“Put His Honour to bed, Mrs. Church,” cried the Commissioner, lifting his hat as he rode on to camp. “He has done the work of six men to-day.”
“You will be glad of some tea,” she said.
He tumbled clumsily out of his saddle and leaned for a moment against his animal’s shoulder. The mare put her head round whinnying, but when Church searched in his pocket for her piece of sugar-cane and offered it to her, she snuffed it and refused it. He dropped the sugar-cane into the dust at her feet and told the syce to take her away.
“If she will not eat her gram give me word of it,” he said. But she ate her gram.
“Will you change first, John?” Judith asked with her hand on his coat-sleeve. “I think you should—you are wet through and through.”
“Yes, I will change,” he said; but he dropped into the first chair he saw. The chair stood on the verandah, and the evening breeze had already begun to come up. He threw back his head and unfastened his damp collar and felt its gratefulness. In the intimate neighbourhood of the dâk-bungalow the private secretary could be heard splashing in his tub.
“Poor Sparks!” said His Honour. “I’m afraid he has had a hard day of it. Good fellow, Sparks, thoroughly good fellow. I hope he’ll get on. It’s very disheartening work, this of ours in India,” he went on absently; “one feels the depression of it always, more or less, but to-night——” He paused and closed his eyes as if he were too weary to finish the sentence. A servant appeared with a wicker table and another with a tray.
“A cup of tea,” said Judith cheerfully, “will often redeem the face of nature”; but he waved it back.
“I am too hungry for tea. Tell them to bring me a solid meal: cold beef—no, make it hot—that game pie we had at breakfast—anything there is, but as soon as possible. How refreshing this wind is!”
“Yes, I must, immediately: I shall be taking a chill.” As he half rose from his chair he saw the postman, turbaned, barefooted, crossing the grass from the road, and dropped back again.
“Here is the dâk,” he said; “I must just have a look first.”
Mrs. Church took her letters, and went into the house to give orders to the butler. Five minutes afterwards she came back, to find her husband sitting where she had left him, but upright in his chair and mechanically stroking his beard, with his face set. He had grown paler, if that was possible, but had lost every trace of lassitude. He had the look of being face to face with a realised contingency which his wife knew well.