Part 4

On this July morning Captain Roger Brentham and Sibyl Grayburn had the untilled portion of the site of Calleva Atrebatum quite to themselves. This, no doubt, was the reason why they had decided to meet there for an explanation which the man deemed to be due to him from the young woman. He, of course, arrived first, but Sibyl was not long in making her appearance from the direction of Silchester common. A groom who rode behind her at the sight of Captain Brentham touched his hat and trotted away.... Brentham tied up the two horses in the shade of the Roman wall.

Sibyl disposed herself gracefully on a mound which covered the site of a Roman dwelling, arranged the long skirt of her riding habit so that the riding trousers and other suggestions of her limbs might not be too obvious to the male eye.

Roger was a captain in the Indian Army, about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, strongly built, tanned in complexion, supple in figure, good-looking, keen-eyed. Sibyl Grayburn was a decidedly pretty young woman of twenty-five, the daughter of Colonel Grayburn who had recently moved from Aldershot to Aldermaston and was trying to live the life of a gentleman farmer on rather slender means. The Brenthams and Grayburns of the younger generation were distant cousins.

Roger (seating himself on the mound not too near to Sibyl, and scanning her attentively): "Well, you're just as pretty as you were five years ago—a little filled out perhaps.... And this is how we meet. How utterly different from what I had been looking forward to! I remember when we said good-bye at Farleigh how you cried, and how for the first four years you scarcely missed a mail.... And you can't say I didn't write—when I got a chance.... Or that I didn't work like a nigger to get a position to afford to marry—and now I hear from Maud you're going to marry Silchester. To tell you the truth it didn't come as a complete shock. I saw hints of it in some beastly Society paper that some one posted to me at Aden—I suppose it was you! And this is what women call fidelity!"

Sibyl (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but presently looks Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women of my own age were to discuss my case—not mere romantic school girls—they would say I had acted with ordinary common sense, and very unselfishly. I am, as you know, twenty-five, and I'm sure you won't have enough to marry on for several years—I should never again get such a chance ... and I really do like Lord Silchester, you don't know how kind he can be—and you can't really care so very much. You reached England a fortnight ago, and never even wrote to me...."

Roger: "I was too much taken aback by that paragraph in the World ... and Maud gave me a hint in the letter she sent to my club. Besides, I had to stop in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office ... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting" (Sibyl ejaculates with scorn: "Missionary meeting!") "and get some clothes.... I had nothing fit to wear when I landed...."

Sibyl: "Well, I'm not blaming you. I only meant that if you were so madly in love with me as you pretend you would have dashed down to get a sight of me before you went hobnobbing with your missionary friends ... or bothered about clothes. I did not want my engagement to come to you as a shock, so I did post that World to you and got Gerry to address it—and I told Maud, so that she might prepare you. But do let's be calm and sensible and not waste time in needless reproaches. I must get back to lunch. We've got Aunt Christabel coming—she helped to bring it about, you know." (Roger interpolates "Damn her!") "She's got twice mother's determination.... Dear old Roger.... I am sorry ... in a way ... but you'll find heaps of girls, much nicer than I am, ready to jump at the prospect of marrying you." (Here Sibyl's eyes glanced with a little regret at his turned-away face, with the bronzed cheek, the firm profile and the upward twist of the dark moustache.) "And you know our 'engagement' was only boy-and-girl fun. Besides, now I know more about things—I was so young when you went away—I don't approve of cousins marrying.... Isn't their—I mean aren't their ... children deaf and dumb or congenital idiots, or something unpleasant?..." (And here Sibyl, appropriately to the period in which she was living, blushed a deeper rose than the ride had given her at the audacity in alluding to children as the result of marriage.)

Roger: "Nonsense. Heaps of cousins marry and everything turns out all right if they come of healthy stock as we do. Besides, we're only second cousins. But of course this is nothing but an evasion. You thought you could do better for yourself by marrying an elderly peer, and so you threw me over...."

Sibyl: "Well! I did think I might, and not selfishly. There's papa—more or less in a financial tangle over his farm.... There's mother, wearing herself ill, trying to make both ends meet ... and Clara and Juliet to be brought out, and the boys to be educated and got into professions..." (crying a little or pretending to do so out of self-pity) "...I know I'm sacrificing myself for my family, but what would you have me do? I shall soon become an old maid, and you won't be able to marry for ever so long...."

(Roger mutters: "I've five hundred a year and...")

Sibyl: "Yes, but what could we do on that? Poor papa could afford to give me nothing more than my trousseau.... Even on seven hundred a year, if you get a Consulate, we couldn't manage two households, and I'm perfectly certain I couldn't stand the African climate long, and I should have to come home. I don't like roughing it, I should dislike hot countries; and I hate black people.... No, Roger ... dear ... be sensible... If you want to carve out a great career in Africa or India you don't want to be hampered with a wife for several years to come; and then ... I'll—I'll find some really nice girl to marry you, somebody with a little money. And Silchester might help you enormously. They'll probably take him into the new Government—aren't you glad that horrid old Gladstone's gone?—He'll be at the Colonial Office or somewhere like that and I know he'd do anything I asked him, once we were married. If you still want to go back to Africa he shall get you made a Consul or a Governor or whatever it is you want...." But Roger was not going to listen to anything so cold-blooded, even though all the time an undercurrent of thought was glancing at the advantages that might accrue from Sibyl's mariage de convenance. He'd be hanged if he'd take anything from Lord Silchester.... He was entitled to some such appointment, anyway, after all he had done. But there, he had lost all interest in life and if he went to the bad, Sibyl would be to blame. All his interest in an African career had been bound up with Sibyl's sharing it. With her at his side he felt equal to anything. He would conquer all Equatorial Africa, strike at the Mahdi from the south, find Emin Pasha, lay all Equatoria at the feet of Queen Victoria, and in no time Sibyl would be Lady Brentham—

"Yes," interjected Sibyl, "and lose my complexion and be old before my time, riding after you through the jungle, or living stupidly like a grass widow at home...."

Yet as he jerked out his tirade rather theatrically she noted him with an approving eye. His anger and extravagance brought out a certain boyishness and, made him, with the freedom of the jungle about him, still additionally attractive physically.... He certainly was good-looking and in the prime of manhood ... she sighed ... the remembrance of Lord Silchester's pale, somewhat flabby face, his slightly pedantic manner, his carefulness about his health.... He rode—yes—they had already had decorous rides together, but she imagined before the ride his cob had had some of the freshness taken out of him by the groom....

Sibyl tried by broken phrases, and half-uttered hints, to convey the idea that Lord Silchester being nearly sixty—at any rate close on fifty-six—and not of robust health, might not live for ever; though really she wouldn't mind if she died first, men were so perfectly hateful, and so was your family—if you were a woman. You were expected to do all you could for your family, and abused into the bargain by others who held you bound by foolish promises made when you were a mere girl without any knowledge of the world. Still, there was a possibility—just a possibility—for weren't we all mortal?—that she might find herself a widow, a lonely widow some day. Roger by then would have made a great career, become a sort of Sir Samuel Baker; he'd have discovered and named lakes after royalty; then they might meet again; and who could say? Certainly, if it came to love, she wouldn't deny she had never felt quite the same towards any one as she had towards Roger....

But Roger checked such philosophizings rudely, saying they were positively indecent: at which she expressed herself as very angry. Then leading out the horses in eye-flashing silence, Roger helped her to mount and swung himself into the saddle. He escorted her silently to Aldermaston main street, raised his hat, and rode off up the Mortimer road with a set face and angry eyes on the way back to Basingstoke.

He paused however at Tadley to give his father's cob—borrowed for the day—a feed and a rest. His ride lay through one of the loveliest parts of England in those days, before "Dora" had commandeered timber from the woods—to find afterwards she did not want it—before farmers had changed tiles or thatch on barns to corrugated iron, and chars-a-bancs, motor cycles and side-cars with golden-haired flappers, school treats and bean feasts had made the country-side noisy, dangerous and paper-strewn.

Insensibly his mood softened as he rode. It was more than four years since he had been home. Though he had spent all of his youth in this country, save for school and military college, his eyes seemed never before to have taken in the charm of English landscapes. Here was England at its best in the early part of July: poppies blazing in the green corn and whitish green oats, hay still lingering—grey on green—in the fields, ox-eyed daisies fully out, wild roses still in bloom in the hedge-rows, blue crane's bill, blue vetch, and purple-blue campanulas in the copse borders. The plump and placid cows, with swinging udders, so different from the gaunt African cattle with a scarcely visible milk-supply, the splendid cart-horses, the sheep—neat and tidy after shearing—the cock pheasants running across the sun-and-shadow-flecked roads, the cawing rooks, and the cooing woodpigeons, the geese and donkeys on the commons. Here and there, off the main road, park gates of finely wrought iron with a trim geranium-decked lodge and a vista of some charming avenue towards an invisible great house; side turnings, half-overgrown with turf, leading to villages quaintly entitled. Some of the details his eye and ear and nose took in—such as the braying of barrel organs on the fringe of an unseen fair, on a rather burnt and blackened gipsy-befouled common; or the smell of pig-sties in a hamlet, or placards in big print pasted round an ancient stump or on an old oak paling—it was irrational to call beautiful. But together they made up England at its best, with old churches packed with the history of England, the little towns so prosperous, the straggling villages, beautiful if insanitary, the signposts with their agreeable Anglo-Saxon and Norman names, so pleasing to the eye after years of untracked wilderness; the postman trudging his round in red-and-black, the gamekeeper in velveteen, the hearty labourers in corduroy, blue-shirted, bare-armed and hairy chested. All this was England. "Was there a jollier country in the world?" (There was not, in 1886.)

And as to Sibyl.... How differently he saw her now, after four years! As pretty as paint, though rather overheated after a short ride; but how artificial! What a delusion to suppose such a woman would have cared for a rough life in Africa. Why she even spoke slightingly of India, a country of romance far exceeding Africa. Indeed, he had only turned to Africa and African problems because all the great careers to be made in India were seemingly over.... There was nothing to be done in India without powerful backing....

Backing? It was perhaps silly to have flouted the suggestion of Lord Silchester's influence.... It was difficult unless you were related to permanent officials or members of Parliament to get a Consular commission in East Africa. Why not gradually—gradually of course—it wouldn't do to forgive her too quickly—become reconciled to Sibyl's marriage and pursue instead his second desire, a great African career?...

So it was a comparatively happy Roger Brentham who cantered up the road to the vicarage at Farleigh Wallop in the late afternoon of that day and sat with his sister Maud in the arbour enjoying a sound English tea. Maud, a pleasant-faced young woman of thirty, the only sister of three stalwart brothers, one a soldier, another a sailor and the third intending to be a barrister; housekeeper to her father, an absent-minded archaeologist; could not be called pretty, because she was too much like a young man of twenty-five with almost a young man's flat figure, but she was in every way satisfactory as a sister. Her father was out on some archaeological ramble and she was glad of it because she thought Roger might have come to her with a heart to mend. No doubt he felt heart-broken over Sibyl's defection. She looked at him inquiringly while she poured out tea, but would not of course broach the subject.

"You've been out a long time with the cob. I hope you haven't over-ridden him? Where did you go?"

"To Silchester and back; but I baited him at Tadley and gave him an hour's rest in Basingstoke; and another hour at Silchester. I've jogged along very quietly, looking up old haunts—and—and I've seen Sibyl Grayburn. She told me all about her engagement."

"Sibyl? Then—you don't mind so much? I hardly knew how to break it to you...."

"Mind? Oh, well, there was a boy-and-girl engagement, a flirtation between us before I went away, as you knew. But Africa drove all that out of my mind. Besides, how can I marry on five hundred a year? I dare say Sibyl has done well for herself, and she's getting on. Girls can't afford to wait and look about them like a man can. By the bye, old girl, why doesn't some one come along and marry you? I don't know a better sort of wife than you'd make...."

Maud: "Thank you, Roger, I'm sure you mean it. But I don't suppose I shall ever marry. My line is to look after father for the rest of his life, and then become everybody's aunt. I'm really his curate, you know. And his clerk and his congregation, very often. Oh, I'm quite happy; don't pity me; I couldn't have nicer brothers ... or perhaps a nicer life. I love Farleigh—"

Roger (not noticing, man-like, the tiny, tiny sigh that accompanied this renunciation of marriage): "Jove! How jolly all this is: you're right. If I wasn't a man I should think like you. What could one have better than this?" And he looked away from the arbour and the prettily furnished tea-table to the well-kept lawn with long shadows from the herbaceous border. Beyond that the wooded slopes of Farleigh Down and the distant meadows of the lowland, and then the sun-gilt roofs of Basingstoke's northern suburb, and the distant trains, three, four, five miles away with their trails of cotton-wool smoke indicating a busy world beyond the quietude of the vicarage garden. He could see the slight trace of a straight Roman road athwart the northern landscape, Winchester to Silchester; the downs of Hannington and Sydmonton and the far-off woods of Sherborne. When he was queer with sun-fever in Somaliland he would sometimes be tantalized by this view, like a mirage, instead of the brown-grey sun-scorched plains ringed by low ridges of table-topped mountains and dotted with scrubby acacias, whitened by the drought ... and would pull himself together, sit upright in the saddle and wonder if he would ever see home again. And here he was.... Hang Sibyl!...

So when Sibyl Grayburn married Lord Silchester at the end of that July—because he was fifty-six and impatient to have some summer for his honeymoon before returning to take up the burden—a well-padded one—of office in the Conservative Government—Captain Roger Brentham was among the guests, the relations of the bride. And his best leopard skin, suitably mounted, was in Sibyl's boudoir at Englefield awaiting Lady Silchester's return from the Tyrol.

And in the winter of 1886, Captain Brentham received from Lord Wiltshire the offer of a Consulate on the Last Coast of Africa and accepted it. It was provisionally styled the Consulate for the Mainland of Zangia where the Germans were already beginning to take up the administration, but Brentham was instructed to reside at first at Unguja, the island immediately opposite the temporary German capital. The British Consul-General for the whole of Zangia had been recalled because of heated relations with Germany. Pending his return Captain Brentham was to act as Consul-General without, however, taking too much on himself, as Mr. Bennet Molyneux of the African Department rather acidly told him.

Molyneux, at the Foreign Office, was not at all pleased at Brentham's appointment: one of those things that Lord Wiltshire was wont to do without consulting the permanent officials. Molyneux had not long been in the new African Department (hitherto disparagingly connected with the Slave Trade section); and as Africa had barely entered world-politics, British Ministers of State showed themselves usually indifferent as to how the necessary appointments were filled up, adopting generally names suggested by Molyneux, so that he was accustomed to nominating his poor relations—he had a reserve of wastrel nephews and cousins—or the friends of his friends—such as Spencer Bazzard (q.v., as they say in Encyclopaedias). If they were "rotters," the climate generally killed them off in a few months; if they made good, they established in time a claim on the Foreign Office regard and got transferred to Consular posts in South America, the Mediterranean, and Western Europe.

But Lord Wiltshire was not always asleep or uninformed, as he sometimes appeared to be. So his Private Secretary countered Bennet Molyneux's querulous Memo on Captain Brentham's lack of qualification for such a responsible East African post by reminding him that the gentleman in question was well versed in Arabic through having accompanied a Political Mission to the Persian Gulf, that he had served in Aden and Somaliland and had conducted an expedition to the Snow Mountains of East Africa for the Intelligence Division, had contributed papers to the Royal Geographical Society, was a silver medallist of the Zoological Society, and was personally vouched for by a colleague of Lord Wiltshire's: all of which information for the African Department was summed up by the Private Secretary to Molyneux in a few words: "See here, Molly; take this and look pleasant. You can't have all the African appointments in your gift. You must leave a few to the Old Man. He generally knows what he's about." So Molyneux asked Brentham to dine with him and apparently made the best of a bad job ... as he said with a grin to his colleague, Sir Mulberry Hawk.

CHAPTER IV

LUCY HESITATES

When the school holidays supervened, Lucy spent her vacation quietly at Aldermaston working at her African outfit—material and mental—in a desultory way. She supposed she would have to leave in the following April to join her betrothed. April seemed a long while ahead. She had not even given notice to the school managers yet of her intention to give up teaching. It would not be necessary to do so or to brace her mind for the agony of separation from her home until John had announced that all was in readiness and she had received the formal intimation of his Missionary Society that they approved of her going out to join him and would make the necessary arrangements for a steamer passage.

Meantime she gave herself up to the delight of reading such books about African exploration or mission life in Africa as she could obtain from the Reading libraries. They served to strengthen her determination to keep faith with John; while other ties and loves were pulling the other way. She had in her veins that imaginational longing to see strange lands and travel which is such an English trait; yet this longing alternated with fits of absolute horror at her foolishness in having consented to such an engagement. Why could she not have recognized when she was well off? Could any one in her station of life have a more delightful home?