The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [96]
The gharis did not break down, but a culvert and half a mile of road that had been swept away by the flooding of a river caused a delay of two days, and the travellers were forced to put up in a near-by dâk-bungalow until the road was mended.
There is little doubt that but for George Garforth, Ash would not have been able to resist the temptation to play truant in the company of Zarin and Ala Yar. But he had not forgotten Belinda's graciousness to George during those three dismal days after leaving Bombay, or that George had been quick to step into the breach when he, Ash, had absented himself in Delhi, so to Zarin's disgust he spent every possible moment in her company during that two days' delay.
Mr Garforth had been equally assiduous, though once again he had been compelled to spend most of the time talking to Mrs Harlowe rather than to her daughter. He had, however, won golden opinions from that lady by holding her knitting wool and telling her at length about his childhood. She had always considered George Garforth to be a very personable and presentable young man, but Byronic features, chestnut curls and melting brown eyes did not compensate for lack of means, and it had to be owned that Mr Garforth's prospects, for the moment anyway, were not bright.
As a new and very junior member of a firm which dealt in beer, wines and spirits, his salary was modest and his social position even more so; for except in the great ports such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, where Commerce was King, Anglo-Indian society ranked the ‘boxwallah’ (a scornful term applied to all who engaged in trade) well below the level of those two ruling castes, the army and the Civil Service, and in such a military stronghold as Peshawar, a junior ‘boxwallah’ would count for very little indeed; which was a pity, thought Mrs Harlowe, because if only things had been different she would have been far happier with George Garforth as a son-in-law than with Ashton Pelham-Martyn, who was so… who was so… It was difficult to explain what she felt about Ashton. On board he had seemed such a quiet and dependable young man, and the fact that he was rich (or, at least, so comfortably off) and that as his uncle had only the one son, there was always the chance that Ashton might one day inherit a baronetcy, had made him appear an excellent matrimonial prospect; but ever since that dreadful day in Bombay she had been beset by doubts.
If only George had been as eligible as Ashton, sighed Mrs Harlowe, how much happier she would feel about dear Bella's future. George, for all his spectacular looks, was so comfortably normal and uncomplicated, and his parents certainly seemed to be well off; his description of his home made it plain that they lived in far greater style than she herself had ever been accustomed to. Two carriages, no less - it made one wonder if he were not a better prospect than he appeared. His father, he had told her, was Irish by extraction, and his maternal grandmother a Greek lady of title (which would account for the romantic profile), and though he himself had wanted to go into the army, his mother had been so set against it that to please her he had given up the idea and agreed instead to go in for commerce. The romance of the East had appealed to his adventurous spirit and led to his accepting a post in the firm of Brown & Macdonald, in preference to some well-paid sinecure obtained for him through family influence in England; for, fond as he was of his parents, George had confessed that he preferred to stand on his own feet and start at the bottom of the ladder, a sentiment that won Mrs Harlowe's full approval.
What a nice boy he was. Now Ashton never mentioned his parents, and what little he had told her of his childhood was so exceedingly odd that she had been forced to discourage him from saying any more, and had told him (tactfully of course) that the less he said about it the better as such a story was likely to be… well… misunderstood. A Hindu foster-mother, the wife of a common syce, whom he actually spoke of as ‘my