Chapter 5

As soon as he had come up quite close he said, mouthing in a growl--

"What's this I hear, Whalley? Is it true you're selling the Fair Maid?"

Captain Whalley, looking away, said the thing was done--money had been
paid that morning; and the other expressed at once his approbation of
such an extremely sensible proceeding. He had got out of his trap to
stretch his legs, he explained, on his way home to dinner. Sir Frederick
looked well at the end of his time. Didn't he?

Captain Whalley could not say; had only noticed the carriage going past.

The Master-Attendant, plunging his hands into the pockets of an
alpaca jacket inappropriately short and tight for a man of his age and
appearance, strutted with a slight limp, and with his head reaching only
to the shoulder of Captain Whalley, who walked easily, staring straight
before him. They had been good comrades years ago, almost intimates. At
the time when Whalley commanded the renowned Condor, Eliott had charge
of the nearly as famous Ringdove for the same owners; and when the
appointment of Master-Attendant was created, Whalley would have been the
only other serious candidate. But Captain Whalley, then in the prime of
life, was resolved to serve no one but his own auspicious Fortune. Far
away, tending his hot irons, he was glad to hear the other had been
successful. There was a worldly suppleness in bluff Ned Eliott that
would serve him well in that sort of official appointment. And they
were so dissimilar at bottom that as they came slowly to the end of the
avenue before the Cathedral, it had never come into Whalley's head that
he might have been in that man's place--provided for to the end of his
days.

The sacred edifice, standing in solemn isolation amongst the converging
avenues of enormous trees, as if to put grave thoughts of heaven into
the hours of ease, presented a closed Gothic portal to the light and
glory of the west. The glass of the rosace above the ogive glowed like
fiery coal in the deep carvings of a wheel of stone. The two men faced
about.

"I'll tell you what they ought to do next, Whalley," growled Captain
Eliott suddenly.

"Well?"

"They ought to send a real live lord out here when Sir Frederick's time
is up. Eh?"

Captain Whalley perfunctorily did not see why a lord of the right sort
should not do as well as anyone else. But this was not the other's point
of view.

"No, no. Place runs itself. Nothing can stop it now. Good enough for a
lord," he growled in short sentences. "Look at the changes in our time.
We need a lord here now. They have got a lord in Bombay."

He dined once or twice every year at the Government House--a