The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
father is one of his tenants. We live at Aldermaston." Her voice
trembled a little in pronouncing the name of the place she now
loved--too late--beyond any other.
"Aldermaston--_of course_ I know it, known it from boyhood. I rode over
there several times last year to see my cousins, the Grayburns. One of
them married Lord Silchester last July, and that's why I stayed at
Englefield and gave the Reading lecture.... So you came and heard it?"
"I did; because, as I was going out to marry a missionary, I thought I
ought to learn something about East Africa. Your ... your lecture made
me want to go--awfully.... That wonderful mountain, those clumps of
palms, the river and the hippopotami--or was it a lake?"
"Well, you'll see lots of such things if you are going up-country. Whom
are you going to marry and where is he stationed?"
"Mr. John Baines, the East African Mission, Ulunga...."
"Oh" (rather depreciatively), "Nonconformist, Plymouth Brethren, or
something of the kind. Now I think of it I went to a big meeting of
theirs last year soon as I came back. Yes, _I_ remember. They're a
trading and industrial mission some distance inland, in the British as
well as the German sphere ... good sort of folk, though their mouths are
full of texts ... but they took me in once when I was half dead with
fever and nursed me back to health. And I liked the way they set to
work to make the best of the country and the people.... But it will be
awfully rough for you; you don't look cut out for what they have to go
through. I should have thought the Anglican Mission more your style,
if, indeed, you went out as a Missionary at all."
He wished to add, "You're much too pretty," but restrained himself.
Just then the breakfast gong sounded and they went down to the Dining
Saloon. Brentham rather masterfully strode to near the top of the long
table as though knowing he was the most important person on board, and
placed himself next but one to the Captain's seat and Lucy on his right,
with a wink at the same time to the Chief Steward as though to say "Fix
this arrangement."
A moment after another lady with gold hair and a dazzling complexion
glided up and nimbly took the seat on Brentham's left hand. The Captain
was absent and intimated that they needn't expect him till the _Jeddah_
was away from Plymouth and out of the Channel. The other lady
passengers were breakfasting in the Ladies' Saloon. As soon as they
were seated and porridge was being offered, the lady on Brentham's left
introduced herself as the wife of a colleague: "My husband is Spencer
Bazzard, the Vice-Consul at Unguja--I dare say you've heard about him at
the F.O.? He's a friend of that dear Bennet Molyneux's, to whom we're
both _devoted_.... _Such_ a grasp of African affairs, don't you think
so? My husband already knows Unguja through and through. I'm sure
he'll be glad to put you up to the ropes. I've never been there before.
Spencer thought he ought to go out first and make a home for me, so I've
been a forlorn grass widow for over a year. However, we shall soon be
reunited. And I understand we're to look on you as our chief till the
Consul-General returns. Spencer's been Sir James's right-hand man.
Thank you. Toast, please. No, I won't take butter: it looks so odd.
Like honey! Ugh!"
After breakfast, Brentham escorted Lucy to the upper-deck, got her a
folding chair and secured it in a sheltered corner, made her
comfortable, lent her a novel and a rug, and then resumed his pacing of
the deck or occasional study of a language book--he was trying, he told
Lucy, to master Swahili by doing Steere's exercises in that harmonious
tongue. Mrs. Bazzard commandeered a steward and a deck-chair and
established herself close to Lucy with a piece of showy embroidery,
bought at Liberty's with half the embroidery done. In a condescending
manner she set herself to pump Lucy about Brentham.... Did she know him
well? Didn't she think him good-looking? Mrs. Bazzard thought of the
two her husband was the finer-looking man. He had longer moustaches and
they were a golden brown, like Mrs. Bazzard's hair; he wasn't perhaps
_quite_ so tall; but _how_ she was looking forward to reunion with him.
He was a paragon of husbands, one of the Norfolk Bazzards. His elder
brother, a person of great legal acumen, had from time to time tendered
advice of signal value to Mr. Bennet Molyneux.... It was thus they had
got "in" with the Foreign Office, and if Mrs. Bazzard were not pledged
to inviolable secrecy (because of Spencer's career) there were things
she knew and things she could tell about Lord Wiltshire's intentions
regarding Africa--and Spencer.... However.... Did Miss--she begged
pardon--she had not caught Lucy's name.... Josselin? any connexion of
Sir Martin Josselin? Oh, _Josling_.... Did Miss Josling come from
Captain Brentham's part of the country? Not a relation? No, of course
not.... Well, did she think him clever? Some--in the Foreign
Office--regarded him as _superficial_. It was his good looks that had
got him on, and the friendship of a great lady ... but then _what_
scandal-mongers _men_ were! And _how_ jealous of one another! Mrs.
Bazzard's husband had got _his_ commission through sheer, outstanding
ability, yet at the time people said the most _horrid_ things, both of
him and her.... But Lord Wiltshire had remained unshaken, knowing
Spencer's value; and undoubtedly held him in view for a very important
post in Africa as soon as he should have inducted Captain Brentham into
his duties.
Lunch came in due course and was eaten in better appetite by most of the
passengers. It was served with coarse plenty, on a lower-middle-class
standard of selection and cuisine.
It was a sunny afternoon when the _Jeddah_ anchored in Plymouth harbour.
The passengers were informed they might spend four hours on shore, so
Captain Brentham proposed to Lucy and to Mrs. Bazzard that he should
take them under his escort and give them their last chance of eating a
decent dinner at an English hotel. Mrs. Bazzard accepted with a gush of
thanks and a determination to commence a discreet flirtation with the
acting Consul-General, who was undoubtedly a handsome man. Lucy
assented simply to the proposition. She was still a little dazed in the
dawn of her new life. But as she went off with the others in the tug
she put aside as an unreasonable absurdity any idea of flight to the
railway station and a return home. It was a great stay to her
home-sickness that there should be on board some one she knew who almost
shared her home country, who had actually met people she had met, and
who would carry this home knowledge out with him to the same region in
Africa as that she was going to. This removed the sting of her regret
and remedied her sense of utter friendlessness in the wilds. Was he not
actually to be _her_ Consul?
These reflections caused her to sit down in the Hotel Writing Room,
whilst dinner was being got ready, and Mrs. Bazzard was titivating, and
dash off a hasty letter to "dearest mother" informing her of the
brighter outlook. Her mother, overjoyed at this silver lining to the
cloud of bereavement, spread the news; and so it reached Englefield,
where Lord Silchester was spending the Easter recess. He retailed it to
Sibyl ... who stamped her foot on the library carpet and said: "_There_!
_Didn't_ I predict it? I _said_ he'd fall in love with a
missionaryess!"
"And why not, my love?" replied Lord Silchester. "What if he does?"
A little tossing on the Bay of Biscay sent Mrs. Bazzard to her cabin,
and made more scanty the public attendance at meals. But Lucy proved as
good a sailor as Brentham, and a great solace to him. For he had his
unacknowledged home-sickness too. You could not spend nine months in
the best of English country life and the most interesting aspects of
London without a revulsion of feeling when you found yourself cut off
from all communication with those scenes of beauty, splendour and
absolute comfort, and before high ambition had been once more aroused,
and the unexplored wilderness had again beckoned her future ravisher.
Lucy might be merely a farmer's daughter, a little better educated than
such usually were at that period, still an unsophisticated country chit
(as Mrs. Bazzard had already summed her up to the tall thin lady); yet
she could talk with some slight knowledge about the Silchesters--her
mother had been maid to Lord Silchester's mother, and her father was
Lord Silchester's tenant. Colonel Grayburn was--or tried to be--a
gentleman farmer within a mile of Lucy's home; she had seen Sibyl
occasionally during the three years in which the Grayburns had lived in
Aldermaston parish. Lucy had never been so far afield as Farleigh
Wallop, but she knew Reading, Mortimer, Silchester, Tadley, and even
Basingstoke. Merely to mention names like these consoled them both as
the steamer ploughed her twelve knots an hour through the "roaring
forties."
And when the _Jeddah_ turned into the Mediterranean, with a passing view
of the Rock of Gibraltar, and entered upon calm seas, blue and dazzling,
their _camaraderie_ increased under Mrs. Bazzard's baleful gaze and
interchange of eyebrow-raisings with the thin bony-nosed lady of Lucy's
cabin.
The _Jeddah_ anchored off Algiers. The thin lady, who here passes out
of the story---I think she was the wife of a British Chaplain--had
invited Mrs. Bazzard to lunch with her on shore. Mrs. Bazzard had
hastened to accept the invitation, the more willingly since Captain
Brentham seemed to have forgotten her existence; except at meal times,
when he was obliged to pass the mustard and the sugar. Brentham and
Lucy went off together into the picturesque white city, rising high into
the half-circle of the hills. They lunched at the Cafe des Anglais and
dined at an hotel near the quay. They climbed the ladder-like streets
of the Arab quarter, bought useless trifles, and had a drive out into
the country which was gay with genista in full bloom, with red-purple
irises and roses, and dignified by its hoary olives, sombre cypresses
and rigid palms.
If Lucy had never been so miserable as she was nine days previously, she
had probably never felt so happy as now. Certainly she had never looked
so pretty. Her violet eyes had a depth of colour new to them; her brown
hair a lustre and a tendency to curl in the little strands and wisps
that escaped control about her forehead. Her cheeks, ordinarily pale,
and her milk-white complexion generally were suffused with a wild rose
flush and a warmth of tint caused by the quickened circulation. The sea
air and the sunshine chased away the languor that had accompanied a
sedentary life. She had not been unobservant, and had taken several
hints in costume from Mrs. Bazzard's dress. She had tightened this,
expanded that, cut short skirts that might have flopped, diminished a
bustle, inserted a frill, and adapted herself to the warmth of the
tropics without losing grace of outline or donning headgear of repellent
aspect.
At Port Said he already called her "Lucy," and she saw nothing in it
that she mightn't accept, a permissible brotherliness due to country
associations and the position of guardian, protector that he had
assumed. He showed her those sights of Port Said that need not shock a
modest girl. They sat side by side to enjoy the thrill with which the
unsophisticated then passed through the Suez Canal. One woman passenger
had left the ship at Port Said; another at Suez. There only remained
the third one--the mother of many babies--changing at Aden into a Bombay
boat--besides Mrs. Bazzard and herself in the Ladies' Saloon. The two
missionary priests told their breviaries, gave at times a pleasant smile