For his thoughts,Would they were blank sooner than filled with me!
Maud did not exactly get a scolding, but Felicia looked extremely grave. Maud's high spirits were gone in an instant; the excitement which had enabled her to defy propriety hitherto deserted her at the door; the recklessness with which Desvœux always infected her had driven away with him in his mail-phaeton, and left her merely with the disagreeable consciousness of having acted foolishly and wrongly. Felicia knew exactly how matters stood and scarcely said a word. Her silence however was, Maud felt, the bitterest reproach.
'Scold me, scold me, dear,' she cried, the tears starting to her eyes; 'only don't look like that and say nothing!'
'Well,' said Felicia, 'first promise me never again to drive alone with Mr. Desvœux.'
'After all,' suggested Maud, 'it is a mere matter of appearances, and what do they signify?'
'Some matters of appearance,' said Felicia, 'signify very much. Besides, this is something more than that. It is bad enough for you to beseenwith him—what I really care about is yourbeingwith him at all.'
'But,' said Maud, 'he is really very nice: he amuses me so much!'
'Yes,' answered the other, 'he amuses one, but then it always hurts. His fun has a something, I don't know what it is, but which is only just not offensive; and I don't trust him a bit.'
'But,' Maud argued, 'he is great friends with George, is he not?'
'Not great friends,' said Felicia; 'they were at college together, and have worked in the same office for years, and are intimate like schoolboys, and George never says an unkind word of any one; but I do not call them friends at all.'
'No?' said Maud, quite unconvinced, and feeling vexed at Felicia's evident dislike for her companion. 'Well, he's a great friend of mine, so don't abuse him, please.'
'Nonsense, child!' cried Felicia, in a fright. 'You don't know him in the least, or you would not say that. To begin with, he is not quite a gentleman, you know.'
'Not a gentleman!' cried Maud, aghast, 'he seems to me a very fine one.'
'As fine as you please,' said Felicia, 'but not a thorough gentleman. Gentlemen never say things that hurt you or offend your taste. Now with Mr. Desvœux I feel for ever in a fright lest he should say something I dislike; and I know hethinksthings that I dislike.'
'I think you are prejudiced, Felicia. What he says seems to me all very nice.'
'Perhaps it is prejudice,' Felicia answered, 'but I think it all the same. I feel the difference with other people; Major Sutton, for instance.'
'He is your ideal, is he not?' cried Maud, blushing and laughing, for somehow she was beginning to feel that Felicia had designs upon her.
'Yes,' Felicia said in her fervent way; 'he is pure and true and chivalrous to the core: he seems to me made of quite other stuff from men like Mr. Desvœux.'
'He is all made of solid gold,' cried Maud, by this time in a teasing mood, 'and Mr. Desvœux is plaster-of-Paris and putty and pinchbeck, and everything that is horrid. But he is very amusing, dearest Felicia, all the same,and very nice. I will not drive with him any more, of course, if you do not like it.'
Thereupon Maud, in a somewhat rebellious frame of mind, was about to go and take her things off, and was already half-way through the doorwaywhen she turned round and saw Felicia's sweet, serene, refined brow wearing a look of harassment and annoyance, and a sudden pang of remorse struck her that she should, in pure mischief, have been wounding a tender heart and endangering a friendship, compared with which she felt everything else in the world was but a straw in the balance. She rushed back and flung her arms round her companion's neck. 'Dearest Felicia,' she said, 'you know that I would fly to the moon rather than do anything you did not like or make you love me the tiniest atom less. I want to tell you something. You think, I know, that I am falling in love with Mr. Desvœux. Well, dear, I don't care for himthat!'
Thereupon Maud clapped two remarkably pretty hands together in a manner highly expressive of the most light-hearted indifference, and Felicia felt that at any rate she might console herself with the reflection that Maud was as yet quite heart-whole, and that, so far as Desvœux was concerned, Sutton's prospects were not endangered. The certainty, however, that Desvœux had selected Maud for his next flirtation, and that she felt no especial repugnance to the selection, made Felicia doubly anxious that her chosen hero should succeed, and herprotégéebe put beyond the reach of danger as soon as possible. But then Sutton proved provokinglyunamenable to Felicia's kind designs upon him.
His continued bachelorhood was a mystery of which not even she possessed the key. It was not insensibility, for every word, look, and gesture bespoke him more than ordinarily alive to all the charms which sway mankind. It certainly was not that either the wish or the power to please were wanting; nobody was more courteous at heart, or more prompt to show it, or more universally popular: nor could it be want of opportunity; for, though he had been all his life fighting, marching, hurrying on busy missions from one wild outpost to another, on guard for months together at some dangerous spot where treachery or fanaticism rendered an explosion imminent; yet the busiest military life has its intervals of quiet, and the love-making of soldiers is proverbially expeditious. Was it, then, some old romance, some far-off English recollection, some face that had fascinated his boyhood, and forbade him, when a man, to think any other altogether lovely? Could the locket, which formed the single ornament where all else was of Spartan simplicity, have told a tale of one of those catastrophes where love and hope and happiness get swamped in hopeless shipwreck? Was it that, absolutely unknown to both parties, his relations to Felicia filled too large a place in his heart for anyother devotion to find room there? Was it that a widow sister who had been left with a tribe of profitless boys upon her hands, and to whom a remittance of Sutton's pay went every month, had made him think of marriage as an unattainable luxury?
Sutton, at any rate, remained without a wife, and showed no symptom of anxiety to find one. To those venturesome friends who were sufficiently familiar to rally him on the subject he replied, cheerfully enough, that his regiment was his wife and that such a turbulent existence as his would make any other sort of spouse a most inconvenient appendage. Ladies, experienced in the arts of fascination, knew instinctively that he was unassailable, and even the most intrepid and successful gave up the thoughts of conquest in despair. To be a sort of privileged brother to Felicia—to be the children's especial patron and ally—to sit chatting with Vernon far into the night with all the pleasant intimacy of family relationship, seemed to be all the domestic pleasures of which he stood in need. 'As well,' Felicia sighed, 'might some poor maiden waste her love upon the cold front of a marble Jove.'
Such was the man upon whom Felicia had essayed her first attempt at match-making; andsuch the man, too, whom Maud, though she had buried the secret deep in the recesses of her heart—far even out of her own sight—had already begun to love with all the passionate violence of a first attachment.
Free love, free field—we love but while we may:The woods are hushed, their music is no more;The leaf is dead, the yearning past away,New leaf, new life—the days of frost are o'er.New life, new love, to suit the newer day:New loves are sweet as those that went before,Free love, free field—we love but while we may.
Felicia was beginning to find Maud a serious charge, and to be weighed down in spirit by the responsibility involved in her protection. It would have been easy enough to tell her not to flirt; but it was when Maud was unconscious and self-forgetful that she fascinated the most; and how warn her against the exercise of attractions of which she never thought and the existence of which would have been a surprise to her? When, on the lawn, Maud's hat blew off and all her wealth of soft brown hair tumbled about her shoulders in picturesque disarray, and she stood, bright and eager and careless of the disaster, thinking only of the fortunes of the game, but beautiful, as every creature who came near her seemed to feel—when she wasmerriest in the midst of merry talk, and made some saucy speech and then blushed scarlet at her own audacity—when her intensity of enjoyment in things around her bespoke itself in every look and gesture—when the pleasure she gave seemed to infect her being and she charmed others because she was herself in love with life, how warn her against all this? You might as well have preached to an April shower!
Desvœux, too, was not a lover likely to be easily discouraged or to let the grass grow beneath his feet. Both from temperament and policy he pressed upon a position where advantages seemed likely to be gained. Despite the very coolest welcomes Felicia began to find him an inconveniently frequent visitor. An avowed foe to croquet, he appeared with provoking regularity at her Thursday afternoons, when the Dustypore world was collected to enjoy that innocent recreation on the lawn, and somehow he always contrived to be playing in Maud's game. Even at church he put in an unexpected appearance, and sate through a discourse of three-quarters of an hour with a patience that was almost ostentatiously hypocritical. Then he would come and be so bright, natural and amusing, and such good company, that Felicia was frequently not near as chilling to him as she wished and as she felt that the occasion demanded. Hewas unlike anybody that Maud had ever met before. He seemed to take for granted that all existing institutions and customs were radically wrong and that everybody knew it. 'Make love to married women? Of course; why not—what are pretty married women for? Hard upon the husbands? Not a bit; all the unfairness was the other way: the husbands have such tremendous advantages, that it is quite disheartening to fight against such odds: tradition and convention and the natural feminine conservatism all in favour of the husbands; and then the Churchmen, as they always do, taking their part too: it was so mean! No, no; if the husbands cannot take care of themselves they deserve the worst that can befall them.' Or he would say, 'Go to church! Thank you, if Miss Vernon sings in the choir and will say "How d'ye do?" to me as she comes out, I will go and welcome; but otherwise,ça m'embête, as the Frenchman said. I always was a fidget, Miss Vernon, and feel the most burning desire to chatter directly any one tells me to hold my tongue; and then I'm argumentative and hate all the speaking being on one side; and then—and then,—well, on the whole, I rather agree with a friend of mine, who said that he had only three reasons for not going to church—he disbelieved the history, disapproved the morality and disliked the art.'
Maud used to laugh at these speeches; and though she did not like them nor the man who made them, and understood what Felicia meant by saying that Desvœux's fun had about it something which hurt one, it seemed quite natural to laugh at them. She observed too, before long, that they were seldom made when Felicia was by, and that Desvœux, if in higher spirits at Mrs. Vereker's than at the Vernons' house, was also several shades less circumspect in what he said, and divulged tastes and opinions which were concealed before her cousin. More than once, as Felicia came up Desvœux had adroitly turned the conversation from some topic which he knew she would dislike; and Maud, who was guilelessness itself, had betrayed by flushing cheeks and embarrassed manner the fact of something having been concealed.
On the whole, Felicia had never found the world harder to manage or the little empire of her drawing-room less amenable to her sway. Her guests somehow would not be what she wished. Desvœux, though behaving with marked deference to her wishes and always sedulously polite, pleased her less and less, Maud's innocence and impulsiveness, however attractive, frequently produced embarrassments which it required all Felicia's tact to overcome. Her husband, laconic and indolent, gave not the slightest help. Another ground on which she distressedherself (very unnecessarily, could she only have known) was, that Sutton, among other performers on Felicia's little stage, played not at all the brilliant part which she had mentally assigned him. The slightly contemptuous dislike for Desvœux which Felicia had often heard him express, and in which she greatly sympathised, though veiled under a rigid courtesy, was yet incompatible with cordiality, or good cheer; and Desvœux, whose high spirits nothing could put down, often appeared the pleasanter companion of the two. Sutton, in fact, had on more occasions than one come into collision with Desvœux in a manner which a less easy-going and light-hearted man would have found it difficult to forgive. Once, at mess, on a Guest-night, Desvœux had rattled out some offensive nonsense about women, and Sutton had got up and, pushing his chair back unceremoniously, had marched silently away to the billiard-room in a manner which in him, the most chivalrous of hosts, implied a more than ordinarily vehement condemnation. Afterwards Desvœux had been given to understand that, if he came to the mess, he must not, in the Major's presence at any rate, outrage good taste and good morals by any such displays. Then, at another time, there was a pretty young woman—a sergeant's wife—to whom Desvœux showed an inclination to be polite. Sutton had told Desvœux that itmust not be, in a quietly decisive way which he felt there was no disputing, though there was something in the other's authoritative air which was extremely galling. He could not be impertinent to Sutton, and he bore him no deep resentment; but he revenged himself by affecting to regard him as the ordinary 'plunger' of the period—necessary for purposes of defence and a first-rate leader of native cavalry, but socially dull, and a fair object for an occasional irreverence. Sutton's tendency was to be more silent than usual when Desvœux was of the party. Desvœux, on the other hand, would not have let Sutton's or the prophet Jeremiah's presence act as a damper on spirits which were always at boiling-point and a temperament which was for ever effervescing into some more or less indiscreet form of mirth. The result was that the one man quite eclipsed the other and tossed the ball of talk about with an ease and dexterity not always quite respectful to his less agile senior. One night, for instance, Maud, in a sudden freak of fancy, had set her heart upon a round of story-telling. 'I shall come last of course,' she said, 'as I propose it, and by that time it will be bedtime; but, Major Sutton, you must tell us something about some of your battles, please, something very romantic and exciting.'
Sutton was the victim of a morbid modesty as toall his soldiering exploits and would far rather have fought a battle than described it. 'Ah,' he said, 'but our fighting out here is not at all romantic; it is mostly routine, you know, and not picturesque or amusing.'
'Yes, but,' said Maud, 'tell us something that is picturesque or amusing: a hairbreadth escape, or a forlorn hope, or a mine. I love accounts of mines. You dig and dig for weeks, you know, and then you're countermined and hear the enemy digging near you; and then you put the powder in and light the match, and run away, and then—now you go on!'
'And then there is a smash, I suppose,' laughed Sutton; 'but you know all about it better than I. I'm not a gunner—all my work is above-ground.'
'Well, then,' cried Maud, with the eager air of a child longing for a story, 'tell us something above ground. How did you get your Victoria Cross, now?'
Maud, however, was not destined to get a story out of Sutton.
'There was nothing romantic aboutthat, at any rate,' he said. 'It was at Mírabad. There was a cannon down at the end of the lane which was likely to be troublesome, and some of our fellows went down with me and spiked it. That was all!'
'Excuse me, Miss Vernon,' said Desvœux; 'Sutton's modesty spoils an excellent story. Let me tell it as it deserves.' And then he threw himself into a mock-tragical attitude.
'Go on,' said Maud, eagerly.
'The street-fighting at Mírabad,' said Desvœux, with a declamatory air, 'was the fiercest of the whole campaign——'
'What campaign?' asked Sutton.
'The Mírabad campaign,' replied the other, with great presence of mind, 'in eighteen hundred and—, I forget the year—but never mind.'
'Yes, never mind the year,' said Maud; 'go on.'
'The enemy fought us inch by inch, and lane by lane; from every window poured a little volley; every house had to be stormed, hand-to-hand we fought our way, and so on. You know the sort of thing. Then, as we turned into the main street, puff! a great blaze and a roar, and a dense cloud of smoke, and smash came a cannon-ball into the midst of us—five or six men were knocked over—Tomkin's horse lost a tail, Brown had his nose put out of joint, Smith was blown up to a second-storey window—something must be done. But I am tiring you?'
'No, no,' cried Maud, 'I like it—go on.'
'Well, let me see. Oh yes, something must bedone. To put spurs to my Arab's sides, to cut my way down through the astonished mob, to leap the barricade (it was only eight feet high, and armed with achevaux de frise), to sabre the six gunners who were working the battery, was, I need hardly say, the work of a moment. Then—a crushing blow from behind, and I remember nothing more, till, a month later, I found myself, weak and wounded, in bed; and a lovely nun gave me some gruel, and told me that Mírabad was ours! "Where am I?" I exclaimed, for I felt so confused, and the nun looked so angelic, that I fancied I must have gone to heaven. My companion, however, soon brought me to earth by—et cætera et cætera et cætera.'
'That is the sort of thing which happens in "Charles O'Malley,"' said Sutton; 'only Lever would have put Tippoo Sahib or Tantia Topee on the other side of the barricade, and I should have had to cut his head off and slaughter all his bodyguard before I got out again.'
'And then,' said Maud, 'the nun would have turned out to be some one.'
'But,' said Desvœux, 'how do you know that the nun didnotturn out to be some one, if only I had chosen to fill up thoseet cæteras?'
'Well,' said Sutton, who apparently had hadenough of the joke 'that part of the story I will tell you myself. The nun was a male one—my good friend Boldero, who took me into his quarters, looked after me for six weeks, till I got about again, and was as good a nurse as any one could wish for.'
'I should have liked to be the nun,' Maud cried, moved by a sudden impulse which brought the words out as the thought flashed into her mind, and turning crimson, as was her wont, before they were out of her mouth.
'That is very kind of you,' said Sutton, standing up, and defending her, as Maud felt, from all eyes but his own; 'and you would have been a very charming nurse and cured me, I dare say, even faster than Boldero. And now, Desvœux, go and sing us a song as afinaleto your story.
Maud knew perfectly well that this was a mere diversion to save her from the confusion of a thoughtless speech and turn Desvœux's attention from her. It seemed quite natural and of a piece with Sutton's watchful, sympathetic care to give her all possible pleasure and to shield her from every shade of annoyance. A thrill of gratitude shot through her. There was a charm, a fascination, in protection so prompt, so delicate, so kind, compared with which all other attractions seemedfaint indeed. That evening Maud went to bed with her heart in a tumult, and wept, she knew not wherefore, far into the night—only again and again the tears streamed out—the outcome, though as yet she knew it not, of that purest of all pure fountains, an innocent first love.
However marred, and more than twice her years,Scarred with an ancient sword-cut on the cheek,And bruised and bronzed,—she lifted up her eyes,And loved him with that love which was her doom.
Summer was beginning to come on apace; not summer as English people know it, the genial supplement to a cold and watery spring, with just enough heat about it to thaw the chills of winter out of one; but summer in its fiercest and cruellest aspect, breathing sulphurous blasts, glowing with intolerable radiance, begirt with whirlwinds of dust—the unsparing despot of a sultry world. The fields, but a few weeks ago one great 'waveless plain' of ripening corn, had been stripped of their finery, and were now lying brown and blistering in the sun's eye. The dust lay deep on every road and path and wayside shrub, and seized every opportunity of getting itself whirled into miniature siroccos. More than once Maud and Felicia had been caught, not in a sweet May shower,stealing down amid bud and blossom and leaving the world moist and fresh and fragrant behind it, but in rough, turbulent clouds of rushing sand, which shut out the sunshine and replaced the bright blue atmosphere with the lurid glare of an eclipse. Felicia's flowers had begun to droop, nor could all her care rescue the fresh green of her lawn from turning to a dingy brown. Already prudent housekeepers were busy with preparations against the evil day so near at hand. Verandahs were guarded with folds of heavy matting, to shut out the intolerable light that would have forced a way through any ordinary barrier; windows were replaced by fragrant screens of cuscus-grass, through which the hot air passing might lose a portion of its sting; and one morning, when Maud came out, she found a host of labourers carrying a huge winnowing-machine to one side of the house, the object of which was, Vernon informed her, to manufacture air cool enough for panting Britons to exist in.
Day by day some piece of attire was discarded as too intolerably heavy for endurance. The morning ride became a thing of the past, and even a drive at sunset too fatiguing to be quite enjoyable. Maud felt that she had never—not even when Miss Goodenough had locked her up for a whole summer afternoon, to learn her 'duty to herneighbour'—known what exhaustion really meant till now.
The children were turning sadly white, and Felicia began to be anxious for their departure to the Hills. Maud would of course go with them, and Vernon was to follow in a couple of months, when he could get his leave. Much as she hated leaving her husband, Felicia was on the whole extremely glad to go. The state of things at home disturbed her. Maud's outspoken susceptibility, Desvœux's impressionable and eager temperament, Sutton's unconsciousness of what she wanted him to do—the combination was one from which it was a relief in prospect to escape to the refuge of a new and unfamiliar society. Felicia's buoyant and hopeful nature saw in the promised change of scene the almost certainty that somehow or other matters would seem less unpromising when looked at from the summits of Elysium.
For Elysium accordingly they started. Three primitive vehicles, whose battered sides and generally faded appearance spoke eloquently of the dust, heat and bustle in which their turbulent existence was for the most part engaged, were dragged one afternoon, each by a pair of highly rebellious ponies, with a vast deal of shouting, pushing, and execrating, into a convenient position before the hall-door, and their tops loaded forthwith with thatmiscellaneous and profuse supply of baggage which every move in India necessarily involves, and which it is the especial glory of Indian servants to preserve in undiminished amplitude. Suffice it to say, that it began with trunks and cradles, went on with native nurses, and concluded with a goat. Vernon sat in the verandah, smoking a cheroot with stoical composure and interfering only when some pyramid of boxes seemed to be assuming proportions of perilous altitude. He was to travel with them, establish them at Elysium, and ride down sixty miles again by night—a performance of which no Dustyporean thought twice. Maud, to whom one of the creaking fabrics was assigned in company with the two little girls, found that (the feat of clambering in and establishing herself once safely accomplished) the journey promised to be not altogether unluxurious. The Vernons' servants were experienced and devoted, and every detail of the journey was carefully foreseen. The interior of the carriage, well furnished with mattresses and pillows, made an excellent bed; a little army of servants gathered round to proffer aid and to give the Sahibs a passing salaam; friendly carriages kept rolling in to say 'Good-bye.' Sutton, who had been kept away on business, galloped in at the last moment and seemed too much occupied in saying farewell to Felicia to havemuch time for other thoughts. 'Good-bye,' he said, in the most cheery tone, as he came to Maud's carriage, and 'Good-bye, Uncle Jem!' shouted the little girls, waving their adieux as best they might under the deep awning; and then, after a frantic struggle for independent action on the part of the ponies, they were fairly off and spinning along the great, straight, high road which stretches in unswerving course through so many hundred miles of English rule.
The little girls were in the greatest glee, and busy in signalling Uncle Jem for as long as possible. Maud, somehow, did not share their mirth: for the first time Sutton had seemed unkind, or near enough unkind, to give her pain. This ending of the pleasant time seemed to her an event which friendship ought not quite to have ignored. She looked back upon many happy hours, the brightest of her life; and the person who had made them bright evidently did not share her sentimental views about them in the least. Partings, Maud's heart told her, must surely be always sad; yet Sutton's voice had no tone of sadness in it. 'Stay—stay a little!' she could have cried with Imogen,
Were you but riding forth to air yourself,Such parting were too petty—
True, they were to meet in a few weeks; but yet—but yet!
'You've dot a big tear on your cheek,' said one of her companions, with the merciless frankness of childhood.
'Have I?' said Maud. 'Then it must be the dust that has gone into my eyes. How hot it is! Come, let us have some oranges!'
By this time evening was fast closing in, and Maud's cheeks were soon safe from further observation. Before long her and her companions' eyes were fast closed by that kindly hand which secures to the most troubled of mankind the boon that one-third, at any rate, of existence shall be spent in peace. When they awoke the stars were shining bright, but the sky was already ruddy with the coming dawn, and Maud could see the giant mountain forms looming, cold and majestical, in the grey air above them. They alighted at a little wayside inn, and found delicious cups of tea (the Indians' invariable morning luxury) awaiting them. Maud had sufficiently recovered her spirits to make a bold inroad on the bread and butter.
A mist hung about the country round, and it was a delightful, home-like sensation to shrink once again, as the cold mountain blasts came swirling down, throwing the wreaths of vapour here and there, and recalling the delicious reminiscence of aNovember fog. In a few moments the horses were ready, the children and nurses packed into palanquins, and the upward march began.
These morning expeditions in the mountains are indescribably exhilarating. At every step you breathe a fresher atmosphere and feel a new access of life, vigour and enjoyment. Sweet little gushes of pure cold air meet you at the turnings of the road and bid you welcome. The vegetation around is rich, profuse and—long-forgotten charm—sparkling everywhere with dew. There has been a thunderstorm in the night, and the mountain-sides are streaming still: little cataracts come tumbling clamorously beside your path; below you a muddy stream is foaming and brawling and collecting the tribute of a hundred torrents to swell the great flood that spreads away miles wide in the plain, and glitters in the far horizon. As the path rises you get a wider view, and presently the great champaign lies below, flashing and blinking in the morning's rays. Miles away overhead a tiny white thread shows the road along which in an hour or two you will be travelling, and a little speck at the summit, the cottage where your mid-day rest will be. Behind you lie heat, monotony, fatigue, hot hours in sweltering courts, weary strugglings through the prose of officialdom, the tiresome warfare against sun and dust; around you and above,it is all enchanted ground; the air is full of pleasant sounds and sweet invisible influences; the genius of the woods breathes poetry about the scene, the mountain nymphs are dancing on yonder crest, and Puck and Oberon and Titania haunting in each delicious nook. Well may the first Englishman, who toiled panting hitherwards from the reeking realms below, have fancied himself half-way to Paradise and have christened the crowning heights Elysium. Maud, at any rate, leaving the rest of the party behind, rode forward in an ecstasy of enjoyment.
They spent the hot hours of the day in a sweet resting-place. Years afterwards the calmness of that pleasant day used to live in Maud's recollection; and though many scenes of bustle and trouble and fevered excitement had come between herself and it, yet the very thought of it used to soothe her. 'I have you, dear,' she would say to Felicia, 'in my mind's picture-gallery, set in a dozen different frames—scenes in which you played a part—and this is my favourite. I love you best of all in this; it cools and gladdens me to look at it.'
The scene, in fact, was a lovely one. On one side rose a vast amphitheatre of granite, rugged, solemn, precipitous; downwards, along the face of this, a careful eye might trace from point to pointthe little path up which the party were to make to-morrow's march. This mountain ridge separated them from the Elysian hills, and seemed to frown at them like some giant bulwark reared to guard the snowy solitudes beyond from human intrusion. On the other hand, fold upon fold, one sweet outline melting into another—here kissed by soft wreaths of cloud, here glittering clear and hard in the flood of light—stretched all the minor ranges, along which for fifty miles the traveller to the Elysians prepares himself for the final sublimity that lies beyond. In front, where the mountains parted, lay sweltering in the horizon, and immeasurably below them, the great Indian plain, spread out as far as eye could follow it—a dim, glistening, monotonous panorama—varied only when occasionally a great river, swollen with the melting snows above, spread out for miles across the plain and twinkled like an inland lake as the sun's rays fell upon it—and the whole suggested intolerable heat.
The hillside around was covered thick with forest growth of tropical luxuriance. On the heights above, a clump of rhododendrons glowed with a rosy glory; here, on a rugged precipice, a storm-stricken deodar spread its vast flat branches as if to brave the storm and the lightning strokes such as had before now seamed its bark. The pathbelow was overhung with a dense growth of bamboo, each stem a miracle of grace, and growing at last to an inextricable jungle in the deep bosom of the mountain gorge. Mountain creepers in fantastic exuberance tossed wildly about the crag's side or hung festooning the roadside with a gorgeous natural tapestry. A hundred miles away the everlasting snow-clad summits, which had stood out so clear in the grey morning, when they first emerged from their couch of clouds, were fading into faintness as the bright daylight poured about them. Just below the spot on which their camp was pitched there was a little spring and a drinking-place, and constant relays of cattle came tinkling up the road and rested in the tall rocks' shadow for a drink, while the weary drivers sat chatting on the edge. Every now and then weird beings from the Interior, whose wild attire and unkempt aspect bespoke them as belonging to some aboriginal tribe, were to be seen staggering along under huge logs of timber felled in the great forests above and now brought down to the confines of civilisation for human use. It was a new page in Nature's grand picture-book, and full of charm. Maud, who was always very much alive to the outer world, was greatly impressed. Her nerves were over-wrought. She took Felicia's hand and seemed to be in urgent need of imparting her excited mood to some one.
'How beautiful this is!' she cried; 'how solemn, how solitary! Already all the world seems to be something unsubstantial, and the mountains the only reality.'
Felicia threw herself back upon the turf and gave a great sigh of relief.
'I love these delicious gusts of air,' she said, 'fresh and pure from the snow-tops.'
'Yes,' cried Maud; 'how serene and grand they look! No wonder the Alpine tourists go crazy about them and break their necks in clambering about them, bewildered with pleasure:
'"How faintly flushed, how phantom fair,Was Monte Rosa hanging there!A thousand shadowy pencilled valleysAnd snowy dells in a golden air!"
'And here is a whole horizon of Monte Rosas! I should like to stop a month here and devote myself to sketching.'
While they were chatting in the shade, a native lad, who had been standing on a neighbouring knoll, came running down to a picketed pony and began hurriedly to prepare him for departure.
'What Sahib's horse?' Vernon asked with that imperative inquisitiveness that the superior race allows itself in India.
'Boldero Sahib,' replied the breathless groom; and before many minutes more 'Boldero Sahib'himself began to be apparent on the opposite hillside.
'The impetuous Boldero,' cried Vernon, 'riding abroad, redressing human wrongs, and doing his best, as usual, to break his neck, as if there could by any possibility be anything worth hurrying about in the plains below. Now, Maud, you will see a real philanthropist in flesh and blood.'
Presently the tiny distant object had shaped itself into a man and horse, and in a quarter of an hour more Boldero came clattering into the yard, had slung himself out of the saddle in a moment, and was already preparing to mount his new horse, when he discovered the Vernons and was introduced to Maud.
He seemed to have broken like a whirlwind into the repose of the party. His servants were evidently well experienced in their master's movements; the saddle had been speedily shifted and the fresh horse was already ready for a start. Boldero drank off a great beaker of cold water. Maud's first impression was that he looked extremely handsome and extremely hot, and in better spirits and a greater hurry than she had ever seen any one in in her life. Vernon, after first greetings, had speedily resumed his attitude of profound repose and evidently had no intention of being infected with bustle.
'Come, Boldero,' he said, 'do, for goodness' sake, send away your horse and wait here and have some lunch, instead of flying off in such a madman's hurry. India, which has already waited several thousand years for your arrival to reform her, can, no doubt, dispense with you for twenty minutes more; and fortune does not send good meetings every day.'
'Yes, Mr. Boldero,' said Felicia, 'and I have just been making a salad, which I am delighted you have arrived to admire; and I daresay you have half-a-dozen new ferns to show me.'
'I am pledged to be at Dustypore to-morrow, and ought to be ten miles further on my way by this time,' said Boldero. 'However, there is a glorious moon all through the night, and this delightful Doongla Gully seems set as a snare to beguile one into loitering by the way. What a sweet little oasis it is among all the gloom of the mountains!'
'Now, Maud,' said Vernon, 'I'll give you an idea of what the virtuous civilian does. He rides all night, he works all day.'
'Or rather,' said Boldero, who had as much dislike as the rest of the army of good fellows to being the topic of conversation, 'by night he dances, by day he plays at Badminton. My visit to the Viceroy was nothing except for the solemnity of the affair.'
'Well,' answered Vernon, 'and now you come just in time to give my cousin a lesson in water-colours. You must know, Maud, that Mr. Boldero carried off the prize at Elysium for a mountain-sketch last year. Now, Boldero, be good-natured and tell her the mystery of your sunset skies, which, though I deny their fidelity, are, I must admit, as beautiful as the real ones.'
'Will you?' said Maud, her eyes flashing out and her colour coming at the mere thought of what she especially desired.
'Will I not?' Boldero said, with alacrity. 'What pleasanter afternoon's work could fortune send one?' And thereupon Maud's sketch-book was produced.
'Did you ever see such a daub?' she cried. 'It looks worse now it is dry than when I did it. It is so provoking! I feel the scenes—I have them all beautifully in my mind, and then come those horrid, hard, blotchy heaps. Just look at this odious mountain! Alas! alas!' Maud went on ruthlessly blotting out her morning's work, which, to tell the truth, did not deserve immortality.
'You made it a little too blue,' said her tutor. 'See, now; I will tone it down for you in a minute.'
'No, no,' cried Maud, 'let us have somethingfresh, that I have not desecrated by a caricature. Here, this in front of us will be lovely.'
'See,' said Boldero; 'we will have that nice bit of dark shade with that ragged deodar, and that jolly little cloud overhead.'
Maud's face glowed with pleasure, and her companion's last thought of getting in time to Dustypore disappeared.
Before the sketch was done the evening shadows were already fast climbing up the mountain's side; the valley's short day was over; cold masses of vapour were gathering about the crags; and the moon, that was to light the traveller through his night-long journey, was sailing, pale and ghostlike, overhead. Boldero waved them a last farewell as he disappeared round the opposite hillside, and seemed to Maud's excited imagination like some knight-errant riding down into the gloom.
Their aches, hopes,Their pangs of love, with other incident throes,That nature's fragile vessel doth sustainIn life's uncertain voyage——
Boldero was one of the Queen's good bargains. His mind teemed with schemes for the regeneration of mankind. Disappointment could not damp his hopefulness, nor difficulty cool his zeal; he was an enthusiast for improvement and the firmest believer in its possibility. Against stupidity, obstinacy, the blunders of routine, officialvis inertiæ, he waged a warfare which, if not always discreet, was sufficiently vigorous to plague his opponents: 'See,' cries Mr. Browning's philanthropist,
I have drawn a pattern on my nailAnd I will carve the world fresh after it—
Boldero's nails were absolutely covered with new patterns, and the little bit of the world on which he was able to operate was continually being carvedinto some improved condition. Nature having gifted him with courage, high spirit, resource, inventiveness, enterprise, and—precious gift!—administrative effectiveness, and Fortune and the Staff Corps having guided his steps from a frontier regiment to a civilian appointment in the Sandy Tracts, his importance was speedily appreciated. Wherever he looked at the machinery about him he saw things out of gear and working badly, and his mind was forthwith haunted with devices to improve them. He saw material, money, time wasted; wheel catching against wheel and producing all sorts of bad results by the friction; office coming to dead-lock with office; one blundering head knocking against another; wants to which no one attended; wrongs which no one avenged; sufferings to which no hand brought relief. Some men see such things and acquiesce in them as inevitable or relieve themselves by cynical remarks on the best of all possible worlds. Boldero felt it all as a personal misfortune and was incapable of acquiescence.
Thus he was for ever discovering grievances, which, when once discovered, no one could deny. His reports to Government sent a little shudder through the Chief Secretary's soul. The Salt Board regarded him with especial disfavour. Cockshaw cursed him for the long correspondence he involved.Fotheringham thought him dangerous, rash, Quixotic. Even Blunt accorded him but a scanty approval, Blunt's view being always the rough, commonplace and unsentimental, and Boldero's projects involving a constant temptation to expenditure. But the Agent was a finer judge of character than any of them, and his keen eye speedily detected Boldero's rare merits and his fitness for responsible employment. Boldero had more than justified the Agent's hopes, and accordingly moved rapidly up from one post to another.
He was now acting as chief magistrate of the district next to Dustypore. Here his energetic temperament had the fullest play. He built, he planted, he drained. Sunrise found him ever in the saddle. He drove his Municipal Committee wild with projects of reform—water-supply, vaccination, canals, tanks, and public gardens. He fulminated the most furious orders, plunged into all sorts of controversies, was always waging war in some quarter or other, and manufactured for himself even a hotter world than Nature had provided ready-made. He offended the doctors by invading the hospitals and pointing out how the patients were killed by defective arrangements; the Chaplain, by objecting to the ventilation of the church and the length of the sermons; the Educational Department by a savage tirade on the schools, and the Generalin command by a bold assault on the drainage of the barracks. Altogether a bustling, joyous, irrepressible sort of man, and, as the Agent knew, a perfect treasure in a land where energy and enthusiasm are hard to keep at boiling heat, and where to get a thing done, despite the piles of official correspondence it gets buried under, is a result as precious as it is difficult of achievement.
When he first came to India he had been for a couple of years in Sutton's regiment, and at the time of Sutton's illness the two had almost lived together. The intimacy so formed had ripened into a cordial friendship, and Boldero had thus become a not unfrequent visitor at the Vernons' house, where, though her husband pronounced him an enthusiastic bore, Felicia ever accorded him a kindly welcome.
He had now, however, carried away with him that which speedily cured him of enthusiasm, or, rather, forbade him to feel enthusiastic about anything but one. With his accustomed earnest precipitancy he had fallen deeply in love with Maud the first moment he had seen her, and all his afternoon had been spent in that paradise which springs into sudden existence beneath a happy lover's feet. Maud had been delighted with him for being so handsome, so good-natured, and the latest comer. And, then, was not he Sutton's friend, whose careand kindness had brought him from Death's door? Maud thought of this with a gush of interest and rained the sweetest and most gracious smiles upon him in consequence. Those bright looks pursued him down the mountain's side, through the livelong night, and next day into court and office and all the hundred businesses of a busy official's day. So bright were they, even in recollection, that all the brightness seemed to have faded out of everything else. The details of his District, lately so full of interest, had become the dreariest routine. Improvements which, when last he thought of them, seemed of vital importance, faded away into uselessness or impossibility. A great pile of papers stood, ranged upon the study table, inviting disposal. A week ago Boldero would have fallen upon them, like a glutton on some favourite repast, and driven through them with alacrity and enjoyment. Now he had not the heart to touch them. A week ago the plains, with all their drawbacks, were pleasanter far, for a healthy man, than the indolent comforts and dull frivolities of a Hill station. Now, alas! Elysium was the only place where life—any life, that is, which deserved the name—was to be had.
Meanwhile, the object of his devotion was conscious only of having had a very pleasant afternoon and added one more to an already ample list of agreeable acquaintances. By the time she arrivedat Elysium next day, Boldero had faded into indistinctness, and his chance meeting with them figured in Maud's thoughts only as one, and not the most striking, incident of a journey which had been to her full of things new, interesting and picturesque.
For they lie beside their nectar, and their bolts are hurledFar below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curledRound their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world.
The conquering races, who in one age or another have owned the fair plains of Hindostan, have successively made the discovery that there are portions of the year when their magnificent possession had best be contemplated from a respectful distance. Some monarchs retired for the summer to the exquisite Cashmir valleys: others to cool plateaux in the far interior. The latest administrators of the country have solved the problem by perching, through the hot season, on the summits of a craggy range, and by performing the functions of Government at an altitude of 7000 feet above the sea.
The fact that the highest officials in the country, having a large amount of hard work to do, should prefer to do it in an invigorating mountain atmosphere, rather than amid swamps, steam and fever in the plains below, is not, of course, surprising. Theonly matter of regret is that the obvious advantages, public and private, of an European climate for half the year can, from the nature of things, be enjoyed by so tiny a fraction of the official world. As it is, the annual removal of the Government to its summer quarters gives rise too often to a little outburst of unreasonable, though not unnatural jealousy; and Indian journalists, who are necessarily closely pinned to the plains, are never tired of inveighing against the 'Capua' of the British rule. The truth is, however, that if Hannibal's soldiers had worked half as hard at Capua as English officials do at Elysium, nothing but good could have resulted from their sojourn in that agreeable resting-place. Of the holiday-makers it may safely be said that, in nine cases out of ten, they have earned, by long months of monotonous, laborious, and often solitary life, a good right to all the refreshment of body and soul that a brief interval of cool breezes, new faces, and an amusing society can give them. The 'Jack' of the Civil Service is often a dull boy because the sternrégimeof 'all work and no play' is too rigorously enforced upon him. Let no one therefore grudge him his few weeks of rest and merry-making, or mock at the profuse homage with which the goddess Terpsichore is adored by her modern votaries on the Himalayan heights.
Elysium, indeed, enchants one on the first approach.You clamber for weary miles up a long, blazing ascent, where even the early morning sun seems to sting and pierce. As the road turns, you enter suddenly a sweet depth of shade formed by thick growths of ilex and rhododendron, from the breaks in which you look out at ease upon the blazing day beyond. Dotted all about the road, above and below, perched on every convenient rock or level ridge of soil, or sometimes built up on a framework of piles, are the homes of the Elysians; not, alas! the ideals which the imagination would conceive of the abodes of the blest, but seaside lodgings, of a by no means first-rate order, with precipices, clouds and rain, instead of sea. Presently the road fails at a great chasm in the mountain-side, and the horses' feet clatter over a frail-looking structure of planks and scaffolding, which clings to the mountain's edge. This is merely a landslip, an event too common even to be observed. Each heavy rainfall, however, washes an appreciable fraction of the Elysian summits to the depths below and leaves the craggy sides barer and steeper than ever. Then, emerging from the ilex grove, the traveller passes to a little Mall, where the fashionable world assembles for mutual edification, and the tide of life, business and gaiety flows fast and strong.
There is something in the air of the place which bespeaks the close neighbourhood of the Sovereignrule, the august climax of the official hierarchy. Servants, brilliant in scarlet and gold, are hurrying hither and thither. Here some Rajah, petty monarch of the surrounding ranges or the fat plains below, attended with his mimic court and tatterdemalion cavalry, is marching in state to pay his homage to the 'great Lord Sahib.' Here some grand lady, whose gorgeous attire and liveried retinue bespeak her sublime position, is constrained to bate her greatness to the point of being carried—slung like the grapes of Eschol—on a pole, and borne on sturdy peasants' shoulders to pay a round of the ceremonious visits which etiquette enjoins upon her. Officers, secretaries, aides-de-camp come bustling by on mountain-ponies, each busy on his own behest. The energetic army of morning callers are already in the field. A dozen palanquins, gathered at Madame Fifini's, the Elysian 'Worth,' announce the fact that as many ladies are hard at work within, running up long-bills for their husbands and equipping themselves for conquest at the next Government House 'At home.' Smartly-furnished shops glitter with all the latest finery of Paris and London, and ladies go jogging along on their bearers' shoulders, gay enough for a London garden-party in July. In the midst of all,—the solid basis on which so huge a structure of business, pomp and pleasure is erected,—clumps the BritishPrivate, brushed, buttoned and rigid, with a loud, heavy tread, which contrasts strangely with the noiselessly moving crowd around him and bespeaks his conscious superiority to a race of beings whom, with a lordly indifference to minute ethnological distinctions, he designates collectively as 'Moors.'
Some servants were waiting at the entrance of the place to conduct the Vernons to their home, and before many minutes the travellers were standing in the balcony, looking out on the steep slopes of green foliage below them and the noble snow-ranges which bounded the entire horizon. Maud soon rushed off to explore the house; and Felicia made her way to the garden, to see how many of last summer's plants the winter had spared to her. Presently she came in, with dew-bedrenched sleeves and gloves and an armful of sparkling roses, geraniums and heliotropes, and deposited them joyously in a heap on the table.
'There,' she cried, 'is my first fruit-offering. Bury your face in them, George, and do homage, as I have been doing, to the Genius of the Hills! Come here, babies, and be crowned.'
Felicia knelt down and stuck the children's hair full of flowers, till each looked as gaudy as a little Queen of May. Her husband came and stood over them and watched the scene.
'Now,' he said, 'Felicia, you ought to be quitehappy—you have your children and your flowers to adore at once.'
'And my husband,' said Felicia, looking up at him, with her sweet, radiant smile. 'And, oh dear, how I wish you had not to go down again to-night! Do you know, George, I mind each separation worse than the last? Next summer we will send the children straight to "The Gully," and we will stay comfortably together.'
Maud came back in the highest spirits. 'Look here,' she said, showing a handful of snow, and fingers red and blue with unaccustomed cold—'how nice it is to feel it once again! And what nectar the air is! And, George, actually, strawberries!'
'Yes,' said Vernon, 'and cream, and plenty of both. Is it not enchanting?'
'You shall have some flowers too, dear,' cried Maud, who seldom missed an opportunity of petting Felicia and letting her love run out in some pretty act or speech. 'See, this rose was made for me to deck you with. Does she not look charming, George?'
'Hush!' said George; 'we shall make her and the little girls too as vain as possible. Now, as I suppose nobody means to crown me, I vote that you go and get ready for breakfast, and I will prepare Maud a plate of strawberries-and-cream, by way of beginning the feast.'
That morning lived ever afterwards in Maud's thoughts as one of the times when the world looked brightest to her. Everything was full of excitement, interest and keen pleasure. If from time to time a thought of Sutton set her heart beating, it was more that she had learnt to worship him as an ideal of all that was most charming in man than that his absence cost her any serious regret. It had given her a pang to part and to feel how little of a pang it had given him. He had been almost unconscious of her departure; he had been certainly quite, quite indifferent to it. Such insensibility was a little speck on the otherwise spotless perfection; but Maud's heart was too light for this to weigh it down for long. A long, charming vista of enjoyment was opening before her. Half-a-dozen people, she knew, were awaiting her arrival with impatience and thought Elysium not quite Elysium till she was there. Before the morning was over there would come, so her prophetic soul announced, kind familiar faces, all the brighter for her presence, with all sorts of delightful projects, often talked of beforehand, now to come into actual fruition; rides, picnics, dances, theatricals, and (thrilling thought!) a fancy ball, at which Maud had already found herself twenty times whirling in anticipated valses, each more enchanting than the last. Who could contemplate such a prospect withequanimity? or whose heart have room for gloomy thoughts with so many bright dreams to crush them out?
Then presently there came a note from Mrs. Vereker, bidding her a cordial welcome and threatening her high displeasure if Maud's first visit was not to her. To Mrs. Vereker's accordingly they went, and found her in a little cottage, romantically stuck into a cleft in the rocks, with a cataract of honeysuckle tumbling all about a wooden porch, and a view of the mountains which even her adorers, burning to behold herself, were yet constrained to stop and look at. There was a little court, with a wooden railing to guard the edge and geraniums blazing all about it, where a succession of enthusiasts' ponies waited while their owners did homage within. Through that convenient cranny in the foliage the deity, unseen, could spy the approaching visitor and decide betimes whether she would be 'at home' or not. Now she was unquestionably at home and met them at the door with merry greetings. She led them in and showed them her drawing-room, the very home of innocence and refined propriety. 'My husband does not wish me to mope when he is away,' she said, with a charming simple smile; and, to do her justice, in this respect, at any rate, she obeyed his wishes. If the loveliest, freshest bonnets, the daintiestgloves, the most picturesque mountain costumes, a succession of bewildering head-dresses, could rescue a widowed soul from melancholy, Mrs. Vereker had no right to gloom. Nor was hers the only nature that was cheered, for all mankind conspired to assure her that she was the most bewitching of her sex. Turn where she would she found a host of willing courtiers, who thought their assiduous services well rewarded with a single smile. She looked at the world through her beautiful purple eyes, and saw it prostrate at her feet.
Even Felicia was captivated, despite her own convictions; and Vernon alone of the party declared her a little ogling hypocrite, and pronounced himself unable to understand how any one could think her even pretty.