The interview was over. Maud had stuck to her programme, which was to treat Desvoeux 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 Desvoeux 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 that Boldero, 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.

CHAPTER XXVII.

CHRISTMAS AT DUSTYPORE.

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 Elysian snows and left a h.o.a.ry 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 anywhere but 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.'

Desvoeux, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 Ca.n.a.l and bestows on it all a lover's a.s.siduity: 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 Ca.n.a.l's ways and manners--how much water it ought to pour per second; how much it _does_ pour; which of the bridges are infirm; where the silt is acc.u.mulating; where the water is being wasted or stolen. He drives his subordinates frantic by a zeal in which they cannot partic.i.p.ate 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 sits now, 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 pa.s.sed 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'

Inspection march 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 pa.s.s. 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 any other 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sisting at the sacrifice of all his hopes.

Desvoeux 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 a.s.signed to him in Dustypore, and which, on all ordinary occasions, he accepted with alacrity and performed with success.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

MORNING CLOUDS.

----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 p.r.o.nounced 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 of Sutton 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 manoeuvres 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 a.s.surance 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's _tete-a-tete_ is 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 really mattered. Her husband's very n.o.bility 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 a _detour_, 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 and wishes, 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 a.s.sumed 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 and hers were by no means in harmony. On one occasion Desvoeux 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 Desvoeux's light-heartedness or impede the easy flow of his amusing small-talk. Sutton, however, did not seem to find it amusing, and a.s.sumed, quite unconsciously, a dignified air, which Maud felt to be rather awful, though Desvoeux 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 Desvoeux 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 Desvoeux, 'a very bad fit indeed, 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 Desvoeux 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? Desvoeux 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.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE HILL CAMP.

And hope to joy is little less in joy Than hope enjoyed----