially, “though I order them about most callously, I am still horribly afraid of the aides-de-camp – in uniform, on duty.”

“And in flannels, off duty?”

“In flannels, off duty, I make them almond toffee and they tell me their love affairs. I am their sisterly mother and their cousinly aunt. We even have games of ball.”

“They are nice boys,” he said, with a sigh of resignation: “I daresay they deserve it.”

There was an instant’s silence of good fellowship, and then she moved her foot a little, so that a breadth of the heliotrope velvet took on a paler light.

“Yes,” he nodded, “it is quite – regal.”

She laughed, flushing a little. “Really! That’s not altogether correct. It ought to be only officiating. But I can’t tell you how delicious it is to be obliged to wear pretty gowns.”

At that moment an Additional Member of Council passed them so threateningly that Mrs. Church was compelled to put out a staying hand and inquire for Lady Bloomsbury, who was in England, and satisfy herself that Sir Peter had quite recovered from his bronchitis, and warn Sir Peter against Calcutta’s cold-weather fogs. Ancram kept his seat, but Sir Peter stood with stout persistence, rooted in his rights. It was only when Mrs. Church asked him whether he had seen the new portrait, and told him where it was, that he moved on, and then he believed that he went of his own accord. By the time an Indian official arrives at an Additional Membership he is usually incapable of perceiving anything which does not tend to enhance that dignity.

“You have given two of my six minutes to somebody else, remember,” Ancram said. For an instant she did not answer him. She was looking about her with a perceptible air of having, for the moment, been oblivious of something it was her business to remember. Almost immediately her eye discovered John Church. He was in conversation with the Bishop, and apparently they were listening to each other with deference, but sometimes Church’s gaze wandered vaguely over the heads of the people and sometimes he looked at the floor. His hands were clasped in front of him, his chin was so sunk in his chest that the most conspicuous part of him seemed his polished forehead and his heavy black eyebrows, his expression was that of a man who submits to the inevitable. Ancram saw him at the same moment, and in the silence that asserted itself between them there was a touch of embarrassment which the man found sweet. He felt a foolish impulse to devote himself to turning John Church into an ornament to society.

“This sort of thing – ” he suggested condoningly.

“Bores him. Intolerably. He grudges the time and the energy. He says there is so much to do.”

“He is quite right.”

“Oh, don’t encourage him! On the contrary – promise me something.”

“Anything.”

“When you see him standing about alone – he is really very absent-minded – go up and make him talk to you. He will get your ideas – the time, you see, will not be wasted. And neither will the general public,” she added, “be confronted with the spectacle of a Lieutenant-Governor who looks as if he had a contempt for his own hospitality.”

“I’ll try. But I hardly think my ideas upon points of administration are calculated to enliven a social evening. And don’t send me now. The Bishop is doing very well.”

“The Bishop?” She turned to him again, with laughter in the dark depths of her eyes. “I realised the other day what one may attain to in Calcutta. His Lordship asked me, with some timidity, what I thought of the length of his sermons! Tell me, please, who is this madam bearing down upon me in pink and grey?”

Ancram was on his feet. “It is Mrs. Daye,” he said. “People who come so late ought not to insist upon seeing you.”

“Mrs. Daye! Oh, of course; your – ” But Mrs. Daye was clasping her hostess’s hand. “And Miss Daye, I think,” said Mrs. Church, looking frankly into the face of the girl behind, “whom I have somehow been defrauded of meeting before. I have a great many congratulations to – divide,” she went on prettily, glancing at Ancram. “Mr. Ancram is an old friend of ours.”

“Thank you,” replied Miss Daye. Her manner suggested that at school such acknowledgments had been very carefully taught her.

“My dear, you should make a pretty curtsey,” her mother said jocularly, and then looked at Rhoda with astonishment as the girl, with an unmoved countenance, made it.

Ancram looked uncomfortable, but Mrs. Church cried out with vivacity that it was charming – she was so glad to find that Miss Daye could unbend to a stranger; and Mrs. Daye immediately stated that she must hear whether the good news was true that Mrs. Church had accepted the presidency – presidentship (what should one say?) – of the Lady Dufferin Society. Ah! that was delightful – now everything would go smoothly. Poor dear Lady Spence found it far too much for her! Mrs. Daye touched upon a variety of other matters as the four stood together, and the gaslights shone down upon the diamond stars in the women’s hair, and the band played on the verandah behind the palms. Among them was the difficulty of getting seats in the Cathedral in the cold weather, and the fascinating prospect of having a German man-of-war in port for the season, and that dreadful frontier expedition against the Nagapis; and they ran, in the end, into an allusion to Mrs. Church’s delightful Thursday tennises.