The Path to Honour Part 18

"A barrier--yes, of course; but a bond, too." This was a state of mind which Honour could thoroughly understand and appreciate. A life-long romantic friendship, absolutely precluded from becoming anything more, was just what appealed to her. It suggested what may be termed the Rolandseck ideal--the hero retiring from the world to an eligible hermitage, affording an extensive view of a desirably situated nunnery, where the heroine was similarly secluded--which, with its peculiar blending of religion and sentimentality, animated so many of her favourite books. "We can never forget that we have both known him, can we? You will tell me more about him, and we will keep his memory alive when all the world has forgotten him."

Whether the relief of unburdening his mind had served to clear her hearer's vision, or merely that the thought of the real Bob Charteris, most unsentimental of men, obtruded itself in all its incongruity with Honour's scheme for commemorating him, certain it is that instead of being grateful to her for falling in so exactly with his wishes, Gerrard was conscious of a distinct impatience. Was there no flesh and blood about the girl--no feeling, but merely sentiment? All unknown to himself, Gerrard had not been intending to suffer alone, and it was a blow to discover that what had meant to him a real and terrible renunciation was to her a mere matter of course, rather pleasurable than otherwise. He groaned as the truth forced itself upon him, and Honour looked up in alarm.

"I have done you harm--tired you," she said anxiously. "We must have another talk when you are better. I see my mother looking for me."

"Honour, it is time for us to go, dear," said Lady Cinnamond, coming in, and looking "like other people," as Mrs Jardine had said, in a huge halo of net and ribbon and flowers and blonde. Honour might make her mother's caps, but they had to be submitted for Sir Arthur's approbation, and as he was strongly of the opinion that there was nothing like roses for setting off a pretty face, the style was apt to incline to the decorated rather than the cla.s.sical. Lady Cinnamond spoke kindly to Gerrard, and expressed the hope that he would look in now and then, glancing the while from him to Honour as though anxious to find something in their faces that might guide her what to say, but in vain. In sheer bewilderment she appealed to her daughter when they were alone.

"Tell me, Onora, did the poor fellow plead with you again to marry him?"

Honour turned quickly. "Oh no, mamma--how could he? Neither of us could ever think of it now."

"That was what made you cry, then?"

"Mamma! why should it? He was telling me about poor Mr Charteris, and I realised how little I had known him. I can say it to you, mamma--it is a privilege to feel that such a man has cared for one."

"Then if he had lived you would have married him, my poor little one?"

cried her mother in dismay.

"How can I tell, mamma? One finds out these things too late. It is always so, isn't it?"

"And the poor young man who is not dead?" there was a hint of exasperation in Lady Cinnamond's voice.

"He doesn't dream of that sort of thing now. We shall always be friends, but never anything more."

"My dearest little foolish one, there are moments when I would gladly take you by the shoulders and shake you!" cried Lady Cinnamond in vehement Spanish. Catching her daughter's astonished eye, she calmed herself forcibly and spoke in English. "If you had seen that poor young man's face as you left the room, as I did, Honour, you would know what nonsense you are talking. Refuse him if you must, but don't keep him in torture."

"Dear mamma, you don't understand. Things are different now----"

"From what they were when I was a girl? I agree! And I prefer them as they used to be. There were your father and I, and his friends and my family trying to prevent our marriage. There were other men in the world, doubtless, but for me they simply did not exist. And we married, and people considered us very romantic. But to be romantic now, it seems, you must persist in remaining unmarried for the sake of a very worthy young man for whom you cared not a straw when he was alive!"

"I can't explain it, mamma. But one has one's feelings----"

"Quite so. And the poor Mr Gerrard has his also. But those you do not consider."

Gerrard's ill-used feelings were still unhealed a week later, when Sir Edmund Antony, learning of the imminent danger of war with Agpur, descended from the hills like a whirlwind to take command of the situation, and incidentally to upset as many as possible of his brother's arrangements. Having learnt all that Gerrard could tell him of the circ.u.mstances, he took occasion, while his secretary was at work on the fresh orders he had hastily drafted to Nisbet, the political officer in charge of the negociations with Sher Singh, to speak on more personal matters.

"I am sorry to see this continued depression of spirits on your part, Gerrard. The sin of despondency is one to which I myself am so conspicuously p.r.o.ne that I dare lose no opportunity of warning others against it."

"Forgive me, sir. Our conversation has led me to recall things so vividly----"

"True. But you feel, as you have a.s.sured me, that our friend Charteris fell in a good cause?"

"There could be no better, sir. But if only I could have died instead of him!"

Sir Edmund frowned. "These things are not in our hands. If Charteris's work was done, no efforts of yours or mine could have saved him. If your work is not done, all the powers of h.e.l.l could not prevail to bring about your death."

"But his work was not complete, sir. There was so much in him that no one realised--he had had no opportunity to display it. You and I, and one other person, have some faint idea of what he really was, but no one else can possibly know--the world can never know."

Colonel Antony pushed back his papers. "And what then?" he asked sharply. "How dare you say that his work was not complete because the world knew nothing of it? The world! The world does not make a man great, any more than it is the world's recognition that makes his work valuable. The value of the work lies in the spirit in which it is done. I tell you"--he spoke as though to himself, with a far-away look in his eyes--"I have seen something of work and the world's recognition of it. You know the interest that I take in the history of our people in India, how my wife and I are always poking and prying among old ma.n.u.scripts and records wherever we go. I have found there the histories of scores of forgotten heroes--men whose names, in any other service or any other country, would have been inscribed upon the nation's roll of honour. They marched half across India--hostile country, every foot of the way--at the head of a few hundred men, and faced and fought the might of empires at the end. They captured cities single-handed, and ruled them afterwards, and they pacified whole provinces, in spite of famine and plague and fever. Oh, they got their recognition--the thanks of the Directors, sometimes even of Parliament, swords of honour and trash of that kind. But who remembers even their names now? You will find their graves sometimes, neglected and defaced, in deserted cantonments, or the remains of their great bungalows grown over with jungle, and perhaps a legend or two will be hanging about among the natives--silly superst.i.tious things, of no value in recalling the man as he was. They did their work, and good work--completed work, as you would say--and they had their recognition, but they are no more remembered now than Charteris will be next year, except by you and one or two more. Ah, Gerrard, we are all very anxious to see our names carved on the stones that men may remember us, but we have to learn that it is enough if G.o.d deigns even to build our bodies into the wall. If Charteris did well what he was permitted to do, he could have done no more if he had lived a hundred years."

The rapt gaze faltered, and the soldier-mystic became the keen administrator once more.

"How much longer are you to be on the sick-list, Gerrard? I am going to send you to Darwan."

"I shall not be able to use this arm for some time, sir. Otherwise the doctor said he would let me off in another week. But you were not suggesting that I should take up Charteris's work?"

"That is exactly what I do suggest. I have no other man to send, and no other place at this moment that is crying out for you. I should not send you to Agpur again, and you would hardly wish to go, I imagine.

What is your objection to Darwan?"

"Simply that it was his work, sir. We were so different in every way--I had rather try almost anything else----"

"Do you wish to decline the post?"

"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 pa.s.sed, 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 cla.s.sify. 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 a.s.sault, 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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!"

"And I believe the fool really is glad, instead of having been thankful that his hated rival was safely out of the way," said Charteris compa.s.sionately.

"Glad is no word for it," said Gerrard. "Come and tell me all about yourself. I'm in the old place--you'll chum with me as usual, of course?"

"I believe you, my boy! But I must satisfy the natural curiosity of the higher powers first. I suppose it's true, as they told me at the gate, that the Colonel has come down like a wolf on the fold, and sneaked the conduct of affairs out of the hands of our Mr James?"

"Yes, he is here. You know he's got his K.C.B.?"

"Wish he had stayed up in the hills with it, then. I don't admire James Antony's taste in jokes, but his heavy hand appeals to me in connection with Sher Singh. Now I am afraid the erring brother will be received with tears of joy and forgiven on the spot and coddled afterwards, and I wanted him kept in suspense for a bit and then put on probation. He has given me some precious unpleasant moments, I can tell you. Well, you go off and prepare fatted calf and any other suitably symbolical prog you may have at hand, and I'll turn up as soon as I can."

Munshi Somwar Mal was in waiting to escort Charteris to his quarters when he emerged from his interview with the Resident, and greeted him with genuine pleasure.