Part 19

Well: I was married to my darling Roger last Wednesday, and if it wasn't every now and then that I think about poor John I should be the happiest woman alive. Mother, I've _always_ loved him since that first morning we met on the steamer and he pointed out the Isle of Wight, and then took such care of me all through the voyage. And he says he fell in love with me the same time. Isn't that _wonderful_ when you think of all the great ladies he has seen, many of them I'm sure in love with him. When I asked him why, he just kissed me and said it was my violet eyes and my look of utter helplessness. But I feel it is _too sacred_ to talk or write about. I was always a true wife to poor John. People may think and say what they like. There is a horrid old cat here on the Mainland, who also travelled out with me. I'm sure she says and writes horrid things about me. It's only jealousy. But even now, Mother, I haven't told you almost the most wonderful thing of all! I did just say in my last letter how I'd gone to stay with the wife of the Consul-General. It happened this way. When we first landed here from one of those dreadful Arab sailing-boats that are full of what you _will_ call B flats but what I think--and so does Roger--it is much more sensible to call "bugs" straight out--when we landed Roger said, "You'd better go to Mr. Callaway and stay there first till I can find out what it's best to do for you." So there I went, and I was just _miserable_. I didn't like to tell you how much at the time for fear of its upsetting you. I really felt almost like committing suicide, only I should never do anything so wicked. But there I lay, inside my mosquito curtain in a room like a Turkish bath, crying, _crying_ to myself about poor John and thinking I should never see Roger again, and what Mrs. Baines would say when I came back all alone; when in walked Lady Dewburn, the wife of the Consul-General--"my boss"--as Roger calls him. She would have it that I was to go away with her then and there. Mother, I'd hardly any clothes after that dreadful journey; that was one reason I felt ashamed to go out. Well, she put me in a lovely cool bedroom at the top of her house.--It has a flat roof and I used so to enjoy walking out of my room and looking at the sea and the natives down below and the ships and palms. She had my meals sent up to me and often came up herself to inquire, and for a week she got Indian tailors to cut out and sew clothes for me to wear. When they were ready I had got quite well again, and then she brought me down and introduced me to her husband, who is the great man of this place. _He_ used rather to make fun of me, tease me you know, but he was kind under it all. Mother, if I'd been _their own daughter_ they couldn't have treated me kinder. She wouldn't let me thank her, said I was a distressed British subject and it was her duty. And after I'd been staying with them about six weeks and was beginning to say I ought to earn my living or else go home, she said, wouldn't you as an alternative like to marry Roger Brentham? And I said, He'd never ask me and if he did I should only spoil his career. And she said, _Nonsense_. And the next day, when they had both gone out driving, Roger came to the room where I was working with Halima (who, strange to say, has married his cook!) and asked me to be his wife. How could I say anything but "yes"? I know now I should have died of consumption or something if he hadn't. But of course I said--"It can't be till poor John has been dead a year." Then that evening when I told Lady Dewburn, she said, "Nonsense! I can see no reason why it shouldn't be at the end of March. Then if Captain Brentham has to go home you can return with him." So, of course, I gave in.

I'm afraid it'll make lots of people angry, especially Mrs. Baines. How can we break it to her?

There are a _thousand_ other things I can tell you, but if I don't finish this letter now I shan't be in time to put it in the Agency mail-bag, which I always think is so much safer than the ordinary post, and I don't have to stamp it.

So in a few more weeks darling mother you will meet again

Your own LUCY.

P.S. Love to father and the dear girls. _Do_ see what you can do with Mrs. Baines. I feel _so_ sorry for her, and I should so like to tell her about John. Things might have been so different if only my little baby had lived, John felt it _dreadfully_.

Private and Confidential. H.M. Agency and Consulate-General, Unguja, _April_ 2.

DEAR BAZZARD,--

I take advantage of a British steamer which is crossing to-day to Medina to send you this hurried note.

Your colleague, Captain Brentham, was married on March 31 to Mrs. John Baines, the widow of the poor fellow who was killed at Hangodi. Brentham will probably be returning to England very shortly on leave of absence (I understood from you you were willing to postpone your leave for a few months). Before he goes I have asked him to co-operate with you in getting affairs at the Medina Consulate settled up satisfactorily, so that you may formally take over from him and be Acting Consul there till there are further developments. I am very grateful to you and Mrs. Bazzard for stepping into the breach caused by these confounded disturbances which have not only occurred in the German hinterland but are now beginning in ours--so we mustn't boast too soon!

Brentham had to leave, as you know, very hurriedly last September, and if the Arabs had succeeded in taking the town matters would have been ever so much worse than they are. He says if there turns out really to be any deficit in the cash due to the embezzlement of the Indian clerk--if he did embezzle--but _what_ has become of him? Was he killed?--he is willing to make it good out of his own pocket. (Rather hard on him as he could not help leaving this man in charge; but I may come in like a benevolent arbiter if the affair is serious.) The loss or disappearance of the office cipher is a serious business--very--. I don't see what good it would be retrieving it from the Germans, as, if they _have_ had it at all in their possession, they have probably derived from it all the information they want!

Whilst Brentham is over at Medina I want him to have an interview with the German commandant, Captain Wissmann, as he can convey to him a message from me.

I hope Mrs. Bazzard continues well? She has certainly shown she can stand the climate. But we mustn't try her _too_ far.

Sincerely yours ... GODFREY DEWBURN.

When this letter reached Spencer Bazzard he took it promptly to his wife, who was seated before her dressing-table rubbing a little of the "hair-restorer" into the very roots of her hair, which had an exasperating way of not starting gold from the skin-level. She said, keeping her eyes fixed on the glass, "Read it aloud." He did so. "Hooray," she exclaimed, with ordered joy so as not to interfere with the delicate operation--they were going out to dine that night with a German functionary--"Hooray! That means he's scuppered. He's going home, you bet, rather off colour. They've made him marry her to placate the missionaries. But he'll never bother us again out here. Well, we'll be civil to him in the clearing up."

_From Captain Roger Brentham to Lady Silchester._

Mbweni, Unguja, _April_ 2, 1889.

DEAR SIBYL,--

I don't think you have any realization of what I've been through lately or you'd have written to inquire, or condole, or encourage. I've had a regular "gaffe"--tell you more about it by and bye. And a wonderful journey in the interior worthy of a Royal Geographical Society's medal--tell you more about _that_ too some day--and--don't start--I've got married!

You always predicted I should marry a "missionaryess." Well: I've done so. Yes, you were right, true Sibyl that you are. I've married the dear little girl--for so she seems to me--whom I escorted out to Unguja three years ago and whom I married myself to her young missionary husband, who was going to a station in the interior called Hangodi. There followed a tragic time. I dare say the newspapers will have told you all about it. She and I got locked up, so to speak, in the far interior and I never thought she, at any rate, would get to the coast alive.

Well: I felt after all we'd gone through together there was only one thing--the right thing--to do, being also very much in love with her. Lady Dewburn (you know whom I mean) thought precisely the same; and Lady Dewburn, let me say, is about the _best_ woman I know. I shall _never_ forget what she did for my poor Lucy. Dewburn performed the civil ceremony for us and gave a small and quiet wedding breakfast after the "small and quiet" wedding at the Cathedral. My old friend Gravening ("the Venble. Archdeacon") was awfully nice about the whole thing ... fully approved of my marrying Lucy, under all the sad circumstances, and said he'd fix up the religious part. Because you know what women are. They never think they've been properly married unless it's in a Church or if they do, their mothers don't.

I know I've got some rough places to get over before I can settle down to work and go full steam ahead, but I look to you and other true friends, real pals--to pull me through. The F.O. seems to have a down on me and a proportion of the Mission World likewise. But when they hear the whole story they will see I was simply dogged with misfortune and did all I could possibly have done. Unfortunately while I was away in the interior everything went to pieces at my Consulate, and two awful bounders--the Bazzards, more about them when we meet--are exploiting it to the utmost.

I am going back to the mainland after a week's holiday to get things put right at the Consulate. Hope I shan't take Bazzard by the throat, or lose my temper with his Bayswater wife. I simply _mustn't_. Well: when I have done all that and left the Bazzards properly installed I take the next steamer back with Lucy. Two years, nearly, have I been out here, and six months' leave on full pay is due to me. I am going home nominally to report. Wonder whether they will send me back? In any case I look to you, dear Cousin and friend, to give me a helping hand--not so much about Consular matters--I feel there if common justice is dealt out I can stand on my own--but as regards little Lucy. Her father's status and that of my father are not very different, when you come to look at it, except that Josling is probably a much more useful member of the community. But she may want a helping hand when we come home, if we are asked out and about. Of course, with her extraordinary African experience behind her she will be quite as interesting to meet as a Lady Baker, a Miss Gordon Cumming, or Isabella Bird----

I've written a short note to good old Maud and a still shorter one to the Pater. Rather rough on a man after only two days of honeymoon to have to sit down and compose all these epistles, even though it is in a tropical paradise like Mbweni--but with the thermometer at ninety something in the shade. I am sure Maud will take to Lucy; not so sure about you. You have become so grand. As to the Pater, he'll hardly pay much attention to us unless we could consent to be buried at Silchester and excavated by him! Maud wrote some time ago to say his neglect of his Church work for excavation of Roman sites was becoming such a scandal that they'd had to engage a curate for Farleigh.

And that the curate hadn't been there two months before he had proposed to her, been refused, and then settled down to a "filial" manner.

How is Silchester? It's getting on for a year since I had a letter from you; but I saw in a recent newspaper he'd been down with influenza but was "making good progress." That always reads ominously.

Look out for me sometime in May. I hope I shall be as welcome as the flowers of that same. I'm bringing you home some leopard skins and an African rattle for Clitheroe. So long!

ROGER.

A week after these letters were put in the Consular mail-bag, Roger had packed up and was waiting for a gun-boat to convey him across to the mainland--where he was to have an important interview with Captain Wissmann, fresh from a great victory over the Arabs. Sir Godfrey, taking leave of him, said: "Looked at the Reuters this morning?"

_Roger_: "No! What's up?"

_Sir Godfrey_: "Your friend Lord Silchester is dead."

"Phew!" said Roger, or as near as he could get to that conventional exclamation of surprise and speculation as to what might have been....

*CHAPTER XV*

*IN ENGLAND*

Captain and Mrs. Brentham arrived in London from East Africa at the end of May, 1889. You must picture Brentham with a reserve of savings of about five hundred pounds lying to his credit at Cocks's, and a salary at the rate of seven hundred a year which will go on till some time in October. After much consideration and discussion during the voyage they have taken a furnished flat on the eighth floor of Hankey's Mansions, St. James's Park, as having a better address--"being close to the Government offices and the clubs, don't you know, and of course if you have the lift going night and day it don't matter whether you're on the first or the eighth floor, to say nothing of the view." Lucy had timidly suggested Pardew's Family Hotel in Great Ormond Street as being very cheap for relations of Aunt Ellen, but Roger with that wistful snobbishness of his class decided it would be rather a come-down to hail from the West Central part of London when you were wishing to impress the Foreign Office favourably; so Hankey's it was, with lots of sunlight, superb views over the Park and the barrack ground with its military challenges and cries.

Mr. Molyneux's room at the Foreign Office.

"Ah, Brentham! Thought you'd soon be turning up. Dewburn's been writing to me about you.... Have a cigar? There are the matches. Well. Horrid thing to say, when a man's only just arrived, but you've stirred up a reg'lar hornet's nest among the unco' guid. This confounded Nonconformist Conscience that Stead's invented or created. There's an obvious reference to you in the last _Review of Reviews_ and Labby's put a very caustic article in last week's _Truth_, trying to get at the Government's East African policy through you. All this has mightily upset the Old Man----"

Roger endeavours to give a lucid and not too lengthy account of the whole sequence of events which led up to his marriage at Unguja; expresses the most justly-felt wrath against the mosquitoes of the Press; offers to horsewhip them or have them up before a court of law....

_Molyneux_: "My _dear_ fellow, what _are_ you talking about? You'd simply do for yourself and have to quit the career. First place, horsewhipping's out of date--dam' low, in any case--in the second, there's nothing _libellous_ in what they've written--only general application, don't you know. If you took any action on it you'd just dot the _i_'s and cross the _t_'s and get laughed at. And as to what they say in Parliament, can't call them into court over _that_. No. Best leave it alone. _Most_ unfortunate. Dare say not a _bit_ your fault. Still I think you might have been a trifle more prudent, not--so to speak--have run your head into the noose. _Quite_ agree with Dewburn you've done the _right_ thing in marrying her....

"Well: so much for that. Now how about this missing cipher? Not sure _that_ don't upset us a bit more than your carryings-on with missionary ladies...."

Roger: "But I _didn't_ carry on--I--I--really must protest against these assumptions----"

_Molyneux_: "_All_ right. Keep your hair on.... Don't get into a wax.... I'm only talkin' for your own good.... But tell us about this cipher."

_Roger_ (still with an angry flush): "What _can I_ tell? I arrive at Medina and am told all in a hurry to re-organize the Consulate there. There was no one but an Indian clerk in charge. I simply take him over. I put my cipher in the safe, but I had to leave the key with the clerk when at very short notice I started for up-country to warn these confounded missionaries.... Wish to _God_ I'd paid no heed to your instructions" ("I _say_, old chap, draw it mild ... and mind what you're doin' with that cigar-ash." Roger strides to the fireplace and throws away the cigar into it.) "I wish to God," he continues, "I'd left 'em alone to stand the racket if the Arabs _did_ come. However, what I mean to say is, I only set out to do what I was told to do and couldn't foresee how long it would take. I didn't get back to my Consulate till last April. _How_ can I tell what happened to the clerk or the cipher or the money? I paid up the deficit.... How do I know what those Bazzards were up to? Mrs. Bazzard----"

_Molyneux_ (his manner has insensibly become stiffer and more ceremonious): "I think we'll leave the Bazzards out of it. At any rate they aren't here to defend themselves. We must refer the whole matter to Dewburn for inquiry. Meantime here you are on leave and I dare say badly wanting a rest. My advice is: go down to the country.... Your father lives in the country, doesn't he?" (Roger nods.) "Well, go down and rusticate a bit and take Mrs. Brentham with you. In a week or two the newspapers and the Nonconformist Conscience will be in full cry after something else. As to whether you should go back, we must leave that to the Old Man. He may think a change of scene advisable. Any use asking you to a bachelor dinner? My wife's out of town just now."

Roger (_very_ unwisely, scenting in this a reluctance to ask Lucy too): "No, thank you. I think I'll take your advice and go off to the country. Ungrateful sort of country--I mean the nation--mine is! Here I've made most important discoveries I've had no time to report on, I've ... I've ..." (Feelings too much for him. Takes his hat and stick, bows to Molyneux and leaves his room.) In all this he has acted most foolishly. If he'd gone to Molyneux's--to "Good old Spavins's"--as the clerks called him in the room opposite--bachelor dinner, had told a few good stories and hunting adventures, Molyneux, who really had his kindly side like most men, would have forgotten the old grudge about his intrusive appointment, have taken a much more charitable view about the lost cipher and the hasty marriage and have written a memo for Lord Wiltshire's eye which would have suggested a year's employment at home and a fresh start in East Africa. Mrs. Molyneux would have called on Mrs. Brentham at Hankey's and Mrs. Brentham would have been pronounced by Molyneux "a dam' good-lookin' wench--don't wonder she turned his head a bit--there can't have been much to look at in East Africa"--and Brentham's difficulties were over; and the whole fate of East Africa might have been a little different. As it was, he wrote some such memo as this for the information of the Under-Secretary of State: "Saw Brentham to-day--from Zangia Consulate, East Africa. Looks rather fagged. Evidently had a rough time. But very angry when asked to explain the awkward circumstances of his very protracted journey through the interior with the lady who is now his wife. He protested with much heat against the attacks of the Press and the attitude of the Missionary Societies. I dare say he is a maligned man, but I should also say he is what we call in diplomacy 'un mauvais coucheur.' Difficult to get on with, quarrelsome with colleagues. He could throw no light on the loss of his cipher. Did not seem to realize what trouble and expense it has caused. He has six months' leave of absence due. Suggest when that is coming to an end he be offered some Consular post in Norway or Algeria."

Roger called at 6A, Carlton House Terrace, but was told by the man-servant opening the door that Lady Silchester and the little Lord Silchester were still in the country, at Engledene, and that it was improbable her Ladyship would be in town again until the autumn, being in deep mourning. Roger scribbled on his card (which would be sent on with other cards of calling and polite inquiries):

"So much want to see you. Starting to-morrow for Church Farm, Aldermaston.--ROGER."

Roger delivered his blushing wife, rather overdressed (for he had insisted on a fashionable outfit), to her parents at Aldermaston; he shook hands heartily with his father-in-law to whom he took an immediate liking, kissed his mother-in-law (to her confusion) and his sisters-in-law, and then let his father-in-law drive him over to the nearest station from which he could get a train to Basingstoke (for Farleigh), promising to return in four days after he had seen his father, sister, and brothers, one of them at Portsmouth. When he did get back to Church Farm, Lucy was in bed, ill, and his father and mother-in-law were looking grave and preoccupied. They were also--as country people are--a little tiresomely reticent. _What had happened_? _This_, as he afterwards pieced it together.

When Mrs. Baines had received Ann Anderson's letter--written, as you will remember, about November 30, but not posted from Unguja till early in January--she had a knock-down blow. It is true the Mission on the receipt of a telegram from Callaway had warned her to expect serious news from Hangodi, but she had not paid much attention, so convinced was she that God must avert all harm from a son of hers. But the letter--from Ann, too, whom she would have welcomed as a daughter-in-law--was convincing, and for the first few hours after she had read it twice through, she locked herself into their joint bedroom to Mr. Baines's great discomfiture--he might wash and sleep where he liked. She had shouted at him through the keyhole, in a hoarse, strangled voice he hardly recognized as hers, that his son John was dead, killed by the "A-rabs," no doubt with that slut of a Lucy's full approval; and left to digest this dreadful news as best he might. Eliza, touched to great pity and a sympathetic sobbing over the fate of Master John, made him up a sort of a shakedown bedroom arrangement in the "libery," where he did his accounts....

Mrs. Baines did not emerge from her fastness for a day and a half. When she did come out she was composed, but with such an awful look in her eyes that no one dared offer sympathy or proffer advice. She gave her orders in as few words as possible. She set to work to confection the deepest mourning and pulled the blinds down, and down they had to remain a full week. During that week by the aid of candle-light she wrote a good many letters--for her. Eliza, who had to post them, for Mrs. Baines shrank from encountering friends or acquaintances till the week was up, noticed that some of them bore quite grand addresses: the member for Reading, the Marquis of Wiltshire, the Editor of the _Review of Reviews_....

How did Mrs. Baines know so soon that Lucy and Roger had returned to England and come down to see the Joslings at Church Farm? Why, because the miller of Aldermaston saw the Brenthams arrive at Aldermaston station and witnessed the greeting of Farmer Josling--such a fine upstanding man--and his son-in-law--just such another, only rather sallow-like and thin; and the miller told old Mrs. Bunsby of the general shop at Theale; and Mrs. Bunsby, wanting badly a supply of ginger beer, for the weather was getting warm and Oxford undergraduates sometimes pushed their walking tours as far as the Kennet Valley--Mrs. Bunsby walked over to _John Baines & Co._ that very afternoon to give an order for four dozen and mentioned the fact of "pore Master John's widow" having come back to her home "with a noo 'usband."