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BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

A SOCIAL DEPARTURE: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves. With 111 Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. 12mo. Paper, 75 cents; cloth, $1.75.

“Widely read and praised on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific, with scores of illustrations which fit the text exactly and show the mind of artist and writer in unison.”—New York Evening Post.

“It is to be doubted whether another book can be found so thoroughly amusing from beginning to end.”—Boston Daily Advertiser.

“For sparkling wit, irresistibly contagious fun, keen observation, absolutely poetic appreciation of natural beauty, and vivid descriptiveness, it has no recent rival.”—Mrs. P. T. Barnum’s Letter to the New York Tribune.

“A brighter, merrier, more entirely charming book would be, indeed, difficult to find.”—St. Louis Republic.

AN AMERICAN GIRL IN LONDON. With 80 Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. 12mo. Paper, 75 cents; cloth, $1.50.

“One of the most naïve and entertaining books of the season.”—New York Observer.

“The raciness and breeziness which made ‘A Social Departure,’ by the same author, last season, the best-read and most-talked-of book of travel for many a year, permeate the new book, and appear between the lines of every page.”—Brooklyn Standard-Union.

“So sprightly a book as this, on life in London as observed by an American, has never before been written.”—Philadelphia Bulletin.

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, New York.

THEY CAME IN LITTLE STRAGGLING STRINGS AND BANDS. [P 43].

THE SIMPLE ADVENTURES OF A MEMSAHIB

BY

SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN

AUTHOR OF

A SOCIAL DEPARTURE, AN AMERICAN GIRL IN LONDON, ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. H. TOWNSEND

NEW YORK

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1893

Copyright, 1893,

By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

Electrotyped and Printed

at the Appleton Press, U. S. A.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE SIMPLE ADVENTURES OF A MEMSAHIB.

CHAPTER I.

HELEN FRANCES BROWNE was formerly a Miss Peachey. Not one of the Devonshire Peacheys—they are quite a different family. This Miss Peachey’s father was a clergyman, who folded his flock and his family in the town of Canbury in Wilts, very nice people and well thought of, with nice, well-thought-of connections, but nothing particularly aristocratic amongst them, like the Devonshire Peacheys, and no beer.

The former Miss Peachey is now a memsahib of Lower Bengal. As you probably know, one is not born a memsahib; the dignity is arrived at later, through circumstances, processes, and sometimes through foresight on the part of one’s mamma. It is not so easy to obtain as it used to be. Formerly it was a mere question of facilities for transportation, and the whole matter was arranged, obviously and without criticism, by the operation of the law of supply. The necessary six months’ tossing fortune in a sailing ship made young ladies who were willing to undertake it scarce and valuable, we hear. We are even given to understand that the unclaimed remnant, the few standing over to be more deliberately acquired, after the ball given on board for the facilitation of these matters the night succeeding the ship’s arrival in port, were held to have fallen short of what they reasonably might have expected. But that was fifty years ago. To-day Lower Bengal, in the cold weather, is gay with potential memsahibs of all degrees of attraction, in raiment fresh from Oxford Street, in high spirits, in excellent form for tennis, dancing, riding, and full of a charmed appreciation of the “picturesqueness” of India.

GOT MIDDLE-AGED LADIES OF WILTSHIRE CUPS OF TEA.

They come from the East and from the West, and from school in Germany. They come to make the acquaintance of their Anglo-Indian fathers and mothers, to teach the Bible and plain sewing in the Zenanas, to stay with a married sister, to keep house for a brother who is in the Department of Police. In the hot weather a proportion migrate northward, to Darjeeling, or Simla, in the Hills, but there are enough in our midst all the year round to produce a certain coy hesitancy and dalliance on the part of pretending bachelors, augmented by the consideration of all that might be done in England in three months’ “Privilege” leave. Young Browne was an example of this. There was no doubt that young Browne was tremendously attracted by Miss Pellington—Pellington, Scott & Co., rice and coolies chiefly, a very old firm—down from the Hills for her second cold weather, and only beginning to be faintly spoilt, when it so happened that his furlough fell due. He had fully intended to “do Switzerland this time,” but Canbury, with tennis every Wednesday afternoon at the Rectory, and Helen Peachey playing there in blue and white striped flannel, pink cheeks and a sailor hat, was so much more interesting than he had expected it to be, that Switzerland was gradually relegated five years into the future. After tennis there was always tea in the drawing-room, and Helen, in the pretty flush of her exertions, poured it out. Just at first, young Browne did not quite know which he appreciated most, Helen who poured it out, or the neat little maid in cap and apron who brought it in—it was so long since he had seen tea brought in by anything feminine in cap and apron; but after a bit the little maid sank to her proper status of consideration, and Helen was left supreme. And Helen Peachey’s tennis, for grace and muscularity, was certainly a thing to see, young Browne thought. She played in tournaments while he stood by in immaculate whites with an idle racquet, and got middle-aged ladies of Wiltshire cups of tea; but she was not puffed up about this, and often condescended to be his partner on the Rectory lawn against the two younger Misses Peachey. It made the best sett that way, for young Browne’s tennis fluctuated from indifferent bad to indifferent worse, and the younger Misses Peachey were vigorous creatures, and gave Helen all she could do to win with her handicap.

Mr. Browne—we must really get into the way of giving him his title—was not naturally prone to depression, rather the reverse; but when the two Misses Peachey came off victorious he used to be quite uncomfortably gloomy for a time. Once I know, when he had remarked apologetically to Helen that he hoped she would have a better partner next time, and she absent-mindedly returned, “I hope so indeed!” his spirits went down with a run and did not rise again until somebody who overheard, chaffed Helen about her blunder and produced gentle consternation and a melting appeal for pardon. That was at a very advanced stage of these young people’s relations, long after everybody but themselves knew exactly what would happen, and what did happen in the course of another week. It was a triviality, it would have had no place in our consideration of the affairs of a young man and woman who fell in love according to approved analytical methods, with subtle silent scruples and mysterious misunderstandings, in the modern way. I introduce it on its merits as a triviality, to indicate that George William Browne and Helen Frances Peachey arrived at a point where they considered themselves indispensable to each other in the most natural, simple, and unimpeded manner. I will go so far as to say that if Helen had not been there—if she had spent the summer with an aunt in Hampshire, as was at one time contemplated—one of the other Misses Peachey might have inspired this chronicle. But that is risking a good deal, I know, at the hands of the critics, and especially perhaps at Helen’s. After all, what I want to state is merely the felicitous engagement, in July of a recent year, of Mr. Browne and Miss Peachey. Two tender months later, Mr. Browne sailed for India again, with a joyful conviction that he had done well to come home, that somewhat modified his natural grief. Helen remained behind for various reasons, chiefly connected with the financial future of the Browne family, and the small part of Calcutta interested in young Browne found occupation for a few days in wondering what Miss Pellington would have said if he had proposed to her. There was no doubt as to the point that he did not. Calcutta is always accurately informed upon such matters.

YOUNG BROWNE’S TENNIS FLUCTUATED FROM INDIFFERENT BAD TO INDIFFERENT WORSE.

The dreary waste of a year and four thousand miles that lay between Miss Peachey and the state of memsahibship was relieved and made interesting in the usual way by the whole Peachey family. You know what I mean, perhaps, without details. Miss Kitty Peachey “etched” Kate Greenway figures on the corners of table napkins, Miss Julia Peachey wrought the monogram P. M. in the centre of pillow-shams with many frills, their Aunt Plovtree, widow of a prominent physician of Canbury, at once “gave up her time” to the adornment of Helen’s future drawing-room in Kensington stitch, and Mrs. Peachey spent many hours of hers in the composition of letters to people like John Noble, holding general councils over the packets of patterns that came by return of post. Mrs. Peachey was much occupied also in receiving the condolences of friends upon so complete a separation from her daughter, but I am bound to say that she accepted them with a fair show of cheerfulness. Mrs. Peachey declared that she would wait until the time came before she worried. As to both the wild animals and the climate she understood that they were very much exaggerated, and, indeed, on account of Helen’s weak throat, she was quite in hopes the heat might benefit her. And really nowadays, India wasn’t so very far away after all, was it? It was difficult, however, even with arguments like these, to reconcile the Canbury ladies to the hardship of Helen’s fate, especially those with daughters of their own who had escaped it. Helen listened to the condolences with bright eyes and a spot of pink on each cheek. They brought her tender pangs sometimes, but, speaking generally, I am afraid she liked them.

In six months it was positively time to begin to see about the trousseau, because, as Mrs. Plovtree very justly remarked, it was not like getting the child ready to be married in England, where one would know from a pin or a button exactly what she wanted; in the case of Indian trousseaux everything had to be thought out and considered and time allowed to get proper advice in. For instance, there was that very thing they were talking about yesterday—that idea of getting Jaeger all through for Helen. It seemed advisable, but who knew definitely whether it was! And if there was an unsatisfactory thing in Mrs. Plovtree’s opinion it was putting off anything whatever, not to speak of an important matter like this, till the last moment.

The event redounded to the wisdom of Mrs. Plovtree, as events usually did. It took the Peachey family quite six months to collect reliable information and construct a trousseau for Helen out of it; six months indeed, as Mrs. Peachey said, seemed too little to give to it. They collected a great deal of information. Mrs. Peachey wrote to everybody she knew who had ever been in India or had relations there, and so did several friends of the Peacheys, and the results could not have been more gratifying either in bulk or in variety. As their Aunt Plovtree said, they really could not have asked for more, indeed they would have had less difficulty in making up their minds without quite so much. “Do be advised,” one lady wrote, with impressive underlinings, “and let her take as little as she can possibly do with. It is impossible to keep good dresses in India, the climate is simple ruination to them. I shall never forget the first year of my married life on that account. It was a heart-breaking experience, and I do hope that Helen may avoid it. Besides, the durzies, the native dressmakers, will copy anything, and do it wonderfully well, at about a fifth of the price one pays at home.” Which read very convincingly. By the same post a second cousin of Mrs. Plovtree’s wrote, “If you ask me, I should say make a special point of having everything in reasonable abundance. The European shops ask frightful prices, the natives are always unsatisfactory, and your niece will find it very inconvenient to send to England for things. My plan was to buy as little as possible in India, and lay in supplies when we came home on leave!”

“In the face of that,” said Mrs. Plovtree, “what are we to do?”

Ladies wrote that Helen would require as warm a wardrobe as in England; the cold might not be so great but she would “feel it more.” She must take her furs, by all means. They wrote also that when they were in India, they wore nothing more substantial than nun’s veiling, and a light jacket the year round. They gave her intense directions about her shoes and slippers—it was impossible to get nice ones in India—they were made very well and cheaply in the “China bazar”—they lasted for ever if one took care of them—they were instantly destroyed by mould and cockroaches when “the rains” came on. She would require a size larger than usual, on account of the heat; she must remember to take a size smaller because she would use her feet so little that they would decrease somewhat, everybody’s did. She must bear one thing in mind, they were quite two years behind the fashion in India, so that it would be advisable to date her garments back a little, not to be remarkable. In another opinion there was this advantage, that in taking a fashionable trousseau to India, one could rely upon its being the correct thing for at least two years. The directions in flannel, and cotton, and linen, were too complicated for precise detail, but they left equal freedom of choice. And choice was difficult, because these ladies were all ex-memsahibs, retired after fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years’ honourable service, all equally qualified to warn and to instruct, and equally anxious to do it. They had lived in somewhat different localities in India, ranging from seven to seven thousand feet above the level of the sea, in the Northwest provinces, in the Punjab, in Southern India, in Beluchistan, and none of them had spent more than an occasional “cold weather” in Calcutta, but this triviality escaped the attention of the Peachey family, in dealing with the matter. India, to their imagination, was incapable of subdivision, a vast sandy area filled with heathen and fringed with cocoanut trees, which drew a great many young Englishmen away from their homes and their families for some occult purpose connected with drawing pay in rupees. So the Peacheys put these discrepancies down to the fact that people had such different ideas, and proceeded to arrange Helen’s trousseau upon a modification of all of them. When this was quite done Mrs. Plovtree remarked with some surprise that with the addition of a few muslin frocks, the child had been fitted out almost exactly as if she were going to live in England. There was the wedding dress, which she might or might not wear upon the occasion, it would be indispensable afterwards; there was the travelling dress chosen primarily not to “take the dust” and secondarily not to show it; two or three gowns of incipient dignity for dinner parties; two or three more of airier sorts for balls—but at this point I must refer you to the ladies’ papers. Turn over a few of their pages and you will see Helen’s trousseau illustrated with skill and imagination, but with trains, I am bound to add, more prehensile than Helen ever wore, the habit of the Peachey family being to follow the fashions at a safe and unaggressive distance. Among the photographs of the brides which accompany you may even find one fairly like Helen. These young ladies have always struck me as bearing a charmingly subdued resemblance to one another, probably induced by the similarly trying conditions under which their portraits are published. And certainly in the lists of presents appended you will find many, if not all of those that the Rev. Peachey packed with his own clerical hands in large wooden boxes, for consignment to the P. and O., indeed I fancy a discriminating inspection of the advertisements would reveal most of them. As the Rev. Peachey himself would say, I need not go into that.

Helen was the first bride that Canbury had contributed to India, in the social memory. Two or three young men had gone forth to be brokers’ assistants or civil servants or bank clerks, and an odd red-coat turned up periodically in the lower stratum of society on furlough, bringing many-armed red and yellow idols to its female relatives; but Canbury had no feminine connections with India, the only sort which are really binding. Helen’s engagement had an extrinsic interest therefore, as well as the usual kind, and Canbury made the most of it. There was the deplorable fact, to begin with, that she could not be married at home. Canbury gave a dubious assent to its necessity; everybody had a dim understanding of the exigencies of “leave,” and knew the theory that such departures from the orthodox and usual form of matrimonial proceeding were common and unavoidable. Yet in its heart and out of the Peachey and Plovtree earshot, Canbury firmly dissented, not without criticism. Would anybody tell it why they had not gone out together last year? On the face of it, there could be no question of saving. The young man was not in debt, and received a salary of five hundred pounds a year—had not Mr. Peachey’s curate married Jennie Plovtree a month after they were engaged on two hundred, and no expectations whatever! Or why, since they had made up their minds to wait, could they not have put it off another year! Surely in two years Mr. Browne might scrape enough together to come home again! Canbury thought it possessed a slight opinion of a young man who could not come after his wife. Privately Canbury upheld the extremest traditions of chivalry, and various among Miss Peachey’s young lady friends, quite unconscious of fibbing, confided to each other that “they wouldn’t be in Helen’s place for anything.” In the rectory drawing-room, however, these stringencies took a smiling face and a sympathetic form, sometimes disappearing altogether in the exaltation of the subject’s general aspects. Helen was told it was very “brave” of her, and Mrs. Peachey was admired for her courage in letting her daughter go. At which she and Helen smiled into each other’s eyes understandingly. Then Canbury began to search the aforesaid advertisements in the ladies’ papers for mementoes suitable in character and price, and to send them to the rectory with as hearty wishes for the happiness of the future Brownes as if they had behaved properly in every respect.

CHAPTER II.

TO Mrs. Peachey, one very consoling circumstance connected with Helen’s going to India was the good she would probably be able to do to “those surrounding her.” Helen had always been “active” at home; she had been the inspiration of work-parties, the life and soul of penny-readings. She often took the entire superintendence of the night school. The Canbury branch of the Y. W. C. T. U. did not know how it should get on without her. Besides playing the organ of St. Stephen’s, in which, however, another Miss Peachey was by this time ready to succeed her. Much as Mrs. Peachey and the parish would miss Helen, it was a sustaining thought that she was going amongst those whose need of her was so much greater than Canbury’s. Mrs. Peachey had private chastened visions, chiefly on Sunday afternoons, of Helen in her new field of labor. Mrs. Peachey was not destitute of imagination, and she usually pictured Helen seated under a bread-fruit tree in her Indian garden, dressed in white muslin, teaching a circle of little “blacks” to read the Scriptures. Helen was so successful with children; and so far as being tempted to its ultimate salvation with goodies was concerned, a black child was probably just like a white one. Of course, Helen would have to adapt her inducements to circumstances—it was not likely that a little Bengali could be baited with a Bath bun. Doubtless she would have to offer them rice or—what else was it they liked so much?—oh yes! sugar-cane. Over the form of these delicacies Mrs. Peachey usually went to sleep, to dream of larger schemes of heathen emancipation which Helen should inaugurate. Mr. Peachey, who knew how hard the human heart could be, even in Canbury, among an enlightened people enjoying all the blessings of the nineteenth century, was not so sanguine. He said he believed these Hindus were very subtle-minded, and Helen was not much at an argument. He understood they gave able theologians very hard nuts to crack. Their ideas were entirely different from ours, and Helen would be obliged to master their ideas before effecting any very radical change in them. He was afraid there would be difficulties.

Mrs. Plovtree settled the whole question. Helen was not going out as a missionary, except in so far as that every woman who married undertook the charge of one heathen, and she could not expect to jump into work of that sort all at once. Besides, the people were so difficult to get at, all shut up in zenanas and places. And she did not know the language; first of all, she would have to conquer the language; not that it would take Helen long, for see what she did in French and German at school in less than a year! For her part, she would advise Helen to try to do very little at first—to begin, say, with her own servants; she would have a number of them, and they would be greatly under her personal influence and control. Mrs. Plovtree imparted an obscure idea of Helen’s responsibility for the higher welfare of her domestics, and a more evident one that it would be rather a good thing to practice on them, that they would afford convenient and valuable material for experiments. In all of which Mrs. Peachey thoughtfully acquiesced, though in fancy she still allowed herself to picture Helen leading in gentle triumph a train of Rajahs to the bosom of the Church—a train of nice Rajahs, clean and savoury. That, as I have said, was always on Sunday afternoons. On the secular days of the week they discussed other matters, non-spiritual, and personal, to which they were able to bring more definiteness of perspective, and they found a great deal to say.

MRS. PEACHEY HAD PRIVATE CHASTENED VISIONS, CHIEFLY ON SUNDAY AFTERNOONS, OF HELEN IN HER NEW FIELD OF LABOUR.

A friend of young Browne’s had gone home opportunely on six months’ leave, and his recently acquired little wife would be “delighted,” she said, to wreak her new-found dignity upon Helen in the capacity of chaperone for the voyage out. But for this happy circumstance, Helen’s transportation would have presented a serious difficulty, for the Peacheys were out of the way of knowing the ever-flowing and returning tide of Anglo-Indians that find old friends at Cheltenham and take lodgings in Kensington, and fill their brief holiday with London theatres and shopping. As it was, there was great congratulation among the Peacheys, and they hastened to invite Mr. and Mrs. Macdonald to spend a short time at the rectory before the day on which the ship sailed. Mrs. Macdonald was extremely sorry that they couldn’t come; nothing would have given them more pleasure, but they had so many engagements with old friends of her husband’s, and the time was getting so short and they had such a quantity of things to do in London before they sailed, that—the Peacheys must resign themselves to disappointment. Mrs. Macdonald hoped that they would all meet on board the Khedive, but held out very faint hopes of making acquaintance sooner than that. It was a bright agreeable letter as the one or two that came before had been, but it left them all in a difficulty to conjure up Mrs. Macdonald, and unitedly they lamented the necessity. What Mr. Macdonald was like, as Mrs. Plovtree observed, being of no consequence whatever. But it was absolute, and not until the Khedive was within an hour of weighing anchor at the Royal Albert Docks, did the assembled Peacheys, forlorn on the main deck in the midst of Helen’s boxes, get a glimpse of Mrs. Macdonald. Then it was brief. One of the stewards pointed out the Peachey group to a very young lady in a very tight-fitting tailor-made dress, swinging an ulster over her arm, who approached them briskly with an outstretched hand and a business-like little smile. “I think you must be Mr. and Mrs. Peachey,” she said; “I am Mrs. Macdonald. And where is the young lady?” Mr. Peachey unbent the back of his neck in the clerical manner, and Mrs. Peachey indicated Helen as well as she could in the suffusion of the moment, taking farewell counsels of her sisters with pink eyelids. “But you mustn’t mind her going, Mrs. Peachey!” Mrs. Macdonald went on vivaciously, shaking hands with the group, “she will be sure to like it. Everybody likes it. I am devoted to India! She’ll soon get accustomed to everything, and then she won’t want to come home—that’s the way it was with me. I dare say you won’t believe it, but I’m dying to get back! You’ve seen your cabin?” she demanded of Helen, “is it forward or aft? Are you port or starboard?”

The Peacheys opened their eyes respectfully at this nautical proficiency, and Helen said she was afraid she didn’t know, it was down some stairs and one turned to the left, toward the end of a long passage, and then to the right into a little corner.

“Oh, then you’re starboard and a little forward of the engines!” Mrs. Macdonald declared. “Very lucky you are! You’ll have your port open far oftener than we will—we’re weather-side and almost directly over the screw. So much for not taking one’s passage till three weeks before sailing—and very fortunate we were to get one at all, the agent said. We have the place to ourselves though, one can generally manage that by paying for it you know—one comfort! How many in your cabin?”

“Three of us!” Helen responded apprehensively, “and it is such a little one! And the one whose name is Stitch has piled all her rugs and portmanteaux on my bed, and there’s nowhere to put mine!”

“Oh, the cabins in this ship are not small,” returned Mrs. Macdonald with seriousness. “She’s got a heavy cargo and they’re pretty low in the water, if you like, but they’re not small. Wait till you get used to it a little. As to Madam Stitch, just pop her bags and things on the floor—don’t hesitate a moment. One must assert one’s rights on shipboard—it’s positively the only way! But there are some people to see me off—I must fly!” She gave them a brisk nod and was on the wing to her friends when Mrs. Peachey put a hand on her arm. “You spoke of the ship’s being low in the water, Mrs. Macdonald. You don’t think—you don’t think there is any danger on that account?”

Little Mrs. Macdonald stopped to enjoy her laugh. “Oh dear, no!” she said with vast amusement, “rather the other way I should think—and we’ll be a great deal steadier for it!” Then she went, and the Peacheys saw her in the confused distance babbling as gaily in the midst of her new-comers as if a thought of the responsibilities of chaperonage had never entered her head.

“Helen, I believe you are older than she is!” exclaimed the youngest Miss Peachey.

“I don’t like her,” remarked the second succinctly. “She giggles and she gabbles. Helen, I wish some of us were going with you.”

“She doesn’t seem to mind travelling,” said the Miss Peachey with the prospective claim to the title.

“Dear me, Helen!” began Mrs. Peachey almost dolorously, “she—she seems very bright,” changing her comment. After all they must make the best of it. The Rev. Peachey clasped his stick behind his back, and tapped the deck with it, saying nothing, with rather a pursing of his wide shaven lips, Helen looked after Mrs. Macdonald helplessly, and her family exchanged glances in which that lady might have read depreciation.

“Your roll-up, Helen?” exclaimed Mrs. Peachey.

“Here, mamma.”

“You have seven small pieces, remember! Have you got your keys? Are you sure you are dressed warmly enough? It will be some time before you get to India, you know!” Mrs. Peachey had suffered an accession of anxiety in the last ten minutes.

They stood looking at each other in the common misery of coming separation, casting about for last words and finding none of any significance, for people do not anticipate an event for a whole year without exhausting themselves on the topic of it. Helen would keep a little diary; she would post it at Gibraltar, Naples, Port Said, and Colombo; and they were to write overland to Naples, and by the next mail to Calcutta, which would reach before she did. These time-worn arrangements were made over again. Helen thought of a last affectionate message to her Aunt Plovtree and was in the act of wording it, when a steward with a yellow envelope inquired of them for “any lady by the name of Peachey.” The contents of the yellow envelope had telegraphic brevity. “Good-bye and God bless you! J. Plovtree.” Helen read, and immediately took out her handkerchief again. “Just like Jane!” said Mrs. Peachey, sadly, with her eyes full, and Mr. Peachey, to cover his emotion read aloud the hours at which the message had been received and delivered. “Forty-two minutes” he announced “fairly quick!” Helen proposed a walk on the quarter-deck. “The luggage, my dear child!” Mrs. Peachey cried. “We mustn’t leave the luggage, with all these people about! James, dear, it would not be safe to leave the luggage, would it! You and the girls may go, Helen. Your father and I will stay here.”

AUNT PLOVTREE.

“Oh, no!” Helen returned reproachfully, and clung to them all.

The crowd on the deck increased and grew noisier, people streamed up and down the wide gangway. Cabin luggage came rattling down in cabs, perilously late, the arm of the great steam-crane swung load after load high in air and lowered it into the hold, asserting its own right of way. “That’s one of your tin-lined boxes, Helen,” exclaimed Mrs. Peachey, intent on the lightening of the last load, “and oh, I’m sure it is not safe, dear! James won’t you call to them that it is not safe!” But the long deal case with “Miss Peachey, Calcutta,” in big black letters on it was already describing an arc over the heads of the unwary, and as it found its haven Mrs. Peachey made a statement of excited relief, “I never saw such carelessness!” said she.

A number of ladies, dressed a good deal alike, arrived upon the deck in company and took up a position near the forward part of the ship, where the second class passengers were gathered together, producing little black books. From these they began to sing with smiling faces and great vigour, various hymns, with sentiments appropriate to long voyages, danger, and exile from home. It was a parting attention from their friends to a number of young missionaries for Burmah, probably designed to keep up their spirits. The hymns were not exclusively of any church or creed—Moody and Sankey contributed as many of them as the Ancient and Modern, but they were all lustily emotional and befitting the occasion to the most unfortunate degree. The departing missionaries stood about in subdued groups and tried to wave their handkerchiefs. One or two young lady missionaries found refuge in their cabins where they might sob comfortably. The notes rang high and bathed the whole ship in elegy, plaintively fell and reveled in the general wreck of spirits and affectation of hilarity. It began to rain a little, but the ladies were all provided with umbrellas, and under them sang on.

“While the nearer waters roll,

While the tempest still is high.”

“What idiots they are!” remarked the youngest plain-spoken Miss Peachey when it became impossible to ignore the effect upon Helen’s feelings any longer. “As if they couldn’t find anything else to sing than that!”

“Oh, my dear,” rebuked Mrs. Peachey, drying her eyes, “we may be sure that their motive is everything that is good.” Whereat the youngest Miss Peachey, unsubdued, muttered “Motive!”

“H’all this for the cabin, miss?” asked a steward, grasping a hat-box and a portmanteau. “I don’t quite know ‘ow that there long box is a-going in, miss. Is it accordin’ to the Company’s regillations, miss?” Mr. Peachey interposed, with dignity, and said that it was—the precise measurements. It came from the Army and Navy Stores, he was quite sure the size was correct. The man still looked dubious, but when Helen said, regardless of measurements, that she must have it, that it contained nearly everything she wanted for the voyage, he shouldered it without further dissent. He was accustomed to this ultimatum of seafaring ladies, and bowed to it.

Mrs. Peachey began to think that they ought to go down to the cabin and stay beside the luggage, there were so many odd-looking people about; but she succumbed to the suggestion of being carried off; and they all went up on the quarter-deck. Mrs. Macdonald was there—they might see something more of Mrs. Macdonald. They clung to the hope.

They did see something more of Mrs. Macdonald—a little. She interrupted herself and her friends long enough to approach the Peacheys and ask if all Helen’s luggage was on board, “wedding presents and all?” jocularly. Mrs. Peachey replied fervently that she hoped so, and Mrs. Macdonald said, Oh, that was all right then, and Was she a good sailor? Oh, well, she would soon get over it. And oh, by the by—departing to her beckoning friends again—it was all right about their seats at table—Miss Peachey was to sit by them—she had seen the head steward and he said there would be no difficulty. Having thus reassured them, “I’ll see you again,” said Mrs. Macdonald, and noddingly departed.

The first whistle shrilled and bellowed, and a parting stir responded to it all over the ship. Mrs. Peachey looked agitated, and laid a hand on Helen’s arm. “There is no cause for haste, mamma,” said the Rev. Peachey, looking at his watch. “We have still twenty minutes, and there is a quantity of freight yet to be got on board.” The missionary ladies began a new hymn,

“Oh, think of the friends over there!”

“Only twenty minutes, my love! Then I think we ought really to be getting off! My darling child——”

The whistle blew again stertorously, and the gangway began to throng with friends of the outward-bound. The dear, tender, human-hearted Peacheys clustered about the girl they were giving up—the girl who was going from their arms and their fireside an infinite distance, to a land of palm-trees and yams, to marry—and what a lottery marriage was!—a young Browne. They held her fast, each in turn. “I almost w-wish I w-weren’t go—” sobbed Helen in her mother’s embraces. “Helen!” said the youngest Miss Peachey sternly, with a very red nose, “you do nothing of the sort! You’re only too pleased and proud to go, and so should I be in your place!” Which rebuke revived Helen’s loyalty to her Browne if it did not subdue the pangs with which she hugged her sister.

At last the gangway was withdrawn and all the Peacheys were on the other side of it. It rained faster, the missionary ladies still sang on, people called last words to their friends in the damp crowd below. A box of sweets was thrown to a young lady on the main deck—it dropped into the black water between the ship and the wharf and was fished out with great excitement. The Peacheys gathered in a knot under their several umbrellas, and Helen stood desolately by herself watching them, now and then exchanging a watery smile. They cast off the ropes, the Lascars skipped about like monkeys, the crowd stood back, slowly the great ship slipped away from the wharf into the river, and as she moved down stream the crowd ran with her a little way, drowning the missionary ladies with hurrahs. In the Peacheys’ last glimpse of their Helen she was standing beside little Mrs. Macdonald and a stout gentleman with a pale face, rather flabby and deeply marked about the mouth and under the eyes—a gentleman whom nature had intended to be fair but whom climatic conditions had darkened in defiance of the intention. Mrs. Macdonald tapped the gentleman in a sprightly way with her parasol, for the Peacheys’ benefit, and he took off his hat. The Peachey family supposed, quite correctly, that that must be Mr. Macdonald.

CHAPTER III.

HELEN thought the prospect of England slipping away from her in the rain as the ship throbbed down the river, too desolate for endurance, so she descended to her cabin with the unavowed intention of casting herself upon her berth to weep. Miss Stitch was there, however, and Mrs. Forsyth-Jones, who occupied the berth above Miss Stitch’s, and the steward, which seemed to Helen a good many, and she retreated.

“Oh, come in!” both the ladies cried; but Helen thought it was obviously impossible. She wandered into the long dining-saloon and sat down in one of the revolving chairs; she watched a fat ayah patting a baby to sleep on the floor, looked into the ladies’ cabin and went hastily out again, for already the dejected had begun to gather there, prone on the sofas and commiserated by the stewardesses. Finally she made her way upon deck again, meeting Mrs. Macdonald in the companion-way. “Are you all right?” asked Mrs. Macdonald cheerfully; but, before Helen had time to say that she was or was not, the lady had disappeared.

The deck was full of irresolute people like herself, who sat about on the damp benches or walked up and down under the awning, still with the look of being fresh from town, still in gloves and stiff hats, and land-faring garments. They put their hands in their pockets and shivered, and looked askance at each other, or made vain attempts to extract their own from the steamer chairs that were heaped up astern, waiting the offices of a quartermaster. An occasional hurrying steward was stopped a dozen times by passengers thirsting for information. Barefooted Lascars climbed about their monkey-like business among the ropes, or polished the brasses on the smoking-cabin, or holystoned a deck which seemed to Helen immaculately clean before. She found a dry corner and sat down in it to consider how much more familiar with the ship many of the people seemed to be than she was, and to envy all the accustomed ones. It seemed to Helen that she had better not analyse her other emotions. She wasn’t comfortable, but no doubt she soon would be; she wasn’t cheerful; but how could anybody expect that? She was restless and damp and unhappy, and it finally became necessary for her to draw young Browne’s photograph out of her hand-bag and peruse it in shelter of the Daily Graphic for a very long time. After which her spirits rose appreciably. “He is a dear!” she smiled to herself, “and he’s got a lovely forehead—and in just five weeks I shall see him again—just five weeks!”

Quite an ordinary reflection you see, without a shade of subtlety, a reflection probably common to engaged young ladies the world over; but I have already warned you under no circumstances to expect anything extraordinary from Helen. It will be my fault if you find her dull, I shall be in that case no faithful historian, but a traducer. I have not known the present Mrs. Browne to be dull, even at the close of a protracted round of Indian social gaieties; but you must not expect her to be original.

The voyage to Calcutta began in this way, and I happen to know that its chief feature of consolation—young Browne’s forehead—remained in Helen’s pocket, and was constantly bespoken. Especially perhaps in the Bay of Biscay, which fulfilled all its traditions for her benefit. I fear that there were moments, tempestuous moments, in the Bay of Biscay, heightened by the impassioned comments of Miss Stitch and Mrs. Forsyth-Jones, when Helen did not dare to dwell upon the comparative advantages of desiccated spinsterhood in Canbury, and matrimony in foreign parts attainable only by sea. She felt that it would be indiscreet, that she could not trust her conclusions to do credit to her fealty. If it were not for Miss Stitch and Mrs. Forsyth-Jones, Helen reflected, the horrors of the situation would have been less keen; but I have no doubt that each of these ladies entertained the same sentiments towards her two fellow-voyagers. They united, however, in extolling the steward. The stewardess was a necessarily perfunctory person, with the quaverings of forty ladies in her ears at once. The stewardess was always sure she “didn’t know, ma’am,” and seemed to think it was a duty one owed the ship to go up on deck, no matter how one felt. She was also occasionally guilty of bringing one cold vegetables, if one occurred about thirty-ninth upon her list of non-diners in public. But the steward was a man, and always respectfully cheerful. He could tell exactly why it was the ship rolled in that peculiar manner—owing to the disposition of iron in the hold. He knew just how long they would be in “the Bay,” and what sort of weather “she” would be likely to experience during the night; also could predict within a quarter of an hour, the time at which they would land at Gibraltar. He was generally incorrect in every particular, but that made no difference to the value of his sanguine prophecies, while it mitigated the distressful effects of his gloomy ones. And it was always he who brought the first advice that the ports might be opened, who calmed all fear of a possible rat or cockroach “coming up from the hold,” and who heralded the ladies’ appearance on deck with armfuls of rugs, in the days of early convalescence. They chanted to one another continually how “nice” he was, and how hard he was obliged to work, poor fellow, each mentally determining a higher figure for her farewell tip than she had thought of the day before. This is the custom of ladies the world over who sail upon the seas.

It must be mentioned that Mrs. Macdonald visited Helen’s cabin several times in the Bay of Biscay. For her part Mrs. Macdonald was never ill, she simply made up her mind not to be, and in her opinion if Helen would only commit herself to a similar effort she would be all right immediately. The expression of this opinion rather lessened the value of Mrs. Macdonald’s sympathy; and the announcement that there was really lovely weather going on above and the ship was beginning to be so jolly, failed to make Helen any more comfortable. “Well, you are funny!” Mrs. Macdonald would say cheerfully in departing, and she said it every day.

Mr. Macdonald remarked that Gibraltar looked much as usual the morning they steamed under its hostile shadow, and Mrs. Macdonald said that if she wasn’t in absolute need of some darning cotton and letter-paper she wouldn’t think of going ashore—the place was such an old story. The consideration of darning cotton prevailed, however, and the Macdonalds went ashore, Helen with them. Helen’s acquaintance with the Macdonalds had progressed meanwhile. She had learned what not to expect of them, which excluded all but the gayest and airiest and most indifferent companionship, and this facilitated matters between them considerably. It was a little difficult at first. It seemed to this young lady from Wiltshire, brought up among serious traditions of matrimony, that her case, if not herself, ought to be taken a little more importantly; that some impression of the fateful crisis in her life, toward which they were helping to hurry her, ought to be evident occasionally in the Macdonald conduct or conversation. It was only gradually that she came to see how lightly such projects as hers and young Browne’s were regarded by these people who were still in the initial stages of their own; how little space she or her affairs occupied in their good-natured thoughts; how invariably she must expect any reference to it to be jocular. During the process Helen had now and then a novel sense of making one of the various parcels which Mrs. Macdonald had undertaken to bring out to friends in Calcutta—a feeling, that she ought properly to be in an air-tight box in the hold, corded and labelled and expected to give no further trouble. She realized, at moments, that she was being “shipped” to young Browne.

They did exactly what everybody does in Gibraltar. There was no time to get permission from the authorities and go through the galleries, there never is. Barring which, the people of the ships find themselves without resource except to drive in the rattle-trap conveyances of the place through its narrow twisting, high-walled over-topping white streets and out past the Spanish market, where everybody buys figs and pomegranates to throw overboard afterwards, and so emerging from the town trot through the sand and the short grass round the mighty gray foot of the Rock, to look up and marvel at the terror of those irregular holes upon its face, and the majesty that it had long before it became conscious with cannon. Helen and the Macdonalds did all this and said just what P. and O. voyagers have said for the last quarter of a century about it. Coming back Mrs. Macdonald bought her darning cotton and her letter-paper at a little shop, whose black-browed proprietor sold photographs and wicked knives, and long pipes as well. Afterwards they all strolled through the Alameda gardens, that cling for life among their verbenas and rose bushes to the sides of the Rock, and finally fell into that fatal corner shop which entraps the unwary with curios. All roads seem to lead to it in Gibraltar, and one knows it by the crowd of speculative passengers that encumber the doorway considering and contrasting desirable purchases. The Spaniards inside are haughty and indifferent, they will abate a shilling or two of their exorbitance perhaps, not more. That is what the Macdonalds said to everybody in an undertone—“You needn’t try, they won’t come down—it doesn’t seem to be worth their while. We used to think they would, but now we don’t ask them!” and in the face of this advice of experience the passengers hesitated still more over their ill-shaped Moorish vases, black and red and blue and gilt, their brass and coloured glass hanging lamps from Cairo, their Persian china superficially gilt but beautifully blue. The things that fascinated Helen were curious plaques in relief, all marshy greens, in which the most realistic lizards and toads were creeping about in imitated moss. Miss Peachey would have liked at least four of these, they struck her as so original and clever, until Mrs. Macdonald at her elbow said, in an impressive whisper “Don’t! You see them in boarding-houses in Calcutta!” when she put them reluctantly down, and bought a big bedecked Spanish hat to make a work-basket of, and a large fan, upon which sundry ladies of depraved appearance and very Irish features were dancing a fandango instead. I have seen that fan in the present Mrs. Browne’s Calcutta drawing-room frequently since. She has it fastened on the wall immediately under a photogravure of The Angelus, and she will not take it down.

Between Gibraltar and Naples, Helen observed the peculiarities of the species P. and O. passenger, the person who spends so large a portion of a lifetime shorter than the average, in wondering how much more of this delightful or this abominable weather “we’ll have,” in the Indian Ocean or the Red Sea. She observed that Miss Stitch arose betimes every morning, and attended the service held by the little pale ritualistic clergyman in the saloon before the tables were laid for breakfast, which struck her as eminently proper, Miss Stitch being a missionary. She also noticed that Mrs. Forsyth-Jones, returning to her husband in Burmah, with three photographs of him in uniform variously arranged in the cabin, had as many small flirtations well in hand, one in the morning, of the promenade sort, with a middle-aged Under-Secretary, one in the afternoon, conducted in long chairs, enhanced by sunset, with a Royal Engineer, whose wife was similarly occupied at the other end of the ship, and one in the evening in a secluded corner of the hurricane deck, charitably witnessed by the moon and stars, with a callow indigo planter about the age of her eldest son. Helen thought that the missionary or somebody, some older person, ought to speak to this lady in terms of guarded reproof, and tell her that her conduct was more conspicuous than perhaps she knew; and our young lady from Wiltshire was surprised to observe not only that nobody did, but that Mrs. Forsyth-Jones seemed to be a person of some popularity on board. The Macdonalds, for instance, hung about her chair with solicitude, in the temporary absence of any of the attachés. Mrs. Macdonald herself had plenty of “men-friends” as she called them. They buzzed about her, whenever she sat or stood long enough to permit their approach, all day—they were always bringing her rugs, or old numbers of Punch, or an orange. But Mrs. Macdonald did not particularize, she was content with a general empire, though she prized that, as anybody could see. Among the throng Mr. Macdonald remained supreme; she expected most attention from him too, and she called him “Mac.”

Miss Stitch confided to Miss Peachey her opinion that “the people on board this ship” were more than usually cliquey; but this was not a conclusion that Helen would have arrived at unassisted. She saw about her day after day, lining the long tables and afterwards scattered about easefully on deck, a great many people, some of whom she thought agreeable-looking, and others distinctly the reverse. Miss Stitch seemed to think one ought to know everybody. Helen was sure that a few—a very few—of the agreeable-looking people would do quite well. She did not see at all how Miss Stitch could bring herself to talk to the person who sat next her at table, and wore a large diamond ring on his third finger, and drank champagne every day at tiffin, and said he was travelling for his “’ealth,” and pointed most of his remarks with a tooth-pick. Helen thought that even missionary zeal would not carry her so far as that. On the other hand, she found it difficult to understand why everybody, including Miss Stitch, seemed agreed not to make acquaintance with a soft-eyed, sad-faced lady of rather dark complexion, who talked in a gentle voice with a slightly foreign accent, Helen thought, and was accompanied by three daughters, who much resembled her. They looked very quiet and lady-like to Helen, and she thought the manners of certain boisterous young ladies who polkaed with the ship’s officers on a heaving deck after dinner, and whom everybody accepted, suffered by comparison with them. When she was told that their name was De Cruz, Helen privately criticised her fellow countrywomen’s attitude. “It must be,” she said to herself, “because they are foreign.” And so it was—because they were foreign. “About four annas in the rupee,” said Miss Stitch about them one day, and told Helen that she would find out what that meant before she had been long in India. But Miss Stitch, M. D., was interested in the welfare, temporal and eternal, only of ladies who were “pure native.”

Then one peaceful rainy morning, after a rolling night, Naples lay before them, gathered all about her harbour with Vesuvius gently smoking in the distance. The slippery hurricane deck was full of people looking for Vesuvius, grouped round the single male passenger, who, awakened by the first officer at four in the morning, had seen it spouting fire. Enviable male passenger! Invidious first officer! Out from shore came disreputable Neapolitan companies in small boats, with stringed instruments, who lay under the ship’s sides and sang, “Finiculi—Finicula!” in a lavish and abandoned manner, turning up their impudent faces for contributions from the truly musical souls on board. Helen listened, enraptured, to a number of these renditions, after which she concluded that she preferred “Finiculi—Finicula” as she had heard it sung by Mr. Browne, in Canbury, Wilts. After breakfast, the Macdonalds attached themselves to an exploring party for Pompeii, under the guidance of a black-browed Neapolitan, representing Messrs. Cook. Mrs. Macdonald went about in a pretty, new waterproof, with Bulwer’s Last Days in her hand, telling people she really must go this time, she had been lazy so often before, and it was so awfully cheap with these people—carriages, rail, tiffin and see everything for only thirty francs each! Helen and Miss Stitch stayed behind, the night had been too rough to let them venture on the absorption of so much ancient history, even at this advantageous rate. But later, when the sun came out, the young ladies recovered their spirits sufficiently to cruise adventurously to shore by themselves, to engage a ragged-pocketed “guide” of perhaps thirteen, and a rattling little victoria, pulled by a clinking little pony, with bells upon his collar, and drive about Naples for three delicious hours. I can’t say they added much to their stock of information. They had no idea where to go and what to see; but one can always absorb colour and life without a guide-book, happily; and I know, from what she told me afterward, that Helen Peachey did that. They found abundant happiness in the curio shops and much unpalatable fruit in the open market; they filled their rattle-trap of a carriage with great bunches of tiny pink roses at a few coppers apiece, and buried their faces in them. They were told, driving through a grand toppling main street, all draped and garlanded with little glass bells for candles, red, green, and blue, that the King was coming next day. The boy guide told them this. He showed them also the Royal Palace, with all the statues of former kings standing about outside, and the “Grand Café de l’Europe,” much embellished by a painter whose art had evidently once found favour with the municipality. In the opinion of the guide, the “Grand Café de l’Europe” was what reasonable people came to Naples to see; he pointed it out many times and with an increasing show of personal admiration. He was a very useful, clever boy the young ladies thought, especially when he took them to the post office and obtained for Miss Stitch a receipt for the registered letter she wanted to send away, in as business-like a manner as if he were in the habit of transmitting large sums abroad daily. “Don’ you lossit, for goodniz sake!” he exclaimed, as he gave her the slip. But I doubt whether he was quite worth the sum he claimed at the water’s edge when they departed—the pay of a full-grown, well-fed guide for a whole day, plus a pourboire, which they ungrudgingly gave between them.

But I cannot give any more of my valuable space to Mrs. Browne’s reminiscences of that voyage, which must, according to the volumes of them, have lasted a space of about seven months. I believe they were all very gay at Port Said, walking through the single wide China bazar street of the place, flaming with colour and resonant of musicians in the gambling houses, drinking black coffee on the boulevard, and realizing no whit of Port Said’s iniquity. The Suez Canal had no incident but several loathly odors, and then came the long smooth voyage to Colombo and a fantastic glimpse of first cocoanut trees fringing the shores of Ceylon. A great deal here about sapphires and rubies and cat’s eyes and little elephants made of ivory and small brown diving-boys, and first tropical impressions, but I must not linger in the chronicling. Then the sail up to Madras, and the brief tarrying there, and the days that came after, short days when everybody packed and rejoiced. At last, one night at ten o’clock, a light that was not a star, shining far through the soft still darkness beyond the bow of the ship, the light at the mouth of a wide brown river that slipped to the sea through the India, Helen would see in the morning, and past the city whither her simple heart had gone before her.

Mrs. Macdonald kept out of the way. It was the one considerate thing she did during the voyage. Young Browne, rather white and nervous-looking, came upon Mr. Macdonald first in the turbulent shore-going crowd. Mr. Macdonald was genial and reassuring. “You’ll find her over there, old man,” said he without circumlocution, “rather back. Better bring her up to Hungerford Street to breakfast yourself.” And Helen straightway was found by young Browne in the precise direction Mr. Macdonald had indicated, and “rather back.” She always remembers very distinctly that on that occasion she wore a blue Chambray frock and a sailor hat with a white ribbon round it. It is not a matter of consequence, still it might as well be mentioned.

CHAPTER IV.

I HAVE no doubt that the present Mrs. Browne would like me to linger over her first impressions of Calcutta. She has a habit now of stating that they were keen. That the pillared houses and the palm-shaded gardens, and the multiplicity of turbaned domestics gave her special raptures, which she has since outgrown, but still likes to claim. She said nothing about it at the time, however, and I am disposed to believe that the impressions came later, after young Browne had become a familiar object, and all the boxes were unpacked. As they were not married immediately, but a week after the Khedive arrived, to give Mrs. Macdonald time to unpack her boxes, the former of these processes was an agreeably gradual one occupying six morning and evening drives in Mr. Browne’s dog-cart, and sundry half-hours between. Mrs. Macdonald wanted to make the house pretty for the wedding. “Really, child,” said she, “you can’t be married in a barn like this!” and to that end she drew forth many Liberty muslins, much “art” needlework, and all the decoration flotsam and jetsam of the season’s summer sales in Oxford Street. I understand that both the Brownes protested against the plan to have a wedding; they only wanted to be married, they said, of course in the Church, regularly, but without unnecessary circumstance. “People can see it next day in The Englishman,” suggested young Browne, urged privately to this course by Helen. But it was a point upon which Mrs. Macdonald was inflexible. “Certainly not a big wedding,” said she, “since you don’t want it, but a few people we must have just to see it properly done. What would Calcutta think of you”—reproachfully, to young Browne, “getting the knot tied that way, in a corner! Besides, it will be a lovely way of letting everybody know we are back. I’ll manage it—I know exactly who you ought to have!”

Thereupon Helen brought out from among her effects a certain square wooden box, and besought that it might be opened. “It’s—it’s the cake,” she explained with blushes; “mother thought I ought to bring it—”

“Oh, of course!” exclaimed Mrs. Macdonald briskly; “everybody does. There were five altogether on board the Khedive. Let us hope it has carried well!”

They opened the box, and Helen took out layers of silver paper with nervous fingers. “It seems a good deal crushed,” she said. Then she came upon a beautiful white sugar bird of Paradise lacking his tail, and other fragments dotted with little silver pellets, and the petals of a whole flower-garden in pink icing. “It has not carried well!” she exclaimed grievously—and it hadn’t. It was the proudest erection of the Canbury confectioner’s experience, a glory and a wonder when it arrived at the Rectory, but it certainly had not carried well: it was a travelled wreck.

“Looks very sorry for itself!” remarked young Browne, who happened to be present.

“It must have happened in that hateful Bay of Biscay!” said Helen, with an inclination to tears.

“Oh, never mind!” Mrs. Macdonald put in airily, as if it were a trifle. “It’s easy enough to get another. I’ll send a chit to Peliti’s this very afternoon. You can use up this one for five o’clock tea afterwards.”

“But do you think it won’t do at all, Mrs. Macdonald?” Helen begged. “You see the lower tier isn’t much damaged, and it came all the way from home, you know.”

“I think it ought to do,” remarked young Browne.

“My dear!” cried her hostess, “think of how it would look! In the midst of everything! It would quite spoil your wedding! Oh, no—we’ll have another from Peliti’s.”

“What could one do?” confided Mrs. Browne to me afterwards. “It was her affair—not ours in the least. We were getting married, don’t you see, for her amusement!” But that was in one of Mrs. Browne’s ungrateful moments. And was private to me. Generally speaking, Mrs. Browne said she thought the Macdonalds arranged everything charmingly. The Canbury cake went, however, to the later suburban residence of the Brownes, and was there consumed by them in the reckless moments of the next six months.

I was one of the people Mrs. Macdonald knew the Brownes ought to have, and I went to the wedding, in a new heliotrope silk. I remember that also came out by the Khedive. It was in the Cathedral, at four o’clock in the afternoon, full choral service, quantities of flowers, and two heads of departments in the company, one ex-Commissioner, and a Member of Council. None of them were people the Brownes were likely to see much of afterward, in my opinion, and I wondered at Mrs. Macdonald’s asking them; but the gown she graced the occasion in would have justified an invitation to the Viceroy—pale green poplin with silver embroidery.

The bride came very bravely up the aisle upon the arm of her host, all in the white China silk, a little crushed in places, which the Canbury dressmaker had been reluctantly persuaded to make unostentatiously. The bridegroom stood consciously ready with his supporter; we all listened to the nervous vows, sympathetically thinking back; the little Eurasian choir-boys sang lustily over the pair. Two inquisitive black crows perched in the open window and surveyed the ceremony, flying off with hoarse caws at the point of the blessing; from the world outside came the hot bright glare of the afternoon sun upon the Maidan, and the creaking of the ox-gharries,[^[1]] and the chatting of the mynas in the casuerina[^[2]] trees, and the scent of some waxy heavy-smelling thing of the country—how like it was to every other Indian wedding where a maid comes trippingly from over seas to live in a long chair under a punkah, and be a law unto kitmutgars!

[1]. Native ox-carts.

[2]. Australian fir.

The new Mrs. Browne received our congratulations with shy distance after it was all over. She looked round at the big stucco church with its white pillars and cane chairs, and at our unfamiliar faces, with a little pitiful smile. I had, at the moment, a feminine desire to slap Mrs. Macdonald for having asked us. And all the people of the Rectory, who ought to have been at the wedding, were going about their ordinary business, with only now and then a speculative thought of this. Everybody who really cared was four thousand miles away, and unaware. We could not expect either of them to think much of our perfunctory congratulations, although Mr. Browne expressed himself very politely to the contrary in the valuable sentiments he uttered afterwards in connection with champagne cup and the Peliti wedding cake, on Mrs. Macdonald’s veranda.

They had a five days’ honeymoon, so far as the outer world was concerned, and they spent it at Patapore. Darjiling, as young Browne was careful to explain to Helen, was the proper place, really the thing to do, but it took twenty-six hours to get to Darjiling, and twenty-six hours to get back, and nobody wanted to plan off a five days’ honeymoon like that. Patapore, on the contrary, was quite accessible, only six hours by mail.

“Is it a hill-station?” asked Helen, when they discussed it.

“Not precisely a hill-station, darling, but it’s on rising ground—a thousand feet higher than this.”

“Is it an interesting place?” she inquired.

“I think it ought to be, under the circumstances.”

“George! I mean are there any temples there, or anything?”

“I don’t remember any temples. There is a capital dâk-bungalow.”

“And what is a dâk-bungalow, dear? How short you cut your hair, you dear old thing!”

“That was provisional against your arrival, darling—so you couldn’t pull it. A dâk-bungalow is a sort of government hotel, put up in unfrequented places where there aren’t any others, for the accommodation of travellers.”

“Unfrequented places! O George! Any snakes or tigers?”

“Snakes—a few, I dare say. Tigers—let me see; you might hear of one about fifty miles from there.”

“Dreadful!” shuddered Helen, rubbing her cheek upon George’s convict crop. “But what is the attraction, dear?”

“The air,” responded he, promptly substituting his moustache. “Wonderful air! Think of it, Helen—a thousand feet up!”

But Helen had not been long enough in India to think of it. “Air is a thing one can get anywhere,” she suggested; “isn’t there anything else?”

“Seclusion, darling—the most perfect seclusion! Lots to eat—there’s always the railway restaurant if the dâk-bungalow gives out, capital air, nice country to walk over, and not a soul to speak to but our two selves!”

“Oh!” said Helen. “It sounds very nice, dear——” And so they agreed.

It was an excellent dâk-bungalow without doubt, quite a wonder in dâk-bungalows. It was new, for one thing—they are not generally new—and clean, they are not generally clean. There had been no deserted palace or disused tomb for the government to utilize at Patapore, so they had been obliged to build this dâk-bungalow, and they built it very well. It had a pukka[^[3]] roof instead of a thatched one, which was less comfortable for the karaits but pleasanter to sleep under; and its walls were straight and high, well raised from the ground, and newly white-washed. Inside it was divided into three pairs of rooms, one in the middle and one at each end. You stepped into one of your rooms on the north side of the house and out of the other on the south side, upon your share of the south veranda. The arrangement was very simple, each pair of rooms was separate and independent, and had nothing to say to any other.

[3]. Made of brick and mortar.

The furniture was simple too, its simplicity left nothing to be desired. There were charpoys[^[4]] to sleep on, travellers brought their own bedding. In one room there were two chairs and a table, in the other a table and two chairs. There was nothing on the floor and nothing on the walls. There was ample accommodation for the air of Patapore, and no other attraction to interfere with it. I don’t know whether we have any right to accompany the Brownes to Patapore, and to stay with them there; it is certain that we would not be welcome, if they knew it. It is equally certain that nobody else did—they were, as young Browne had predicted, supremely alone. At seven in the morning the old khansamah in charge of the place gave them chota hazri[^[5]] in the room with the table in it, bringing tea in a chipped brown teapot, and big thick cups to drink it out of, one edged with blue and the other with green, and buttered toast upon a plate which did not match anything. He was a little brown khansamah, with very bright eyes and a thin white beard and a trot—he reminded one curiously of a goat. His lips were thin and much compressed; he took the Brownes solemnly, and charged them only three rupees a day each for their food, which young Browne found astonishingly moderate, though Helen, when she worked it out in shillings and pence, and considered the value received, could not bring herself to agree with this.

[4]. Native beds.

[5]. Little breakfast.

After chota hazri they went for walks, long walks, stepping off the dâk-bungalow veranda, as Helen said, into India as it was before ever the Sahibs came to rule over it. For they could turn their backs upon the long straight bank of the railway and wander for miles in any direction over a country that seemed as empty as if it had just been made. As far as they could see it rolled in irregular plains and low broken ridges and round hillocks all covered with short, dry grass, to the horizon, and there, very far away, the gray outlines of an odd mountain or two stood against the sky. A few sarl trees were scattered here and there in clumps, all their lower branches stolen for firewood, and wherever a mud hut squatted behind a hillock there grew a tall castor oil bean tree or two, and some plantains. There were tracks of cattle, there was an occasional tank that had evidently been dug out by men, and there were footpaths making up and over the hillocks and across the stony beds of the empty nullahs;[^[6]] but it was only in the morning or in the evening that they met any of the brown people that lived thereabouts. Then they came in little straggling strings and bands, looking at these strangers from under inverted baskets, appearing from nowhere and disappearing in vague and crooked directions. Helen’s husband told her that they were coolies working in coal mines on the side of the railway. There were crows, too, and vultures—the crows were familiar and impertinent, the vultures sailed high and took no notice of them—and that was all. They went forth and they came back again. Helen made a few primitive sketches in her husband’s note-book. I do not think she did the country justice, but her sketches seemed to me to indicate the character of her impressions of it. They went forth and they came back again, always to a meal—breakfast, or tiffin, or dinner, as the case might be. Helen liked dinner best, because then the lamps were lighted, and she had an excuse for changing her dress. They partook of these meals with three-tined steel forks, and knives worn down to dagger points, according to the unfathomable custom of the mussalchi.[^[7]] The courses consisted of variations upon an original leg of mutton which occurred at one of their earlier repasts, served upon large cracked plates with metal reservoirs of hot water under them, and embellished by tinned peas of a suspicious pallor. And always there was moorghy[^[8]]—moorghy boiled and fried and roasted, moorghy cutlets, moorghy curry, moorghy stew. “Nice old person,” said Helen, the first time it appeared, “he has given us fowl! Dear old patriarch.” “He may or may not be a dear old patriarch,” George responded, fixing grim eyes upon the bird, “but he is tolerably sure to have the characteristics of one. You aren’t acquainted with the indigenous moorghy yet, Helen. You regard him in the light of a luxury, as if he were a Christian fowl. He isn’t a luxury out here upon my word. He stalks up and down all over India improving his muscular tissues, he doesn’t disdain to pick from a drain, he costs threepence to buy. He is an inferior creature still. It may be a prejudice of mine, but if there’s any other form of sustenance to be had I don’t eat moorghy.”

[6]. Stream beds.

[7]. Dishwasher.

[8]. Fowl.

“He tastes,” said Mrs. Browne after experiment, “like an ‘indestructible’ picture-book.” It was an unwarrantable simile upon Mrs. Browne’s part, since she could not possibly remember the flavour of the literature she used to suck as an infant; but her verdict was never reversed, and so one Indian staple passed out of the domestic experiences of the Brownes.

These two young people had unlimited conversation, and one of them a great many more cigars than were good for him. So far as I have been able to discover, by way of diversion they had nothing else. It had not occurred to either of them that the equipment of a honeymoon required any novels; and the dâk-bungalow was not provided with current fiction. They covered an extensive range of subjects, therefore, as they thought, exhaustively. As a matter of fact, their conversation was so superficial in its nature, and led to such trivial conclusions, that I do not propose to repeat it. They were very unanimous always. Young Browne declared that if his views had habitually received the unqualified assent which Helen gave them he would have been a member of the Viceroy’s Council years before. They could not say enough in praise of the air of Patapore, and when the wind rose it blew them into an ecstasy. Frequently they discussed the supreme advantages of a dâk-bungalow for a honeymoon, and then it was something like this on the afternoon of the third day.

“The perfect freedom of it, you know—the being able to smoke with one’s legs on the table——”

“Yes, dear. I love to see you doing it. It’s so—it’s so home-like!” (I think I see the Rev. Peachey with his legs upon the table!) Then, with sudden animation, “Do you know, George, I think I heard boxes coming into the next room!”

“Not at all, Helen. You didn’t, I’m sure you didn’t. And then the absolute silence of this place——”

“Lovely, George! And that’s how I heard the boxes so distinctly.” Getting up and going softly to the wall—“George, there are people in there!”

“Blow the people! However, they haven’t got anything to do with us.”

“But perhaps—perhaps you know them, George!”

“Most piously I hope I don’t. But never mind, darling. We can easily keep out of the way, in any case. We won’t let them spoil it for us.”

“N-no, dear, we won’t. Certainly not. But you’ll find out who they are, won’t you, Georgie? Ask the khansamah, just for the sake of knowing!”

“Oh, we’ll find out who they are fast enough. But don’t be distressed, darling. It will be the simplest thing in the world to avoid them.”

“Of course it will,” Mrs. Browne responded. “But I think, George dear, I really must put on my tailor-made this afternoon in case we should come in contact with them in any way.”

“We won’t,” replied George, cheerfully lighting another cigar.

To which Mrs. Browne replied without seeming relevance, “I consider it perfectly SHAMEFUL for dâk-bungalows to have no looking-glasses.”

An hour later Helen flew in from the veranda. “Oh, George, I’ve seen them: two men and a lady and a black and white dog—spotted! Quite nice, respectable-looking people, all of them! They walked past our veranda.”

“Confound their impudence! Did they look in?”

“The dog did.”

“None of the rest? Well, dear, which way did they go?”

Helen indicated a south-easterly direction, and the Brownes that evening walked almost directly north, with perhaps a point or two to the west, and did not return until it was quite dark.

The fourth day after breakfast, a stranger entered the veranda without invitation. He was clad chiefly in a turban and loin cloth, and on his head he bore a large tin box. He had an attendant, much like him, but wearing a dirtier loin-cloth, and bearing a bigger box.

“Oh! who is it?” Helen cried.

“It’s one of those wretched box-wallahs, dear—a kind of pedlar. I’ll send him off. Hujao,[^[9]] you!”

[9]. Be off!

“Oh, no, George! Let us see what he has to sell,” Helen interposed with interest; and immediately the man was on the floor untying his cords.

“My darling, you can’t want anything from him!”

“Heaps of things—I shall know as soon as I see what he’s got, dear! To begin with, there’s a lead pencil! So far as I know I haven’t a lead pencil in the world. I’ll take that lead pencil! Soap? No, I think not, thank you. Do tell me what he says, George. Elastic—the very thing I wanted. And tape? Please ask him if he’s got any tape. Tooth-brushes—what do you think, George?”

“Not tooth-brushes!” her lord protested, as one who endures. “They may be second-hand, dear.”

“Oh! No! Here, take them back, please! Ribbon—have you any narrow pale blue? That’s about right, if you’ve nothing better. Hooks and eyes are always useful. So are mixed pins and sewing cotton. I can’t say I think much of these towels, George, they’re very thin—still we shall want towels.”

Mrs. Browne was quite pink with excitement, and her eyes glistened. She became all at once animated and eager, a joy of her sex was upon her, and unexpectedly. The box-wallah was an Event, and an Event is a thing much to be desired, even in one’s honeymoon. This lady had previously and has since made purchases much more interesting and considerably more expensive than those that fell in her way at Patapore; but I doubt whether any of them afforded her a tenth of the satisfaction. She turned over every one of the box-wallah’s commonplaces, trusting to find a need for it. She laid embroidered edging down unwillingly, and put aside handkerchiefs and hosiery with a sigh, pangs of conscience arising from a trousseau just unpacked. But it was astonishing how valuably supplementary that box-wallah’s stores appeared to be. Helen declared, for instance, that she never would have thought of Persian morning slippers, which she has never yet been able to wear, if she had not seen them there, and this I can believe.

The transaction occupied the best part of two hours, during which young Browne behaved very well, smoking quietly, and only interfering once, on the score of some neckties for himself. And when Helen remonstrated that everything seemed to be for her, he begged her to believe that he really didn’t mind—he didn’t feel acquisitive that morning; she mustn’t consider him. To which Helen gave regretful compliance, for the box-wallah had a large stock of gentlemen’s small wares. In the end Mr. Browne paid the box-wallah, in a masterly manner, something over a third of his total demand, which he accepted, to Helen’s astonishment, with only a perfunctory demur, and straight away put his box on his head and departed. About which time young Browne’s bearer came with respectful inquiry as to which train he would pack their joint effects for on the morrow. This is an invariable terminal point for honeymoons in India.

CHAPTER V.

IT is time, perhaps, to state a few facts about Mr. George William Browne in addition to those which are in the reader’s possession already. I have mentioned, I think, that he played tennis badly and was fond of privacy; it runs in my mind also that I have in some way conveyed to you that he is a rather short and thickly built young gentleman, with brown eyes and a dark moustache, and a sallow complexion and a broad smile. Helen declares him handsome, and I never considered him unpleasant-looking, but it is undoubtedly the case that he is very like other young men in Calcutta, also clerks in tea and indigo houses on five hundred rupees a month, with the expectation of partnership whenever retirement or fever shall remove a head of the firm. His tastes were common to Calcutta young men also. He liked golf and polo, and regretted that his pony was not up to the paper-chases; in literature he preferred Clark Russell and the Pioneer, with Lord Lytton for serious moments. He complied with the customs of the Cathedral to the extent of a silk hat and a pair of gloves in the cold weather, and usually attended one service every Sunday, invariably contributing eight annas to the offertory. His political creed was simple. He believed in India for the Anglo-Indians, and despised the teaching and hated the influence, with sturdy reasons, of Exeter Hall. Any views that he had of real importance mainly concerned the propagation of tea in distant markets; but his spare ideas had a crispness that gave them value in a society inclined to be intellectually limp, and his nature was sufficiently cheerful and sympathetic to make him popular, in connection with the fact that he was undeniably a good fellow.

When all this has been said, I fear that Mr. Browne will not appear in these pages with the equipment proper for a young man of whom anything is expected in the nature of modern fiction. Perhaps this, however, is not so important as it looks, which will be more evident when we reflect that in marrying Miss Helen Frances Peachey Mr. Browne performed considerably the greater part of what will be required of him in this history.

That Young Browne’s tulub[^[10]] was only five hundred rupees a month is, however, a fact of serious importance both to the Brownes and to the readers of these chapters. It must be borne in mind, even as the Brownes bore it in mind, to the proper understanding of the unpretending matters herein referred to. There are parts of the world in which this amount translated into the local currency, would make a plutocrat of its recipient. Even in Calcutta, in the olden golden time when the rupee was worth two invariable shillings and the stockbroker waxed not so fat as now, there was a sweet reasonableness about an income of five hundred that does not exist to-day. There is no doubt, for one thing, that at that time it did not cost so much to live in a house. At the present time, and in view of the degeneracy of the coin, that luxury is not so easy to compass as it used to be.

[10]. Pay.

The Brownes would live in a house, however. Young Browne, when the matter was up for discussion, stated with some vehemence his objection to the Calcutta system of private hostelries. Helen said conclusively that if they had no other reason for housekeeping, there were those lovely dessert knives and forks from Aunt Plovtree, and all the other silver things from people, to say nothing of the complete supply of house and table linen, ready marked with an artistically intertwined “HB.” In the face of this, to use other people’s cutlery and table napkins would be foolish extravagance—didn’t George think so? George thought so, very decidedly, that was quite a strong point. It must be a whole house, too, and not a flat; there was no autonomy in a flat and no proprietorship of the compound; moreover, you were always meeting the other people on the stairs. By all means a house to themselves—“if possible,” added young Browne.

“About what rent does one pay for a house?” Helen inquired.

“You get a fairly good one for three hundred a month, on lease. A visiting Rajah down for the cold weather to try for a ‘C. I. E.’[^[11]] sometimes pays a thousand.”

[11]. Companion of the Indian Empire.

“But we,” responded Mrs. Browne blankly, “are not Rajahs, dear!”

“No, thank the Lord,” said Mr. Browne, with what struck his wife as unnecessary piety; “and we’ll make ourselves jolly comfortable notwithstanding. Nellums—you’ll see!” George Browne was always over-optimistic. If those two young people had come to me—but it goes without saying that they went to nobody.

Helen desired a garden, a tennis-court, and, if possible, a cocoanut palm-tree in the garden. She would prefer a yellow house to a pink one, in view of the fact that the houses were all yellow or pink, and she would like a few pillars in front of it—pillars seemed so common an architectural incident in Calcutta that she thought they must be cheap. Mr. Browne particularly wanted air in the house, “a good south veranda,” and a domicile well raised above its native Bengal. Mr. Browne was strong upon locality and drains, and the non-proximity of jungle and bushes. Helen bowed to his superior knowledge, but secretly longed that a garden with a cocoanut palm in it might be found in a neighbourhood not insanitary. And so they fared forth daily in a ticca-gharry to inspect desirable addresses.

They inspected many. There was no unnecessary formality about permission to look, no “Enquire of Messrs. So and So,” no big key to procure from anywhere. The ticca-gharry[^[12]] stopped, and they alighted. If the high wooden gates were closed, Mr. Browne beat upon them lustily with his stick, shouting, “Qui hai!”[^[13]] in tones of severe authority. Then, usually from a small and dingy domicile near the gate, issued a figure hastily, a lean, brown figure, in a dirty dhoty, that salaamed perfunctorily, and stood before them waiting.

[12]. Hired carriage.

[13]. Whoever is!

“Iska ghur kali hai?”[^[14]] Mr. Browne would inquire and the figure would answer, “Ha!”

[14]. Is this house empty?

Whereat, without further parley, the Brownes would enter the place and begin to express their minds about it. Generally it invited criticism. If the previous sahib had been but three weeks departed the place had an overgrown look, the bushes were unkempt, the grass ragged; there were cracks in the mortar and stains on the walls; within it smelt of desolation. Helen investigated daintily; it looked, she said, so very “snaky.” The general features of one house were very like the general features of another; that is to say, their disadvantages were fairly equal. They all had jungly compounds, they were all more or less tumble-down, all in fashionable Eurasian neighbourhoods, and all at least fifty rupees a month more than the Brownes could afford to pay. Helen found some æsthetic charm, and young Browne some objectionable odour in every one of them. She, one might say, used nothing but her eyes, he nothing but his nose. With regard to the attractions of one address in particular they came almost to a difference of opinion. It was a bungalow, and it sat down flatly in a luxuriant tangle of beaumontia, and bougainvilliers, and trailing columbine. It had a veranda all roundabout, and the veranda was a bower of creeping things. Not only cocoanut palms, but date palms, and areca palms, and toddy palms grew in the corners of the compound with hibiscus bushes all in crimson flower along the wall, a banyan-tree in the middle, and two luxuriant peepuls, one on each side, almost meeting over the roof of the house. The walls and pillars of the bungalow were in delicate tones of grey and green; close behind it were all the picturesque features of a native bustee, and immediately in front a lovely reflection of the sky lay in a mossy tank in places where the water was deep enough. The rent was moderate: it had been empty a long time.

“George!” Helen exclaimed, “it has been waiting for us.”

George demurred. “It’s far and away the worst place we’ve seen,” he remarked.

“I think it’s perfectly sweet,” his wife maintained.

“If we took it,” he returned implacably, “within three months two funerals would occur in this neighbourhood: one would be yours and one would be mine. I don’t speak of the mortality among the servants. I’ll just ask the durwan[^[15]] how many sahibs have died here lately. And he asked the durwan in his own tongue.”

[15]. Doorkeeper.

“He says three in the last family, and it was the ‘carab bimar,’ which is the bad sickness or the cholera, my dear. What a fool of a durwan to leave in charge of an empty house! If you still think you’d like to have it, Helen, we can inquire——”

“Oh, no!” Helen cried. “Let us go away at once!”

“I was going to say—at the undertaker’s for additional accommodation. But perhaps we had better not take it. Let’s try for something clean.”

I consider that the Brownes were very lucky in the end. They found a house in a suburban locality where a number of Europeans had already survived for several years, at a rent they thought they could afford by careful managing. It turned its face aside from the street and looked towards the south; sitting on its roof, they could see far across those many-laned jungle suburbs where the office baboo[^[16]] lives, and whither the sahibs go only on horseback. The palm fronds waved thick there, fringing the red sky duskily when the sun went down. The compound was neglected, but had sanitary possibilities; there was enough grass for a tennis-court and enough space for a garden. A low line of godowns ran round two sides of it, where the servants might live and the pony. Palms and plantains grew in the corners. It was very tropical, and it was inclosed by a wall coloured to match the house, in the cracks of which sprouted every green thing. The house itself was pink, which Helen declared her one disappointment: she preferred the yellow ones so much. Inside it was chiefly light green, stencilled in yellow by way of dadoes, which must have been trying, though Helen never admitted it. There were other peculiarities. The rafters curved downwards and the floor sloped toward the middle and in various other directions. In several places trailing decorations in mud had been arranged by white ants. None of the doors had locks or bolts; they all opened inwards and were fastened from the inside with movable bars. The outermost room had twelve French windows; the innermost room had no windows and was quite dark when its doors were shut. Irregular holes appeared at intervals over the wall for the accommodation of punkah-ropes, each tenant having fancied a different seat outside for his punkah-wallah. Two or three small apartments upstairs in the rear of the house had corners divided off by partitions about six inches high. These were bath-rooms, arranged on the simple principle of upsetting the bath-tub on the floor and letting the water run out of a hole in the wall inside the partition. Most of the windows had glass in them, but not all, and some were protected by iron bars, the domestic conditions inside having been originally Aryan and jealous.

[16]. Native clerk.

I do not wish it to be supposed from these details, that the Brownes were subjected to exceptional hardships, or took up housekeeping under particularly obscure circumstances. On the contrary, so few people with their income in Calcutta could afford to live in houses at all, that young Browne had his name put up on the gatepost with considerable pride and circumstance. “George W. Browne,” in white letters on a black ground, in the middle of an oblong wooden tablet, according to the custom of the place. The fact being that the characteristics of the Brownes’ house are common, in greater or less degree, to every house in Calcutta. I venture to say that even the tub of a Member of Council, on five thousand rupees a month, is discharged through a hole in the wall.

Perhaps their landlord was more or less unique. The landlord common to Calcutta is a prosperous Jew, a brocaded Rajah, at least an unctuous baboo fattened upon dhol-bat and chutney. The Brownes’ landlord wore a pair of dirty white trousers and a lean and hungry look, his upper parts being clad in yards of soiled cotton, in which he also muffled up his head. He followed them about the place in silent humility—they took him for a coolie, and young Browne treated his statements with brevity, turning a broad British back upon him. I don’t think this enhanced the rent; I fancy it would have been equally extortionate in any case. But it was only when Mr. Browne asked where the landlord was to be found that he proudly disclosed his identity, with apologetic reference, however, to the state of his attire. He said that his house had been vacant for many months, and that he had just spent a thousand rupees in repairing it. His prospective tenant accepted the first of these statements, and received the second with open laughter. They closed the bargain, however, and as the landlord occupied an adjoining bustee, and was frequently to be met in the neighbourhood, Mrs. Browne was for some time uncertain as to whether she ought to bow to him or not.

MRS. BROWNE WAS FOR SOME TIME UNCERTAIN WHETHER SHE OUGHT TO BOW TO HIM OR NOT.

CHAPTER VI.

THERE are a number of ways of furnishing a house in Calcutta. I, who have known the ins and outs of the place for twenty odd years, have learned the unsatisfactoriness of all of them, and am prepared to explain. You can be elaborately done up by a fine belati upholsterer, who will provide you with spindle-legged chairs in velvet brocade, and æsthetic window curtains with faded pink roses on them, everything only about six months behind the London shops, with prices however considerably in advance. This way is popular with Viceroys. Or you may go to the ordinary shops and get Westbourne Grove sorts of things only slightly depreciated as to value and slightly enhanced as to cost, paying cash—a way usually adopted by people of no imagination. Or you may attend the auction sale that speeds the departure of some home-going memsahib, and buy her effects for a song: but that must be at the beginning of the hot weather, when the migration of memsahibs occurs. Or you can go to Bow Bazar, where all things are of honourable antiquity, and there purchase pathetic three-legged memorials of old Calcutta, springless oval-backed sofas that once upheld the ponderous dignity of the East India Company, tarnished mirrors which may have reflected the wanton charms of Madame Le Grand. Baboos sell them, taking knowledge only of their outward persons and their present utility; and they stand huddled in little hot low-roofed shops, intimate with the common teak-wood things of yesterday, condescending to gaudy Japanese vases and fly-blown coloured prints and cracked lamps and mismatched crockery. Bow Bazar is not always bad and it is always cheap, granting some previous experience of baboo morals, and the proprietors charge you nothing for the poetry of your bargain. They set it off, perhaps, against necessary repairs. This is not a popular way, as the baboos will testify, but it is a pleasing one, and it is the way the Brownes took in the main, supplementing these plenishings with a few from the China Bazar, where a multitude of the almond-eyed sell you wicker chairs and tables.

It is a divinely simple thing to furnish a house in India. It must be cleaned and it must be matted. This is done in a certain number of hours while you sleep, or ride, or walk, or take your pleasure, by a God of Immediate Results, whom you colloquially dub the “bearer,” working through an invisible agency of coolies. Then you may go and live in it with two chairs and a table if you like, and people will only think you have a somewhat immoderate hatred of hangings and furniture and other obstacles to the free circulation of air. This you might easily possess to an extreme, and nobody will consider you any the worse for it. I should have added an “almirah” to the list of your necessaries, however. You would be criticised if you had not one or more almirahs. An almirah is a wardrobe, unless it contains shelves instead of hooks, and then it is a tall cupboard with doors. Almirahs, therefore, receive all your personal property, from a dressing-gown to a box of sardines, and it is not possible to live decently or respectably in India without them. But the rest is at your good pleasure, and nobody will expect you to have anything but plated forks and bazar china. Outward circumstance lies not in these things, but in the locality of your residence and the size of your compound. If you wish to add to your dignity, buy another pony; if you wish to enhance it, let the pony be a horse and the horse a Waler. But think not to aggrandize yourself in the eyes of your fellow Anglo-Indians by treasures of Chippendale or of Sèvres, by rare tapestries or modern masters, or even a piano. Dust and the mosquitoes and the monsoon war against all these things; but chiefly our inconstancy to the country. We are in conscious exile here for twenty or twenty-five years, and there is a general theory that it is too hot and too expensive to make the exile any more than comfortable. Beside which, do we not pass a quarter of our existence in the cabins of the P. and O.? But I must not digress from the Brownes’ experiences to my own opinions.

The Brownes’ ticca-gharry turned into Bow Bazar out of Chowringhee, out of Calcutta’s pride among her thoroughfares, broad and clean, and facing the wide green Maidan, lined with European shops, and populous with the gharries[^[17]] of the sahibs, into the narrow crookedness of the native city, where the proprietors are all Baboo This, or Sheik That, who sit upon the thresholds of their establishments smoking the peaceful hubble-bubble, and waiting until it please Allah or Lakshmi to send them a customer. Very manifold are the wants that Bow Bazar provides for, wants of the sahib, of the “kala sahib,”[^[18]] of its own swarming population. You can buy a suit of clothes there—oh, very cheap—or a seer of rice; all sorts of publications in English, Bengali, and Urdu; a beautiful oil painting for a rupee, a handful of sticky native sweetmeats for a pice. You can have your beard shaved, your horoscope cast, your photograph taken, all at a rate which will deeply astonish you. There is a great deal of noise in the Bow Bazar, coming chiefly from strenuous brown throats, a great deal of dust, a great number and variety of odours. But there the sahiblok, in the midst of luxury, can enjoy economy—and you can’t have everything.

[17]. Carriages.

[18]. “Black sahibs,” i.e. Eurasians.

The sellers of sahib’s furniture have the largest shops in Bow Bazar, and the heaviest stock; they are important among the merchants; they often speak a little English. The baboo to whom the Brownes first addressed themselves had this accomplishment, and he wore the dual European garment of white duck, and a coat. He was a short baboo, very black, with a round face so expressive of a sense of humour that young Browne remarked to Helen privately that he was sure the fellow had some European blood in him, in spite of the colour—no pukka Bengali ever grinned like that!

“What iss it, sir, that it iss your wish to buy?” he inquired. He spoke so rapidly that his words seemed the output of one breath; yet they were perfectly distinct. It is the manner of the native who speaks English, and the East Indians have borrowed it from him.

“Oh! we want to buy a lot of things, Baboo!” said Mr. Browne, familiarly, “at half your regular prices, and a large discount for cash! What have you got? Got any chairs?”

“Oh yess indeed; certainlee! Will you please to come this way?”

“This way” led through a labyrinth of furniture, new and old, of glass and crockery and chipped ornaments, a dusty haven of dismayed household gods. “What have you got in there, Baboo?” asked young Browne, as they passed an almirah revealing rows of tins and labels.

“Stores, sir,—verree best qualitty stores. You can see fo’ you’self, sir—Crosse an’ Blackwell——”

“Oh yes, Baboo! And how long did you say they’d been there?”

“Onlee one month, sir,” the baboo replied, attempting an expression of surprise and injury. “I can tell you the name of the ship they arrived in, sir.”

“Of course you can, Baboo. But never mind. We don’t want any to-day. Let’s see the chairs. Now, Helen,” he continued, as the baboo went on in advance, “you see what we are subject to in this ungodly place. Those pease and gooseberries and asparaguses have probably been in Calcutta a good deal longer than I have. They look like old sojourners; I wouldn’t give them a day under six years. They are doubtless very cheap, but think, Helen, of what might happen to my inside if you gave me green pease out of Bow Bazar!” Mrs. Browne looked aghast. “But I never will, George!” said she, solemnly. And young Browne made her vow it there and then. “There are two or three decent European shops here,” he said, with unction, “where they make a point of not poisoning more people than they can help. You pay rather largely for that comfortable assurance, I believe, but it’s worth having. I’d have more faith in the stability of the family, Helen, if you would promise always to go to them for tinned things.”

Helen promised effusively, and it is to her credit that she always informed young Browne, before consumption, whenever a domestic exigency made her break her word.

They climbed up a dark and winding stair that led out upon a flat roof, crossed the roof and entered a small room, borrowed from the premises of some other baboo. “Hold your skirts well up, Helen; it’s just the place for centipedes,” her husband remarked callously; and Mrs. Browne exhibited a disregard for her ankles that would have been remarkable under any other circumstances.

IT’S JUST THE PLACE FOR CENTIPEDES.

“Here, you see, sir, all the chairs,” stated the little baboo, waving his hand. “I must tell you, sir, that some are off teak and some off shisham wood. Thee shisham are the superior.”

“You mean, baboo,” said young Browne, seriously, “that the shisham are the less inferior. That’s a better way of putting it, baboo.”

“Perhaps so, sir. Yessir, doubtless you are right, sir. The less inferior—the more grammatical!”

“Precisely. And now about the prices, baboo. What is your exact overcharge for fellows like this? He’s shisham, isn’t he? And he’s about as sound as any of ’em.”

“Best shisham, sir—perfeckkly sound—not secon’ hand—our own make. Feel the weight of thiss, sir!”

“All right, baboo—I know. What’s the price?”

“If thee ladee will just sit down in it for a minit shee will see how comfortable it iss!”

“Trifle no longer, baboo—what’s the dom?”

“The price off that chair, sir, is eight rupees.”

Mr. Browne sank into it with a pretence at gasping. “You can’t mean that, baboo. Nothing like that. Eight rupees! You’re dreaming, baboo. You forget that you only paid two for it. You’re dreaming, baboo—or you’re joking!”

Hurry Doss Mitterjee smiled in deep appreciation of the gentleman’s humour. He even chuckled, with a note of deprecation.

“Ah, no, sir! You will pardon me for saying that is a mistake, sir! In bissiness I doo not joke, never! For those chairs I pay seven rupees four annas, sir! It iss a small profit but it iss contentable. I doo not ask more, sir!”

“This is very sad, baboo!” said Mr. Browne seriously. “This is very sad, indeed! I understood that you were a person of probity, who never asked more than a hundred per cent. But I know the value of shisham chairs, and this is four hundred—Oh, very sad, indeed! Now see here, I’ll give you three rupees apiece for these chairs, and take six.”

“Salaam!” said the baboo, touching his forehead with ironical gratitude and pushing back the chair. “Nossir!”

“You may take them at coss price, sir—at seven four you may take them, and I make no profit: but perhaps I get your custom. Take them—seven four!”

Mr. Browne turned away with a slight sigh. “Come along, dear,” he said to his wife, “this man sells only to Rajahs and Members of Council.”

The baboo ignored the pleasantry this time—the moment had come for action. “What do you give, sir?” he said, following them—“for the sake off bissiness, what do you give?”

“Four rupees!”

“Five eight!”

“Four eight, baboo—there!”

“Ah, sir, I cannot. Believe me they coss five eight to buy!”

“Look here, baboo—I’ll give you five rupees apiece for six of those shisham wood chairs, every one as good as this, and I’ll pay you when you send them—that’s thirty rupees—and not another pice! Helen, be careful of these steps.”

“To what address, sir? Will to-morrow morning be sufficient early, sir?”

“George!” exclaimed Helen, as they reached the outer world of Bow Bazar, “what a horrid little cheat of a man! Did you hear him say at first that they cost seven four to make?”

“Oh, my dear,” young Browne responded, superiorly. “That’s a trifle! You don’t know the baboo.”

“Well!” said his wife, admiringly, “I don’t know how you kept your patience, George!”

Whereat Mr. Browne looked still more superior, and informed Mrs. Browne that the only way to deal with these fellows was to chaff ’em; make up your mind in the beginning that you’re going to be done in the eye, and act accordingly. They always score, he added, with true Anglo-Indian resignation.

They bought a table next, from a very fat old gentleman—simply clad—in a beard and a dhoty.[^[19]] The beard and the dhoty were much the same colour, and both fell so abundantly about his person that it would be difficult to say which was most useful to him as an article of apparel. And his moral obliquity was concealed under more rolls and pads of oily-brown adipose tissue than could often be seen in Bow Bazar. He must have been a rascal, as young Browne said, or being a Hindu he wouldn’t have had a beard.

[19]. Cloth for legs.

It was a small mahogany dining table, second-hand, and its owner wanted twenty rupees for it.

“I think,” said young Browne, “that the memsahib might give you fourteen!”

The usual humbly sarcastic salaam—it was a very excellent table—the baboo could not think of parting with it for that.

“All right!” said Mr. Browne, “the memsahib says she won’t give more than fourteen, and that’s very dear. But I’ll make you one offer—just one, mind, baboo! I’ll give you fifteen. Now take it or leave it—one word!”

The baboo salaamed so that his beard swept the ground, and fervently refused.

“Very well, baboo! Now I don’t want it at any price, see if you can bargain with the memsahib.”

“Eighteen rupees, memsahib!” insinuated the old fellow, “very cheap.”

“No, indeed!” Helen exclaimed with indignation, rising to the occasion, “I won’t give you any more than fourteen.”

“Chowdrah rupia, memsahib—fo-teen rupee! But the sahib he offer fifteen!”

“Oh, I don’t want it at all now,” said the sahib, who stood in the door with his back turned and whistled. “Now you must bargain with the memsahib.”

The baboo looked at his customers anxiously for a moment. “For sixteen rupees you take it,” he said.

“Don’t want it,” responded Mr. Browne.

“Alright—for fifteen?”

“Will you give him fifteen, Helen?”

“Certainly not, dear! Fourteen.”

“Fifteen the sahib say he give!” cried the baboo, his beard wagging with righteous reproach. “Take it for fifteen!” But Mr. and Mrs. Browne had made their way out. The baboo followed reminding and entreating for a hundred yards. They were deaf. Then he wheeled round upon them in front. “Very well, you give me fourteen?” The Brownes went back and left their address, which was weak in them, I consider; but I have no doubt that to this day that bearded baboo considers himself an injured person, and the victim of a most disastrous bandobust.[^[20]]

[20]. Bargain.

CHAPTER VII.

“LET’S have them up!” said Mr. Browne.

Mr. Browne was smoking a cigar after breakfast in his own house. There had been a time when Mr. Browne smoked his morning cigar on his way to office, but that was formerly. The department of the tea interest entrusted to Mr. Browne by his firm did not receive his active personal superintendence to the usual extent during the early months of the cold weather of ’91. I am aware of this because my husband is a senior partner. Not that the firm minded particularly—they liked young Browne, and I know that we were rather pleased at the time that he had discovered something in the world besides tea.

The Brownes had been settled some two or three days, and the wheels of their domestic arrangements had been running with that perfection of unobtrusive smoothness that can be fully experienced only in India, so far as I know. The meals had appeared and disappeared as by magic, the rooms had been swept and dusted and garnished while there was no eye to see, their wishes had been anticipated, their orders had been carried out in the night, as it seemed.

“Let’s have ’em up!” suggested Mr. Browne, with reference to the mysterious agents of all this circumstance. Helen wanted to see her servants.

“Bear-er!” shouted the sahib, young Browne.

“Hazur!”[^[21]] came the answer, in deep tones, from regions below, with a sound of bare feet hastily ascending the stair.

[21]. Your honour.

“Hazur bolya?”[^[22]] enquired the bearer in a subdued voice, partially presenting himself at the door.

[22]. Your honour called.