Chronicles of Dustypore Part 10

CHAPTER XVI.

ELYSIUM.

For they lie beside their nectar, and their bolts are hurled Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world.

The conquering races, who in one age or another have owned the fair plains of Hindostan, have successively made the discovery that there are portions of the year when their magnificent possession had best be contemplated from a respectful distance. Some monarchs retired for the summer to the exquisite Cashmir valleys: others to cool plateaux in the far interior. The latest administrators of the country have solved the problem by perching, through the hot season, on the summits of a craggy range, and by performing the functions of Government at an alt.i.tude of 7000 feet above the sea.

The fact that the highest officials in the country, having a large amount of hard work to do, should prefer to do it in an invigorating mountain atmosphere, rather than amid swamps, steam and fever in the plains below, is not, of course, surprising. The only matter of regret is that the obvious advantages, public and private, of an European climate for half the year can, from the nature of things, be enjoyed by so tiny a fraction of the official world. As it is, the annual removal of the Government to its summer quarters gives rise too often to a little outburst of unreasonable, though not unnatural jealousy; and Indian journalists, who are necessarily closely pinned to the plains, are never tired of inveighing against the 'Capua' of the British rule.

The truth is, however, that if Hannibal's soldiers had worked half as hard at Capua as English officials do at Elysium, nothing but good could have resulted from their sojourn in that agreeable resting-place. Of the holiday-makers it may safely be said that, in nine cases out of ten, they have earned, by long months of monotonous, laborious, and often solitary life, a good right to all the refreshment of body and soul that a brief interval of cool breezes, new faces, and an amusing society can give them. The 'Jack' of the Civil Service is often a dull boy because the stern _regime_ of 'all work and no play' is too rigorously enforced upon him. Let no one therefore grudge him his few weeks of rest and merry-making, or mock at the profuse homage with which the G.o.ddess Terpsich.o.r.e is adored by her modern votaries on the Himalayan heights.

Elysium, indeed, enchants one on the first approach. You clamber for weary miles up a long, blazing ascent, where even the early morning sun seems to sting and pierce. As the road turns, you enter suddenly a sweet depth of shade formed by thick growths of ilex and rhododendron, from the breaks in which you look out at ease upon the blazing day beyond.

Dotted all about the road, above and below, perched on every convenient rock or level ridge of soil, or sometimes built up on a framework of piles, are the homes of the Elysians; not, alas! the ideals which the imagination would conceive of the abodes of the blest, but seaside lodgings, of a by no means first-rate order, with precipices, clouds and rain, instead of sea. Presently the road fails at a great chasm in the mountain-side, and the horses' feet clatter over a frail-looking structure of planks and scaffolding, which clings to the mountain's edge. This is merely a landslip, an event too common even to be observed. Each heavy rainfall, however, washes an appreciable fraction of the Elysian summits to the depths below and leaves the craggy sides barer and steeper than ever. Then, emerging from the ilex grove, the traveller pa.s.ses to a little Mall, where the fashionable world a.s.sembles for mutual edification, and the tide of life, business and gaiety flows fast and strong.

There is something in the air of the place which bespeaks the close neighbourhood of the Sovereign rule, the august climax of the official hierarchy. Servants, brilliant in scarlet and gold, are hurrying hither and thither. Here some Rajah, petty monarch of the surrounding ranges or the fat plains below, attended with his mimic court and tatterdemalion cavalry, is marching in state to pay his homage to the 'great Lord Sahib.' Here some grand lady, whose gorgeous attire and liveried retinue bespeak her sublime position, is constrained to bate her greatness to the point of being carried--slung like the grapes of Eschol--on a pole, and borne on st.u.r.dy peasants' shoulders to pay a round of the ceremonious visits which etiquette enjoins upon her. Officers, secretaries, aides-de-camp come bustling by on mountain-ponies, each busy on his own behest. The energetic army of morning callers are already in the field. A dozen palanquins, gathered at Madame Fifini's, the Elysian 'Worth,' announce the fact that as many ladies are hard at work within, running up long-bills for their husbands and equipping themselves for conquest at the next Government House 'At home.'

Smartly-furnished shops glitter with all the latest finery of Paris and London, and ladies go jogging along on their bearers' shoulders, gay enough for a London garden-party in July. In the midst of all,--the solid basis on which so huge a structure of business, pomp and pleasure is erected,--clumps the British Private, brushed, b.u.t.toned and rigid, with a loud, heavy tread, which contrasts strangely with the noiselessly moving crowd around him and bespeaks his conscious superiority to a race of beings whom, with a lordly indifference to minute ethnological distinctions, he designates collectively as 'Moors.'

Some servants were waiting at the entrance of the place to conduct the Vernons to their home, and before many minutes the travellers were standing in the balcony, looking out on the steep slopes of green foliage below them and the n.o.ble snow-ranges which bounded the entire horizon. Maud soon rushed off to explore the house; and Felicia made her way to the garden, to see how many of last summer's plants the winter had spared to her. Presently she came in, with dew-bedrenched sleeves and gloves and an armful of sparkling roses, geraniums and heliotropes, and deposited them joyously in a heap on the table.

'There,' she cried, 'is my first fruit-offering. Bury your face in them, George, and do homage, as I have been doing, to the Genius of the Hills!

Come here, babies, and be crowned.'

Felicia knelt down and stuck the children's hair full of flowers, till each looked as gaudy as a little Queen of May. Her husband came and stood over them and watched the scene.

'Now,' he said, 'Felicia, you ought to be quite happy--you have your children and your flowers to adore at once.'

'And my husband,' said Felicia, looking up at him, with her sweet, radiant smile. 'And, oh dear, how I wish you had not to go down again to-night! Do you know, George, I mind each separation worse than the last? Next summer we will send the children straight to "The Gully," and we will stay comfortably together.'

Maud came back in the highest spirits. 'Look here,' she said, showing a handful of snow, and fingers red and blue with unaccustomed cold--'how nice it is to feel it once again! And what nectar the air is! And, George, actually, strawberries!'

'Yes,' said Vernon, 'and cream, and plenty of both. Is it not enchanting?'

'You shall have some flowers too, dear,' cried Maud, who seldom missed an opportunity of petting Felicia and letting her love run out in some pretty act or speech. 'See, this rose was made for me to deck you with.

Does she not look charming, George?'

'Hush!' said George; 'we shall make her and the little girls too as vain as possible. Now, as I suppose n.o.body means to crown me, I vote that you go and get ready for breakfast, and I will prepare Maud a plate of strawberries-and-cream, by way of beginning the feast.'

That morning lived ever afterwards in Maud's thoughts as one of the times when the world looked brightest to her. Everything was full of excitement, interest and keen pleasure. If from time to time a thought of Sutton set her heart beating, it was more that she had learnt to worship him as an ideal of all that was most charming in man than that his absence cost her any serious regret. It had given her a pang to part and to feel how little of a pang it had given him. He had been almost unconscious of her departure; he had been certainly quite, quite indifferent to it. Such insensibility was a little speck on the otherwise spotless perfection; but Maud's heart was too light for this to weigh it down for long. A long, charming vista of enjoyment was opening before her. Half-a-dozen people, she knew, were awaiting her arrival with impatience and thought Elysium not quite Elysium till she was there. Before the morning was over there would come, so her prophetic soul announced, kind familiar faces, all the brighter for her presence, with all sorts of delightful projects, often talked of beforehand, now to come into actual fruition; rides, picnics, dances, theatricals, and (thrilling thought!) a fancy ball, at which Maud had already found herself twenty times whirling in antic.i.p.ated valses, each more enchanting than the last. Who could contemplate such a prospect with equanimity? or whose heart have room for gloomy thoughts with so many bright dreams to crush them out?

Then presently there came a note from Mrs. Vereker, bidding her a cordial welcome and threatening her high displeasure if Maud's first visit was not to her. To Mrs. Vereker's accordingly they went, and found her in a little cottage, romantically stuck into a cleft in the rocks, with a cataract of honeysuckle tumbling all about a wooden porch, and a view of the mountains which even her adorers, burning to behold herself, were yet constrained to stop and look at. There was a little court, with a wooden railing to guard the edge and geraniums blazing all about it, where a succession of enthusiasts' ponies waited while their owners did homage within. Through that convenient cranny in the foliage the deity, unseen, could spy the approaching visitor and decide betimes whether she would be 'at home' or not. Now she was unquestionably at home and met them at the door with merry greetings. She led them in and showed them her drawing-room, the very home of innocence and refined propriety. 'My husband does not wish me to mope when he is away,' she said, with a charming simple smile; and, to do her justice, in this respect, at any rate, she obeyed his wishes. If the loveliest, freshest bonnets, the daintiest gloves, the most picturesque mountain costumes, a succession of bewildering head-dresses, could rescue a widowed soul from melancholy, Mrs. Vereker had no right to gloom. Nor was hers the only nature that was cheered, for all mankind conspired to a.s.sure her that she was the most bewitching of her s.e.x. Turn where she would she found a host of willing courtiers, who thought their a.s.siduous services well rewarded with a single smile. She looked at the world through her beautiful purple eyes, and saw it prostrate at her feet.

Even Felicia was captivated, despite her own convictions; and Vernon alone of the party declared her a little ogling hypocrite, and p.r.o.nounced himself unable to understand how any one could think her even pretty.

CHAPTER XVII.

A BATTLE ROYAL.

Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer----

Leaving the celestials to their business and pleasures in the upper regions, the Historic Muse must now descend into the plains and record the wrath of Blunt and the more than Homeric combats which, stirred by Ate in her most malignant mood, that irrepressible official waged against his luckless compeers at the Board. The outbreak was horribly inopportune. The weather was becoming disagreeably hot; c.o.c.kshaw was looking up his rifles and fishing-rods for a month's run into Cashmir; Fotheringham was preparing to retire behind his cuscus entrenchments and aestivate in placidity till the moment arrived for going to the Hills.

But the black soul of Blunt was impervious to climatic influences; his craving for information became more insatiable, his contempt for Fotheringham's plat.i.tudes and Strutt's tall writing less and less disguised. The further Blunt looked into the Rumble Chunder affair the keener grew his sense of the feeble, roundabout, inaccurate, unthorough way in which it had been treated by every one who had essayed to take it in hand. 'The way to handle nettles,' he said, roughly, 'is to take tight hold of them and bear what stinging you get and have done with it.'

Neither Fotheringham nor c.o.c.kshaw were in the least disposed to handle official nettles or to admit the force of Blunt's logic as applied to themselves.

'Some nettles,' Fotheringham said, with dignified composure, 'will not bear handling at all. Many of our Indian maladies you will find, Blunt, require a course of treatment always unpopular with ardent physicians, that, namely, of being left alone.'

'Ay,' said c.o.c.kshaw, blowing a great stream of smoke from his mouth, as if he wished he could treat Blunt and his schemes in like fashion; 'leave well alone, Blunt. What the deuce is it you are driving at?'

'I'll tell you what I am driving at,' said Blunt, 'I want to be out of the muddle in which we have been going on all these years, just for want of a little explicitness and courage.'

'Excuse me,' said Fotheringham testily; 'I am not aware that the conquerors and administrators of the Sandy Tracts have ever been accused of deficiency in courage, at any rate.'

'Of course not,' answered the other; 'no one supposes anything of the sort; but what I mean is that no one has faced the consequences of that confounded Proclamation of the Governor-General in a plain, business-like way, and seen what it really comes to.'

Now the Governor-General's Proclamation was regarded in official circles at Dustypore with a sort of traditional awe, as something almost sacred.

Fotheringham had often spoken of it as the Magna Charta of the Sandy Tracts, and Strutt generally quoted it in the peroration of his Annual Report. Nothing, accordingly, could be less congenial to his audience than Blunt's coa.r.s.e, offhanded, disrespectful way of referring to it.

Fotheringham's whole nature rose in arms against the idea of this rash, irreverential intruder handling with such jaunty freedom and contempt the things which he had all his life been accustomed to treat and to see treated with profound respect. The moment had now come when to put up with Blunt any longer would, he thought, be simple weakness; the cup of Blunt's misdeeds at last was full; and Fotheringham, his patience fairly at an end, pale and excited, spoke, and spoke in wrath.

'I must beg,' he said, in a tone of aggrieved dignity which Blunt especially resented, 'to remind our junior colleague that there are some things of which his inexperience of the country renders it impossible for him to be a competent judge, and of which, when he knows them better, he will probably think and speak with more respect. This Rumble Chunder Grant is one of them. c.o.c.kshaw and I have been at work at it for twenty years: we know the places, the people, the language, the feeling it excites, the dangers it may provoke. The Proclamation, which Blunt is pleased to describe as "confounded," was, we know, a high-minded, well-considered act of a great statesman and has been the foundation stone of all peace, prosperity, and civilisation in the province. It all seems clear to you, my good sir, because--forgive me for saying it--you do not see the intricacies of the matter, and are incapable of appreciating its bearings. For my part'----

'Come, come, Fotheringham,' said c.o.c.kshaw, who had been looking nervously at his watch and knew that it wanted only seven minutes to the hour at which his afternoon game of racquets should begin, 'don't let us drift into a quarrel. As to speaking rudely of the Proclamation, it is as bad as the man who d.a.m.ned the North Pole, you know--no harm is done to any one by that. Blunt is not so nervous about the matter as we are, because he has not had such a deal of bother over it as we have had. My idea is that we have gone into it of late quite as far as we can just now. Suppose we drop it for the present and take it up again in the cold weather?'

'I object altogether,' Blunt said, in a dogged way, which made c.o.c.kshaw give up his chance of racquets that day as desperate. 'That system of postponements is one of the objectionable practices which I especially deprecate. Whenever any of us comes across a thing which he does not fancy, or cannot or will not understand, he puts it into his box and burkes it, and no more is heard of it for a twelvemonth. I would sooner take the chance of going wrong than the certainty of doing nothing.'

'And I,' answered c.o.c.kshaw, lighting a new cheroot with the remaining fraction of his old one, 'would sooner take the risk of a little delay than the certainty of going wrong, as you will do to a moral certainty if you are in such a devil of a hurry.'

'Please, c.o.c.kshaw,' said Fotheringham, to whom his colleague's cheroots and bad language were a chronic affliction, 'do not lose your temper.

For my part, I was going to observe when you interrupted me just now, I really do not know what it is that Blunt imagines could be done.'

'This could be done,' Blunt said, 'we could bring things to a head, and know exactly how we stand; ascertain the claims, the rights, and at what prices we could buy the owners of them out.'

'My good sir,' Fotheringham exclaimed, by this time fairly in a pa.s.sion, 'that is exactly what all of us have been trying to do for the last ten years, and you talk as if it could be done out of hand.'

'And so it could,' cried Blunt, 'if any one would only resolve to do it.

I tell you what: let me have Whisp and a few clerks and translators, and hold a local commission, and I will go into the District myself and knock my way through the matter somehow or other.'

'You will find it infernally hot,' said c.o.c.kshaw.

'You will have a rising on the frontier,' said Fotheringham, 'mark my words, and come back deeper in difficulties than ever.'

However, Blunt at last got his way and went off trotting on his cob.

c.o.c.kshaw escaped gleefully to the racquet-court, and Fotheringham sat sadly at the Board-room, conscious of present hara.s.sment and impending disaster. Both he and Blunt used to carry away with them to their domestic circles the traces of the conflicts in which they had been engaged: both reached their homes in a truly pitiable state of mind and body whenever this hateful Rumble Chunder Grant affair was on hand: both their ladies knew only too well the days when it formed part of the programme. Blunt used to stamp about and abuse the servants, emphasising his language with various vehement British expletives, quaffing large goblets of brandy and soda-water, as if to a.s.suage an inward fury, and making no secret of his opinion that Fotheringham was a donkey.

Fotheringham, on the other hand, retired to his sofa, called for sal-volatile, had both the Misses Fotheringham to bathe his temples with toilet-vinegar, and breathed a hint that poor Blunt was a terribly uncouth fellow, and that it was extremely disagreeable to have to do with people who, not being gentlemen themselves, could not understand what gentlemen felt. Mrs. Fotheringham thought so too, and began, on her part, not to love Mrs. Blunt.