"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, crushing 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 worship 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.

"Bullah!" sneered a bearded Sikh orderly waiting to carry his master's prayer-book. "You Poorbeahs can talk glibly of change. And why not?

seeing it is but a change of masters to born slaves. Oil burns to b.u.t.ter! b.u.t.ter to oil!"

The evil face scowled. "Thou wilt have to shave under thy master, anyhow, Gooroo-jee! Ay! and dock thy pigtail too."

This allusion to a late ruling against the Nazarene customs of the newly raised Sikh levies might have led to blows--the bearded one being a born fighter--if, the short service coming to an end, the masters had not trooped out, pausing to exchange Christmas greetings ere they dispersed.

"Never saw Mrs. Erlton looking so pretty," remarked Captain Seymour to his wife, as, with the restored Sonny between them, they moved off to their own house, which stood close by, plumb on the city wall. He spoke in a low voice, but Major Erlton happened to be within earshot.

He turned complacently to identify the speaker, then looked at his wife to see if the remark was true. Scarcely; to Herbert Erlton's quickened recollection of the girl he had married. Yet she looked distinctly creditable, desirable, as she stood, the center of a little group of men and women eager to help her with the Christmas tree. It struck him suddenly, not in the least unpleasantly, that of late his wife had had no lack of aids-de-camp, and that one, Captain Morecombe, the pick of the lot, seemed to have little else to do. A symptom which the Major could explain from his own experience, and which made him smile; he being of those who admire women for being admired.

"I have arranged about the conjuror, Mrs. Erlton," said Captain Morecombe, who was, indeed, quite ready to do her behests; "that sweep, Prince Abool-bukr,--who is coming, by the way, to see the show,--has promised me the best in the bazaar. And some Bunjarah fellows who act, and that sort of business."

"Better find out first what they do act," put in young Mainwaring, who chafed under the superior knowledge which the Captain claimed as interpreter to the Staff. "I saw some of those brutes in Lucknow last spring, and----"

"Oh! there is no fear," retorted the other with a condescending smile.

"The Prince is no fool, and he is responsible. It will most likely be something extremely instructive. Now, Mrs. Erlton, I will drive you round to the College and you can show me anything else you want done.

I can drive you home afterward."

"Don't think we need trouble you, thanks, Morecombe," said a voice behind. "I'll drive my wife. I'll stay as long as you like, Kate; and I can stick things high up, you know."

There was no appeal in his tone, but Kate, looking up at his great height, felt one; and with it came a fresh spasm of that self-reproach. As she had knelt beside him in church she had been asking herself if she was not unforgiving; if it was not hard on him.

"That will be a great help," she said soberly.

So Mrs. Seymour, coming in daintily when the hard work was over to put a Father Christmas on the topmost shoot, wondered plaintively how she could have managed it without Major Erlton, and put so much soft admiration into her pretty eyes, that he could scarcely fail to feel a fine fellow. He was in consequence a better one for the time being. So that he insisted on returning in the afternoon to hand the tea and cake, when he made several black-and-tan matrons profusely apologetic and proud at having the finest gentleman there to wait upon them. For the Major was a very fine animal, indeed. As Alice Gissing had told him frankly, over and over again, his looks were his strong point.

The larger portion of the guests were of this black-and-tan complexion. Of varying shades, however, from the unmistakably pure-blooded native Christian, to the pasty-faced baby with all the yellow tones of skin due to its pretty, languid mother, emphasized by the ruddiness of the English father who carried it.

They came chiefly from Duryagunj, a quarter of the city close to the Palace, between the river and the Thunbi Bazaar. It had once been the artillery lines, and now its pleasant garden-set houses were occupied by clerks, contractors, overseers, and such like. Then later on, for the sports and games, came a contingent of College lads, speaking English fluently, and younger boys clinging affrightedly to their father's hand as he smirked and bowed to the special master for whose favor he had perhaps braved bitter tears of opposition from the women at home. The mission school sent orderly bands, and there was a ruck of servants' children, who would have gone to the gates of h.e.l.l for a gift.

"You will tire yourself to death, Kate," called her husband, as, quite in his element, he handicapped the boys for the races. He spoke in a half-satisfied, half-dissatisfied tone, for though her success pleased him, he fancied she looked less dainty, less attractive.

"Come and see the play," suggested Captain Morecombe, who did not seem to notice anything amiss. "It will be rest, and we needn't light up yet a while."

"I'm going wis zoo," said Sonny confidently, escaping from his ayah as they pa.s.sed; so, with the child's hand in hers, Kate went on into the long narrow veranda which had been inclosed by tent-walls as a theater. Open to the sunlight at the entrance, it was dark enough to make a swinging lamp necessary at the further end. There was no stage, no scenery, only a coa.r.s.e cotton cloth with indistinguishable shadows and lights on it hung over a rope at the very end. The place was nearly empty. A few native lads squatted in front, a bench or two held a sprinkling of half-castes, and at the entrance a group of English ladies and gentlemen waited for the performance to begin, laughing and talking the while.

"You look quite done," said Captain Morecombe tenderly, as Kate sank back in the armchair he placed for her halfway down, where a c.h.i.n.k of light and air came through a slit in the canvas.

"I didn't feel tired before," she replied dreamily. "I suppose it is the quiet, and the giving in. Tell me about the play, please," she went on more briskly. "If I don't know something of the plot before it begins, I shall not understand."

"I expect you will," he began; but at that moment a cry for Captain Morecombe arose, and to his infinite anger he had to go off and interpret for the Colonel and Prince Abool-Bukr, who had just arrived.

Kate, to tell truth, felt relieved. After the clamor outside, and the constant appeals to her, the peace within was delightful. She leaned back, with Sonny in her arms, feeling so disposed for sleep that her husband's loud voice coming through the c.h.i.n.k startled her.

"Can't possibly take that into consideration. The race must be run on the runners' own merits only."