Part 16 (1/2)
”Naughty Poll! Bad Poll!” came Sonny's mellifluous lisp from the Major's shoulder. ”Zoo mufn't make a noise and interrupt.”
The admonition made the bird smooth its ruffled temper and feathers.
Not that there was much to interrupt; the Major's halting acknowledgments being of the briefest; partly because of breakfast, partly from lack of Hindustani, mostly from the inherent insular horror of a function.
”Thank G.o.d! that's over,” he said piously, when the last tray had been emptied on the miscellaneous pile, round which the servants were already hovering expectantly, and the last well-wisher had disappeared. ”Still it was nice of them to remember Freddy,” he added, looking at the toys--”Wasn't it, wife?”
She looked up almost scared at the t.i.tle. ”Very,” she replied, with a faint quiver in her voice. ”We must send some home to him, mustn't we?”
The p.r.o.noun of union made the Major, in his turn, feel embarra.s.sed. He sought refuge once more in Sonny.
”You must have your choice first, jackanapes!” he said, swinging the child to the ground again. ”Which is it to be? A box of soldiers or a monkey on a stick?”
”Fanks!” replied Sonny with honest dignity, ”but I'se gotted my plesy already. She's give-ded me the polly--be-tos it 'oves me dearly.”
Kate answered her husband's look with a half-apology. ”He means the c.o.c.katoo. I thought you wouldn't mind, because it was so dreadfully noisy. And it never screams at him. Sonny! give Polly an apple and show Major Erlton how it loves you.”
The child, nothing loth to show off, chose one from the heap and went over fearlessly to the vicious bird; the servants pausing to look admiringly. The c.o.c.katoo seized it eagerly, but only as a means to draw the little fellow's arm within reach of its clambering feet. The next moment it was on the narrow shoulder dipping and sidling among the golden curls.
”See how it 'oves me,” cried Sonny, his face all smiles.
Major Erlton laughed good-temperedly at the pretty sight and went in to breakfast.
Then the dog-cart came round. It was the same one in which the Major had been used to drive Alice Gissing. But this Christmas morning he had forgotten the fact, as he drove Kate instead, with Sonny, who was to be taken to church as a great treat, crus.h.i.+ng the flounces of her pretty dress.
Yet the fresh wind blew in their faces keenly, and the Major, pointing with his whip to the scudding squirrels, said, ”Jolly little beasts, aren't they, Kate,” just as he had said it to Alice Gissing. What is more, she replied that it was jolly altogether, with much the same enjoyment of the mere present as the other little lady had done. For the larger part of life is normal, common to all.
So they sped past the rocks and trees swiftly, down and down, till with a rumble they were on the draw-bridge, through the ma.s.sive arch of the Cashmere gate, into the square of the main-guard. The last clang of the church bell seemed to come from the trees overhanging it, and in the ensuing silence a sharp click of the whip sounded like a pistol crack. The mare sped faster through the wooden gate into the open. To the left the Court House showed among tall trees, to the right Skinner's House. Straight ahead, down the road to the Calcutta gate and the boat bridge, stood the College, the telegraph office, a dozen or so of bungalows in gardens, and the magazine shouldering the old cemetery. Quite a colony of Western ways and works within the city wall, clinging to it between the water-bastion and the Calcutta gate.
Close at hand in a central plot of garden, circled by roads, was the church, built after the design of St. Paul's; obtrusively Occidental, crowned by a very large cross.
As the mare drew up among the other carriages, the first notes of the Christmas hymn pealed out among the roses and the pointsettias, the glare and the green. Not a Christmas environment; but the festival brings its own atmosphere with it to most people, and Major Erlton, admiring his wife's rapt face, remembered his own boyhood as he sang a rumbling Gregorian ba.s.s of two tones and a semi-tone:
”Oh come, all ye faithful Joyful and triumphant.”
The words echoed confidently into the heart of the great Mohammedan stronghold, within earshot almost of the rose-red walls of the palace; that survival of all the vices Christianity seeks to destroy.
”They have a new service to-night,” yawned the chaplain's groom to others grouped round a common pipe. ”I, who have served _padres_ all my life--the pay is bad but the kicks less--saw never the like. 'Tis a queer tree hung with lights, and toys to bribe the children to wors.h.i.+p it. They wanted mine to go, but their mother is pious and would not.
She says 'tis a spell.”
”Doubtless!” a.s.sented a voice. ”The spell Kali's priest, who came from Calcutta seeking aid against it, warned us of--the spell which forces a body to being Christian against his will.”
A scornful cluck came from a younger, smarter man. ”Trra! a trick that for offerings, Dittu. The priest came to me also, but I told him my master was not that sort. He goes not to church except on the big day.”
”But the _mem?_” asked a new speaker enviously. ”'Tis the _mems_ do the mischief to please the _padres_; just as our women do it to please the priests. My _mem_ reads prayers to her ayah.”
”Paremeshwar be praised!” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the man to whom the pipe belonged. ”My master keeps no _mem_, but the other sort. Though as for the ayah it matters not, she has no caste to lose.”
There was a grunt of general a.s.sent. The remark crystallized the whole question to unmistakable form. So long as a man could get a pull from his neighbor's pipe and have a right to one in return, the master might say and do what he chose. If not; then----?
An evil-faced man who still smarted from a righteous licking, given him that morning for stealing his horse's grain, put his view of what would happen in that case plainly.