How do I love thee? Let me count the sums.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height,My soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of Being and Ideal Grace——
When, a month later, Sutton was carried into Dustypore, he was, as any one would have felt, a fit subject for romance, and Maud was just in the mood to appreciate all that was romantic about him to the full. She had been thinking about this event and fancying it, and dreaming about it for weeks past, poor child, till it had become for her the very climax of existence. As the time for its realisation drew near she had been haunted by nervous apprehensions as to whether she had not misinterpreted Sutton's words of kindness at that last interview, and whether the moment of disillusionment might not be now arriving. Sutton, so a morbid mood suggested, might have meant nothing; or his words, perhaps, proved only a passing tenderness,engendered by the special circumstances of the hour: her fancy, perhaps, had dressed up a few careless expressions into something serious. But there came a truer voice which said that it was not so; that Sutton was not a man of careless words or a transient mood, and that a pledge had been given, though without actual spoken vow, which he assuredly would redeem on his return. On the whole then, though not absolutely without a misgiving, Maud was joyous and courageous, and her heart was light within her. She, however, felt herself becoming greatly embarrassed and excited as the hour of Sutton's arrival drew near. The most needless blushes came flushing into her cheeks; the simplest things seemed difficult to answer. Felicia knew, Maud was certain, pretty well how matters stood; knew at any rate that there was something between her and Sutton: yet Maud had never summoned up courage to inform her what it was, nor had Felicia chosen to inquire. It was rather agitating, accordingly, that Felicia should now be about to have an opportunity of judging for herself how matters stood.
Then Sutton arrived, too suffering from his wound to be moved except in a palanquin; and was got, with a great deal of trouble and pain apparently, to the sofa in Vernon's study, which was turned into his sitting-room for the time being, and wherethe invalid was to spend the day. Here he lay, a close prisoner, as feeble as a bad wound and a month's fever could make him, and quite in a condition for judicious nursing. A man in such a plight wants company—pleasant, gentle, noiseless, unexciting, feminine if possible; he wants to be read to, and sung and played to; he wants cooling drinks, which, when mixed and administered by a hand like Felicia's, are more than nectar; he wants those delicious idle gossips, for which the healthy busy side of life so seldom provides either the opportunity or the mood. If a man lack these, an illness is a dreary affair; if he has them, it may bring him the pleasantest hours of his life.
All these pleasant conditions now attended the fortunate Sutton's convalescence. Felicia welcomed him with a joyful cordiality and devoted herself with enthusiasm to the task of making his imprisonment as little wearisome as might be. Vernon stole an hour from his office to read him the 'Pall Mall Gazette;' Maud found herself busy with the rest, a willing attendant on the happy warrior in his hour of weakness. Everybody made a great deal of him. Felicia's little girls, coming with much modesty and many blushes, brought him a nosegay apiece and kissed his hand with a sort of affectionate reverence. His face was wan and thin, and marked with lines of suffering; but the sweet,kind smile was still the same, and the honest eyes and finely-chiselled brow. On the whole Maud found him handsomer and ten times more touching than ever before. She knew, too, before they had been a minute in each other's company that all was well with her. The time of separation, uncertainty, distress, was done: happiness, greater than she had ever dreamed of, was already hers. Her foot stood already on the crowning ridge of existence, and all the horizon blazed with the golden clouds of Hope and Joy.
One effect that Sutton always had upon her she was especially conscious of just now: she had no feeling of shyness with him, such as she felt with all the world beside; he stirred her being too profoundly for any slighter feeling to find a place. Shyness deals with the superficial, slighter outcomings of life. Sutton seemed to transport her to another world of thought and feeling: thoughts too high and feelings too intense to heed the mode of their expression. The consequence was, that it seemed quite natural to Maud for her to be waiting on him; who had so good a right as she to that pleasant duty?
Then presently Felicia went away with the children, and the two were again, for the first time, alone together.
'Come,' Sutton said, changing his manner instantly,'sit down by me and tell me all that has happened since we parted on the mountain's side. You missed me a little, I hope?'
'Yes,' said Maud, simply, looking at him with fearless, trusting eyes; 'your going was the end of all our pleasure—we went away to the Gully, and then came your accident and some dreadful days of anxiety. Since then everything has seemed a sort of dream.'
'It has seemed a dream to me sometimes,' said Sutton, 'as I lay and wondered whether the happiness I fancied for myself was real or fable. Things befall one so suddenly in life, and strokes of good or ill fortune take one so by surprise, that one distrusts one's own belief about them, and cannot fancy that the old life which went before has been all transfigured. Now, however, that I see you and hear you and have you about me, I begin to feel it was not a dream after all.'
'It was no dream,' said Maud, in her serious way; 'here is your locket, which I have been keeping for you since we parted.'
'No,' said the other, giving back the proffered locket and keeping the hand which gave it in captivity; 'you shall keep it now, if you will, for good and all; that is, if you have a fancy for an old soldier, wounded and battered as you see me. Here I shall be for weeks, I suppose, a burden onthe friends who are good-natured enough to be my nurses. You will have to tend me, as Elaine did Launcelot in his cave.'
'I will,' Maud said, wrapped into a mood which left her scarcely mistress of herself; 'my love is as great as hers was. I have been living all these weeks only that I might see you again. I must have died if you had not come back, or come back other than I hoped.'
The die was cast—the words were spoken; they came out naturally, spontaneously, almost unconsciously before Maud had time to know what she was about, or to judge of the wisdom and propriety of what she was saying. They were the truth; they were what she had been feeling and saying to herself for weeks past; they were the true outcoming of her honest heart; and yet no sooner were they spoken than Maud felt an awful conviction that they had better have been left unsaid; they were more, far more, than anything which had been said on Sutton's part to her. Was it wrong, unwomanly, indecorous, thus to have declared herself and torn the veil from her feelings without waiting for a lover's hand to remove it? The thought rushed in upon her with an agonizing distinctness; the blood came rushing to her cheeks and forehead; her very hand which Sutton was holding in his own, emaciated and bloodless, was blushing too. She couldsay nothing, she could do nothing but stay, helpless, having made her confession, and wait for Sutton to rescue her.
As he lay there, holding her hand in his, clasping it with a firm, tender grasp, which seemed to be expressive of all she wanted, Felicia came into the room. Maud stood there, scarlet, and moved not, nor did Sutton seem inclined that she should.
'Felicia,' he said, 'you are the good angel of us both, and this moment would have been incomplete without you. Maud has just consented to become my wife.'
Felicia took Maud to her arms in a sort of rapture of happiness; her heart was too full for speech. It was a delightful relief from the anxiety and distress which had been weighing upon her all the summer and which had of late grown into an acute pang. She felt grateful to both parties, who had at last brought about the result for which she had wished so anxiously and of which she had somehow begun to despair.
Maud, on her part, felt it natural that Sutton should, at a trying emergency, have protected her skilfully, considerately, efficiently from the embarrassment into which her outspokenness had betrayed her; it was like himself to do so, and typical of the sort of feeling of confidence withwhich he always inspired her. There was a delightful sense of safety and protection in being with him. How should her heart not beat high at the thought that this safety and protection would evermore be hers!
All through, loveProtested in a world of ways save oneHinting at marriage——
The news of Maud's engagement was naturally a congenial topic for gossip in Dustypore. The romantic circumstances under which it had come about lent themselves readily to the superaddition of any details, necessary, in the teller's opinion, in order to bring the story to the correct pitch of embellishment. Everybody considered Maud a lucky girl; some cynics remarked that once again Sutton had shown himself the most courageous of mankind; and Mrs. Vereker said, sentimentally, that she feared poor Desvœux wouldthis timebe really broken-hearted. There was some satire lurking in the words 'this time,' because the present occasion was by no means the first on which the same sort of thing had occurred. Desvœux's was one of those inconveniently adjusted temperaments to which no woman is completelydelightful till she has become unattainable. His relations to the opposite sex did not as a general rule appear to involve anything of a seriously pathetic order; but no sooner was a girl engaged to some one else than he awoke to the terrible discovery that he was deeply in love with her himself and deeply aggrieved by her betrothal to another. He was known not to be a marrying man; he made no secret of his dislike of matrimony as an institution; still he greatly resented other people's marriages. Whenever any ladies of his acquaintance got married he used to send them the most lovely bridal presents, with beautiful little gilt-edged notes on the finest satin paper, politely intimating that he was broken-hearted. Sometimes his feelings were too much for prose and his melancholy would break out into epigrammatic versicles; sometimes the gift bore only an inscription eloquent in its reticence—'Le don d'un triste célibataire,' or 'Avec un soupir.' The presents, however, were so very pretty (for Desvœux's tastes were of the extravagant order), that their fair recipients, for the most part, were glad enough to take them, sighs, poetry and all, without inquiring too rigidly into the giver's actual frame of mind. As most of the young ladies who had for some years past been married at Dustypore had experienced something of the sort, they probably comparednotes and reassured each other as to the probability of a disease, from which Desvœux had already more than once recovered, not proving fatal on any subsequent occasion.
Maud's engagement, however, touched Desvœux more nearly than any previous blow of the same description. Her joyous, childish beauty, the readiness of her wit, the quickness of her replies, the great fun which they always had whenever Fortune was kind enough to throw them together, Maud's unconcealed appreciation of himself, despite the coquettish airs in which she now and then indulged; the ready frankness which invited intimacy so pleasantly—all had gone deep into Desvœux's heart, and he had grown to feel a sort of proprietorship in them, which it vexed him terribly to feel suddenly at an end. He felt certain that Maud liked him very much; and certain, doubly certain now, that he intensely admired her. No one else, he felt bitterly, had an equal right to do so. That Sutton, too, should be the fortunate rival made defeat all the bitterer. Sutton's good qualities were precisely those which Desvœux could least appreciate; his military prowess did not impress him in the least; his chivalry touched no corresponding chord; his ideas of duty seemed pedantic, his feelings about women an anachronism.
If there was one thing in which it was especially irritating that such a man should have carried the day, it was in the ascendancy over women, which Desvœux considered as his especial forte. He piqued himself not a little on his knowledge of the sex, his insight into their weaknesses, his experienced tact in dealing with them to the best account. He had established what he considered a perfectly satisfactory footing with Maud, and had spent no little time, trouble, and sentiment in the process. It was a cruel humiliation to be rudely displaced from this agreeable eminence by a mere commonplace soldier, who had lived all his life in a camp and talked about women like a child.
Women are, Desvœux came bitterly to feel, inscrutable, and the cleverest or stupidest of mankind alike puppets in their hands when they have a passion to gratify or a secret to conceal. Anyhow, the news of Maud's engagement set his heart a-beating and sent his spirits down to zero. He was dining with the officers in the Fort when the announcement was made. One of them had been calling at the Vernons', and had heard the interesting fact from Felicia's own lips. 'Honneur aux braves!' cried Desvœux, with ostentatious merriment, tossing off his glass; 'here's to their very good healths.' He was an adept at concealinghis feelings, but a near observer might have seen that his hand trembled so that it was with difficulty he could carry his glass to his lips, and that, despite his jovial tones, he had turned deadly pale.
'I am glad she has come into the Army, at any rate,' said some one.
'Of course,' said Desvœux; 'it is the old story. "J'aime beaucoup les militaires." What chance have we poor civilians when a red jacket is in the field?'
'And what, pray,' said one of the guests, a new arrival, 'is the lady's name?'
Desvœux had risen from the table, and was moving towards the billiard-room. 'Her name,' he said, stopping in the act of lighting a cigar, 'is that of the rest of her sex—frailty.'
'Desvœux is hard hit this time,' observed one of a little knot who lingered behind the rest over their wine; 'he really loved her.'
'Fiddlededee!' said another. 'Desvœux love her, indeed!'
'He will have to drop all that now,' observed a third; 'Sutton would wring his neck for him or pitch him out of the window, if he as much as dared look at her!'
The fact, however, was that, conceal it as he would, Desvœux was hard hit. His usual expedientof buying a handsome wedding present and writing the lady some poetry quite broke down. Maud's bright eyes and glowing cheeks, her beautiful upper lip—now full of pretty scorn, now melting into a smile that was sweetness itself—haunted him in his dreams. He lit his pipe, he raged about the room, he denounced the perfidy of womankind, he read all the most horrible passages in all the worst French novels in his possession, he quoted all the fiercest cynicism of Chamfort and Rochefoucauld in vain; there was Maud, enthroned unquestioned mistress of his heart, and it was labour lost to endeavour to displace her.
In course of time Desvœux lashed himself into a highly uncomfortable state of mind and became perfectly convinced that Maud had treated him most cruelly. Accordingly, when next they met, his appearance was suggestive of a Byronic gloom of the very deepest dye; his handkerchief was tied with the negligence which spoke of shattered hopes, and his general demeanour was that of a man for whom the world was over. Maud was really in consternation at her friend's metamorphosis and felt herself growing inconveniently shy. She was conscious of an instinctive apprehension that Desvœux was going to bring about a scene. His face of martyrdom was a study in the completeness of its woe.
'You expect me to wish you joy,' he said, 'and so I do. May all bright things attend you wherever you go, and wherever you are! The news of your engagement surprised and hurt me, of course.'
'Surprised and hurt you, Mr. Desvœux!' cried Maud, with increased alarm, 'I can't think why it should do that or why you should look so very odd and—untidy.'
'Cannot you?' cried the other, stalking about the room and fanning the flame of his excitement; 'I suppose not; you women are all so heartless.'
'No, we are not,' said Maud; 'and if we were, I do not see that you, of all people in the world, have any right to complain. Come now, tell me what is the matter. Has the Agent been scolding you?'
'The Agent!' cried Desvœux, in tones of the profoundest disgust; 'you little traitress, don't you know as well as possible that there is only one thing in the world that could really hurt me, and that you have done it?'
'I!' exclaimed Maud, in horror. 'I'm sure I am very sorry. You must try and forget me.'
'Try and fly to the moon!' said Desvœux; 'I shall remember you all my life, to my cost, as the most bewitching little piece of mischief inexistence. Why am I so unfortunate? I wish to goodness I had never seen you.'
'I am sure,' said Maud, fervently, 'I wish to goodness you never had, since it makes you so unhappy. But remember, if you please, that I had no idea of what you were feeling. You never told me, you know.'
'Who was to guess that Sutton would be so abominably precipitate? I thought he was safe with his soldiers and out of harm's way. Besides, I told you! Why, you knew as well as possible that I adored you. Don't you remember how I squeezed your hand at the last Government House ball?'
'And don't you remember,' cried Maud, indignantly, 'how I refused to dance a single round dance with you all the evening in consequence, and only gave you a Lancers to prevent your being laughed at?'
'I only wish you could feel my heart beating,' said Desvœux, feeling that interesting organ, and apparently horrified at its activity.
'That is because you will go stamping about the room in that absurd way instead of sitting still and talking quietly. Come now, Mr. Desvœux, come and sit down and wish me joy kindly and pleasantly, or I never will speak to you again.'
'Little tyrant!' said the other, doing as he was bid as meekly as could be wished; 'and to thinkthat you should be growing lovelier every day and more charming, if possible, and all for Sutton! Speak to me, indeed! Why, you will not dare open your mouth for fear of a scandal. Sutton will make you cut me, you will see, as an old admirer.'
'Indeed,' said Maud, upon whom Desvœux's flattery always told with some effect, 'I have not the slightest intention of giving up my old friends. Why should I? Only you will not make love to me, of course.'
'Oh, of course not,' said the other, with a laugh. 'But tell me now, are you not a wee bit sorry for a poor fellow who is breaking his heart about you?'
'Breaking his fiddlestick!' cried Maud, bursting out laughing. 'Why, Mr. Desvœux, you don't, I assure you, know what you say. It is very kind of you to like me, and admire me, and so forth, and I am very much obliged.'
'Don't, don't, for heaven's sake, talk like that,' cried the other; 'it is not kind of me at all to be over head and ears in love with you, but just my misfortune. But, tell me: they teased you into it, did they not?'
'Teased me into it!' cried Maud, tossing her head indignantly; 'how little you know!'
'Yes,' said the other, positively, 'it is obvious. You are an orphan—you have that sweet, interesting,dependent look that orphans have; and Mrs. Vernon made it up; set Sutton to flirt with you; everybody observed that much last summer; and then, no doubt, told you that you had been flirting and were bound to accept him. Why didn't you pluck up heart of grace and say "No"?'
'Because I plucked up heart of grace to say "Yes." Do you think that Colonel Sutton is a sort of man who needs any one to help his wooing?'
'I do,' said Desvœux, with provoking persistency, 'and Mrs. Vernon gave him every assistance. I only wish she would have done half as much for me.'
'Well, then,' cried Maud in a passion, 'if you must know, it was I that proposed to him—not he to me; and I adore the tip of his little finger more than all the other men and women in the world. Now do you think they teased me into it?'
'No; but if you begin with so much enthusiasm you will come to dislike him very much before long. His little finger indeed! And here am I left out in the cold! What am I to do?'
'Write and consult Mrs. Vereker,' said Maud. From which unfeeling remark it may be inferred that she believed less in Desvœux's broken-heartedness than he was inclined to do himself.
'Well,' said her companion, with a resigned air, which Maud felt had a touch of reproachful dignityin it, 'laugh at me as you will. I love you, and always shall.'
'Nonsense!' said Maud. 'Here comes my cousin. I have a great mind to tell her, and get her to comfort you.'
The interview was over. Maud had stuck to her programme, which was to treat Desvœux with an airy indifference and his protestations with ostentatious disbelief. Nevertheless his words were not without effect. Had she been less inexperienced Maud would have known that she had allowed him to leave off in a most dangerous position; that of an admirer whose homage was sufficiently congenial to be allowed a hearing; whom it was within her power to have at any moment at her feet, and who, whether rightly or wrongly, felt he had some show of right to be aggrieved and disappointed at her declared preference for another man.
There was another person, however, besides Desvœux to whom the news of Maud's engagement gave a serious shock.
One of Sutton's first acts, after Maud and he had mutually ascertained each other's views, was to scribble a line to Boldero, announcing the joyful event; and he had done so, too full of his own happiness to pay much attention, even had he known more than he did, to the view his friend might take of it. All that he knew was thatBoldero, like all the world, was a great admirer of his future wife. This was but natural, and Sutton without the least misgiving accepted the position. 'My dear old boy,' he wrote, 'you will, I know, be pleased to hear a good piece of news of me, to make up for my bad luck the other day. Come over as soon as you can and wish me joy. Meanwhile, remember, of course, that you must be my groomsman.'
'His groomsman!' Boldero sat, pale and speechless and stunned by the sudden overthrow of all his hopes. The day-dream of his existence was ended by this stern awakening. Life—all that part of life, at least, which is worth living—was, he felt bitterly, over for him. It was, to use Heine's expressive figure, as if some one had climbed up a celestial ladder, rolled up the bright blue sky and taken down the sun. Only the dismal scaffolding, the dust, the gloom remained. Maud, though she had never quite encouraged him to hope, had never bidden him despair, and figured, we may be certain, the lovely chatelaine of all his castles in the air. He found out now to his cost how full his thoughts had been of her. And now it was all over. His pleasant hope lay shattered on the ground. The blow was hard to bear; none the easier, perhaps, that it was his dearest friend's hand that struck it.
Being, however, a man of pluck and determination,he sat down courageously, wrote a cheery note of congratulation to the fortunate winner of the prize, promised his services as groomsman or anything else which Sutton wished, and then ordered his horse and rode twenty miles to an outlying village, where there was a troublesome boundary dispute to be settled, which he had had in his eye for weeks past as wanting a visit from the Collector.
Truth is the strong thing. Let man's life be true—And love's the truth of mine—time prove the rest!
Christmas had arrived, and Christmas was a festival observed at Dustypore with all the emphasis proper to men who had carried their Lares and Penates beneath a foreign sky, and were treasuring in alien regions the sacred fire of the paternal hearth.
The weather was cold enough to realise all that English tradition requires as 'seasonable' in the way of climate. For weeks past, great bullock-carts, piled high with gnarled heaps of jungle-wood, had been creaking along the dusty tracks from the outlying villages and supplying the Station with materials for Christmas-fires of appropriate magnificence. The air was deliciously clear, crisp and invigorating: the searching wind came with its breath frozen from the Elysiansnows and left a hoary rime on all the country's face. English habits began to resume their sway: people were glad to forego the morning ride, and came down to breakfast at half-past nine with red noses and blue fingers and—romantic reminiscence of European life—extremely bad colds in their heads.
Dustypore surrendered itself to holiday-making. The Salt Board suspended its sittings. The vehement Blunt, finding that no work was to be got out of any one for love or money, started off into the country with his rifle after black-buck and jungle-partridges. The courts were closed for a fortnight, and judges and collectors devoted themselves to sweeping off long arrears of morning calls. Contingents of visitors from all the surrounding out-stations came pouring in to share the festivities: every house was full and more than full; for, by the hospitable usages of India, when your spare rooms are filled you order tents to be pitched in the garden, and enlarge your encampment as each new guest arrives. An Indian house is, therefore, viewed as to its capacities for hospitality, extremely elastic, and just now every house in Dustypore had its elasticity tested to the uttermost. Felicia was renowned as a hostess; and there were half-a-dozen friends whose winter holiday would have lost half its charm if spent anywherebut beneath her roof. There was a mixture of joyousness and pathos in these Christmas gatherings which suited her temperament exactly, and showed her in her sweetest, most attractive mood. Her guests invariably went away with cheered spirits and lightened hearts and a little store of remembered kindness to last them through the dreary months to come. Nor was Felicia alone in her good intentions. Everybody set about keeping Christmas with heroic good-nature. The Agent gave a ball in the state apartments in the Fort. The Dustypore Hunt had a home meet and a lunch. The 'Tent Club' organised a pig-sticking expedition for the keener sportsmen. The volunteers had a gala-day, and were formed into a hollow square and panegyrised by the General of the Division on their loyalty and discipline. Everybody attempted something for the edification of everybody else.
The Vernons gave some private theatricals, and Felicia and Maud made a great success as Portia and Nerissa in the 'Merchant of Venice.' Desvœux, who was entrusted with the part of Shylock, heroically shaved off his moustache and transformed himself into the most frightful of old Israelites, with a hook-nose and beard of diabolical aspect. The way in which he rolled his eyes when Gratiano exclaimed 'Now, infidel, I have thee on the hip!'had twice caused Maud to explode in irrepressible laughter at rehearsals and very nearly caused a break-down among the actors at the final performance. Altogether it was very like home, and very pleasant, as all the party felt.
These Indian festivities are, perhaps, none the less festive, and certainly the more touching, for the fact that at least half the holiday-makers have a dark, sad corner in their hearts which has to be hidden from the world's eye and to be ignored in the common intercourse of life. Separation is the dark cloud which hangs over an Indian existence: husbands and wives, mothers and children, forced asunder, perhaps at the very time when union is most delightful, and living (how maimed and sad a life!) in the absence of all that is best-beloved. They put a brave face upon it, but the heartache is there all the same. What a strong pulse of love and tenderness and sorrow goes throbbing week by week across half the world from the wives and children at home to the lonely exile, struggling bravely with his fate in the far-off Indian station: what dear, ill-spelt, round-hand, stupid letters, which yet are wept over with such passionate pleasure and treasured with such pious care! People have a cheap tariff for telegraphing back to India their safe arrival in England, with a rupee extra for saying that the traveller 'is better.'What a story it tells of anxious men in India toiling over work, with their hearts far away with the shattered, invalid lady or flickering child's life, carried away to cool regions in hopes of saving it!
Take, for instance, little Major Storks, who was stage-manager for the Vernons' theatricals and sang a comic song between the acts. He is a grizzly, wizen, well-tanned, wiry little fellow, but has, under that rough exterior, as brave and tender a heart as ever beat. He is in charge of the Rumble Chunder Canal and bestows on it all a lover's assiduity: for it he thinks, he writes, he plans, he labours early and late: he rides about in the most demented fashion until the sun has dried him up into a perfect mummy. He knows the Canal's ways and manners—how much water it ought to pour per second; how much itdoespour; which of the bridges are infirm; where the silt is accumulating; where the water is being wasted or stolen. He drives his subordinates frantic by a zeal in which they cannot participate and a thoroughness which they cannot shirk. To the world outside he seems the merest drudge. To-day, however, he is in paradise. It is Christmas morning and the mail has brought him a goodly budget of letters, all redolent of home and tender conjugal love, and—precious alleviation of exile—photographs of half-a-dozen little Storks. He sitsnow, with all his family before him, with tears of joyful satisfaction in his eyes. What comely lads! what sweet, ingenuous little girls! what dear, familiar looks, the legacy of a youth that has passed away, greeting him from every little portrait! In a moment Storks' soul quits its shabby tenement of clay and its hot surroundings, and is away in England with wife and children—the wife, whose heart has ached for many a dreary year of separation—the children, who have been taught to love him with a sort of romantic piety, all the more for being far away—the pleasant, cool, idle life in England, which lies afar off, a sort of Promised Land, if ever his long, rough task in India can get itself performed. Then, in the fulness of his heart, he will put on his shabby uniform and order round his shabby dogcart, and go and show his treasures to Felicia, who will, he knows, have a quick sympathy for his pleasure and his pain; and when the two act in a charade that night, each will know that all is not as merry as it seems, but that, under a stoical calmness, lie thoughts and hopes and pangs which stir the very depths of man's being, and which require all the help that sympathy and kindliness can give.
The last and most interesting occasion of the holidays was one in which Sutton and Maud played a leading part. Sutton had a two months' Inspectionmarch before him, and no better sort of honeymoon could be desired. The country through which they were to go was wild but very picturesque. Sutton's duties would never take him away for more than a few hours; and camp life is idyllic in its freedom, unconstraint and tranquillity. Existence has something charming about it when each morning's ride takes you through new scenes to a new home, in which you live as comfortably for the next twenty-four hours as if you had been there all your life. Maud was in rapture at the prospect, nor was her happiness lessened by the arrival of the most perfect Arab to be found in Bombay—her husband's wedding gift to her—on which her long journey was to be performed. To Sutton these weeks seemed the fitting threshold of the new and brighter existence into which he was about to pass. Each day Maud bound herself closer to his heart by some sweet act or word, some unstudied outpouring of devotion, childish in its simplicity and unconsciousness, but womanly in its serious strength; some sympathetic note which vibrated harmoniously to his inmost soul. 'To be with you, dear,' he said, 'is like travelling through a lovely mountain country, where each turn in the road opens up a fresh delight: you charm me in some new fashion every hour.'
To this sort of remark Maud had no need of anyother reply than that easiest and most natural of all to feminine lips, which dispenses with the necessity of spoken words. Her kisses were, we may be certain, eloquent enough to Sutton's heart, irradiated for the first time with a woman's love and beating high with a courageous joyfulness and hope.
By the end of January Sutton was well enough to be emancipated from the pleasant thraldom of an invalid's sofa; nor could his march be any longer delayed. One afternoon, accordingly, the little world of Dustypore assembled to see the brave soldier and the beautiful girl made man and wife. Boldero came in from the District and performed his part as groomsman with creditable stoicism. No one—Maud and Sutton least of all—had the least idea that he was assisting at the sacrifice of all his hopes.
Desvœux preserved his tragic demeanour to the last, presented Maud with a diamond pendant which must have gone far into his quarter's income, and refused obstinately to return thanks for the bridesmaids—a task which was traditionally assigned to him in Dustypore, and which, on all ordinary occasions, he accepted with alacrity and performed with success.
——The little rift within the lute——
Sutton brought back his bride in April, all the better, as it appeared, in health and spirits for her two months' expedition. The beautiful rose of her cheeks had a tinge of brown which spoke only of healthy exercise in the open air. Everybody pronounced her prettier, brighter and more charming than ever. She was in the highest spirits to be back, and Sutton seemed pleased to bring her and to be once more amongst old friends.
To all who saw them, except Felicia's observant eye, they seemed everything which a newly-wedded pair should wish to be. But Felicia felt less confident of their happiness. Whether Maud's letters had unconsciously sounded a little note of distress, or whether it was that she knew both their natures so well and how they ought to harmonise, that the least approach to discord caught her ear—something,at any rate, made her aware of the existence of a subtle disquietude between Maud and her husband. The discovery, or rather the suspicion, filled her with a distress which she attempted in vain to ignore. She found herself joining languidly and insincerely in the chorus of gratulation which the Dustypore community set up over the happy couple. When Mrs. Vereker came to call, rustling in the loveliest of new dresses, and poured out a little stream of gossiping remarks—how pretty it was to see them together, and what a charming lover Sutton made, and was not Maud a picture of a girl-wife?—Felicia responded with a coldness which puzzled her visitor and which Felicia was conscious of trying in vain to conceal. Something, her fine instinct told her, was amiss. One alarming symptom was the obvious relief which Maud found in her society, and the profuse tenderness and affection which she displayed whenever there was no one else to see. She lavished on her a sort of unconscious fondness, for which Felicia looked in vain in her behaviour to her husband. With him her affection seemed constrained, conscious, too deferential to be natural and happy. There was about Maud, when she and Felicia were alone together, a joyous self-abandonment to animal high spirits, which was for ever flowing out into some pretty childish act of fun or affection, but which vanished at the appearance ofSutton or any other onlooker. She became a girl again—she sang, she danced, she got into the wildest games with the children—she let off her excitement and mirth in a thousand natural acts. Then Jem would come in, and it all seemed to die away. When visitors arrived, and Felicia had presently more on her hands than was at all to her taste, Maud would seem to enjoy it and to get amused and interested; then, as the door closed upon the strangers, she would come and throw her arms round Felicia and caress her, as if her one feeling about the visit was that it had been an inconvenient restraint on love which was wanting every moment to express itself in some outspoken fashion; 'I love you the best, the best of all,' she would say impetuously.
'Of all women,' Felicia put in.
'Of all women and of all men too, except Jem,' Maud answered; 'yes, and I believe I love you better even than Jem; anyhow, I love you.'
More than once, too, Felicia detected little manœuvres on Maud's part to walk or drive with her and to quit her husband's society in order to do so. Altogether Felicia felt frightened, anxious and sad about her friends: and Vernon, who always knew her melancholy moods and could generally guess their cause, in vain endeavoured to console her with the assurance that all was right and that Sutton's had been a wise and happy choice.
The truth was that the march had not been altogether a success. A great authority on such matters has said that people often endanger the permanent happiness of married life by putting too severe a strain upon it at its outset. Now a two-month'stête-à-têteis a serious strain. Life wants something besides mere affection to make it run smoothly: it wants the ease and comfort of familiarity, the freedom of tastes ascertained to be congenial, the pleasant usages of common action. The first year of wedded life is, no doubt, a series of experiments in getting on; two wheels, however nicely fitted, are likely to rub a little at some point of contact or other. And then Paradise itself would lose its charm if it were all the same; and the days on Maud's first journey had a distracting resemblance. Her eyes ached with the interminable horizon of dust and sand, the scrubby brushwood, the lonely crumbling tomb, the rare clumps of palms, the scuffling, bellowing herds of cattle. Sutton's cook, whom his master in his simple tastes believed a prodigy of culinary skill, used to send up the same dishes with depressing monotony, and, do what she would, Maud could not like them. Then some marches were over terribly rough ground, and her Arab made stumbles that took her breath away, though she was ashamed to say so. But it was not the little things which reallymattered. Her husband's very nobility of nature oppressed her. A hundred times she had felt how good he was, how true, how really great, how chivalrous in his devotion, how tenderly considerate, and yet—and yet—something more unheroic would perhaps have been sometimes a relief. When the most ineffably stupid young officers rode across from some neighbouring station and plunged with cheerful volubility into the gossip of last season at Elysium, there was, Maud felt, something welcome in the humbler companion and the more trivial theme. Then, too, the solitary days oppressed her. Sutton had often outlying posts to visit and would accomplish them by starting off three or four hours before Maud was awake and making adetour, so as to meet her at their new halting-place at breakfast. On these mornings Maud had the company of an escort of troopers, her greyhound Punch, and her own thoughts, which were apt to get gloomy. Even Punch, she fancied, thought it a bore, and went along in a dejected fashion. Sometimes Sutton's work could not be so quickly disposed of, and he would be detained till the evening, and then the solitary day seemed sad and interminably long. More than once the tears had come unbidden to her eyes. Did Sutton forget her? Never for an instant, her heart told her clearly enough; but he did not perhaps sufficiently realise the wants andwishes, the flickering, uncertain spirits, the wayward moods, the causeless melancholy of one who, though invested with the dignities of womanhood, was in character and powers in reality still a child.
Then, though Sutton was never in the slightest degree imperative, and though her every spoken wish was law, Maud was conscious sometimes of being kept in better order than she liked and being forced up to a standard which was inconveniently high. Her husband spoke little of his tastes; no word from him ever assumed the resemblance of a command; yet Maud not unfrequently felt that a secret pressure was constraining her to something that was not exactly congenial; she knew with an almost distressing distinctness what her husband liked and disliked, and the knowledge was something of a burden. She was conscious when she hurt him; sometimes from mere waywardness she chose to do it, but she hurt herself in the process as much as him. She had given him her heart and made him all her world, and was glad to have done so. None the less there was sometimes an undefined pang about her self-devotion; she became restless, anxious, uncertain in her moods, and the tears seemed to lie near the surface and would spring to light, in unwary moments, at trifles too slight to cause their flow.
Then on some matters her husband's tastes andhers were by no means in harmony. On one occasion Desvœux had seized the opportunity of the Agent's camp being in the neighbourhood and had ridden across and travelled a couple of marches with them. Maud had looked forward to seeing him with pleasure and greeted his arrival with marked animation. The visit turned out as pleasant as she had expected; but the pleasure was marred by a secret conviction of her husband's disapproval. Nothing could quench Desvœux's light-heartedness or impede the easy flow of his amusing small-talk. Sutton, however, did not seem to find it amusing, and assumed, quite unconsciously, a dignified air, which Maud felt to be rather awful, though Desvœux was, as usual, imperturbable in his gaiety. His spirits, however, were better, and she was more at her ease to be infected by them when Sutton was not by. It vexed her to the heart to know that it was so, but so she knew it was.
The morning that Desvœux went away was one of Sutton's busy days, and Maud was alone when their guest bade her farewell. 'Good-bye,' she said, with a sort of sigh; 'how I wish you could have stopped and ridden with me this morning! I shall be alone all day and feel that I am going to have a fit of low spirits.'
'And so am I,' said Desvœux, 'a very bad fitindeed, which will last till next time we meet. Good-bye.'
Maud saw him turning pale, as he used to do when he got excited, and heard the eager tremble in his voice. He held her hand for an instant as if he could not bear to give it up, and looked at her with a look that was earnest and reproachful and, Maud felt, very, very sad. Then Desvœux had left without another word, but how eloquent may silence sometimes be!
Was she smiling or crying, and did she really want his company; and was she neglected and miserable? Desvœux had galloped away with his heart in a tumult from queries such as these, cursing the cruel fate which obliged him to be at his master's camp, full thirty miles away, with endless boxes of despatches ready for disposal before to-morrow morning.
Thus it was that Maud's early married life had not been without its morning clouds and sorrows. Then, as people do when they are unhappy, casting about for a cause of her unhappiness, she began to reproach herself. The old doubts of her fitness, her worthiness for her position, her power to retain her husband's love, began to haunt her. 'Ah me!' she sometimes felt inclined to cry, 'I fear that I am no true wife.' And yet she knew that, not even if her inmost thoughts were read,could she bring any charge of doubtful love or allegiance against herself. Sutton's men had, she had often heard, begun to worship him when his exploits in the Mutiny had raised their enthusiasm to its height. Maud felt that she could understand the feeling; in fact, she did worship him with all her being. But then worship is not all that is wanted for a happy married life. Maud, at any rate, felt it delightful to be with Felicia once again.