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.
“I—I think I liked it better as it used to be,” he said hesitatingly. Eveleen sighed loudly.
“Some people are never satisfied!” she lamented, then her tone changed. “And y’are come to take me back with y’at last? Oh, don’t tell me y’are not!”
“I—I really can’t say, my dear. We ain’t our own masters in Khemistan nowadays—I suppose you know?”
“That Sir Harry Lennox is coming up? I know that, of course. Brian’s safely on the Staff now—you have heard?”
“I saw it gazetted—yes.” The tone firmly declined to congratulate either superior or subordinate. “Well, then, you must see that things are altered. It don’t lie with me to give you leave to come up the river—nor even with Bayard now.”
“Sure it’s all the same thing, if it lies with Sir Harry. But why do you talk as if he would change things?”
“His appointment must supersede Bayard—may supersede all of us. Surely you perceive that? Bayard and Bayard’s men ain’t likely to be here long.”
“I don’t see why. I believe Colonel Bayard and Sir Harry will like one another greatly.”
“Fall on each other’s necks and swear eternal friendship, in fact? Well, my dear, I hope so, but I doubt it. Old Lennox is Maryport’s man, and if he comes here, it’s to further Maryport’s policy, and we all know what that is.”
“But Sir Harry don’t see eye to eye with Lord Maryport by any means. Brian says he can’t speak with patience of the way his plan for the Ethiopian Expedition was bungled at the end—leaving the ladies prisoners and all. If they hadn’t been rescued, ’twas all the talk in Poonah that he’d have called out the Governor-General.”
“Well, there you are, you see. He would have had us remain in Ethiopia, no doubt.”
“Not a bit of it! He wouldn’t allow native states inside our boundaries, but he would never advance a step beyond them unless he was forced. The times I’ve heard him say that! If he comes, ’twill be to make the Khans keep their treaties, that’s all.”
“Pray, my dear, don’t agitate yourself so excessively. Ain’t Bayard here to make the Khans keep their treaties, and will they do it? And if they won’t do it for him, whom they call their father and mother, will they do it for the first arrogant old party that comes behaudering [swaggering] along? And when they won’t—what then?”
“Why, Sir Harry will make ’em, or know the reason why.”
“Precisely; he’ll break ’em, and say that was his orders.”
“But if ’twas his orders, sure he must do it?”
“D’ye think any orders would induce Bayard to do it? He’d be broke first himself, and that’s what will happen, you mark my words. The G.-G. wants Khemistan, and means to get it.”
He spoke so warmly that Eveleen’s voice was quite timid—she could not bear to hint at disagreement when Richard was for once talking to her as a reasonable being—as she suggested meekly, “But if the Khans made the treaties, oughtn’t they keep them?”
“Well, ain’t Bayard trying to make ’em? As he says, if the fools would only consult their own interests, they would be on his side. The treaties leave ’em quite free to govern the country according to their own ideas—though that don’t commend itself to you, eh? But there they are, and if they would behave themselves in their external relations, Maryport himself couldn’t lay a finger on ’em. But they won’t—very far from it.”
“Sure they ought be punished, then.”
“All very well theoretically, my dear, but you wait till it has to be done. That’s where the trouble will begin, and we shall all be in two camps. Bayard on one side—one of ourselves, a great shikari, a pukka sportsman—and on the other a foul-mouthed old blackguard who boasts that he knows nothing of India, and goes about abusing high and low the Directors, who are our masters and his, and the Services, who are supposed to be his comrades, and making the troops discontented. Whose part d’ye think most people will take—all old Indians especially?”
“But you wouldn’t mean they’d——”
“I ain’t suggesting there’ll be bloodshed among ourselves. But Bayard will resign, or be kicked out, and old Harry will rush to destruction with no one to stop him. The G.-G. may think he has set him an easy task, but he don’t know Khemistan. It’ll mean war to a certainty. Without Bayard to smooth ’em down, the Khans won’t stand the old chap’s gali, [insults] and their Arabits will face any army we can bring against ’em. Kamal-ud-din especially is full of fight.” He stopped suddenly, then laughed a little. “I don’t know what you’ll say to Kamal-ud-din’s latest, by the bye. Whether the performances of the talisman haven’t quite come up to expectation, or whether he heard of your threat to keep the luck, and resents it, I can’t say, but he seems to think the Seal ain’t quite complete. At any rate, a friend of his called upon me to enquire in the most discreet manner whether I was disposed to part with you, as there was a good home waiting for you where the jewel and you would be reunited.”
“The shameful wretch!” Eveleen’s blue eyes had dilated till they looked all black. “To dare to suggest such a thing——! And what did you say?”
“That his flattering proposals could not be entertained till my wife was a widow—— Eh? what did you say?”
“Nothing more? You let him think——?”
“Oh, I kicked him out. But they saw nothing shocking in the idea, of course—meant everything to be quite open and above-board, arranged in the most friendly way——”
“Well, if you call that friendly!” Tears and fury strove in Eveleen’s voice.
“They would regard it as quite friendly to invite a man to divorce his wife that she might marry some one else. The unfriendly way would be to take her without asking. Now really, my dear! I thought you would look upon it as a good joke, or I wouldn’t have told you.”
“And I suppose he said your wife was a crosspatch, and as ugly as sin, and altogether you’d do well to be rid of her and get another?”
“You must think me a very patient fellow, my dear! And ’pon my honour,” slowly, “I begin to believe I must be.”
“Ambrose, you have made a joke! D’ye hear, that was a joke! What’s come to you?” She was laughing hysterically. “And to do it when you must be cursing yourself for not taking the chance to get rid of me and start afresh! A new wife who would be English and proper and suitable and all the things I couldn’t be to save my life!”
“And wouldn’t be if you could? No, steady! no more of this, please. Quiet!”
His firm hand on her shoulder helped Eveleen to choke back the screams which threatened to burst forth, but she grasped the hand convulsively and held fast to it. “No, I’ll be good, I’ll be good! I didn’t mean—— But tell me now—Ambrose, tell me—what have I done? How have I disappointed you? How will I ever put things right if I don’t know what’s wrong?”
Panting painfully, she leaned half out of the bed, still gripping his hand with both hers, her eyes searching his face. Richard Ambrose, hating a scene at least as much as most Englishmen, wriggled uncomfortably. “Really, my dear, I don’t know—— Why”—with a sudden bright idea—“I thought it was you who were disappointed. Give you my word I did.”
“Then you had no business to. But what is it was wrong with me? It ain’t as though you didn’t know what I was like. We had known one another so long——”
“True.” He carried the war boldly into the enemy’s country. “But it was so long ago that I had forgot the changes time must bring. I had lived too much alone: I was an old man before I was a young one. But looking back, I thought—I hoped—I might succeed in making you happy. I was mistaken, and by involving you in my mistake I wrought you an irreparable injury.”
“Ambrose!” Eveleen was as easily diverted as a child. Her eyes filled with tears, her lip trembled. “What are you saying—a mistake, injury? That you have injured me, would you say?”
“Don’t I know from your own lips that you are the most miserable woman in the world?” he asked bitterly, but it must be confessed, with a feeling of shame.
“I didn’t say it! I did not! How can you——?”
“Pardon me, you did—at Qadirabad, five months ago.”
“But if I did, I never meant it—y’ought to know that! You must know—you couldn’t have believed it! Swear to me you did not, or I’ll crawl out of bed and hold to your feet so you can’t get away!”
“Pray don’t. It ain’t necessary. I’ll swear anything you choose. What will old Mother Gibbons say to me for letting you agitate yourself like this?”
“Mrs Gibbons is a dear sweet soul, and the heart of Dr Gibbons doth safely trust in her, because she never runs up bills. Indeed, then, she scolds him when he spends too much on cheroots. Would you have me turn like her?”
“Certainly not—in that respect, at any rate.”
“Then I’ll tell you this—I’d rather be myself, and be scolded by you, in your most shockingly cold style, than be like Mrs Gibbons—there! Now, will you let me come back with you to Qadirabad?”
“Good heavens!” he said helplessly. “Were the hysterics nothing but a sham, then?” But he saw the perplexity in her eyes changing again into poignant reproach, and hastened to make amends.
“No, I’m a fool, forgive me. But you will allow it’s a bit difficult for a man to follow you into a fresh mood every second minute—eh?”
“But why would I be in the same mood all the time?” in genuine perplexity. He laughed shortly.
“Don’t know, I’m sure, my dear. Blame me as much as you like, but judge me leniently when you find me slow. I was born like it, and have very likely got worse.”
He cut short her assurances that on no account would she have him the least bit different by departing, on the plea that he feared a scolding from Mrs Gibbons, and left to herself, Eveleen realised that she was baffled still. The enigma was not solved, the barrier was still between them. Compared with the good-comradely relations existing between Dr and Mrs Gibbons, she and Richard were like strangers feverishly struggling to behave as near friends. Perhaps, after all, Richard was right, and nothing else was possible to him. It was hardly likely he could change much at his age, and the more she dashed herself against his defences the more uncomfortable and embarrassed he would be. She must be calm, reasonable, English, if they were to be happy together. “And how will I manage that?” she asked herself dolefully. “I’ll try—if it’s only to please him, but it’s a poor chance!”
Whether from his own feelings alone, or assisted by Mrs Gibbons, Richard had learnt his lesson. No more hysterics for him! He had taken up his quarters at Government House—since Colonel Bayard had deputed him to act as his representative in receiving Sir Henry Lennox when he landed—and he paid his wife a visit punctiliously morning and evening, but departed instantly if she showed the least sign of becoming excited. Under this bracing treatment Eveleen improved rapidly in health, and was promoted first to a couch on the verandah and then to taking drives, and was even well enough to be allowed to accompany her hostess to the shore to welcome the new ruler when he arrived from Bombay. Everything seemed to conspire to spoil Sir Henry’s first impression of Bab-us-Sahel. It was bad enough that his steamer should have been compelled to anchor off the port the night before, in imminent danger of running upon a reef in the darkness, and it was undignified for the person invested with supreme military and political power in Khemistan to be dragged in his boat through the surf and up the beach by yelling coolies because the tide would not allow of his landing at the pier. But the ladies watching from their carriages opined that something more serious must be wrong as the small bent figure, with dark glasses and long straggling beard, hobbled up the shore. Sir Henry had brushed aside brusquely the greetings of the officers awaiting him, and was giving sharp orders, pointing now to the vessel pitching on the horizon, now to the headlands on either side of the town. Something had to be done instantly, that was clear, for not until two or three men had detached themselves from the group, and mounted and ridden off in hot haste, did he appear to remember his manners.
“Sickness on board!” said Mrs Gibbons the experienced, noting that the port surgeon was one of those who had ridden away. “Now I wonder what it is—not cholera, I trust! I must see what beds——”
“Ah, but just wait till Sir Harry has passed!” urged Eveleen, in deep disappointment. “We don’t know that it’s sickness. And you wouldn’t make me cut my own brother? There he is—that’s Brian!” indicating a youth whose tall form towered above that of the General, naturally short and now bowed with rheumatism. Brian had a large mouth—expanded further by a cheerful smile—and blue eyes like his sister’s, one of them closed at the moment in a palpable wink. Eveleen was so much taken up with responding to this greeting that she was surprised to find her husband—portentously stiff and correct, as who should say, “This is none of my doing!” bringing Sir Henry up to the carriage. The General’s faded blue tunic might have been a relic of the Peninsula, and he wore a curious helmet of his own invention instead of the ordinary cap or shako with a linen cover and curtain. But the keen eyes twinkling through the dark spectacles, and the enormous nose, would have made him noticeable anywhere, quaint little figure though he was. He saluted and bowed low as he approached the two ladies in their best white gowns and flower-trimmed lace caps—Mrs Gibbons solid, jolly, and dependable; Eveleen all on wires, quivering with interest and excitement.
“My chief pleasure in coming to Khemistan,” he said courteously, “was the prospect of meeting Mrs Ambrose again, but I did not expect to have the honour so soon.”
“Ah, but that’s because I have been here for the hot weather,” said Eveleen eagerly. “But I may go up the river again with Ambrose, may I not?”
“So far as the matter rests with me, I shall be only too delighted,” was the courtly reply, and it took all Eveleen’s self-control not to cast a glance of triumph at her husband.
“And how is Black Prince?” she enquired, seeking hastily for safer themes.
“A bit seedy just now—we have had a terrible voyage——” his face was shadowed. “But he’ll soon shake that off.” Then the twinkle reappeared. “But would not a well-conducted lady have enquired first after my wife and the girls?”
“Ah, I never was that!” lamented Eveleen. “But I’ll do it, I’ll do it! Pray, Sir Harry, has Lady Lennox forgiven me yet for teaching Sally to jump?”
“I think I may say she has—particularly since she believes Sally has forgot the accomplishment.”
“While all the time Sally’s naughty papa has been keeping it alive in secret—eh, Sir Harry? Ah then, I know you, you see—and you and Sally and I will have many a fine gallop yet. I’ve set up a little Arab I’d like you to see——”
“With all my heart—but not at present, I fear. Now I must reluctantly bid——”
“Ah, but I must make known to you my kind friend Mrs Gibbons here, who would be Chief Medical Officer if ladies could be doctors. She read in your face that you had sickness on board while you were still far down the strand.”
“Ah, my dear lady!” there was no badinage now in the General’s voice—“we don’t alarm our gentle friends with these sad matters, but we have lost fifty-four men from cholera since leaving Bombay. That was what detained me just now—giving orders for pitching a camp of isolation immediately on the point yonder. I can do nothing till my poor fellows are transferred there.”
“Then Mrs Gibbons is the person you want!” triumphantly. “She has already reckoned up in her mind how many beds she can put her finger on in an hour.”
The General shot a keen look at Mrs Gibbons’s composed face. “By Jove, ma’am, you’re the woman for me! With your permission, I’ll send over my own surgeon to consult with you immediately. Ladies, your servant!”
“Oh, Sir Harry!” cried Eveleen desperately as he turned away, “you’ll be letting Brian—my brother—come to tiffin, or dinner, at any rate?”
“Lieutenant Delany shall certainly pay his respects to Mrs Ambrose and her hostess this evening”—again Brian’s eye sought his sister’s and closed in a wink—“if his duties will allow. During the day he will be continuously occupied.”
“If I might suggest, sir——” they heard Richard’s voice as Sir Henry stumbled off resolutely through the sand to the waiting horses. They heard also the General’s answer.
“No, sir, you may not suggest. There is far too much ‘suggesting’ here. I take no suggestions from my subordinates.”