——In the glance,A moment's glance, of meeting eyes,His heart stood still in sudden trance—He trembled with a sweet surprise;All in the waning light she stood,The star of perfect womanhood.That summer eve his heart was light,With lighter step he trod the ground,And life was fairer in his sight,And music was in every sound:He bless'd the world where there could beSo beautiful a thing as she.
The western horizon was all ablaze, and the sun's rays came slanting through the gloom of the Rhododendron Forest, as Sutton and his companion rode down the mountain-side towards the plains.
Did Felicia's wishes and hopes breathe a subtle influence around them, which drew their hearts together and opened to each the destiny which awaited it? Did the sweet, serious look with which she bade Sutton farewell speak to his eye, for years accustomed to watch for her unspoken commands, of something in which he had failed to please her,to understand her desire, to do or to be exactly what she wanted? Was there some shade of reserve, constraint, dissatisfaction in Felicia's manner that aroused his attention and led him to explore his companion with an anxious curiosity which usually he was far from feeling? Or was it something in Maud, a causeless embarrassment, a scarcely concealed trepidation, a manner at once sad and excited, the flush that, as Desvœux had told her in the morning, gave her cheek more than its accustomed beauty, which, before they had been ten minutes on the road, had sent such a flash of intelligence through Sutton's being,—which came upon him like an inspiration, clear, cogent, indisputable, and only curious in not having been understood before?
Be that as it may, Sutton suddenly found himself in an altogether different mood and in altogether different company to that which he had figured to himself for the first stage of his journey. Maud had all at once become supremely interesting and infinitely more beautiful than he had ever yet conceived her. She was no longer the mere excitable, romantic child, whose nascent feelings and ideas might be watched with half-amused curiosity, but a being whose brightness and innocence were allied with the most exquisite pathos, and who was ready to cast at the first worthy shrine all the wealth of an impulsive, ardent, tender nature. As for Maud,she was too excited, too profoundly moved, too much the prey of feelings of which she knew neither the true measure nor the full force, to be able to analyse her thoughts or to be completely mistress of herself.
Dissimulation was an art of which life had not as yet taught her the necessity, or experience familiarised the use. The unconscious hypocrisy with which some natures from the very outset, perhaps all natures later on in life, veil so much of themselves from the outer world, had never occurred to her as a possible or necessary means of self-protection in an existence which till now had been too simple, childish and innocent to call for concealment. She fixed her clear, honest eyes on her interrogator, whoever he was, be the question what it might, and he knew that it was the truth, pure, simple and complete, that she was telling. Each phase of feeling wrote itself on her expression almost before Maud herself had realised it, certainly long before she knew enough about it to attempt to conceal it from the world. The feeble attempts at deception, which the accidents of life had from time to time forced upon her, had proved such absolute failures as merely to warn her of the uselessness of everything of the kind, even if it had occurred to her to wish to deceive. Her courtesy was the courtesy of sincerity, and she had none other to offer. Those whom she disliked, accordingly, pronounced her rude, and it was fortunatethat they were very few in number. Her friends, on the contrary, and their name was legion, read, and knew that they read, to the very bottom of her heart. Now, for the first time in her life, she was distinctly conscious of a secret which it would be misery and humiliation to divulge, but for the custody of which neither nature nor art had supplied her with any effectual means. Silence was the natural resource, but silence is sometimes more eloquent than speech. Whether she spoke or whether she held her peace, Maud felt a terrified conviction that she would betray herself, should it occur to Sutton to pay the least attention to her state of mind.
'There,' Sutton said, pointing to a range of hills just visible in the faint horizon, 'there is the Black Mountain, and there lies the pass where we shall be marching in a day or two. It is such a grand, wild place! I have been along it so often, but have never had leisure to paint it. This time, however, I hope to get a sketch.'
'Tell me,' Maud said, 'the sort of expeditions these are, and what happens, and what kind of danger you are all in.'
'I will tell you,' said her companion. 'They are hot, troublesome, inglorious promenades, over country which lames a great many of our horses and harasses our men. We burn some miserablehuts, destroy a few acres of mountain crops and drive off such cattle as the people have not had time to drive away themselves, and, in fact, do all that soldiering admits of in the absence of that most important ingredient of a brilliant campaign, an enemy:he, unluckily, is invariably over the hills and far away some hours previous to our arrival.'
Maud felt this account to be on the whole reassuring: 'How soon,' she asked, 'will you come back again?'
'Before you have time to miss me,' said her companion; 'it is an affair literally of days. Besides, Elysium, you will find, is all the pleasanter for having its crowd of soldiers somewhat thinned.'
'It will not be the pleasanter to us,' said Maud, 'for your being gone.'
Her tone took Sutton greatly by surprise.
'You are having a happy time here, are you not?' he asked. 'It seems to me a pleasant sort of life.'
'Yes,' said Maud, emphatically, 'the pleasantest, happiest I have ever known. All life has been bright to me; but there are things in it that hurt one, for all that.'
'Yes?' said Sutton, with a kind inquiry in his tones, for he had never thought of Maud but as the pretty incarnation of enjoyment; 'well, tell me the things which hurt you.'
'The things that have hurt me the most,' said Maud with a sudden impulse of outspokenness, 'are partings. They grieve me, even though I know that they are no real cause for grief. I minded leaving school and my dear mistress more than I can tell, and yet I longed to go. I minded leaving my friends on board ship, and yet I had only known them a month. I minded leaving you at Dustypore when we came away, and now to-day I am sad because you are leaving us.'
'That makes me sad too,' said Sutton, grieved, and yet not wholly grieved, at each new phase of sentiment which the childish frankness of his companion revealed to him; 'but, you know, we soldiers are for ever on the move, and nobody is surprised or sad when we are ordered off. You love Felicia, do you not?'
'Yes,' said Maud, seriously; 'I feel a sort of worship for her. Who could be so sweet, noble and pure without being adored? But then she makes me melancholy too sometimes, because she is so melancholy herself; and, oh, how far above one! Could one ever hope to be half as good? She fills me with love, but love with a sort of despair about it.'
Maud was highly wrought up and feeling strongly and painfully about everything that formed her life. She was full of thoughts that clamouredfor expression; and Sutton, she knew not why, seemed the natural and proper recipient; it was so easy almost to confess to him, to trust him with thoughts, hopes, pangs, which instinct said the common eye must never see; to claim from him a sort of gentle, chivalrous protection which no one but he knew how to give.
'Felicia,' Sutton said, 'need fill no one with despair, rather with hopefulness and courage about life. I have known her since she was a child; we two, in fact—children of two sisters, whose marriages had bound them closer in affection to each other—lived for years more as brother and sister than anything else. I have watched her for years gathering strength, calmness, and nobility from going nobly and calmly through the troubles of the world. She seems to me, in the midst of all that is vulgar and base in the world around her, like the Lady in Comus, impervious to everything that could sully or degrade.'
'Ah!' said Maud, 'if one could only go through life in that way—but it is so horribly unattainable. Everything is too difficult, and one is so shamefully weak. I could never be calm or noble in a trouble, like Felicia.'
'Wait till the troubles come,' said her companion kindly; 'you will find how one rises to an emergency. Felicia would not be what she is but forthe trials she has borne. But see there is the guard, and here, alas! our pleasant journey together ends. I must travel on alone.'
A few hundred yards below stood Sutton's first relay of horses, and here they were to part. A trooper was waiting to escort Maud on her homeward journey till she rejoined Felicia and the children.
'This,' Sutton said, 'has been a charming ride, though something of a sad one. I shall like to remember it. See, you shall give me that sweet rose you wear, and that shall be my badge in all tournaments to come. In return I will give you something to keep for me. This locket, you know, holds my mother's hair. I never part with it; but I have often thought it a foolish risk to take it on such wild expeditions as this. This time you shall take care of it for me, if you will.
Sutton gave her the locket with the grave, pathetic air which, to Maud's eye, threw a sort of romance over his least important actions. He took her hand and held it in his own, and it seemed as though some sacred pledge were at the moment, with no spoken words, given and received.
Maud never afterwards forgot that little scene—the kind, gentle eyes, the sorrowful furrowed brow, the tender solemn voice; in front the wide mysterious plains, stretching far below, all the horizonstill aglow with the expiring glory of the sunset; behind her a cold blue darkening world—the gathering vapours, no longer irradiated, settling in solid masses on the solemn mountain-tops. As she came to a bend in the path she turned to wish her companion a last farewell, for she knew that he was watching her departure. Then she rode homewards through the gloom, moved, agitated, frightened, yet on the whole happier—with a deeper kind of happiness than she had ever known before.
Love is begun—thus much is come to pass;The rest is easy.
Sutton rode onward in a condition of happy bewilderment. He recalled the conversation, every word Maud had spoken—her look, her tone: and as he did so the result of the whole seemed to take a deeper hold upon his mind. An afternoon's ride with a pretty girl—what was there in it to a man like Sutton, the experienced companion of so many who had both the power and the will to charm? What was there in this child to whom he had shown the mere ordinary good-nature due to her circumstances, that all of a sudden, he hardly knew whether by her doing or his own, he should find himself completely fascinated? How was it, too, that the first woman with whom he really felt in love should be so different from the ideal which all his life he had set before himself of what was especially lovable? In his childhood he had loved Felicia with the spontaneous and unconcealed attachment of a near relation. Then had followedyears of school, long expeditions abroad, a life which soon became adventurous, grave cares, anxieties and interests at a time when most lads are still trifling over their lessons. Sutton had not only to push his own way in life, but to keep guard over others less capable than himself, of whom he found himself, while still a boy, constituted the natural protector. His mother, suddenly left a widow, had looked to him unhesitatingly for counsel, protection and—so Sutton's account book would have testified—supplies, which he was ill able to contribute. Brothers had had to be set a-going, and kept a-going, in that troublesome and anxious process of making a livelihood in a world where no one is in the least want of one's services. Then Fortune and Valour had combined to push Sutton forward as a soldier, and one or two adventures, brilliant because they were not disastrous, made him a reputation which secured him constant employment. When, years later, he had met Felicia again, a newly-arrived bride, in the Sandy Tracts, though he felt towards her the same affection as ever, it had not occurred to him to envy the man who was now lawful possessor of that to which he might have seemed, had circumstances allowed, a natural pretender. He had remained the loyal friend of both. None the less was Felicia the typical conception in his mind of what a woman ought to be.Her grave, refined serenity; her unstudied dignity of form and gesture; her mirthfulness flashing all about a melancholy mood; her sorrows so acutely felt, so bravely borne, so sedulously concealed; the prompt excitability that made the world full of pleasures and interests to her, and her a moving influence in the world; the tenderness of sympathy which, beginning in the little home centre, spread in increasing circles to all who came within her range of thought or action and enthroned her mistress of a hundred hearts,—made up the type which his imagination had adored. Now he was startled to find himself kneeling at quite another shrine, adoring quite another deity, and adoring it, as he was constrained to confess to himself, with a sudden, vehement devotion, characteristic rather of boyish enthusiasm than of the mature sobriety of middle age.
Anyhow, as Sutton rode into the yard of the little inn where dinner awaited him, he wished, for the first time in his life, that the campaign was well over and himself safe back again at the pacific pursuits on which duty was just now sternly calling him to turn his back.
Here he found the Agent and Desvœux, who had been busy all the afternoon with despatches and were waiting now for the moonlight to allow them to get forward on their journey.
Desvœux, as was always the case in times of difficulty, had risen to the occasion and fully justified the confidence of those who placed a seeming fop in a responsible position. He had been working all day like a slave, and he was now dining like an Epicurean, and in higher spirits than Epicureans mostly are. The Agent, who kept him in thorough order and got an inordinate amount of first-rate work out of him at times, rewarded him by a generous confidence and a liberty of speech in private, which no other subordinate enjoyed. A jaded, weary official, with an uncomfortably lively scepticism as to the usefulness of himself and his system to the world, forced into all sorts of new and uncomfortable conditions, could not but be grateful to an assistant whose spirits, like Desvœux's, were always in inverse ratio to the darkness of surrounding things, whose cynicism was always amusing, and whose observations on the world around and above him, if frequently somewhat impertinent, were never without good sense and insight.
At present both Desvœux and his master were abusing Blunt over an excellent bottle of champagne. Sutton was soon installed at the banquet, which presently beganda capoon his account.
'We shall have no moon till eleven,' said the Agent; 'so Desvœux and I are amusing ourselves by inveighing against poor Blunt for the kettle offish he has set a-boiling down below; and which you and your troopers, Sutton, must dispose of as best you can. It is another instance of that bane of the service—zeal. Tallyrand was quite right to insist on no one having any of it.'
'Yes, sir,' said Desvœux; 'Enthusiasm, Experience and Principle may be said to be the three rocks on which we get shipwrecked—enthusiasm, because it gives us affairs like this of Blunt's; experience——'
'Experience and principle require no illustration,' said the Agent, filling up Sutton's glass and his own. 'I feel how disastrous they are in my own case. But, seriously, one of the difficulties in dealing with a matter is that you always have to rescue it from the clutches of some one who knows too much by half about it, and who takes a host of details for granted of which nobody but himself has the faintest glimmer of understanding. You are right, Desvœux, in naming experience as one of your banes; I qualify it by the addition of an epithet—inarticulate.'
'Oh!' cried Desvœux, gaily, 'one takes that for granted. If men possessed the art of making themselves understood, there would be no difficulty in governing at all.'
'Yes,' said the Agent; 'officials and their reports remind one of cuttle-fish, beings capable of extrudingan inky fluid for the purpose of concealing their intentions. And now, Sutton, king of men, tell us how soon you mean to lead the bold Acheans to the fray.'
'As fast as I can march the bold Acheans up. In three days at the furthest I hope to be well into the enemy's country; the mule battery will, I expect, do wonders in bringing about a loyal state of mind, and I may rely on the mules and camels for my commissariat?'
'You may rely,' said the Agent; 'I sent word to Boldero yesterday.' And Sutton knew that on that score, at any rate, he might feel secure.
'Boldero,' cried Desvœux, 'has no doubt by this time impressed every donkey in the province and has a cavalcade of camels awaiting us. The job will, it is to be hoped, have driven Miss Vernon out of his poor bleeding heart. Here is to her good health.'
'And here's to Mrs. Vereker's,' cried Sutton, who felt an urgent need of an immediate change in the conversation.
'Cruel, cruel Sutton,' cried Desvœux, 'to suggest the mournful thought. Let me see; it is half-past ten. I left at noon. I grieve to think that I have been forgotten an entire afternoon. Mrs. Vereker's recollections, I believe, never survive a repast. Luncheon, no doubt, swept me from her thoughts.'
'Desvœux,' said the Agent, 'you are a very unfeeling young man. I believe I am rather in love with Mrs. Vereker myself.'
'Then, sir, I presume you will wish me to transfer my attentions elsewhere; but meanwhile let me dream of the paradise I have quitted—
In the clear heaven of her delightful eyeAn angel guard of loves and graces lie;Around her knees domestic duties meet——'
'So that,' interposed the Agent, 'as you look at her face, and not at her knees, you naturally see more of the loves and graces than of the domestic duty.'
'Indeed, sir,' cried Desvœux, 'she is all that a wife and mother should be.'
'Very well,' said the Agent; 'then go and order the horses and let us be off.'
——A barren strand,A petty fortress and a dubious hand——
The expedition, though in no way distinguishable from twenty others, did not prove such a mere promenade as Sutton had anticipated. The whole country-side was in a nasty, excitable mood. The news of Blunt's injudicious proceedings had spread far and wide, and the prospect of endangered rights turned the wavering scale with wild clans, whose loyalty at the best of times was anything but proof against a seeming danger or a fancied wrong.
Every landholder whose title Blunt had impugned proved a centre of disaffection; and even where there was no reason for hostility the example of unruliness was infectious. Many a stalwart hillsman, coerced for years into uncongenial tranquillity, felt the old pulses throb within him, and his heart beating high at the prospect of a fight; unearthed some primitive weapon—sword or matchlockor lance—from its hiding-place beneath the floor of his hut, mounted on a wiry pony and made his way over the mountains to the scene of action. Several more outrages, of which the District officers knew the significance too well, had already been reported. Everything predicted a storm, and a pretty severe one.
Indian life is like a strange, dark sea, full of invisible currents, strange tides, unsuspected and unexplained influences. The waters, which look so smooth and lifeless, may be stealing silently along and hurrying the hapless vessel to its doom. Magnetic streams, inappreciable to the nicest scrutiny, pour this way or that and disturb the most accurate calculations. Storms gather and lower and burst when all looks most serene; a little cloud rises in the quarter where danger is least expected, and in a few minutes the ship is tossing, a crushed and staggering wreck, in the midst of a tornado.
Just before the great outbreak of 1857 the ruler of India had occasion to remark on the absolute tranquillity of the Empire and on the peaceful prospects of a reign which stood, as the facts proved, on the very crisis of its fate, and whose annals were presently to be written in characters of blood. Men who live in such a world as this become sensitive to its symptoms, and adept at interpreting them. The magistrates knew well enough—theycould scarcely have said why—that mischief was at work. Police officers on remote stations wrote uneasily and hinted at the advisability of reinforcements. Strange, weird beings, whose unkempt locks and half-crazy visages bespoke for them theprestigeof especial sanctity, thronged about the bazaars, the wells, the spreading tree where travellers halted for rest and talk. A famous Fakir went through the District haranguing excited audiences on the kindred duties of piety and rebellion against an impious ruler. Then the first drops of the storm began to fall. One morning the collector of a neighbouring town was sitting in his verandah; in front a pair of saddled horses were being led up and down; by his side was a tea-table, with letters, business papers and the frugal repast which ushers in the Indian official's day. At his feet two little children sat at play. From inside a lady's voice cried that she would be ready for a start in two minutes. Presently an animated bundle of rags, hair and dirt, came grovelling up with a petition. The misery of the creature was its passport, and the sentry who stood by, at a signal from the officer, let it pass. Then came a whining, rambling, unintelligible story of grievance; and then, as the listener's eye for a moment wandered from the speaker, a sudden rush—the flash of a concealed dagger—a groan—a heavy fall, and the Englishmanlay dead on the ground with a cruel Pathan knife-wound through his heart. The assassin stood fiercely at bar, exulting in his accomplished vow to slay a 'Feringhee,' and trying his best to stab the sentry who approached him. They cut him down as he stood; and before noon that day rumour had whispered in a hundred villages that Allah's will had been done, and that the Jehad, or Sacred War, was forthwith to commence.
To strike quickly, effectually, and with an air of absolute confidence in the result, is in such cases the safest policy. A symptom of hesitation, an hour's delay, would ensure disaster. The spark, which one moment might be stamped under foot, the next would be a consuming fire, forbidding all approach.
Sutton's business was, he well understood, to teach these lawless spirits (which no conqueror has ever yet succeeded in taming) a stern lesson of obedience, and to teach it them quickly, sharply, and in the mode most likely to impress the popular imagination. If all went well the business would be over in a week, and the refractory clansmen our good friends and subjects till temper, forgetfulness, or an official blunder produced another outburst. If things went ill—but this is a contingency upon which the administrators of British India cannot afford to calculate and which Sutton'stemperament and good fortune alike had long accustomed him to ignore.
When he rode into the camp he found everything in readiness and everybody in the highest spirits. Boldero had impressed a fine array of camels and bullock-carts, and had organised a commissariat train more than sufficient for the wants of the expedition. The mule battery had arrived in perfect order. The little knot of officers who were to join the expedition gave a hearty welcome to a leader whose very presence seemed to them the best guarantee of success. In a minute the news spread through the camp that the 'Colonel Sahib' had arrived, and the men, whom he had led so often to victory, glowed at the thought that the well-loved and well-trusted leader was once again in the midst of them and that something stirring was certainly at hand. The little force was to encamp that night at the bottom of the pass along which for the next two days their route would lie; then they would come to a high level table-land, where the enemy was (so the scouts said) entrenched, and where the serious part of the business might be expected to begin.
Occasions such as these were the parts of Sutton's life in which hitherto he had felt himself most at home, and which he had, in fact, enjoyed the most keenly. He had been very successful,and had, he knew, been not undeserving of success. This was the thing in life which he could do pre-eminently well, and the doing it gave him a thrill of pleasure, which lasted all through the duller parts of his existence. Yet now things seemed changed to him. He had looked forward to this expedition with enthusiasm; it had taken in every way the shape which he wished; and now, when the hour was come, it had brought no sense of pleasure with it. Sutton was startled at his own lack of zeal. The lads who were having their first apprenticeship in actual soldiering, were, he felt, far more soldier-like about it than he was. He could not sleep that night, and strolled about the camp amid all the old accustomed sights and sounds; the long array of human sleeping forms, each one motionless and corpse-like; the lines of tethered horses; the sentinels pacing stolidly up and down and challenging the passer-by in the still, clear air; the bullocks encamped by their carts, serenely chewing through the peaceful hours undisturbed by the thought of pokes and shoves which awaited them on the morrow. It was all very familiar, and brought back many a like occasion of former years; and yet there was, Sutton knew, a difference: the world was no longer the same; a new current of thought and feeling had set in and disturbed allthe old associations. His afternoon ride had metamorphosed his entire being. Maud's sweet impassioned air as she had wished him farewell; her serious, soft, pathetic tones; her last look as she turned to go, the sort of earnest rapture which her eyes bespoke; the unspoken pledge which had been exchanged between them; these were the matters which preoccupied his thoughts and left but scant room in them for the business which he had in hand. He found himself, accordingly, uninterested, unenthusiastic, and, for the first time in his life, completely sceptical as to the usefulness of his employment. Every man, philosophers tell us, is seized at some period of his career with a misgiving as to whether his life-task is not a delusion. Is it worth the long, painful endeavour, the patient waiting, the resolute hopefulness which a successful career demands? Life seems, as it did to the sailors of Ulysses, a wearisome, endless affair,
For ever climbing up the climbing wave;
Is it certain that the end for which we struggle so earnestly is good for ourselves or for any one? Sutton had such a mood just now strong upon him. He had been all his life soldiering; a hundred time-honoured phrases had declared it the finest profession in the world; but what did it cometo? To be chasing a pack of lawless savages about a country scarcely less savage than themselves, and inflicting a chastisement which no one supposed would be more than temporarily effectual. To drill a handful of freebooters into something sufficiently like discipline to render them effectual as an instrument of destruction; to march up a pass and stamp out the first germs of civilised life by burning a few wretched crops and crumbling hovels; to fire at an enemy always well out of reach, and then march down again; what was there in all this to deserve the thought, the devotion, the sacrifice of life itself, which men so freely gave in its pursuit? Had not life something better worth living for than this? Were not the civilians right who sneered at soldiering as a meet occupation for brainless heads and hands for which, if not kept thus wholesomely employed, Satan was sure to find some less desirable occupation? Thus it came to pass that of all the men who marched in the expedition its leader was the one who was least in love with it.
Two days later Sutton had warmed into his work and was in better spirits. The march had been delightful. The splendid military road, which coiled in and out among the folds of the mountain, robbed the journey alike of anxiety and fatigue. Nothing gives a pleasanter sense of power and triumph over nature than these great engineering exploits. Youcanter along a splendid road with easy gradients, a scarcely perceptible ascent; there is a precipice above, a precipice below, and no spot anywhere on which, till the hand of science came to make it, a human foot could rest. Every now and then a distant vista reminds you that you are climbing some of the wildest and steepest hill sides in the world. The mountaineers may well cower and fly before a foe who begins with so impressive an achievement, and who cuts his way—resistless as fate itself—across the rocky brow of barriers which it seems half-mad, half-impious to try to scale.
The expedition, Sutton found, was in every way complete. His own regiment was always ready to march at twenty minutes' notice, and the General at Dustypore seemed to have been equally well prepared. The air, despite the hot sun, was fresh and exhilarating; the men were in the very mood for brilliant service. Besides, a peasant who had just been brought in from the district told them that, ten miles across the plain which now stretched away in gentle undulations before them, the enemy was entrenched in strength and intended to show fight. The village had been fortified, the man said, with a wall of earth and stones, and the fighters would be found behind it.
'Then, gentlemen,' cried Sutton, who was standing with a knot of officers at his tent door whenthe news arrived, 'I propose that we attack them to-night. If we let them have a day to do it in, these scoundrels will give us the slip.'
In half an hour the whole force was on the march. The day was delightfully fresh; the mountain-mists gathered overhead and formed a welcome shelter from the blazing sky. Sutton had his troopers on either flank; then came the tiny battery, looking more like playthings than the grim realities the Armstrongs proved; in the midst of a long line of Native Infantry. The men marched with a will and with the exciting consciousness that in the afternoon there was to be a fight. At noon, when there was a halt to rest the force, the outline of the village wall might be clearly seen, and those who had telescopes could make out an occasional figure creeping stealthily about. There was a little rising ground some half-mile from the village, and here Sutton determined to establish his battery. The tiny telescope-like tubes soon did their work, and the main gate of the village fell inwards with a crash; the mud wall crumbled and fell wherever it was touched, and a thick cloud of dust showed where each ball had lodged. In ten minutes the village was in flames, and Sutton's little army was advancing on it at a run. Presently they got within musket-shot, and bullet after bullet came singing through the air. Sutton was riding, witha trumpeter on the right, half-a-dozen yards in advance of his men; the ground, though firm and safe, grew rougher as they neared the village; and the troops' line was somewhat broken. By this time they could make out the mud wall which had been thrown up in front of the village and measure the paces between it and them. It was a mere nothing, but the men were going at it faster than they should. Two horses were struck and fell heavily just as their riders were pulling them together for the jump. Half-a-dozen more refused: then came the usual scene of rearing, plunging, and dismounted men. There was an instant's check, but only an instant's, for Sutton and the trumpeter were over, and the first dozen men who followed them had knocked the wall level with the ground. Sutton had speedily disposed of two of the hillsmen, who fired their pistols in his face and made at him with their swords; and had galloped up to help the trumpeter, who was having a hard time of it with a Sawar, mounted on a nimble little horse and evidently a competent and practised swordsman. The man turned on his noble antagonist and made a cut which left a deep dent on Sutton's sword-handle. The native had, however, met with more than his match. The others got over just in time to see Sutton cut him down, and his horse gallop wildly off with an empty saddle.The men gave a shout and galloped forward. Then some one from a neighbouring window took a lucky shot. Sutton was at the moment giving an order and pointing with his sword in the direction indicated. His sword flew out of his hand, his arm fell powerless, and his horse, rearing up, fell back upon him. His native aide-de-camp dragged him out from under the horse, which was lying shot through the heart across him. Half-a-dozen men carried him to the rear. Ten minutes later, when the village had been cleared and the troop returned from the pursuit, they found him lying in a crimson pool, insensible, with a broken arm and a bullet-wound in his side, the red stream from which the surgeon, kneeling beside him, was endeavouring in vain to staunch.
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 theeternal 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 institution 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 melancholysatisfaction 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 hefelt; 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.
Cockshaw, 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 Cockshaw had come to dislike Blunt by far the worst. Fotheringham, he knew, was an ass; 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 allthis and was known to talk about the Civil Service in a way that made Cockshaw long to knock him down and give him a thrashing, as he would have done to a rude schoolfellow years ago. An article appeared in the 'Edinburgh Review' about the Government of India, which Cockshaw 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 Cockshaw 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 thegenerally improved tone of English manners; but Indian Governments had long remained the home of jobbery. The stringent remedy of the Competitive System had been necessary to deal with the accumulated 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 class of men to whom the job had been entrusted, that it had ever got administered at all.
'D—— his impudence!' exclaimed Cockshaw 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 Cockshaw had come to take of his colleague's mental attitude, and of the respect or consideration to which he and his proposals were entitled.
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 ammakingit.' 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 embarrassed. 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 ofindistinctness, 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 shifting 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 entitled 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 prettygarden where their mamma received society to tea and croquet—the dining-room where the Senior Member had regaled his friends—the library where he assailed 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 hislocum tenenswould 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 cluster 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 embellishing hand had worked wonders. Nature, as if in gratitude 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 mass 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 pass 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 pass 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 blackmountain 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 associated it with the first piece of really bad news that had ever come to her in the whole of her sunshiny 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 beena fight, and the entrenched village has been carried by acoup 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 thatthey 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 passing 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, gratitude andlove. The mists had cleared away, the world was irradiated with happiness and hope; even the blackened hillside opposite had caught a ray of sunshine 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 gratitude that the calamity so near and terrible had passed away, leaving this young bright life as bright as ever.