Read Ebook: The Path to Honour by Grier Sydney C

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Ebook has 1404 lines and 103045 words, and 29 pages

Charteris winked in the most vulgar manner. "What'll you take on it? Do you think she don't know she has set you and me by the ears? If not, old Mother Jardine will soon enlighten her. And then--oh, my revered Hal, can you doubt what her first move will be? To reconcile us, my boy, as if we were two dirty little snivelling urchins in her village school at home! Will she make us shake hands? Oh, ain't it glorious!"

He dropped into his chair, helpless with laughter, while Gerrard surveyed him with distaste. It was some consolation to feel that Bob could not possibly be properly in love, if he could thus contemplate the likelihood of the object of his affections making herself ridiculous. But as if he had read his friend's thoughts, Charteris sat up suddenly, and spoke with perfect gravity.

"Mind you, Hal, all this don't signify that I forgive you in the least for coming between her and me. I'm willing to call a truce because falling out is horrid inconvenient, and looks silly. But your intrusive existence has turned love's young dream into a farce, and this suggestion of yours can only make things worse. I never bargained for being a sort of Siamese twin, but that's how it comes out. The unfortunate girl will never be able to think of one of us without the other. If she is dwelling affectionately on your modest merit, what you call, I believe, my swaggering dare-devilry will force itself into her mind, and if any of my encounters with tigers or dacoits should reach her ears, they will only recall your powers of discussing theology or reeling off poetry by the yard. Make no mistake. You intrude, sir; and I resent it."

"And words can't express the depth of my resentment that you should have poked your nose into my affairs," returned Gerrard heartily.

Definite refusal.

Not at home, lit. the door is shut.

HER SIDE OF THE CASE.

"I feared so much that you might consider me intrusive," said Mrs Jardine.

"On the contrary, I consider you most kind," replied Lady Cinnamond. She sat very erect, a beautiful woman still, with her dark eyes and white hair. Mrs Jardine was not an imaginative person, but the outlines of the Cinnamonds' family history had reached her, and her thoughts wandered involuntarily to the storming of Badajoz and the beautiful Spanish girl who had sought refuge in the British camp, and she found excuse for that infatuation on Sir Arthur Cinnamond's part which she had denounced bitterly when she first heard that "the new General's" wife was a foreigner. Not that she felt as yet quite at her ease with Lady Cinnamond. There was something that seemed to baffle her, a kind of regal willingness to hear all she had to say with courtesy, but with no promise to follow her advice.

"I have other daughters, and they have not been entirely without lovers." There was a slight quiver of amusement about the lips of the General's wife.

"Yes?" said Mrs Jardine, with such breathless interest that her hostess had not the heart to baulk her curiosity.

"We were living at Boulogne before my husband was sent to the Cape," she said, choosing her words with care--"for the advantages of education, of course, and--well, dear Mrs Jardine, you know what half-pay means as well as I do, and I need not apologize, need I? Two elderly cousins of Sir Arthur's happened to pass through, and we were able to offer them hospitality when the packet was prevented crossing by a storm. They took the greatest fancy to little Honour, and wished to adopt her, but we refused. Then came the Cape appointment--to the Eastern Province, where the climate is so dangerous to young children born elsewhere, and they renewed their offer. And we consented to let them have Honour until she was seventeen. They were most kind to her, I am sure."

"Yes?" breathed Mrs Jardine softly again.

"Really, there is little more to say. Naturally your child becomes something of a stranger when you do not see her for fifteen years. But pray don't imagine that I blame the Miss Cinnamonds. Honour has been well educated, and taught to be a companion to her elders--rather too much so, perhaps. She has visited the poor, and taught a class in the village school, and practised all the good works which Sir Arthur says are new in England since his day, and I believe her aunts hoped to see her married to the curate. But unfortunately he went over to Rome."

"How truly terrible!" cried Mrs Jardine, then stopped in pitiable confusion, remembering that the lady before her had been almost certainly born and bred a Roman Catholic, though she now attended the tomb-church Sunday by Sunday with Sir Arthur, and betrayed far less impatience than he did when Mr Jardine's discourses exceeded the regulation length.

"It might have been much worse," said Lady Cinnamond innocently. "I cannot discover that Honour's heart was at all touched. But as you may imagine, her aunts were much distressed, and it was almost a relief to them to send her out to us as soon as an escort could be found."

"Yes?" said Mrs Jardine for the third time, but as it was evident no further information was forthcoming, she covered her disappointment with a little gush of friendly interest. "And do tell me, dear Lady Cinnamond, what is the dear girl's real name? As I said to Mr Jardine only two days ago, 'You may take my word for it, Samuel, Miss Cinnamond was baptized Honora or Honoria. Honour is merely a sweet little family name.'"

"I suppose it may sound foolish to strangers," said Lady Cinnamond, with a calmness that suggested she did not care whether it did or not. "It was a kind of joke of Sir Arthur's. I was playing with her one day when she was a baby, and calling her in Spanish the dearest thing in the world, and he pounced on me at once. 'I thought honour was the dearest thing in the world?' he said--I had told him so long before--and after that he would not hear of calling the baby anything but Honour."

She paused--with a definiteness which suggested that Mrs Jardine's call had lasted long enough, but the visitor was by this time aware that she had been guided dexterously away from her main object, and was determined to repair the omission.

The slightest possible gesture from the great lady stopped her.

"I have no fear whatever that either my daughter or any gentleman who may be among the guests will transgress the laws of propriety," said Lady Cinnamond icily.

"But what course were you intending to propose?" asked the hostess, with natural curiosity.

"Refused them both?" cried the visitor incredulously.

"Of course. I thought you would have been sure to know," said Lady Cinnamond sweetly. She rose as she spoke, and Mrs Jardine found it well to take her leave. Her hostess watched her depart, with a rather worried little smile, and then passed along the verandah to the dressing-room where her two daughters were arranging their dresses for the evening. Marian, the elder, had married her father's aide-de-camp soon after the move to Ranjitgarh, and the return from the honeymoon was the occasion for the ball to be given by the army in their honour. Vivid scarlet geraniums were to loop up Mrs Cowper's pale amber draperies, blush-roses to nestle in the airy folds of Honour's white tarlatan, and the bride claimed her mother's attention at once.

"Here," said Lady Cinnamond without hesitation, indicating a third place, and both girls cried out in admiration. That was just right. They knew it went awkwardly before, but they could not quite see where it should be. Their mother threw herself into their occupation, altering a fold here and pulling out a puff there, apparently engrossed in what she was doing, but conscious, through all Marian's light-hearted chatter, of the shade on Honour's brow. Her heart ached to see it, but she would not force the girl's confidence. There was not between her and her youngest-born the sympathy which had made those other handsome, capable daughters, whose married homes were landmarks of the wanderings of Sir Arthur and his wife, regard their mother almost in the light of an elder sister--only fifteen years older, indeed, than Charlotte, the eldest--and bring their joys and sorrows naturally to her. Honour was disappointed in her parents, her mother felt; it might almost be said that she disapproved of them, and though the feeling was not new to Lady Cinnamond in her own case, since she was obliged in every new station to live down the disadvantage of being a foreigner, it raised in her a tumult of indignation that any one, and most of all his own daughter, should presume to disapprove of Sir Arthur. But Honour was very young, and even if time did not soften her views, closer acquaintance must.

"Come to my room when you are dressed, Honour, and I will lend you my pearl necklace," said Lady Cinnamond, laying her hand on the girl's shoulder. Honour's response was drowned in the noise of horse-hoofs and clanking that announced an arrival in front of the bungalow.

"Dear Papa and Charles returned already!" cried Mrs Cowper, peering through the Venetians. "Fly, Mamma! Charley, Charley, come and see whether you approve of my gown!"

Lady Cinnamond fled, in answer to the sonorous shout of "Rosa! Rosita! Sita!" which pealed through the house, and Captain Cowper entered from the verandah.

"Stunning!" he breathed fervently. "Horrid shame to waste it all on a handful of politicals up in No Man's Land instead of exhibiting it at Government House. You wear this fallal on your head, I suppose?"

"But it would look ravishing wherever you wore it," averred her husband, dodging the geranium-spray she threw at him, and there followed a brisk engagement with the flowers left in the box, to which Honour listened with some secret contempt but considerable interest, as she sewed on her roses where her mother had pinned them. Honour was learning lessons which ran counter to every maxim that had influenced her hitherto, and baffled all her efforts to reconstruct her vanished world. Those were the days when phrenology was considered an indispensable aid to instructors of youth, and a professor of the science had duly felt Honour's bumps, and recorded, for the guidance of her cousins, his mature opinion that, "though this young lady will not find it easy to apply herself to fresh subjects of study, yet she will never lose what she has once mastered." But in this case the mastering was the difficulty. To her, life had hitherto meant a round of recurring duties, to be performed conscientiously as they came, and love a blinding illumination revealing to a humble worshipper the form of a hero and a saint, but ending preferably in renunciation--if voluntary and wholly unnecessary so much the nobler and better. To think of love in connection with an ordinary, average man was something very like sacrilege, and poor Honour fairly shuddered when Mrs Jardine, who bore her a grudge for unsettling Mr Jardine's mind with the new views she had brought from home, broke to her the horrible fact that she had made two ordinary young men fall in love with her. It was of a piece with the disturbing discovery that whereas she had come out, as she understood, to soothe the declining years of her aged parents, those parents, though grey-haired, were disconcertingly hale and hearty, and asked only that she would be happy and make herself agreeable--two tasks of which Honour found the first impossible, and the second extremely difficult.

Her daughters took a very secondary place in Lady Cinnamond's mind when her husband was in question, and it was seldom that Sir Arthur had to complain of his wife's not being present to receive him when he returned from his duties. She ran into his snuggery now like a girl, and broke into the liquid Spanish which formed such an effective defence against the ears of aides-de-camp or English-speaking servants.

"You are tired, my Arturo. The sitting has been very long. Were the Durbar open to reason?"

"My dearest, they have no thought but to procrastinate and obstruct business, and our excellent Colonel indulges them far too tenderly. Every form of ceremony must be observed, and all the long-drawn compliments duly inserted, until a whole morning is wasted over one small matter."

"And my poor Arturo must sit and listen to it?"

"So much the better for the conduct of business, then. But they will not love him as they do the Colonel."

Sir Arthur laughed. "I fancy James can dispense with their affection if he secures their obedience. The Colonel desired his compliments to you, my love, and begged that you would not consider his absence this evening in any way a slight, since his principles demand it of him. The furbelows all ready, eh?"

"Nearly. But, Arturo, I have been entertaining Mrs Jardine the greater part of the morning."

"Some nice new piece of scandal, eh? What was the 'real duty' that brought her out in the heat?"

"An earnest desire to promote peace. She thought it might be better if Honour did not appear to-night. No, my Arturo,"--as Sir Arthur moved explosively,--"it was a warning given out of pure kindness to me, a foreigner. I told her what had happened, and she went away, I trust, satisfied. She thought me cold, I fear, for I restrained both voice and words."

"She is so young, Arturo; she did not understand. And it was not all her fault."

"Which means that it was her father's. Well, but how was I to know that a daughter of yours and mine would turn out a fool? When she overwhelms me with a cool proposal to set up schools and I don't know what for the European women and children, what could I do but tell her it was the chaplain's business? You won't say that I ought to have encouraged her? Think of all the unpleasantness it would have caused in the regiments! And surely it was only natural to turn aside the matter by pointing out a sphere where her efforts would be more acceptable? Why, if I had said such a thing to Charlotte, or Eliza, or Marian, they would have blushed prettily and said, 'Oh, Papa!' and Marian might have giggled, but would any of them ever have thought of actually carrying it out?"

For this was the unfortunate result of Sir Arthur's ill-timed jocularity in advising his daughter to turn her enthusiasm for humanity to account in reforming some of Colonel Antony's assistants, instancing Gerrard and Charteris as standing in special need of her services. Young ladies were scarce, Honour was handsome and had inherited a touch of her mother's dignity, and when she unbent and displayed a flattering interest in the moral and spiritual welfare of each young man, the mischief was done.

"And then, to improve matters, she refuses both of them!" went on Sir Arthur despairingly. "What does she want? No one seems to please her."

"If we were in Spain, it would be very simple," mused Lady Cinnamond. "She would go into religion."

"Aye, romance--all romance!" growled Sir Arthur. "For your sake and mine, my dear, I trust it may wear off soon, but I doubt it. What hope is there of a girl who wears King Charles the First's hair in a locket?"

With the laudable idea of discouraging gossip by behaving as if nothing unpleasant had happened, Gerrard secured a dance, and sheer pity for his embarrassed partner impelled him to make conversation while they waited for the music to begin. Colonel Antony disapproved of dancing, especially in India, on account of the effect on the natives, but his brother James had just passed them, with Marian Cowper, a radiant vision, on his arm, and Gerrard ventured a remark on the contrast between the stern-featured civilian and his partner. Receiving nothing but an almost inaudible murmur of assent, he observed how well and happy Mrs Cowper was looking.

"Oh yes. Of course, she likes India." The sigh which accompanied the words told more than Honour had intended, and she went on hastily. "She has a sort of natural connection with it, you know, for Mrs Hastings was her godmother."

"Yes, the widow of Warren Hastings. Doesn't it carry one back into history?" Honour had forgotten her embarrassment, for things of this kind had a way of making links between Gerrard and herself.

"I should have thought it was impossible."

"Oh, she only died about ten years ago--yes, the year the Queen came to the throne. So I am not making poor Marian out to be terribly old."

The minds of both were wandering back to Westminster Hall filled with serried rows of faces, with all eyes turned upon a small pale man in the midst, when they were suddenly recalled to the present by the indignant approach of Bob Charteris.

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