Part 3
“You should congratulate me, too,” replied General Brandon, gently. “It was written that I should have to give up my child, and since it had to be, I am glad to give her to a man as admirable in every way as Captain Darrell.” General Brandon would have said this about any son–in–law not an absolute blackguard. But accidentally he happened to be right, for Darrell was indeed admirable in many ways. “She will go far from me,” said the General, with a sudden break in his voice, “but that a father must be prepared for. May she be happy,—that is all I ask. Captain Darrell came to see me this morning and mentioned settlements. At the words I was somewhat offended, not being used to having such matters mentioned in connection with marriage; but I speedily found that his intentions were most generous, he merely wanted to give my daughter everything he had. On my part I endowed my daughter with all I had, seven bonds of the Egyptian government, for which I paid a thousand pounds in English money, the best part of what I received during my service with the Khedive Ismail. I believe they would now bring very little in the market, but no doubt in the course of time the Egyptian government will meet all of its obligations in full. We must not lose our faith, my dear Pelham, in human nature. I also wished to make over to my daughter the equity in my house, for I have never been able to pay off the mortgage which I acquired when I bought it; but this Captain Darrell most generously refused to accept. And when he told me that his pay and allowances would amount to something like five hundred pounds a year, I felt that it should be quite enough to support a young couple in India, at least for the present.”
Pelham had to look away and laugh, at the bare idea of two such innocents as General Brandon and Jack Darrell attempting to transact business, and the gravity with which General Brandon mentioned the Egyptian bonds would have provoked a laugh from a dead horse. But there was so little money concerned in the transaction that it really did not make much difference.
In the course of twenty–four hours, through the good offices of the British Ambassador at the Washington office with the War Office in London, a cablegram arrived, granting an extension of leave for fourteen days to both Pelham and Darrell. Their prolonged stay in Washington had already made it necessary for them to return to India by way of Suez, and to give up their transcontinental trip. The additional two weeks gave time for the wedding preparations, which were necessarily simple for a wedding tour of two days and the sailing from New York in time to catch the next steamer of the Messageries Maritimes at Marseilles.
Pelham saw Elizabeth nearly every day during the two weeks preceding the marriage, and every time he saw her the melancholy conviction came over him that she was the woman he was never to forget and never to cease to love.
Mrs. Luttrell took charge of affairs, as much as Pelham would let her. She gave the newly engaged pair a large and splendid dinner in honor of their engagement, and there were other festivities of the same nature given by other persons on a smaller scale. All of Elizabeth’s former admirers, and they were legion, sent her wedding presents, and the shabby house was nearly swamped with them.
Richard Baskerville was of great assistance to Pelham in putting things through, for it was Pelham who made the marriage possible. Darrell could do nothing but gaze into Elizabeth’s beautiful black eyes, and if Pelham would have let him, would have spent all the money necessary for their first–class passage to India in buying bouquets for Elizabeth. Between Richard Baskerville, already known as one of the cleverest young lawyers in Washington, and Pelham a sincere friendship sprang up, as the two men were alike in many respects.
On a bright, sunny day in February, Elizabeth Brandon became the wife of Jack Darrell. The wedding took place at a little suburban church where the seats were cheap enough for General Brandon, who was a strong churchman, to afford seats for two. There were neither bridesmaids nor groomsmen, nor any of the showy paraphernalia of a smart wedding. Elizabeth, as much in love as she was, yet felt too much the coming parting from her father to make her wedding a merry one; it was, rather, sad, as are many of the sweetest things in life. Pelham was best man, and the Ambassador, who had good–naturedly helped the matter along, was present. Also there were half a dozen fossils, old comrades and Virginia relations of the Brandons. Richard Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell were there, and the society newspapers described Mrs. Luttrell as wearing a superb black–velvet gown and a magnificent ermine cape. Mrs. Luttrell’s black–velvet gown and ermine cape were a uniform which she had worn for the last forty years, replacing each velvet gown and ermine cape, as fast as they wore out, with new ones.
Her carriage took the bride and her father to the church, the bridegroom and his best man having preceded them in a cab. Elizabeth, in her simple white wedding gown, with magnificent old lace and her grandmother’s pearls, made an exquisite bride, and Darrell looked every inch a soldier in his scarlet tunic. It was a wedding where love and honor presided, yet Pelham’s heart was heavy at what might be the outcome.
There was a simple wedding breakfast at Elizabeth’s home, where were assembled a few persons, some of them, like the Ambassador and a couple of cabinet officers, sufficiently important to have delighted the newly rich to have secured as guests, and others, like the old comrades and the decayed Virginia relatives, so unimportant that the newly rich would not have touched them with a ten–foot pole. The bride’s health was drunk in cheap champagne. When she departed in her travelling gown for her two days’ wedding trip before sailing on that other tremendous journey to India, tears were in the eyes of most present, but General Brandon was dry–eyed and smiling. When he had bidden the last guest farewell and turned into his lonely home, which had that strange look of emptiness that follows a wedding or a funeral, Pelham returned with him.
General Brandon, seeing the sympathy in the eyes of Pelham, who had his own heartache, laid both hands on his shoulders and said, “My dear sir, believe me, I am at this moment a perfectly happy and delighted man,” and then suddenly wept like a child.
Pelham spent the next two days comforting and uplifting General Brandon, and felt himself comforted and uplifted by association with such a man. He said earnestly, at parting with the General: “Believe me, your daughter has the best of friends as well as husbands in Darrell, but she shall never want a friend as long as I live. India is a treacherous place to men who are out in the hot sun, and life is held there by a very uncertain tenure. So your daughter may survive us both; but as long as either one of us is alive, she shall be as well protected as if she were in your house.”
Two days after the wedding Pelham saw Elizabeth on the deck of the steamer which was to carry them to Havre. Her first words were, “How is my father?” and despite the deep glow of happiness which radiated from her soul through her eyes, she could not speak of him without tears. Nor did she at any time show any forgetfulness of him. She wrote him every day, and posted her letters at every stopping–place on that long journey to India.
Travelling makes people as well acquainted as marriage does, and by the time Captain and Mrs. Darrell and Pelham reached Marseilles, Pelham knew Elizabeth quite as well as Darrell did, and understood her far better. It was a delightful but saddening joy to Pelham when he found Elizabeth soon turning to him, rather than to Darrell, to answer her intelligent questions. In fact, Darrell himself, when she asked him, would say, “Pelham will tell you; he knows a lot more about those old classic beggars and Greek cads and ruffians than I do.” Elizabeth still found Darrell the most charming man in the world.
It was at Marseilles on a late afternoon in early March that Darrell said this to Elizabeth. The three were sitting at a table on the terrace of a café overlooking the old harbor, with its crumbling Vauban forts. The ships’ lights were twinkling against the dark blue of the water and the darker blue of the sky, while afar off they could see faintly the outline of the Château d’If, where Monte Cristo learned his language of the Abbé. Pelham had been telling Elizabeth the story of the city. The ancient Massilia, inhabited by a people whose talk was not, as the old Greek wrote, of seed–time or ploughing or harvest, but of
“Mast and helm and oar–bench, And the stately ships wherein They have all joy and pleasure O’er the wet sea way to win.”
Elizabeth, with the keen delight of a mind newly awakened to books and travel, was capable of enjoying both. Her childhood and first girlhood had been spent in a secluded country house, where the books were few and old and of little value. The two or three years she had spent in Washington since her father’s return from Egypt, enriched only by his Egyptian bonds, had not been of a sort to develop her mind. They had chiefly been spent in dancing and flirting; but Elizabeth, with the Southern girl’s inevitable tendency both to dance and flirt, had that which often goes with it, a depth of intelligence and a serious understanding. It was a like seriousness of understanding in Pelham which attracted her so powerfully. Darrell, whom she still thought, and was to think for some time to come, the most charming man in the world, was never serious about anything except dogs and horses and Elizabeth. He took everything easily, especially life and death, and would have ridden up to a roaring battery or into any other of the many mouths of hell with a smile upon his lips. He did not quite understand why Elizabeth, in the midst of her bridal joy, often shed tears for her father, and although never showing the least impatience at it, or aught but the tenderest kindness, wondered why she should want anybody but him, as he wanted no one but her.
He was, like many men of his kind, perfectly modest, too high–minded if not too large–minded for jealousy, and thought it the most natural thing in the world that Elizabeth should turn to Pelham for sympathy and information, as Darrell himself had always done. At this moment he was very much interested in Pelham’s account of the ancient tunny fisheries, as they had just had among their _hors–d’œuvres_ dried tunny fish, as well as their bouillabaisse. Elizabeth knew something of the man of yesterday who had made bouillabaisse immortal, but Darrell was surprised to hear that Thackeray had ever written verse. Pelham, sitting next Elizabeth and, although habitually a silent man, doing most of the talking, began to wonder sadly how long it would be before Elizabeth became desperately bored by her lover husband. No such thought entered Elizabeth’s mind; she only deemed herself twice fortunate in having the companionship of such a friend as Pelham as well as the love of her hero husband Darrell.
Next morning they sailed through Suez for Bombay. Elizabeth proved a good sailor and spent most of her waking hours on deck. Darrell lay back in his steamer chair and smoked, being quite satisfied with the spectacle of his charming Elizabeth tripping up and down the deck and talking with Pelham. The other passengers were not quite certain at first whose wife she was.
As they sailed over the blue Mediterranean, it was Pelham who told Elizabeth when they would come in sight of Stromboli; and it was on his arm that she watched before daybreak a great, pallid moon sinking into the black world of waters on the west, while on the east the dun sky, across which fled great ragged masses of dark clouds, was lighted by the vast torches of Stromboli waving like a blazing head of Medusa. Meanwhile Darrell was sound asleep in his berth. It would have taken more than ten Strombolis to have gotten him up on deck at that hour. But a gun, a dog, or a fishing–rod would have kept him up all night and made him as alert and watchful as if his life depended upon the issue. It was Pelham who showed to Elizabeth the sickle–shaped port of Messina, and told her of the ancient coins of the city, which bore a sickle upon them. And together, as they sailed along the desolate shores of Crete, they followed the itinerary of Paul of Tarsus.
When the ship made its slow way through the Canal to Suez, Darrell was roused to study it from the aspect of a military man. But it was Pelham, who had more military science in his ugly head than Darrell had in his whole handsome young body, who watched with Elizabeth the red flamingoes rising from amid the tamarisk trees. Once out of the Canal, Darrell again resumed his life of smoking, sleeping, eating, and adoring Elizabeth; but Elizabeth, who was being educated by Pelham, listened with the eagerness of an intelligent child to Pelham’s stories of those historic lands whose bleak, black–scarred, and rocky shores border the Red Sea. He told her of those strange Mohammedan people who inhabit this country, where nature is as fierce as man, and where “Allah is God of the great deserts,” as Pierre Loti says,—those people in whom Islam is incarnate. Together Elizabeth and Pelham watched the passage around Bab–el–Mandeb, the “Gate of tears.”
At last, on a hot, bright morning, they landed at Bombay, the great busy, dirty city, and after a week’s travel by night and day they finished their journey at Embira, in one of the remotest depths of the Punjab. Elizabeth had travelled far and fast, since that January night when both Pelham and Darrell had searched for the little pearl heart, dropped from around her milk–white throat; but she had travelled farther and faster than she knew.
_Chapter Three_
Embira was like most second and third rate Indian stations, neither better or worse. There were a dirty native city, where plague and famine alternated; a river that was either a rushing torrent or as dry as a bone; and cantonments which had seen little change since the Mutiny. A battalion of Pelham and Darrell’s regiment was stationed there, with large detachments of artillery and cavalry.
The only remarkable thing about the station was that, although it was very far from being garrisoned by any part of a crack regiment, the social status of the officers and their wives appeared to be almost on a level with that of the household troops. The wife of the Colonel commanding was the niece of an Earl besides being the commanding officer of the C. O. There were a couple of titled women among the officers’ wives, and no less than two subalterns would inherit baronetcies. Neither Pelham nor Darrell stood any chance of inheriting his grandfather’s title, nor did there seem much more possibility of Darrell’s inheriting the problematical fortune which was the staple joke between Pelham and himself.
Darrell, who would have been classed as a detrimental in London, was of the sort to be adored by the young ladies of the post; and his appearance with a bride, and that with scarcely a day’s warning, was both a slight and a grievance to the ladies of Embira. And an American wife, too! It was the aim and object of the ladies to maintain the social tone of the regiment, of which they were enormously proud, and here was Darrell, the grandson of a peer, introducing a person among them whom it was taken for granted he had met in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains near Philadelphia, or who was perhaps a miner’s daughter in the vicinity of Boston.
It was in this critical and even hostile circle that Elizabeth made her first appearance, three days after her arrival at Embira. It was on the occasion of the regimental sports, which were rendered brilliant by the presence of a large party of visitors from England, including the noble Earl who was uncle to the C. O.’s wife, a commissioner who had brought his own new wife on purpose to eclipse the pretty wife of the deputy–commissioner, and a vice–regal aide–de–camp,—all together a brilliant party for a remote Indian station.
The afternoon was hot and bright, but the gardens which were reserved for tea and flirtations were still unparched and the white polo grounds adjoining were not as yet dust blinded. When Elizabeth, at five o’clock in the afternoon, appeared dressed for the occasion, on the veranda of their quarters, Darrell surveyed her with pride and pleasure, not unmixed with apprehension. She looked, it is true, exquisitely charming in her pale green muslin, her rose–crowned hat, her white parasol, and with her little, black, silver–buckled shoes, a model of daintiness to the eyes of the Englishmen. But Darrell also felt some anxiety; he suspected that she would be coldly received by the unkind women and patronized by the kind ones, and he feared that Elizabeth might be as crushed by both as an English girl might have been. Pelham, on the contrary, who understood Elizabeth far better than her husband did and felt even a deeper pride in her as his silent adoration for her had grown deep and strong, felt not the slightest fear. Elizabeth was in manner and bearing, as well as in beauty, far above the most patrician woman at the station. Every other woman except herself realized and recognized that there was some one above her in station, she was of necessity the social inferior of somebody. Not so with Elizabeth. As an American woman of good birth, she had never seen or heard of any one who was above her, and would have been perfectly at her ease with royalty itself. The admiring glances and compliments of Pelham and Darrell flattered Elizabeth and brought the wild–rose color to her creamy cheeks; and with the consciousness of looking her best, she entered the gardens with her husband walking on one side of her and Pelham on the other, and was duly presented to the Colonel’s lady.
There is perhaps nowhere in the world that the inability of Englishwomen to dress well and their total subjection to their dressmakers are so obvious as in India. There the woollen gowns which look well on an autumn day among the Scotch hills, and the tailor–made dresses which are suited for Regent Street on a dull morning, the elaborate silks and laces which are fit for London drawing–rooms and theatres, are worn with a serene unconsciousness of unfitness. On this hot afternoon the ladies of Embira had put on their best,—that is to say, their worst clothes as far as unsuitability went. Hats bristling with feathers, large white boas, rustling silks, and gorgeous parasols made the gardens bright, but made the wearers look half–baked. Among these came Elizabeth’s delicate green muslin and airy lightness of attire. The men, on looking at her, felt as if they had just had an iced drink. The ladies saw that she had accomplished something quite beyond them in the way of dress, which, as Darrell half feared, made the unkind determine to be more icy to her and the kind even more patronizing.
The Colonel’s lady, a vast person in purple silk and a collection of diamond ornaments which made her appear as if covered with a breastplate of jewels, was one of the latter kind. She greeted Elizabeth as if she were a fifteen–year–old schoolgirl who must needs be awed by all she saw around her. Elizabeth, who knew well the cosmopolitan society of Washington and was accustomed to see power and importance classed together, was in no way terrified; nor was she even astonished when the Earl, a shabby person who had a turbulent wife whom he was very glad to leave at home, asked to be introduced to Mrs. Darrell.
The Colonel’s wife, who had spent the whole time of her uncle’s visit trying to induce him to be introduced to people against his will, was staggered, but promptly agreed to his proposition. She whispered his name and rank in Elizabeth’s ear and advanced a step or two towards the Earl, but Elizabeth quite unconsciously stood perfectly still and had the Earl brought to her to be introduced, receiving him exactly as she would have done some of the numerous pleasant elderly gentlemen whom she had met in Washington. The Earl, who was not without humor, saw the look of amazement on the face of the Colonel’s lady at Elizabeth’s calm attitude and secretly enjoyed the situation. He was an easy–going person who had but one requirement on the face of the earth, and that was to be perpetually amused and entertained. And this one requirement of his soul was amply satisfied by the charming young American girl. She was not in the least like most of the American girls he had known and met in England, who were usually the daughters of retired tradesmen and rather poor imitations of Lady Clara Vere de Vere. The Earl, however, much to his chagrin was not allowed to have Elizabeth all to himself and was compelled to share her society with a couple of impudent subalterns, who in the pursuit of a pretty face and a dainty foot feared neither man nor devil.
This was only the beginning of an afternoon of triumph for Elizabeth, a triumph which she enjoyed without appreciating its true significance. She had the enormous advantage of being distinctly different from the women around her, and of having the perfect ease which comes from the feeling of perfect equality. She was perhaps the best–born woman of all those present, reckoning good birth to mean many generations of people at the top of the ladder. Ever since the first Brandon, a decayed gentleman, had set foot on American soil in the days of Charles I., the Brandons had been in the front rank, with none better than themselves. The Earl himself had a great–grandmother who began life as a milliner’s apprentice and thence progressed to the London stage. But Elizabeth’s great–grandmothers were all of the Brahmin caste in her own country. The ancestry of the titles in the regiment went back only as far as the early part of the eighteenth century, while Elizabeth’s ancestors had behind them already some hundreds of years as gentle people, before their advent into the new country. It was that perhaps which gave Elizabeth the patrician nose and her delicate hands and feet, and it certainly gave her that perfect composure of manner which, unlike Lady Clara Vere de Vere’s icy stateliness, could not be successfully imitated by any parvenu who ever walked the earth.
Darrell was secretly delighted at the admiration which Elizabeth excited. He had not felt so great a sensation of triumph since he had introduced into the regimental mess a certain Irish setter with a pedigree which could be proved back to the time of Queen Elizabeth. Pelham, who would have been a favorite among the ladies had he allowed it, saw everything out of the tail of his eye and was rather sorry when he saw the drift of men towards Elizabeth. When the trio returned to Darrell’s quarters through the soft Indian twilight, Darrell was openly elated and Elizabeth secretly so, but Pelham felt that Elizabeth’s course lay in dangerous waters.