Chronicles of Dustypore Part 14

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE GULLY.

I know not if I know what true love is; But if I know, then if I love not him, Methinks there is none other I call love.

Perhaps the thing which more than any other exasperated Fotheringham about this unlucky frontier outbreak was the cool way in which Blunt took it. He quite ignored all responsibility in the matter. This was more than Fotheringham could forgive. When he had to come post-haste back to Dustypore, with his tail, so to speak, between his legs, leaving the country in a blaze behind him, with an escort of cavalry to protect him from the animosities which his proceedings had provoked, the least that could be expected of him was to wear the penitent air of a man who has had his own way and come to grief. Blunt, however, was as unabashed and uncompromising as before, and it had never, it was evident, crossed his mind that he could be the person to blame. The whole affair was gall and wormwood to Fotheringham: it was improper, incongruous, and a shock to his perceptions of the eternal fitness of things. It never ought to have happened--never, so his fine instincts told him, would have happened--but for this rough, self-confident, inexperienced outsider. It came too at the most horrid time of year, just when almost every one was at the hills and the few whose ill-luck compelled them to remain in the plains were exhausted with the summer and in need of repose. The Misses Fotheringham and their mamma had been all the summer at Elysium, and poor Fotheringham had been meaning to join them for a few weeks'

autumnal holiday; and this was now out of the question. This in itself was no small grievance. And then, on public grounds, Fotheringham felt the outbreak a sort of stain on himself and the inst.i.tution which he cared most about. The Salt Board might be to others a mere abstraction, but he had worked at it and in it till he had come to regard it with a sort of fondness. Now Blunt's mismanagement exhibited the Board in a perfectly false light, as political incendiaries. The Rumble Chunder Grant was made to figure as a stone of stumbling and rock of political offence, instead of, as its advocates felt it to be, a sort of moral buffer on which any little unpleasantness which the wear and tear of government engendered, was allowed to vent itself in safety.

Fotheringham had exactly foretold the result, and felt, it must be supposed, that kind of melancholy satisfaction which the most good-natured prophets of evil cannot but experience when their prophecies come true. He was too much of a gentleman to say to Blunt, 'There! I told you so,' in so many words; but this was what he _felt_; and this sort of inward triumph joined together with the other and graver aspects of the affair to make him treat Blunt in a manner, which, no doubt, the latter gentleman, pachydermatous as he was, found the reverse of soothing.

c.o.c.kshaw, too, in his idle way, was greatly put out and not at all inclined to make himself pleasant. He smoked more cheroots than ever--was more impatient of discussion--fidgeted worse when Fotheringham was settling down into nicely-rounded periods and getting real relief from doing so, and altogether did not behave as Fotheringham felt that he ought at a trying time.

Of his two colleagues c.o.c.kshaw had come to dislike Blunt by far the worst. Fotheringham, he knew, was an a.s.s; but then he had known him as such ever since they were at Haileybury together as lads, and his being asinine seemed all right and proper in the natural course of things.

With all his feebleness he had a sort of chivalry about him, a pride in his order, an enthusiasm about his work, a professional sympathy with his colleagues, which bound him to his brother-civilians. Blunt was a stranger to all this and was known to talk about the Civil Service in a way that made c.o.c.kshaw long to knock him down and give him a thras.h.i.+ng, as he would have done to a rude schoolfellow years ago. An article appeared in the 'Edinburgh Review' about the Government of India, which c.o.c.kshaw felt certain from its style was Blunt's, and which spoke of the administrators of the country with undisguised contempt. There was a phrase about 'one dead level of mediocrity,' which some angry Governor-General had used, and which the article quoted with an approval which c.o.c.kshaw could neither forgive nor forget. The Rumble Chunder Grant was quoted as a specimen of the gigantic messes which ensue, when second and third rate men have the management of first-rate questions.

The local Governments were described as costly bureaux, with all the natural defects of a bureau and some peculiar evils of their own to boot--now meddlesome and fussy, now indolent and obstructive, frequently unprincipled and insubordinate. The three separate War establishments were disposed of with a sneer as the most expensive folly in existence.

The vile corruption which characterised the East India Company in its earlier days, the scandalous exhibitions of public and private wickedness which fired the righteous wrath of Burke, had, the writer admitted, been rendered impossible by the increased communication with home and the generally improved tone of English manners; but Indian Governments had long remained the home of jobbery. The stringent remedy of the Compet.i.tive System had been necessary to deal with the acc.u.mulated dulness with which years of licensed favouritism had crowded the ranks of the service. On the whole it was not true, or anything like true, that India was well administered. The wonder, however, was, considering the cla.s.s of men to whom the job had been entrusted, that it had ever got administered at all.

'D---- his impudence!' exclaimed c.o.c.kshaw with all the fervour of an indignation which had been gaining strength through a dozen pages of unpalatable reading; and the expression may be taken as representing in a concise formula the view which c.o.c.kshaw had come to take of his colleague's mental att.i.tude, and of the respect or consideration to which he and his proposals were ent.i.tled.

The meetings of the board grew very stern and stiff. Unluckily, too, at this very time the Board's Annual Report had to be written, and the conflicting views of the members as to the cause of the disaster could scarcely fail to be brought prominently forward. It was one of the occasions which Strutt had been accustomed to treat historically, and which called, he felt, for something grander than Whisp's businesslike and unpretentious style. 'My good sir,' he would say, 'I have no time to read history: I am _making_ it.' In the good old days, when Strutt had his own way, he would have knocked the affair off in half-a-dozen well-rounded, vague, magniloquent phrases; have left the connection of the Board with the whole thing in obscurity; have congratulated the Government on the excellent behaviour of the troops; applauded the accuracy and range of the Armstrong battery, and paid Providence a handsome compliment on the fortunate turn which events had taken.

But now Strutt felt a painful misgiving that this sort of thing would not do. When he began the paragraph--'The sun of the official year has set in blood,' he saw Blunt's horrid cynical look, and knew that he would never stand it. Any allusion to Providence--and Strutt felt that one was quite essential to anything like a proper peroration--Blunt would, he was sure, ruthlessly draw his pen through. Nor was it only as to matters of taste and style that Strutt felt embarra.s.sed. Fotheringham would, he was certain, deprecate any reference to a connection between the outbreak and the Rumble Chunder Grant. 'Policy,' he would say, in a mysterious way, 'calls for reticence. We may be misconstrued, but we cannot afford to show all the world our hand; we don't want the hillmen to imagine that we admit them to have a grievance.' Blunt, on the other hand, would be for having it all down in black and white--for describing the outbreak as the natural result of indistinctness, cowardice and idleness. Altogether Strutt felt that his lines had been cast in rough places, and began to agree with Fotheringham that outsiders like Blunt were a mistake.

While things stood thus, one of those events occurred which form so constant a characteristic of Indian life and add so formidable a contribution to the difficulties of government. How is it possible to have continuity of action, settled policy, completeness of design, when existence is so s.h.i.+fting that no man who begins a work is likely to see its close? Promotion or leave or the chances of health keep the hierarchy of Indian officials for ever on the move. One man goes home to Europe, and his departure involves the change of a dozen others, each of whom is waiting anxiously for an advance and is ent.i.tled to step into his fellow's shoes. One of these vicissitudes befell the Board, for poor Fotheringham fell violently ill, and for some time seemed likely to create a permanent vacancy. A week's fever left him a skeleton, but a live one, and his only chance of re-established health was immediate flight for home. Accordingly, in fewer hours than it takes an English lady days to determine where she will spend her summer holiday, the Fotheringham establishment had moved off the scene. The fine barouche--the Australian carriage-horses--the lovely Arabs on which the Miss Fotheringhams took their morning exercise--the pretty garden where their mamma received society to tea and croquet--the dining-room where the Senior Member had regaled his friends--the library where he a.s.sailed his enemies--the piano at which the young ladies sang tremulous duets--the arm-chair in which Fotheringham had sate and thought or seemed to think--all became matters of the past. A neat paper, copied out by the elder Miss Fotheringham and containing the scanty catalogue of an Indian official's worldly belongings, was circulated in the Station, each item at so many rupees for those who liked to buy. Before the week was over the house was stripped, the simple treasures were scattered to a dozen new possessors, and the Fotheringhams, as the Arab folds his tent and glides silently away, had departed. The waters of the official life rolled smoothly over them, and next day the 'Dustypore Gazette' announced with laconic severity that Mr. Snaply had on such and such a morning taken over charge, as Member of the Salt Board, from Mr.

Fotheringham, during the absence of the latter on sick leave, or pending further orders.

Now Snaply was known as the crossest man in the Service, and it cheered poor Fotheringham, who was almost too ill and weak to care about anything, to know that his _loc.u.m tenens_ would not allow Blunt to repose on a bed of roses if he could help it.

Felicia, meanwhile, had carried Maud off to the 'Gully,' a mountain retreat some twenty miles away, where purer air and a less constrained life were to be had than at Elysium. It was, in fact, nothing more than one of a cl.u.s.ter of log-huts, built years before, when a working party of soldiers had been cutting one of the grand military roads that traverse the mountains in these parts, and sold offhand, when the work was done, for what they would fetch to the first comer. Felicia and her husband had been encamped in the neighbourhood, and had fallen in love with the wildness of the place, the exquisitely pure air, the huge towering pines, which gave the scene a character of its own, and, moreover, with the unfamiliar idea of owning a part of the Himalayas in freehold.

For a few hundred rupees, accordingly, Vernon had become possessor of the huts and some adjoining acres, and since then Felicia's embellis.h.i.+ng hand had worked wonders. Nature, as if in grat.i.tude for unaccustomed devotion, lent herself in a lavish mood to beautify the little structure. A profuse growth of creepers festooned the porch; a delicious piece of turf, bright, smooth and soft, and broken only by one or two projecting crags, stretched down the mountain-side in front; inside the rough deodar paling the beds were all ablaze with English flowers that not even Felicia's tenderness could coax into healthiness in the plain below. 'These are my invalids,' Felicia said, to whom this spot was always full of charms: 'I send them up with the babies to breathe a little wholesome air. Shut your eyes, Maud, and smell this--cannot you fancy yourself in a sweet English wood in June?'

There were other beauties, moreover, about the place than those of an English summer. They were hanging in a little picturesque nook of safety, but all around them was sublime. Storms gathered and crashed and spent their fury as if this was their very home where they could play at ease. An inky ma.s.s came lowering over the heights above and shed itself in one angry deluge on the mountain-side; the thunder crashed in fierce echoes from crag to crag, and all the heavens blazed from end to end as the fearful fiery zig-zags came darting out of the gloom; then the tempest would pa.s.s away and nothing be heard but the distant rumble and the hundred muddy torrents roaring downwards. The great folds of mist came swirling up the precipice, wrapping everything for a few moments in gloom; then they would pa.s.s on, and presently again the sky be serene and bright, and the reeking mountains sun themselves gleefully in the brightness and warmth that were everywhere present.

'It is beautiful,' Maud said, 'but too grand to be quite pleasant; it is rather awful. That black mountain opposite, with its army of skeleton deodars, makes me shudder.'

Across the gorge the forest had been burnt--the first rude attempt by the mountaineers at reclaiming the soil. For weeks together these blazing patches may be seen on the hillside, hidden in a cloud of smoke by day, and at night lighting up the landscape with a lurid, fitful glare. When, by a change in the wind or sudden downpour, the conflagration ceases, nothing remains but a gloomy array of charred stumps, with here and there some monstrous stem towering above, which the flames, though they were able to kill, have not succeeded in devouring. Then among the ruins of the forest comes the primitive cultivator, with his tiny plough and scrambling goat-like bullocks, and wrings a scanty crop of oats or potatoes from each ridge and cranny of the rocky steep; and so the reign of agriculture has begun. The effect, however, from the picturesque point of view is weird and gloomy; it was so, at any rate, in Maud's thoughts, for she ever after a.s.sociated it with the first piece of really bad news that had ever come to her in the whole of her suns.h.i.+ny existence. A note arrived one morning from Vernon at Dustypore, and Felicia read it out before she was well aware of its import. He was just starting, Vernon said, for the head-quarters of the expedition. 'There has been a fight, and the entrenched village has been carried by a _coup de main_, and----'

'And what?' said Maud, who felt herself turning deadly cold and her heart beating so that she could scarcely speak, 'Go on, Felicia, please.'

'"Sutton, I fear, has had a serious wound and a fall from his horse. I am going out to look after him. More news to-morrow."'

Maud rose and fled, without a word, to her bedroom, to deal with this agitating piece of news as best she might. She did not feel sure enough of her composure to trust herself to the chances of a break-down even before Felicia. There was something in herself, she knew, that she did not wish even Felicia's eye to read. To Felicia her husband's letter spoke only of the fortunes of their common friend; to Maud it was, as a quick, agonising pang told her, an affair of life or death. A serious wound--a fall from horseback--terrible, vague words that might mean anything--that might mean something that would eclipse all Maud's existence in the gloom of a lifelong disaster. She had thought over their last ride together often; but she knew now, and now only, to the full what it had really been to her. She had recalled his last acts and words--they had been sweet and tender words, such as would keep their fragrance through a lifetime; but, supposing that they were to be really last words, the long farewell of a man who was going to his doom!

Maud sat still, crushed and stunned at this first brush of misfortune's pa.s.sing wing: a dark shadow, black and fateful as the storms which came raging up the valley, seemed to be gathering across her life. Life itself seemed to hang on a slender thread, the tidings which to-morrow's messenger should bring--perhaps even now life was over for her.

Felicia did not leave her long in solitude; she came in presently, with her kind considerate air, knowing and feeling all, as Maud instinctively was aware, but speaking only just what should be spoken, and guarded by a delicate tact (rare attribute of only the most finely-moulded natures) from the possibility of a word too much.

'Courage,' she said; 'I know the meaning of George's letter too well to be frightened. To-morrow, dear Maud, there will be good news for both of us.'

Maud took her companion's hand in a helpless, imploring way that went to Felicia's very heart; but, if her life had depended on it, no spoken word would come.

There are some things in life, some desperate chances, some horrible possibilities of suffering, which seem to strike one mute. Maud seemed now to have come across some such crisis of existence. She followed Felicia about; they took the children for a walk; she went almost unconsciously about the little routine of their home life; all the time she seemed to herself in a sort of dreadful dream; she turned faint and chill as the messengers now and again came clambering up the gorge, each with his fresh item of news from the world below, some one of them, as she knew must be the case, carrying with him the sentence of her fate.

'It makes my blood run cold,' she told Felicia afterwards, 'to see one of them coming even now.'

Sutton's words of farewell to her were not, however, destined to be his last. The next day a good friend at Government House sent them across the Hills a copy of a telegram from head-quarters, which showed that Sutton's life was at any rate in no immediate danger. Then came a letter to Felicia from her husband. He had been up to head-quarters, he said, and stayed two days with Sutton. He was a good deal knocked about; there was a bullet lodged in his side, which had been troublesome, and he had been much bruised by his horse rolling across him. But there was no danger; in a week or two he would be able to move, and meanwhile he was in splendid air, and well looked after.

Then Maud went to her precious locket once again, and wept over it tears of joy, grat.i.tude and love. The mists had cleared away, the world was irradiated with happiness and hope; even the blackened hillside opposite had caught a ray of suns.h.i.+ne and seemed to smile back at her. She felt a very child again in the lightness of her heart; and Felicia, in a graver but not less happy mood, breathed a deep prayer of fervent grat.i.tude that the calamity so near and terrible had pa.s.sed away, leaving this young bright life as bright as ever.

CHAPTER XXV.

AN INVALID.

How do I love thee? Let me count the sums.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height, My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace----

When, a month later, Sutton was carried into Dustypore, he was, as any one would have felt, a fit subject for romance, and Maud was just in the mood to appreciate all that was romantic about him to the full. She had been thinking about this event and fancying it, and dreaming about it for weeks past, poor child, till it had become for her the very climax of existence. As the time for its realisation drew near she had been haunted by nervous apprehensions as to whether she had not misinterpreted Sutton's words of kindness at that last interview, and whether the moment of disillusionment might not be now arriving. Sutton, so a morbid mood suggested, might have meant nothing; or his words, perhaps, proved only a pa.s.sing tenderness, engendered by the special circ.u.mstances of the hour: her fancy, perhaps, had dressed up a few careless expressions into something serious. But there came a truer voice which said that it was not so; that Sutton was not a man of careless words or a transient mood, and that a pledge had been given, though without actual spoken vow, which he a.s.suredly would redeem on his return. On the whole then, though not absolutely without a misgiving, Maud was joyous and courageous, and her heart was light within her. She, however, felt herself becoming greatly embarra.s.sed and excited as the hour of Sutton's arrival drew near. The most needless blushes came flus.h.i.+ng into her cheeks; the simplest things seemed difficult to answer. Felicia knew, Maud was certain, pretty well how matters stood; knew at any rate that there was something between her and Sutton: yet Maud had never summoned up courage to inform her what it was, nor had Felicia chosen to inquire. It was rather agitating, accordingly, that Felicia should now be about to have an opportunity of judging for herself how matters stood.

Then Sutton arrived, too suffering from his wound to be moved except in a palanquin; and was got, with a great deal of trouble and pain apparently, to the sofa in Vernon's study, which was turned into his sitting-room for the time being, and where the invalid was to spend the day. Here he lay, a close prisoner, as feeble as a bad wound and a month's fever could make him, and quite in a condition for judicious nursing. A man in such a plight wants company--pleasant, gentle, noiseless, unexciting, feminine if possible; he wants to be read to, and sung and played to; he wants cooling drinks, which, when mixed and administered by a hand like Felicia's, are more than nectar; he wants those delicious idle gossips, for which the healthy busy side of life so seldom provides either the opportunity or the mood. If a man lack these, an illness is a dreary affair; if he has them, it may bring him the pleasantest hours of his life.

All these pleasant conditions now attended the fortunate Sutton's convalescence. Felicia welcomed him with a joyful cordiality and devoted herself with enthusiasm to the task of making his imprisonment as little wearisome as might be. Vernon stole an hour from his office to read him the 'Pall Mall Gazette;' Maud found herself busy with the rest, a willing attendant on the happy warrior in his hour of weakness.

Everybody made a great deal of him. Felicia's little girls, coming with much modesty and many blushes, brought him a nosegay apiece and kissed his hand with a sort of affectionate reverence. His face was wan and thin, and marked with lines of suffering; but the sweet, kind smile was still the same, and the honest eyes and finely-chiselled brow. On the whole Maud found him handsomer and ten times more touching than ever before. She knew, too, before they had been a minute in each other's company that all was well with her. The time of separation, uncertainty, distress, was done: happiness, greater than she had ever dreamed of, was already hers. Her foot stood already on the crowning ridge of existence, and all the horizon blazed with the golden clouds of Hope and Joy.

One effect that Sutton always had upon her she was especially conscious of just now: she had no feeling of shyness with him, such as she felt with all the world beside; he stirred her being too profoundly for any slighter feeling to find a place. Shyness deals with the superficial, slighter outcomings of life. Sutton seemed to transport her to another world of thought and feeling: thoughts too high and feelings too intense to heed the mode of their expression. The consequence was, that it seemed quite natural to Maud for her to be waiting on him; who had so good a right as she to that pleasant duty?

Then presently Felicia went away with the children, and the two were again, for the first time, alone together.

'Come,' Sutton said, changing his manner instantly, 'sit down by me and tell me all that has happened since we parted on the mountain's side.

You missed me a little, I hope?'

'Yes,' said Maud, simply, looking at him with fearless, trusting eyes; 'your going was the end of all our pleasure--we went away to the Gully, and then came your accident and some dreadful days of anxiety. Since then everything has seemed a sort of dream.'

'It has seemed a dream to me sometimes,' said Sutton, 'as I lay and wondered whether the happiness I fancied for myself was real or fable.

Things befall one so suddenly in life, and strokes of good or ill fortune take one so by surprise, that one distrusts one's own belief about them, and cannot fancy that the old life which went before has been all transfigured. Now, however, that I see you and hear you and have you about me, I begin to feel it was not a dream after all.'

'It was no dream,' said Maud, in her serious way; 'here is your locket, which I have been keeping for you since we parted.'

'No,' said the other, giving back the proffered locket and keeping the hand which gave it in captivity; 'you shall keep it now, if you will, for good and all; that is, if you have a fancy for an old soldier, wounded and battered as you see me. Here I shall be for weeks, I suppose, a burden on the friends who are good-natured enough to be my nurses. You will have to tend me, as Elaine did Launcelot in his cave.'

'I will,' Maud said, wrapped into a mood which left her scarcely mistress of herself; 'my love is as great as hers was. I have been living all these weeks only that I might see you again. I must have died if you had not come back, or come back other than I hoped.'

The die was cast--the words were spoken; they came out naturally, spontaneously, almost unconsciously before Maud had time to know what she was about, or to judge of the wisdom and propriety of what she was saying. They were the truth; they were what she had been feeling and saying to herself for weeks past; they were the true outcoming of her honest heart; and yet no sooner were they spoken than Maud felt an awful conviction that they had better have been left unsaid; they were more, far more, than anything which had been said on Sutton's part to her. Was it wrong, unwomanly, indecorous, thus to have declared herself and torn the veil from her feelings without waiting for a lover's hand to remove it? The thought rushed in upon her with an agonizing distinctness; the blood came rus.h.i.+ng to her cheeks and forehead; her very hand which Sutton was holding in his own, emaciated and bloodless, was blus.h.i.+ng too. She could say nothing, she could do nothing but stay, helpless, having made her confession, and wait for Sutton to rescue her.

As he lay there, holding her hand in his, clasping it with a firm, tender grasp, which seemed to be expressive of all she wanted, Felicia came into the room. Maud stood there, scarlet, and moved not, nor did Sutton seem inclined that she should.