The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [133]
‘Insufferable young puppy,’ fumed the Major, justifiably incensed; and he retired to his study to compose a forceful letter to the Commandant of the Corps of Guides, while Ash rode back to Mardan with his mind in a turmoil of anger and disgust and sheer, concentrated bitterness.
It was not Belinda's engagement that stuck in his throat. He could have found excuses for that: the Victorian age approved the marriage of young girls to much older men, and it was no uncommon thing for a girl of sixteen or seventeen to marry a man of forty. Mr Podmore-Smyth, whatever his physical disadvantages, was rich, respected and successful, and Belinda had probably been flattered by his attentions and ended by mistaking her admiration for his qualities as something much warmer, and persuading herself that it was love. She was, after all, young and impressionable, and she had always been impulsive. Ash might have forgiven her engagement, but he could neither excuse nor condone her behaviour in the matter of George.
George had undoubtedly told a lot of silly lies, but the revenge Belinda was taking on him was cruelly unjust, for it was not as though he had intended to marry her under false pretences. He knew very well that neither she nor her parents would ever have seriously considered him as a possible husband, and the most he had hoped to do was to make himself more interesting in her eyes and be accepted as an equal by the narrow, insular society of the cantonment. Yet now she was planning to expose him as a liar and a half-caste to that same society, knowing full well that although they might forgive the first, they would neither forgive nor forget the second. George would be ruined socially, for Anglo-India was intensely parochial and the story would follow him up and down the country. Wherever he went there would always be someone who knew it, or had heard it from someone else, and the virtuous middle-class matrons would whisper behind their fans while their daughters snubbed him and their menfolk laughed – and blackballed him at their Clubs.
‘It's not fair!’ thought Ash passionately. What did it matter who a man's grandmother was? Or his father or mother, if it came to that? He wished now that he had swallowed his pride and his bile and put in a plea for George to Belinda's father. He ought to have spoken up and told that old puffing-billy what his daughter was up to, and that she must be stopped. Except that it was already too late for that, as according to her she had already told several people, and for all he knew, her father might agree with her. Her mother and that tattling woman Mrs Gidney obviously did, and so, presumably, would their friends and acquaintances, all of whom would sympathize with that conceited little bitch, Belinda, and turn on poor George like a pack of wolves. The ugliness and injustice of it stuck in Ash's throat and choked him, and he felt physically ill with disgust.
He had arrived back in Mardan in a black rage and blacker disillusionment. And a few day later Dilasah had absconded with the carbines, and five sowars of his clan, including Malik Shah and Lal Mast, had been stripped of their uniforms and expelled from the Regiment with orders to bring back the stolen carbines or never again show their faces in Mardan…
Ash had intended to demand an interview with the Commandant in order to protest against the action that had been taken. But he had been forestalled by the belated arrival of a letter from Major Harlowe, and had been sent for instead to explain himself. The dressing-down he had received from Belinda's father had been nothing to the one he received from his C.O., though most of it went over his head, for once again he was obsessed with an injustice. It was not fair that five men of Dilasah Khan's tribe, with impeccable records -men who had never even liked Dilasah, let alone helped him! – should be driven out