When it became obvious that the College Grants Notification held fateful possibilities for John Church personally, and for his wife incidentally, it rapidly developed into a topic. Ladies, in the course of midday visits in each other’s cool drawing-rooms, repeated things their husbands had let fall at dinner the night before, and said they were awfully sorry for Mrs. Church; it must be too trying for her, poor thing. If it were only on her account, some of them thought, the Lieutenant-Governor—the “L.G.,” they called him—ought to let things go on as they always had. What difference did it make anyway! At the clubs the matter superseded, for the moment, the case of an army chaplain accused of improper conduct at Singapore, and bets were freely laid on the issue—three to one that Church would be “smashed.” If this attitude seemed less sympathetic than that of the ladies, it betokened at least no hostility. On the contrary, no small degree of appreciation was current for His Honour. He would not have heard the matter discussed often from his own point of view, but that was because his own point of view was very much his own property. He might have heard himself commended from a good many others, however, and especially on the ground of his pluck. Men said between their cigars that very few fellows would care to put their hands to such a piece of zubberdusti^[D] at this end of the century, however much it was wanted. Personally they hoped the beggar would get it through, and with equal solicitude they proceeded to bet that he wouldn’t. Among the sentiments the beggar evoked, perhaps the liveliest was one of gratitude for so undeniable a sensation so near the end of the cold weather, when sensations were apt to take flight, with other agreeable things, to the hill stations.

The storm reached a point when the Bishop felt compelled to put forth an allaying hand from the pulpit of the Cathedral. As the head of the Indian Establishment the Bishop felt himself allied in no common way with the governing power, and His Lordship was known to hold strong views on the propriety with which lawn sleeves might wave above questions of public importance. Besides, neither Dr. MacInnes nor Professor Porter were lecturing on the binomial theorem under Established guidance, while as to Father Ambrose, he positively invited criticism, with his lives of the Saints. When, therefore, the Cathedral congregation heard his Lordship begin his sermon with the sonorous announcement from Ecclesiastes,

“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. He—that increaseth—knowledge—increaseth—sorrow,”

it listened, with awakened interest, for a snub to Dr. MacInnes and Professor Porter, and for a rebuke, full of dignity and austerity, to Father Ambrose; both of which were duly administered. His Lordship’s views, supported by the original Preacher, were doubtless more valuable in his sermon than they would be here, but it is due to him to say that they formed the happiest combination of fealty and doctrine. The Honourable Mr. Ancram said to Sir William Scott on the Cathedral steps after the service—it was like the exit of a London theatre, with people waiting for their carriages—that while his Lordship’s reference was very proper and could hardly fail to be of use, public matters looked serious when they came to be discussed in the pulpit. To which Sir William gave a deprecating agreement.

Returning to his somewhat oppressively lonely quarters, Ancram felt the need of further conversation. The Bishop had stirred him to vigorous dissent, which his Lordship’s advantage of situation made peculiarly irritating to so skilled an observer of weak points. He bethought himself that he might write to Philip Doyle. He remembered that Doyle had not answered the letter in which he had written of his changed domestic future, frankly asking for congratulation rather than for condolence; but without resentment, for why should a man trouble himself under Florentine skies with unnecessary Calcutta correspondents? He consulted only his own pleasure in writing again: Doyle was so readily appreciative, he would see the humour in the development of affairs with His Honour. It was almost a week since Mr. Ancram had observed at the ball, with acute annoyance, what an unreasonable effect the matter was having upon Judith Church, and he was again himself able to see the humour of it. He finally wrote with much facility a graphically descriptive letter, in which the Bishop came in as a mere picturesque detail at the end. He seemed to pick his way, as he turned the pages, out of an embarrassing moral quagmire; he was so obviously high and dry when he could fix the whole thing in a caricature of effective paragraphs. He wrote:—

/# “I don’t mind telling you privately that I have no respect whatever for the scheme, and very little for the author of it. He reminds one of nothing so #/ /# much as an elderly hen sitting, with the obstinacy of her kind, on eggs out of which it is easy to see no addled reform will ever step to crow. He is as blind as a bat to his own deficiencies. I doubt whether even his downfall will convince him that his proper sphere of usefulness in life was that of a Radical cobbler. He has a noble preference for the ideal of an impeccable Indian administrator, which he goes about contemplating, while his beard grows with the tale of his blunders. The end, however, cannot be far off. Bengal is howling for his retirement; and, notwithstanding a fulsome habit he has recently developed of hanging upon my neck for sympathy, I own to you that, if circumstances permitted, I would howl too.” #/

Ancram’s first letter had miscarried, a peon in the service of the Sirkar having abstracted the stamps; and Philip Doyle, when he received the second, was for the moment overwhelmed with inferences from his correspondent’s silence regarding the marriage, which should have been imminent when he wrote. Doyle glanced rapidly through another Calcutta letter that arrived with Ancram’s for possible news; but the brief sensation of Miss Daye’s broken engagement had expired long before it was written, and it contained no reference to the affair. The theory of a postponement suggested itself irresistibly; and he spent an absorbed and motionless twenty minutes, sitting on the edge of his bed, while his pipe went out in his hand, looking fixedly at the floor of his room in the hotel, and engaged in constructing the tissue of circumstances which would make such a thing likely. If he did not grow consciously lighter-hearted with this occupation, at least he turned, at the end of it, to re-peruse his letters, as if they had brought him good news. He read them both carefully again, and opened the newspaper that came with the second. It was a copy of the Bengal Free Press, and his friend of the High Court had called his special attention to its leading article, as the most caustic and effective attack upon the College Grants Notification which had yet appeared. Mr. Justice Shears wrote:—

/# “As you will see, there is abundant intrinsic evidence that no native wrote it. My own idea, which I share with a good many people, is that it came from the pen of the Director of Education, which is as facile as it would very naturally be hostile. Let me know #/ /# what you think. Ancram is non-committal, but he talks of Government’s prosecuting the paper, which looks as if the article had already done harm.” #/

Doyle went through the editorial with interest that increased as his eye travelled down the column. He smiled as he read; it was certainly a telling and a forcible presentation of the case against His Honour’s policy, adorned with gibes that were more damaging than its argument. Suddenly he stopped, with a puzzled look, and read the last part of a sentence once again:—

/# “But he has a noble preference for the ideal of an impeccable Indian administrator, which he goes about contemplating, while his beard grows with the tale of his blunders.” #/

The light of a sudden revelation twinkled in Doyle’s eyes—a revelation which showed the Chief Secretary to the Bengal Government led on by vanity to forgetfulness. He reopened Ancram’s letter, and convinced himself that the words were precisely those he had read there. For further assurance, he glanced at the dates of the letter and the newspaper: the one had been written two days before the other had been printed. Presently he put them down, and instinctively rubbed his thumb and the ends of his fingers together with the light, rapid movement with which people assure themselves that they have touched nothing soiling. He permitted himself no characterisation of the incident—lofty denunciation was not part of Doyle’s habit of mind—beyond what might have been expressed in the somewhat disgusted smile with which he re-lighted his pipe. It was like him that his principal reflection had a personal tinge, and that it was forcible enough to find words. “And I,” he said, with a twinkle at his own expense, “lived nine months in the same house with that skunk!”