It was the first time in history that the town of Bhugsi had been visited by a Lieutenant-Governor. Bhugsi was small, but it had a reputation for malodorousness not to be surpassed by any municipality of Eastern Bengal. Though Bhugsi was small it was full—full of men and children and crones and monkeys, and dwarfed, lean-ribbed cattle, and vultures of the vilest appetite. The town squatted round a tank, very old, very slimy, very sacred. Bhugsi bathed in the tank and so secured eternal happiness, drank from the tank and so secured it quickly. All such abominations as are unnameable Bhugsi also preferred to commit in the vicinity of the tank, and it was possibly for this reason that the highest death-rate of the last “year under report” had been humbly submitted by Bhugsi.

Noting this achievement, John Church added Bhugsi to his inspection list. The inspection list was already sufficiently long for the time at his disposal, but Church had a way of economising his time that contributed much to the discipline of provincial Bengal. He accomplished this by train and boat and saddle; and his staff, with deep inward objurgations, did its best to keep up. He pressed upon Judith the advisability of a more leisurely progress by easier routes, with occasional meeting-places, but found her quietly obstinate in her determination to come with him. She declared herself the better for the constant change and the stimulus of quick moves; and this he could believe, for whenever they made a stay of more than forty-eight hours anywhere it was always she who was most feverishly anxious to depart. She filled her waking moments and dulled her pain in the natural way, with actual physical exertion. While the servants looked on in consternation she toiled instinctively over packings and unpackings, and was glad of the weariness they brought her. She invented little new devotions to her husband—these also soothed her—and became freshly solicitous about his health, freshly thoughtful about his comfort. Observing which, Church reflected tenderly on the unselfishness of women, and said to his wife that he could not have her throwing herself, this way, before the Juggernaut of his official progress.

There were no Europeans at all at Bhugsi, so the Lieutenant-Governor’s party put up at the dÂk-bungalow, three miles outside the town. Peter Robertson, the Commissioner of the Division, and the district officer, who were in attendance upon His Honour, were in camp near by, as their custom is. The dÂk-bungalow had only three rooms, and this made the fact that two of His Honour’s suite had been left at the last station with fever less of a misfortune. By this time, indeed, the suite consisted of Judith and the private secretary and the servants; but as John Church said, getting into his saddle at six o’clock in the morning, there were quite enough of them to terrify Bhugsi into certain reforms.

He spent three hours inspecting the work of the native magistrate, and came back to breakfast with his brows well set together over that official’s amiable tolerance of a popular way of procuring confessions among the police, which was by means of needles and the supposed criminal’s finger-nails. It had been practised in Bhugsi, as the native magistrate represented, for thousands of years, but it made John Church angry. He ate with stern eyes upon the table-cloth, and when the meal was over rode back to Bhugsi. There was only that one day, and beside the all-important matter of the sanitation he had to look at the schools, to inspect the gaol, to receive an address and to make a speech. He reflected on the terms of the speech as he rode, improving upon their salutary effect. He said to his private secretary, cantering alongside, that he had never known it so hot in April—the air was like a whip. It was borne in upon him once that if he could put down the burden of his work and of his dignity and stretch himself out to sleep beside the naked coolies who lay on their faces in the shadow of the pipal trees by the roadside, it would be a pleasant thing, but this he did not say to his private secretary.

It was half-past five, and the bamboos were all alive with the evening twitter of hidden sparrows, before the Lieutenant-Governor returned. For an instant Judith, coming out at the sound of hoofs, failed to recognise her husband, he looked, with a thick white powder of dust over his beard and eyebrows, so old a man. He stooped in his saddle, too, and all the gauntness of his face and figure had a deeper accent.

“Put His Honour to bed, Mrs. Church,” cried the Commissioner, lifting his hat as he rode on to camp. “He has done the work of six men to-day.”

“You will be glad of some tea,” she said.

He tumbled clumsily out of his saddle and leaned for a moment against his animal’s shoulder. The mare put her head round whinnying, but when Church searched in his pocket for her piece of sugar-cane and offered it to her, she snuffed it and refused it. He dropped the sugar-cane into the dust at her feet and told the syce to take her away.

“If she will not eat her gram give me word of it,” he said. But she ate her gram.

“Will you change first, John?” Judith asked with her hand on his coat-sleeve. “I think you should—you are wet through and through.”

“Yes, I will change,” he said; but he dropped into the first chair he saw. The chair stood on the verandah, and the evening breeze had already begun to come up. He threw back his head and unfastened his damp collar and felt its gratefulness. In the intimate neighbourhood of the dÂk-bungalow the private secretary could be heard splashing in his tub.

“Poor Sparks!” said His Honour. “I’m afraid he has had a hard day of it. Good fellow, Sparks, thoroughly good fellow. I hope he’ll get on. It’s very disheartening work, this of ours in India,” he went on absently; “one feels the depression of it always, more or less, but to-night——” He paused and closed his eyes as if he were too weary to finish the sentence. A servant appeared with a wicker table and another with a tray.

“A cup of tea,” said Judith cheerfully, “will often redeem the face of nature”; but he waved it back.

“I am too hungry for tea. Tell them to bring me a solid meal: cold beef—no, make it hot—that game pie we had at breakfast—anything there is, but as soon as possible. How refreshing this wind is!”

“Go and change, John,” his wife urged.

“Yes, I must, immediately: I shall be taking a chill.” As he half rose from his chair he saw the postman, turbaned, barefooted, crossing the grass from the road, and dropped back again.

“Here is the dÂk,” he said; “I must just have a look first.”

Mrs. Church took her letters, and went into the house to give orders to the butler. Five minutes afterwards she came back, to find her husband sitting where she had left him, but upright in his chair and mechanically stroking his beard, with his face set. He had grown paler, if that was possible, but had lost every trace of lassitude. He had the look of being face to face with a realised contingency which his wife knew well.

“News, John?” she asked nervously; “anything important?”

“The most important—and the worst,” he answered steadily, without looking at her. His eyes were fixed on the floor, and on his course of action.

“What do you mean, dear? What has happened? May I see?”

For answer he handed her his private letter from Lord Scansleigh. She opened it with shaking fingers, and read the first sentence or two aloud. Then instinctively her voice stopped, and she finished it in silence. The Viceroy had written:—

They spoke for a few minutes of the Viceroy’s loyalty and consideration and appreciation. She dwelt upon that with instinctive tact, and then Church got up quickly.

“I must write to Scansleigh at once,” he said. “I am afraid he is determined about this, but I must write. There is a great deal to do. When Sparks comes out send him to me.” Then he went over to her and awkwardly kissed her. “You have taken it very well, Judith,” he said—“better than any woman I know would have done.”

She put a quick detaining hand upon his arm. “Oh, John, it is only for your sake that I care at all. I—I am so tired of it. I should be only too glad to go home with you, dear, and find some little place in the country where we could live quietly——”

“Yes, yes,” he said, hurrying away. “We can discuss that afterwards. Don’t keep Sparks talking.”

Sparks appeared presently, swinging an embossed silver cylinder half a yard long. New washed and freshly clad in garments of clean country silk, with his damp hair brushed crisply off his forehead, there was a pinkness and a healthiness about Sparks that would have been refreshing at any other moment. “Have you seen this bauble, Mrs. Church?” he inquired: “Bhugsi’s tribute, enshrining the address. It makes the fifth.”

Judith looked at it, and back at Captain Sparks, who saw, with a falling countenance, that there were tears in her eyes.

“It is the last he will ever receive,” she said, and one of the tears found its way down her cheek. “They have asked him from England to resign—they say he must.”

Captain Sparks, private secretary, stood for a moment with his legs apart in blank astonishment, while Mrs. Church sought among the folds of her skirt for her pocket-handkerchief.

“By the Lord—impossible!” he burst out; and then, as Judith pointed mutely to her husband’s room, he turned and shot in that direction, leaving her, as her sex is usually left, with the teacups and the situation.

A few hours later Captain Sparks’ dreams of the changed condition of things were interrupted by a knock. It was Mrs. Church, sleepy-eyed, in her dressing-gown, with a candle; and she wanted the chlorodyne from the little travelling medicine chest, which was among the private secretary’s things.

“My husband seems to have got a chill,” she said. “It must have been while he sat in the verandah. I am afraid he is in for a wretched night.”

“Three fingers of brandy,” suggested Sparks concernedly, getting out the bottle. “Nothing like brandy.”

“He has tried brandy. About twenty drops of this, I suppose?”

“I should think so. Can I be of any use?”

Judith said No, thanks—she hoped her husband would get some sleep presently. She went away, shielding her flickering candle, and darkness and silence came again where she had been.

A quarter of an hour later she came back, and it appeared that Captain Sparks could be of use. The chill seemed obstinate; they must rouse the servants and get fires made and water heated. Judith wanted to know how soon one might repeat the dose of chlorodyne. She was very much awake, and had that serious, pale decision with which women take action in emergencies of sickness.

Later still they stood outside the door of his room and looked at each other. “There is a European doctor at Bhai Gunj,” said Captain Sparks. “He may be here with luck by six o’clock to-morrow afternoon—this afternoon.” He looked at his watch and saw that it was past midnight. “Bundal Singh has gone for him, and Juddoo for the native apothecary at Bhugsi—but he will be useless. Robertson will be over immediately. He has seen cases of it, I know.”

A thick sound came from the room they had left, and they hurried back into it.

“Water?” repeated the Commissioner; “yes, as much as he likes. I wish to God we had some ice.”

“Then, sir, I may take leave?” It was the unctuous voice of the native apothecary.

“No, you may not. Damn you, I suppose you can help to rub him? Quick, Sparks; the turpentine!”

Next day at noon arrived Hari Lal, who had travelled many hours and many miles with a petition to the Chota LÂt Sahib, wherein he and his village implored that the goats might eat the young shoots in the forest as aforetime; for if not—they were all poor men—how should the goats eat at all? Hari Lal arrived upon his beast, and saw from afar off that there was a chuprassie in red and gold upon the verandah whose favour would cost money. So he dismounted at a considerable and respectful distance, and approached humbly, with salaams and words that were suitable to a chuprassie in red and gold. The heat stood fiercely about the bungalow, and it was so silent that a pair of sparrows scolding in the verandah made the most unseemly wrangle.

Bundal Singh had not the look of business. He sat immovable upon his haunches, with his hands hanging between his knees. His head fell forward heavily, his eyes were puffed, and he regarded Hari Lal with indifference.

“O most excellent, how can a poor man seeking justice speak with the LÂt Sahib? The matter is a matter of goats——”

“Bus! The LÂt Sahib died in the little dawn. This place is empty but for the widow. Mutti dani wasti gia—they have gone to give the earth. It was the bad sickness, and the pain of it lasted only five hours. When he was dead, worthy one, his face was like a blue puggri that has been thrice washed, and his hand was no larger than the hand of my woman! What talk is there of justice? Bus!”

Hari Lal heard him through with a countenance that grew ever more terrified. Then he spat vigorously, and got again upon his animal. “And you, fool, why do you sit here?” he asked quaveringly, as he sawed at the creature’s mouth.

“Because the servant-folk of the Sirkar do not run away. Who then would do justice and collect taxes, budzat? Jao, you Bengali rice-eater! I am of a country where those who are not women are men!”

The Bengali rice-eater went as he was bidden, and only a little curling cloud of white dust, sinking back into the road under the sun, remained to tell of him. Bundal Singh, hoarse with hours of howling, lifted up his voice in the silence because of the grief within him, and howled again.

A little wind stole out from under a clump of mango trees and chased some new-curled shavings about the verandah, and did its best to blow them in at the closed shutters of a darkened room. The shavings were too substantial, but the scent of the fresh-cut planks came through, and brought the stunned woman on the bed a sickening realisation of one unalterable fact in the horror of great darkness through which she groped, babbling prayers.