An American Girl in India/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
HE REALLY DOES PROPOSE, AND I AM HAPPY
I am actually on my way home. You may think that a bit sudden, but you can't possibly think it more sudden than I do myself. I was to have stayed in India until the end of February, and returned home with Lady Manifold and Marjory, but—well, things happened.
You see it was like this. Berengaria and John and I had returned from the Great Durbar, and were slowly recovering from the strain and excitement of it in the peace of Slumpanugger. As the Scotchman said when they asked him how he felt soon after his wife was dead, 'It was verra dull but verra peaceful.' In a while we were to start on a camping tour, and Berengaria had a big party coming out to join us for a shoot. It was glorious weather—fresh clear air under a cloudless sky, and just for those few days one was content to sit all day under the trees in Berengaria's delightful garden idly revelling in the present, and dreaming lazily of things past and things to come. It was in that garden that it happened.
John had gone off to office, and Berengaria had driven to the station five miles away to meet the first of her guests who were due that afternoon. I was alone in the garden half dozing in a hammock, just gloriously content with the world at large and with myself in particular. One white-robed kitmatgar was bringing out a little wicker-table, and another followed with a tea-tray—a charming glimpse of snowy white and silver. That tea-tray just seemed to add the last touch of bliss to my content. The kitmatgar salaamed, 'Cha taiyar, Miss Sahib,' and retired. I lay looking at it, lazily revelling in the charming effect of the dazzling white and shining silver against the soft deep background of the turf that was Berengaria's special pride.
I was so dreamily happy with things as they were that I scarcely noticed a ramshackle ticca ghari crawling up the drive. Have I told you what a ticca ghari is? You can't fail to miss it if you ever go to India. It's quite ubiquitous, and it never was new. It's like some people who never were young. One isn't told if Adam took Eve out driving in the cool of evening, but if he did it must have been in a ticca ghari, and the changeless East has carefully preserved the type of carriage ever since. It reminds you of a prehistoric peep in Punch. It's a box—a very shaky box—on wheels—very shaky wheels, and you get in at the side. Sometimes the door opens, and sometimes it's not made to do anything so advanced as that. In that case you have to climb over it, and it's no good worrying yourself and trying to look dignified while you are doing it. You must give up all thoughts of that, and turn all your mind to the safety of your hat and skirts. Say you get inside safely somehow without leaving a yard of frills caught on the step, it isn't all just plain sailing even then. It's only in a very superior ticca ghari indeed that you can sit up straight with your hat on. If you happen to be a stranger in those parts, and have guilelessly entered that ticca with a nice new aigrette on you'll simply have to sit with your head stuck forward, just as if you were going to butt the unfortunate young man who is probably crouched up opposite trying to keep his knees and feet out of the way of your skirts. Then you start, and that ghari shakes and rattles, and you bump about inside till your limbs feel kind of loose like a dancing doll's, and if that young man opposite will insist on talking it makes the strain worse, for you never can catch more than half he says on account of the exasperating rattle. Added to this the road is sure either to be very uneven and very full of unexpected holes or else of a stony hardness inconceivable. So if you can get out of that ghari looking fresh and spick and span, you must be one of the wonders of the age. You are generally so much upset when you do get out that you haven't any sympathy for the poor little rats of horses which have done so much better for you than their looks promised.
But I think, in spite of all its drawbacks, I shall always have a particular affection for the Indian ticca ghari, especially for the one that came rumbling and swaying and creaking up the drive that afternoon. I could just see that there was someone inside as it drew up under the porch, but I was much too far away to recognise who it was. It was only a caller, I thought, whom the servants would send away, Berengaria not being at home, and I felt too absolutely happy and content with my own society just then to welcome anyone. Every prospect pleased, and ten to one if any man came along he would be vile. So I was just a bit annoyed when I saw the chaprassi coming towards me from the house carrying a card on a tray. I took the card carelessly, and prepared to look upon it with a frown. Then I suddenly sat up. Was it a joke? Could someone possibly be poking fun at me? I said 'Salaam' hastily to the chaprassi, and then I thought about my hair. I had been lying all the afternoon in the hammock, and I trembled to think of it. I scrambled into one of the wicker-chairs by the tea-table, and tried to look cool, furtively prodding and patting and trying to conceal recalcitrant hairs. If only I might have escaped inside for just two minutes! But that was impossible. Already crossing the lawn between me and the house was—Lord Hendley. I fortunately remembered that I have very expressive eyes, and busied them with the tea-things. But of course I had to raise them as he came up.
'Have I given you a surprise?' he asked smilingly as we shook hands. There was no mistaking the pleasure in Lord Hendley's eyes. Consequently I tried to make mine doubly innocent and blank. It's a mistake, and unnecessary to show a man you are pleased to see him when you are quite certain he is pleased to see you. I determined to take it all as coolly as if he had just looked in to tea in Hill Street as he had so often done at home.
'You have indeed,' I said as casually as I could, with a whirl of thoughts as to the why and wherefore of his coming darting through my brain. 'I had no idea you were in India. Will you have some tea?'
He laughed, his nice, clean, pleasant laugh. I suddenly realised how much I had missed it.
'Thanks,' he said. 'It's a long way and very dusty between this and Berkeley Square, and I'm just dying for a cup of tea.'
'What,' I said, falling into his mood, 'have you come straight here?'
He laughed again.
'Yes, straight from Berkeley Square to Slumpanugger.'
I did so wish he would not look at me quite like that.
'I'm so sorry Berengaria is out,' I murmured.
He didn't look at all sorry, but of course he politely said he was.
'But she will soon be back,' I informed him cheerfully, looking towards the long red drive as if she might be appearing any moment.
He looked decidedly sorry then. His smile died out, and I thought he actually seemed for a moment quite nervous. That gave me confidence straight away. If I see anybody else getting nervous, I always at once feel perfectly at ease. In the same way if I see anybody unhappy, I'm sorry, of course, and I weep with them, but it gives me a real cheery feeling underneath to think that I'm at least happier than somebody else.
'It's a great pity you missed the Durbar,' I remarked pleasantly as I handed him a scone.
He relieved me of the plate, and carefully selected the most appetising scone before replying.
'Yes, it is a pity,' he replied as one who really didn't care a bit, 'but still there are other things to see in India beside the Durbar.'
He bit the scone in half with his nice strong white teeth, and smiled across at me as he did it.
'But you must go to other parts of India for sight-seeing,' I said. 'I am afraid there is very little to see in Slumpanugger.'
I caught his eye as I looked up, and felt myself blushing. I thought of that wretched boy Tony, and determined not to get 'beetroot' this time.
'Oh, I thought there was quite a lot to see here,' he said smiling. I did so wish he wouldn't sit and smile at me like that. It made me feel so horribly like a fly sitting opposite a spider. 'Isn't there a fort?'
'Oh yes,' I said disparagingly, 'there's a fort.'
'And some caves?'
'And some caves,' I admitted.
'And a mosque?'
'Several,' I said, 'but you find them everywhere.'
'And a ruined palace of the Moghul Emperors?' he went on, quite regardless of my contemptuous attitude towards the sights of Slumpanugger.
'I believe so,' I said indifferently, 'but I have not yet seen it.'
'It will take me quite a long time to see all the interesting things in Slumpanugger,' he said, as he gave me his cup for more tea.
'Oh no,' I said decidedly and discouragingly, 'you can see them all in one day.'
'Wouldn't that be rather rushing it?' he asked seriously. Anyone might have thought that he really was interested in the stupid old sights of Slumpanugger.
'It would be a pity to linger over them too long,' I advised, 'since there are so many other sights so much more worth seeing elsewhere.'
'I'm not at all sure I shall have time to see them,' he said, smiling at me again as he took his replenished cup and another scone.
I wanted to ask him what he meant, and lots of things about his plans, but it's such a mistake to let a man know you are curious about his doings. If you don't appear curious he will want to tell you all the more. Lord Hendley at once told me something that I wanted very much to know without my asking him.
'You see, I must be home for the beginning of the Session,' he informed me.
'Then I am afraid you won't have very long out here,' I said with an air of polite interest.
'I have to sail next week,' he said with a twinkle in his eye, 'so I am afraid I shall have to defer my sight-seeing till another time.'
He had come out to India for a matter of ten days just when the Durbar was over! It really must be coming at last. Yet how awful if I really were on the wrong tack. I felt 'cold and hot all over,' as Ermyntrude would have expressed it.
'How is the Duchess?' I asked, trying to appear as if I were thinking of nothing but her Grace's health.
'Quite well, thanks,' he replied, 'and, by the way, she sent you many messages and a letter.'
He pulled it out from the inside pocket of his coat as he spoke, and gave it to me. It was the kind of double-size envelope that the Duchess always uses, addressed in her large, great sprawling handwriting. It was sealed on the back with a dear little strawberry-leaved coronet. Surely that could only mean one thing. Surely it must be coming at last. Bless the man, why on earth didn't he speak out. Most men rush in head first, and blurt it out straight away. I had never met a man like this before who hung about and skirmished and seemed to enjoy lingering over it and protracting it as long as possible.
I toyed with the letter in my hands, my eyes upon it, wondering what its contents might be. Lord Hendley didn't speak, and I felt I positively could not look up and catch his eye just then. I grew desperate. Suddenly I jumped up.
'There's Berengaria coming back,' I said hastily, looking as if I heard the sound of wheels on the road. That did it. He jumped up quickly too.
'I love you,' he said.
I felt dreadfully guilty. What would he think when the carriage didn't come? I almost prayed that Berengaria might turn up, though I knew quite well that she could not be there for quite a little time yet. Still, whatever happened, he had done it at last. There was no getting out of that. My confidence revived. I turned and looked at him smilingly.
'How long have you done that?' I asked demurely.
'Exactly four months, nineteen days and some odd hours,' he said. 'I counted driving along in the ticca ghari.'
I laughed.
'You have been rather a long time telling me, haven't you?' I said reproachfully. What an extraordinary lover he was! Why, any other of the men who had proposed to me would have been acting in quite the orthodox fashion long ago if I had given them half as much encouragement.
'You see you have refused at least half a dozen men I know,' he defended himself comically. 'So I intended to make quite sure that I should not get "No" too. You see, I never have been refused yet.'
We both laughed. But still he never took me in his arms as I should have thought he would, and as they always do in books. I got piqued.
'And do you think you are quite sure now?' I asked, quite in the style of Lady Disdain.
He did come a step nearer then.
'I love you,' he said again with a delicious little quiver in his voice. 'Couldn't you—couldn't you find it possible to love me?'
I gazed out across the lawn with unseeing eyes, quite like the heroine in the story-books.
'No,' I said sadly, quite as if my heart were elsewhere. 'No, I'm afraid not.'
Then I got a panic. What if he should take me at my word, and never ask me again. Men are such fools. I dared not look round. But Lord Hendley was more sensible than that. He didn't give me any time to think about it. He had done it at last. He was beside me seizing my hands, and looking down into my face.
'Look up at me,' he said fiercely. 'Look up at me and say that again.'
He was crushing my hands, and I gloried in his strength and his flash of anger. He was roused at last. I lifted my eyes to his, and gave up everything.
'I can't,' I said.
For the next few minutes I don't remember much. I recollect Aunt Agatha saying that men who restrain themselves longest are always the most violent when they do let themselves go. My future husband must be one of that sort. It makes me kind of afraid at times. They say love casts out fear. But I'm not sure. There is something just delicious in being a wee bit afraid of the strength of the man you love.
We got calmer after a few minutes, and I simply had to think about my hair again. A woman always has to do that even at the greatest crises in her life. In fact, it's after a crisis like the one I had just passed through that she has to think about it most of all. There is nothing so hair-ruffling as a proposal that's accepted.
'I couldn't wait till you came home,' he said.
'That was sweet of you,' I murmured from somewhere about the lapels of his coat. He seemed to think it necessary to hug me and kiss me after everything I said. It was very nice.
'And I'm not going to let you go again.' It was delightful to hear the note of mastery and determination in his voice. Especially as I had no desire to be let go again.
'I came out on purpose to take you home.' I was much relieved. I had been so horribly afraid that he might suggest a nasty quiet little wedding out there. That wouldn't have suited me at all. One doesn't get the chance of marrying the heir to a Dukedom every day. When one does one likes to do it where all the other women can look on and envy you. Marrying a Duke on the quiet would be like hoarding up coin of the realm on a desert island—quite without satisfaction. Fortunately Lord Hendley did not propose that. I guess if he had I should have just had to give in. After all it's better to marry a Duke on the quiet than not to marry him at all. You mustn't think all this very calculating. It's just the way I'm built. I'm very practically minded, and although I was desperately in love I couldn't help common or garden everyday sort of things flitting about in the back of my mind behind the sentiment.
'You can arrange to come home by the Medusa next week?' he asked, holding me away from him to look at me again. His eyes just danced. 'You can tear yourself away?'
'Yes,' I said, flinging away at one fell swoop all sorts of engagements for the six weeks to come. What does anything else matter when you've just made quite certain of a husband?
Then there really was the sound of wheels on the drive. We scrambled on to separate chairs, and I tried frantically to rearrange myself and look as if I hadn't just been proposed to. But of course Berengaria, being a woman, saw and guessed, and the moment we were alone together I told her all that there was to tell.
'Only to think,' she said, looking at me thoughtfully with a new sense of my importance as she sat in my room that night, 'only to think that you will be a Duchess without any trouble at all, whereas I,' she sighed comically with a little shrug, 'however much I prod John along, I can never hope in my wildest dreams to become anything more than a Lady.'
Ermyntrude received the news with no less wonder and delight.
'Your Grace will sound so much better than Miss, won't it, miss?' she said, growing quite animated. 'If only his Lordship doesn't go and die before his father. What a pity that would be. We must pray that he doesn't get attacked by any of the ninety-six diseases, miss—just as the little Shan chiefs at the Durbar said they prayed for the King.'
The next few days flew by. A lord, the son of a Duke, is a rarity in an Indian Mofussil station, and Slumpanugger was as anxious to see him as Berengaria was to show him off. Lord Hendley certainly saw all the sights. The Fort, the Palace, and the caves, we did them all—at least, we visited all the places, though Berengaria had an annoying habit of finding out when we got back that we had missed seeing the most important thing each time. Whereupon, of course, we expressed the greatest concern, but didn't really care a bit.
We were standing on the deck of the Medusa at last watching Bombay Harbour slowly beginning to recede from sight. Everything had been delightfully arranged. My dear nice Duchess of the Arethusa was chaperoning me, and everybody vied with one another to make things pleasant. Yet I couldn't help just a tinge of regret at leaving India. Great happiness had come to me there, and I had got to love the place for its own sake, short as my stay had been.
'I think I shall know what it means to hear the East a-callin',' I said softly, watching the glorious sweep of coast and clear blue-green waters of the bay as they grew fainter and more miniature-like in the haze of distance. 'I just love India. We must come back some day.'
'Yes,' he said, but I don't believe he was thinking about India at all just then, and he wasn't even looking at the last fair picture of her that was rapidly fading away.
Wherever I am I think I shall always feel in my heart the mysterious subtle influence of the East. Wherever I am if I close my eyes I shall see it again. There will flash past as in a dream the long bare dusty roads, with their fitful flow of traffic crawling lazily beneath the blinding midday sun in a cloudless sky, the heavy ponderous carts creaking as the bullocks with mild complaining eyes sway drowsily from side to side, and the driver sleeps at his post; the tiny mud-built straw-thatched village, a jumble of huts, creeper-grown, crouched in the shade of the palm; the little brown urchins rolling in the sun and the dust, naked and unashamed in a row of beads or a single string round the waist, tied, as the mother will tell you, to warn the child when he has eaten his fill, and more will bring remorse; the silent women in their bright gay saris, with their own inimitable grace returning from the well, their water-pots poised easily upon their heads or quietly preparing the evening meal against their lord's return; the sweet all-restful sound of the cowbells along the slopes of the hills as the cattle wend their homeward way, the deep, low musical notes of the wooden bells answering the merry tinkling of the metal ones from hill to hill; and the shimmering haze of the fleeting eastern twilight as the blood-red sun sets slowly in a blaze of gold and purple and orange and rose and green, and leaves the world to slumber. Even the smell of it all—the indescribable smell of the East—seemed to creep into my nostrils as I gazed my last at the receding coast, and drew me back to that mystic land.
And then the thought flashed across me. It was an American woman who was vice-queen of it all!
I always felt that Lord Hendley could read my thoughts. He read them then.
'You would really like to come back?' he asked, breaking in upon my reverie.
'Yes, oh yes, a thousand times yes,' I answered, looking round at him.
There was the light in his eyes that I love—the light that just goes straight away to the thing it wants and gets it.
'There's been an American Vicereine once,' he said.
I think something must have leaped up into my eyes too.
'Why shouldn't there be another?'
Did he actually whisper it, or was it only my vivid imagination that spoke the words.
Anyway, I'm in love, and I'm going to be a Duchess. What could any American girl anywhere want more? I guess it won't be just my fault if you don't hear of me knocking around again somewhere very soon.