[Illustration: Cover]
CHRONICLES OF DUSTYPORE
H. S. CUNNINGHAM
DUSTYPORE.
Ballantyne Press,
BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO.
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
CHRONICLES OF DUSTYPORE
_A TALE OF MODERN ANGLO-INDIAN SOCIETY_
BY
H. S. CUNNINGHAM
AUTHOR OF "WHEAT AND TARES," "LATE LAURELS," ETC.
=A New Edition=
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1877
[_All rights reserved_]
TO
R. H. W.
You promised me once that, if ever the 'Chronicles of Dustypore' shaped
themselves into being, they might be dedicated to you. While writing
them my thoughts have often turned to happy hours passed in your
society, and pleasant scenes witnessed beneath your roof. If the story
has profited thereby, and Felicia has borrowed whatever charms she may
possess from those remembered scenes and hours, forgive me, and let me
lay the portrait, with all its imperfections, at your feet.
H. S. C.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE SANDY TRACTS 1
II. MAUD 10
III. WAR AT THE SALT BOARD 22
IV. FELICIA 29
V. 'SUTTON'S FLYERS' 38
VI. 'A COMPETITION WALLAH' 46
VII. THE RUMBLE CHUNDER GRANT 58
VIII. GOLDEN DAYS 64
IX. THE FIRST BALL 72
X. THE WOES OF A CHAPERON 83
XI. FRIENDS IN COUNCIL 92
XII. A CHAPTER OF DISCLOSURES 108
XIII. DESVOEUX MAKES THE RUNNING 115
XIV. TO THE HILLS! 126
XV. A DISTRICT OFFICER 141
XVI. ELYSIUM 147
XVII. A BATTLE ROYAL 156
XVIII. GAUDIA IN EXCELSIS 163
XIX. A BRUSH ON THE FRONTIER 175
XX. A LAST RIDE 184
XXI. MAUD'S SECRET 192
XXII. LOVE IS BEGUN 201
XXIII. A STRAY SHOT 208
XXIV. THE GULLY 220
XXV. AN INVALID 235
XXVI. DESVOEUX IN DESPAIR 243
XXVII. CHRISTMAS AT DUSTYPORE 256
XXVIII. MORNING CLOUDS 264
XXIX. THE HILL CAMP 273
XXX. TEMPTATION 281
XXXI. BOLDERO ON GUARD 287
XXXII. A GRASS WIDOW 298
XXXIII. FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI 305
XXXIV. BAD TIMES IN THE PLAINS 314
XXXV. AN ELYSIAN PICNIC 320
XXXVI. A KISS 330
XXXVII. ILL NEWS FLY APACE 348
XXXVIII. FLIGHT 359
XXXIX. THE PRODIGAL'S RETURN 366
L'ENVOI 373
CHRONICLES OF DUSTYPORE.[1]
CHAPTER I.
THE SANDY TRACTS.
He seems like one whose footsteps halt,
Tolling in immeasurable sand;
And o'er a weary, sultry land,
Far beneath a blazing vault,
Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,
The city sparkles like a grain of salt.
Any one who knows or cares anything about India--that is, say, one
Englishman in a hundred thousand--is familiar with the train of events
which resulted in the conquest of the Sandy Tracts, the incorporation of
that unattractive region in the British Indian Empire, and the
establishment of an Agency at Dustypore. The ninety-nine thousand nine
hundred and ninety-nine, who neither know nor wish to know, would not be
grateful for all account of battles fought at places of which they never
heard, of victories gained by generals whose fame is already forgotten,
or of negotiations which nobody but the negotiators understood at the
time, and which a few years have effectually relegated to the oblivion
that awaits all that is at once dull, profitless, and unintelligible.
Suffice it to say that the generally admired air of 'Rule Britannia,'
which has been performed on so many occasions for the benefit of
admiring audiences in different parts of the Indian continent, was once
again piped and drummed and cannonaded into the ears of a prostrate
population. The resistless 'red line,' historical on a hundred
battle-fields, once again stood firm against the onset of despairing
fanaticism, and once again in its advance moved forward the boundaries
of the conquering race. The solid tramp of British soldiers' feet
sounded the death-knell of a rule whose hour of doom had struck, and one
more little tyranny--its cup of crime, perfidy, and folly full--was
blotted for ever from the page of the world's story. The sun set into a
horizon lurid with the dust of a flying rabble, and the victorious
cavalry, as it returned, covered with sweat and dirt, from the pursuit,
found all the fighting done, an English guard on duty at the city gates,
a troop of English artillery drawn up in front of the principal mosque,
and a couple of English sentinels plodding up and down with all the
stolidity of true Britons in front of the Officers' Quarters. The Sandy
Tracts were ours.
The next morning at sunrise the British flag was flying on the Fort of
Dustypore, and a British General and his staff were busy with maps,
orders, and despatches in quarters from which the ladies of a royal
seraglio had fled in post-haste the afternoon before. Thenceforward
everything went on like clockwork. Before the week was out order, such
as had not been dreamed of for many a long year, prevailed in every nook
and corner of the captured city. One morning an elderly gentleman, in
plain clothes, attended by two or three uniformed lads and a tiny
cavalry escort, rode in, and a roar of cannon from the Fort announced
that the 'Agent' had arrived. Then set in the full tide of civil
administration. Courts began to sit, pickpockets and brawlers were
tried; sanitary regulations were issued; returns were called for,
appointments were made. The 'Dustypore Gazette,' in its first issue,
announced with the greatest calmness, and in the curt language
appropriate to an everyday occurrence, the annexation of the Sandy
Tracts; and a gun fired from the Fort every morning, as near as might be
to mid-day, announced to the good people of Dustypore that, by order of
Queen Victoria, it was twelve o'clock, and twelve o'clock in a British
cantonment.
The new addition to Her Majesty's possessions resembled the Miltonic
hell in one particular at any rate--in being a region of fierce
extremes. On winter mornings a biting wind, fresh from its icy home in
the distant snow-clad range, cut one to the core; and people clustered,
with chattering teeth and blue fingers, round blazing hearths, where
great logs worthy of an English Christmas tempered the cruel atmosphere
to a genial glow. When the 'Rains' came it poured a little deluge.
During the eight months of summer the state of things resembled that
prevailing in the interior of a well-constructed and well-supplied
Arnott's stove. Then it was that the Sandy Tracts were seen in the
complete development of their resources and in the fullest glory. Vast
plains, a dead level but for an occasional clump of palms or the dome of
some despoiled and crumbling tomb, stretched away on every side, and
ended in a hazy quivering horizon that spoke of infinite heat. Over
these ranged herds of cattle and goats, browsing on no one could see
what, or bewildered buffaloes would lie, panting and contented, in some
muddy pool, with little but horns, eyes, and nostrils exposed above the
surface. Little ill-begotten stunted plants worked hard to live and grow
and to weather the roaring fierce winds. The crows sat gasping,
open-beaked, as if protesting against having been born into so
sulphurous an existence. Here and there a well, with its huge lumbering
wheel and patient bullocks, went creaking and groaning night and day, as
if earth grudged the tiny rivulet, coming so toilfully from her dry
breast, and gave it up with sighs of pain. The sky was cloudless,
pitiless, brazen. The sun rose into it without a single fleck of vapour
to mitigate its fierceness, and pierced, like a red-hot sword, the rash
mortal who dared, unprotected, to meet its ray. All day it shone and
glistened and blazed, until the very earth seemed to crack with heat,
and the mere thought of it was pain. 'Ægypt,' to use the poet's phrase,
'ached in the sun's eye.' The natives tied their heads up in bags,
covered their mouths, and carried their clothes between the sun and
themselves. Europeans entrenched themselves behind barriers of moistened
grass, lay outstretched under monster fans and consoled themselves with
what cool drinks their means allowed, and with the conviction, which
seemed to spring perennial in each sufferer's breast, that the present
was by far the hottest summer ever known.
Dew there was none. You stepped from your door in the morning into a bed
of sand, which no amount of watering could reduce to the proper
solidity of a garden-path. As you came in at night you shook off the
dust that had gathered on you in your evening stroll. Miles away the
galloping horseman might be tracked by the little cloud that he stirred
up as he went. The weary cattle trudged homeward from their day's work
in a sand-storm of their own manufacture. There was sand in the air one
breathed, in the food one tried to eat, in the water that pretended to
assuage one's thirst: sand in heaven and sand on earth--and a great deal
of sand in the heads of many of the officials.
This getting of sand into the head, and getting it in in a degree
compatible neither with health, comfort, or efficiency, was a recognised
malady in the Sandy Tracts. It cost the Government a great deal of money
and the services of many a useful brain. Officers, when they felt
themselves becoming unendurably sandy and their ideas proportionately
confused, used to take furlough, and go home and try to get washed clear
again at Malvern or Wiesbaden: and there was a famous physician in
Mayfair, renowned for his skill in ridding the heads of those poor
gentlemen of the unwelcome deposit, who made a reputation and a fortune
by, so to speak, dredging them.
There was one official head, however, at Dustypore in which no particle
of sand was to be found, and that was Mr. Strutt's. It was for this
reason, probably, amongst others, that he was made Chief Secretary to
the Salt Board, a post which, at the time when this history commences,
was one of the most important, responsible, and lucrative in the entire
service. For the Salt Board, as will hereafter be seen, was an
institution whose dignity and powers had grown and grown until they
almost overtopped those of the Agency itself. If the Salt Board was the
embodiment of what was dignified and powerful in Dustypore, Mr. Strutt
had concentrated in his own person the functions and attributes of the
Board. He was prompt, indefatigable, self-satisfied, and, what his
superiors valued him for especially, lucky.
A long career had taught him and the world that those who attacked him
came off second-best. His answers were unanswerable, his reports
effective, his explanations convincing. His nervous hand it was that
depicted the early triumphs of the Dustypore Administration and in
sonorous periods set forth the glories of the British rule--the roads,
the canals, the hospitals and schools--the suppression of crime, the
decreased mortality, the general passion of the inhabitants for female
education. His figures were constantly quoted by people who wished to
talk about India to English audiences, and his very name was a pillar of
strength to the champions of the English rule. Even his enemies were
constrained to admit that he possessed the art of 'putting it' to a
degree of fearful and wonderful perfection.
The maxim, 'like master like man,' was as far as possible from being
verified in the case of Mr. Strutt and his superiors. Of these Mr.
Fotheringham, the Chairman, was lymphatic in temperament, inordinately
vain, and the victim of an inveterate habit of enunciating platitudes.
Cockshaw, who came next, was off-hand, superficial, and positive, with
the positiveness of a man who hates deliberation and despises every form
of uncertainty. Blunt, the third member, was a non-civilian, and had
been brought out from England on account of his practical acquaintance
with salt-mines, and of his having been a secretary in the Board of
Trade. He was business-like, straightforward, and unconciliating;
generally thought differently from his colleagues, and had the roughest
possible manner of saying what he thought.
Such a trio had sometimes, as may well be imagined, no little trouble in
preserving toward the outer world the aspect of serene, benevolent, and
consistent infallibility, the maintenance of which Fotheringham regarded
as the first of duties, Cockshaw did not in the least mind a row, so
long as he was not kept too long at office for the purpose of making it.
Blunt would have stayed at office till midnight, arguing doggedly,
sooner than abandon his point. Happily Fotheringham had a great sense
of propriety, concealed the dissensions of his colleagues from the
public eye, and preserved the Board's dignity from ignominious collapse.
Under Strutt came a hierarchy of less important subordinates, who paved
the long descent, so to speak, from the official altitudes in which the
Salt Board had its being to the vulgar public who consumed the salt.
Chief of these was Vernon, with whom the reader will speedily become
better acquainted. Under him, again, came Mr. Whisp, the
Assistant-Secretary, a young gentleman whose task it was to draw up
minutes of the Board's proceedings, to draft its circulars and to
collect the statistics out of which Strutt concocted his reports. He had
thus, it will be seen, an opportunity of acquiring much useful
information and a highly ornamental style, and Whisp was generally
regarded in the service as a rising man.