CHAPTER XXIV.
THE GULLY.
I know not if I know what true love is; But if I know, then if I love not him, Methinks there is none other I call love.
Perhaps the thing which more than any other exasperated Fotheringhamabout this unlucky frontier outbreak was the cool way in which Blunttook it. He quite ignored all responsibility in the matter. This wasmore than Fotheringham could forgive. When he had to come post-hasteback to Dustypore, with his tail, so to speak, between his legs, leavingthe country in a blaze behind him, with an escort of cavalry to protecthim from the animosities which his proceedings had provoked, the leastthat could be expected of him was to wear the penitent air of a man whohas had his own way and come to grief. Blunt, however, was as unabashedand uncompromising as before, and it had never, it was evident, crossedhis mind that he could be the person to blame. The whole affair was galland wormwood to Fotheringham: it was improper, incongruous, and a shockto his perceptions of the eternal fitness of things. It never ought tohave happened--never, so his fine instincts told him, would havehappened--but for this rough, self-confident, inexperienced outsider. Itcame too at the most horrid time of year, just when almost every one wasat the hills and the few whose ill-luck compelled them to remain in theplains were exhausted with the summer and in need of repose. The MissesFotheringham and their mamma had been all the summer at Elysium, andpoor Fotheringham had been meaning to join them for a few weeks'autumnal holiday; and this was now out of the question. This in itselfwas no small grievance. And then, on public grounds, Fotheringham feltthe outbreak a sort of stain on himself and the institution which hecared 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 asort of fondness. Now Blunt's mismanagement exhibited the Board in aperfectly false light, as political incendiaries. The Rumble ChunderGrant was made to figure as a stone of stumbling and rock of politicaloffence, instead of, as its advocates felt it to be, a sort of moralbuffer on which any little unpleasantness which the wear and tear ofgovernment engendered, was allowed to vent itself in safety.Fotheringham had exactly foretold the result, and felt, it must besupposed, that kind of melancholy satisfaction which the mostgood-natured prophets of evil cannot but experience when theirprophecies come true. He was too much of a gentleman to say to Blunt,'There! I told you so,' in so many words; but this was what he _felt_;and this sort of inward triumph joined together with the other andgraver aspects of the affair to make him treat Blunt in a manner, which,no doubt, the latter gentleman, pachydermatous as he was, found thereverse of soothing.
Cockshaw, too, in his idle way, was greatly put out and not at allinclined to make himself pleasant. He smoked more cheroots thanever--was more impatient of discussion--fidgeted worse when Fotheringhamwas settling down into nicely-rounded periods and getting real relieffrom doing so, and altogether did not behave as Fotheringham felt thathe ought at a trying time.
Of his two colleagues Cockshaw had come to dislike Blunt by far theworst. Fotheringham, he knew, was an ass; but then he had known him assuch ever since they were at Haileybury together as lads, and his beingasinine 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 inhis order, an enthusiasm about his work, a professional sympathy withhis colleagues, which bound him to his brother-civilians. Blunt was astranger to all this and was known to talk about the Civil Service in away 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 articleappeared in the 'Edinburgh Review' about the Government of India, whichCockshaw felt certain from its style was Blunt's, and which spoke of theadministrators of the country with undisguised contempt. There was aphrase about 'one dead level of mediocrity,' which some angryGovernor-General had used, and which the article quoted with an approvalwhich Cockshaw could neither forgive nor forget. The Rumble ChunderGrant was quoted as a specimen of the gigantic messes which ensue, whensecond and third rate men have the management of first-rate questions.The local Governments were described as costly bureaux, with all thenatural defects of a bureau and some peculiar evils of their own toboot--now meddlesome and fussy, now indolent and obstructive, frequentlyunprincipled and insubordinate. The three separate War establishmentswere disposed of with a sneer as the most expensive folly in existence.The vile corruption which characterised the East India Company in itsearlier days, the scandalous exhibitions of public and privatewickedness which fired the righteous wrath of Burke, had, the writeradmitted, been rendered impossible by the increased communication withhome and the generally improved tone of English manners; but IndianGovernments had long remained the home of jobbery. The stringent remedyof the Competitive System had been necessary to deal with theaccumulated dulness with which years of licensed favouritism had crowdedthe ranks of the service. On the whole it was not true, or anything liketrue, that India was well administered. The wonder, however, was,considering the class of men to whom the job had been entrusted, that ithad ever got administered at all.
'D---- his impudence!' exclaimed Cockshaw with all the fervour of anindignation which had been gaining strength through a dozen pages ofunpalatable reading; and the expression may be taken as representing ina concise formula the view which Cockshaw had come to take of hiscolleague's mental attitude, and of the respect or consideration towhich he and his proposals were entitled.
The meetings of the board grew very stern and stiff. Unluckily, too, atthis very time the Board's Annual Report had to be written, and theconflicting views of the members as to the cause of the disaster couldscarcely fail to be brought prominently forward. It was one of theoccasions which Strutt had been accustomed to treat historically, andwhich called, he felt, for something grander than Whisp's businesslikeand unpretentious style. 'My good sir,' he would say, 'I have no time toread history: I am _making_ it.' In the good old days, when Strutt hadhis own way, he would have knocked the affair off in half-a-dozenwell-rounded, vague, magniloquent phrases; have left the connection ofthe Board with the whole thing in obscurity; have congratulated theGovernment on the excellent behaviour of the troops; applauded theaccuracy and range of the Armstrong battery, and paid Providence ahandsome compliment on the fortunate turn which events had taken.
But now Strutt felt a painful misgiving that this sort of thing wouldnot do. When he began the paragraph--'The sun of the official year hasset in blood,' he saw Blunt's horrid cynical look, and knew that hewould never stand it. Any allusion to Providence--and Strutt felt thatone was quite essential to anything like a proper peroration--Bluntwould, he was sure, ruthlessly draw his pen through. Nor was it only asto matters of taste and style that Strutt felt embarrassed. Fotheringhamwould, he was certain, deprecate any reference to a connection betweenthe outbreak and the Rumble Chunder Grant. 'Policy,' he would say, in amysterious way, 'calls for reticence. We may be misconstrued, but wecannot afford to show all the world our hand; we don't want the hillmento imagine that we admit them to have a grievance.' Blunt, on the otherhand, would be for having it all down in black and white--for describingthe outbreak as the natural result of indistinctness, cowardice andidleness. Altogether Strutt felt that his lines had been cast in roughplaces, and began to agree with Fotheringham that outsiders like Bluntwere a mistake.
While things stood thus, one of those events occurred which form soconstant a characteristic of Indian life and add so formidable acontribution to the difficulties of government. How is it possible tohave continuity of action, settled policy, completeness of design, whenexistence is so shifting that no man who begins a work is likely to seeits close? Promotion or leave or the chances of health keep thehierarchy of Indian officials for ever on the move. One man goes home toEurope, and his departure involves the change of a dozen others, each ofwhom is waiting anxiously for an advance and is entitled to step intohis fellow's shoes. One of these vicissitudes befell the Board, for poorFotheringham fell violently ill, and for some time seem
ed likely tocreate a permanent vacancy. A week's fever left him a skeleton, but alive one, and his only chance of re-established health was immediateflight for home. Accordingly, in fewer hours than it takes an Englishlady days to determine where she will spend her summer holiday, theFotheringham establishment had moved off the scene. The finebarouche--the Australian carriage-horses--the lovely Arabs on which theMiss Fotheringhams took their morning exercise--the pretty gardenwhere their mamma received society to tea and croquet--the dining-roomwhere the Senior Member had regaled his friends--the library where heassailed his enemies--the piano at which the young ladies sang tremulousduets--the arm-chair in which Fotheringham had sate and thought orseemed to think--all became matters of the past. A neat paper, copiedout by the elder Miss Fotheringham and containing the scanty catalogueof an Indian official's worldly belongings, was circulated in theStation, each item at so many rupees for those who liked to buy. Beforethe week was over the house was stripped, the simple treasures werescattered to a dozen new possessors, and the Fotheringhams, as the Arabfolds his tent and glides silently away, had departed. The waters of theofficial life rolled smoothly over them, and next day the 'DustyporeGazette' announced with laconic severity that Mr. Snaply had on such andsuch a morning taken over charge, as Member of the Salt Board, from Mr.Fotheringham, during the absence of the latter on sick leave, or pendingfurther orders.
Now Snaply was known as the crossest man in the Service, and it cheeredpoor Fotheringham, who was almost too ill and weak to care aboutanything, to know that his _locum tenens_ would not allow Blunt torepose on a bed of roses if he could help it.
Felicia, meanwhile, had carried Maud off to the 'Gully,' a mountainretreat some twenty miles away, where purer air and a less constrainedlife were to be had than at Elysium. It was, in fact, nothing more thanone of a cluster of log-huts, built years before, when a working partyof soldiers had been cutting one of the grand military roads thattraverse the mountains in these parts, and sold offhand, when the workwas done, for what they would fetch to the first comer. Felicia and herhusband had been encamped in the neighbourhood, and had fallen in lovewith the wildness of the place, the exquisitely pure air, the hugetowering pines, which gave the scene a character of its own, and,moreover, with the unfamiliar idea of owning a part of the Himalayas infreehold.
For a few hundred rupees, accordingly, Vernon had become possessor ofthe huts and some adjoining acres, and since then Felicia's embellishinghand had worked wonders. Nature, as if in gratitude for unaccustomeddevotion, lent herself in a lavish mood to beautify the littlestructure. A profuse growth of creepers festooned the porch; a deliciouspiece of turf, bright, smooth and soft, and broken only by one or twoprojecting crags, stretched down the mountain-side in front; inside therough deodar paling the beds were all ablaze with English flowers thatnot even Felicia's tenderness could coax into healthiness in the plainbelow. 'These are my invalids,' Felicia said, to whom this spot wasalways full of charms: 'I send them up with the babies to breathe alittle wholesome air. Shut your eyes, Maud, and smell this--cannot youfancy yourself in a sweet English wood in June?'
There were other beauties, moreover, about the place than those of anEnglish summer. They were hanging in a little picturesque nook ofsafety, but all around them was sublime. Storms gathered and crashed andspent their fury as if this was their very home where they could play atease. An inky mass came lowering over the heights above and shed itselfin one angry deluge on the mountain-side; the thunder crashed in fierceechoes from crag to crag, and all the heavens blazed from end to end asthe fearful fiery zig-zags came darting out of the gloom; then thetempest would pass away and nothing be heard but the distant rumble andthe hundred muddy torrents roaring downwards. The great folds of mistcame swirling up the precipice, wrapping everything for a few moments ingloom; then they would pass on, and presently again the sky be sereneand bright, and the reeking mountains sun themselves gleefully in thebrightness and warmth that were everywhere present.
'It is beautiful,' Maud said, 'but too grand to be quite pleasant; it israther awful. That black mountain opposite, with its army of skeletondeodars, makes me shudder.'
Across the gorge the forest had been burnt--the first rude attempt bythe mountaineers at reclaiming the soil. For weeks together theseblazing patches may be seen on the hillside, hidden in a cloud of smokeby day, and at night lighting up the landscape with a lurid, fitfulglare. When, by a change in the wind or sudden downpour, theconflagration ceases, nothing remains but a gloomy array of charredstumps, with here and there some monstrous stem towering above, whichthe flames, though they were able to kill, have not succeeded indevouring. Then among the ruins of the forest comes the primitivecultivator, with his tiny plough and scrambling goat-like bullocks, andwrings a scanty crop of oats or potatoes from each ridge and cranny ofthe rocky steep; and so the reign of agriculture has begun. The effect,however, from the picturesque point of view is weird and gloomy; it wasso, at any rate, in Maud's thoughts, for she ever after associated itwith the first piece of really bad news that had ever come to her in thewhole of her sunshiny existence. A note arrived one morning from Vernonat Dustypore, and Felicia read it out before she was well aware of itsimport. He was just starting, Vernon said, for the head-quarters of theexpedition. 'There has been a fight, and the entrenched village hasbeen carried by a _coup de main_, and----'
'And what?' said Maud, who felt herself turning deadly cold and herheart 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. Iam going out to look after him. More news to-morrow."'
Maud rose and fled, without a word, to her bedroom, to deal with thisagitating piece of news as best she might. She did not feel sure enoughof her composure to trust herself to the chances of a break-down evenbefore Felicia. There was something in herself, she knew, that she didnot wish even Felicia's eye to read. To Felicia her husband's letterspoke only of the fortunes of their common friend; to Maud it was, as aquick, agonising pang told her, an affair of life or death. A seriouswound--a fall from horseback--terrible, vague words that might meananything--that might mean something that would eclipse all Maud'sexistence in the gloom of a lifelong disaster. She had thought overtheir last ride together often; but she knew now, and now only, to thefull what it had really been to her. She had recalled his last acts andwords--they had been sweet and tender words, such as would keep theirfragrance through a lifetime; but, supposing that they were to bereally 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'spassing wing: a dark shadow, black and fateful as the storms which cameraging up the valley, seemed to be gathering across her life. Lifeitself seemed to hang on a slender thread, the tidings which to-morrow'smessenger should bring--perhaps even now life was over for her.
Felicia did not leave her long in solitude; she came in presently, withher kind considerate air, knowing and feeling all, as Maud instinctivelywas aware, but speaking only just what should be spoken, and guarded bya 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 tobe frightened. To-morrow, dear Maud, there will be good news for both ofus.'
Maud took her companion's hand in a helpless, imploring way that went toFelicia's very heart; but, if her life had depended on it, no spokenword would come.
There are some things in life, some desperate chances, some horriblepossibilities of suffering, which seem to strike one mute. Maud seemednow to have come across some such crisis of existence. She followedFelicia about; they took the children for a walk; she went almostunconsciously about the little routine of their home life; all the timeshe seemed to herself in a sort of dreadful dream; she turned faint andchill as the messengers now and again came clambering up the gorge, eachwith his fresh item of news from the world below, some one of them, asshe knew must be the ca
se, carrying with him the sentence of her fate.
'It makes my blood run cold,' she told Felicia afterwards, 'to see oneof them coming even now.'
Sutton's words of farewell to her were not, however, destined to be hislast. The next day a good friend at Government House sent them acrossthe Hills a copy of a telegram from head-quarters, which showed thatSutton's life was at any rate in no immediate danger. Then came a letterto 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; therewas a bullet lodged in his side, which had been troublesome, and he hadbeen much bruised by his horse rolling across him. But there was nodanger; in a week or two he would be able to move, and meanwhile he wasin splendid air, and well looked after.
Then Maud went to her precious locket once again, and wept over it tearsof joy, gratitude and love. The mists had cleared away, the world wasirradiated with happiness and hope; even the blackened hillside oppositehad caught a ray of sunshine and seemed to smile back at her. She felt avery child again in the lightness of her heart; and Felicia, in a graverbut not less happy mood, breathed a deep prayer of fervent gratitudethat the calamity so near and terrible had passed away, leaving thisyoung bright life as bright as ever.