GOLDEN DAYS.
O lovely earth! O lovely sky!
I was in love with nature, I;
And nature was in love with me;
O lovely life--when I was free!
Felicia had been surprised, and not altogether pleased, at the
unnecessary cordiality with which Maud had bade their visitor farewell.
There was an excitement, an animation, an eagerness in her manner which
Felicia had not before perceived, and which she felt at once might be
difficult to manage. Desvoeux was exactly the person whom she did _not_
want Maud to like, and the very possibility of her liking him brought
out in Felicia's mind a latent hostility of which, under an exterior of
politeness and even familiarity, she was always dimly conscious. She did
not mind talking to him herself; she was even amused by him; but then it
was always with a kind of protest; she knew exactly how far she meant to
go and felt no temptation to go any further. But the notion of him in
any other capacity but that of a remote member of society, whose
function it was to say and do absurd things in an amusing way, was
strange and altogether distasteful. Anything like intimacy was not to be
thought of for an instant; the merest approach to close contact would
bring out some discord, the jar of which, by a sort of instinctive
anticipation, Felicia seemed to feel already. So long as he moved in
quite another plane and belonged to a different world, his
eccentricities might be smiled at for their comicality without the
application of any rigid canon of taste or morals. But a person who was
at once irreligious and over-dressed, who constantly had to be 'put
down' for fear he should become offensive, and who was a stranger to all
the little Masonic signals by which ladies and gentlemen can find each
other out--the very idea of his presuming to cross the pale, and to form
any other tie than those of the most indifferent acquaintance, filled
Felicia with the strongest repugnance. It was provoking, therefore, that
he seemed to take Maud's fancy and impress her more than any other of
the many men with whom she was now becoming acquainted. It was more than
provoking that she should let her impressions come so lightly to the
surface, and be read in signs which Desvoeux's experienced eye would,
Felicia knew, have not the least trouble in interpreting.
Suppose--but this was one of the disagreeable suppositions which
Felicia's mind put aside at once as too monstrous to be
entertained--suppose he should come to stand in the way of the rightful,
proper, destined lover? She thrust away the notion as absurd. All the
same, it made her uncomfortable, and no doubt justified her to herself
in pushing forward Sutton's interests with more eagerness than she might
otherwise have thought it right to employ about another person's
concerns. When one feels a thing to be _the_ thing that ought to happen,
and sees it in danger of being frustrated by some thoroughly
objectionable interference, it is but natural to do something more than
merely wish for a fortunate result. Felicia, at any rate, could boast of
no such passivity; and, if praising Sutton would have married him,
Felicia's wishes on the subject would have been speedily realised.
The course of love, however, rarely flows exactly in the channels which
other people fashion for it, and Maud's inclinations required, her
cousin felt, the most judicious handling. There could be no harm,
however, in allowing Sutton's visits to go on with their accustomed
frequency; and since Maud must forthwith learn to ride and Sutton
volunteered to come in the mornings to teach her, no one could blame
Felicia if, in the intervals of instruction, the pupil and teacher
should become unconsciously proficient in any other art besides that of
equitation. Maud used to come in from these rides with such a bright
glow on her cheek and in such rapturous spirits, that her cousin might
well feel reassured.
Sutton had found for her the most perfect pony, whose silky coat, lean
well-chiselled head and generally aristocratic bearing, pronounced it
the inheritor of Arab blood. Maud speedily discovered that riding was
the most enjoyable of all human occupations. Down by the river's side,
or following long woodland paths, where the busy British rule had
planted many an acre with the forests of the future, or out across the
wide plains of corn stretching for miles, broken only by clumps of palms
or villages nestling each in a little grove under the wing of some
ancestral peepul-tree, the moon still shining overhead and the sun just
above the horizon, still shrouded in the mists of morning--how fresh,
how picturesque, how exhilarating everything looked! How pleasant, too,
to go through all these pretty scenes with a companion who seemed
somehow to know her tastes and wishes, and to have no thought but how to
please her! Sutton, though in public a man of few words and
unsatisfactorily taciturn on the subject of his own exploits, had, Maud
presently discovered, plenty to tell her when they were alone. The power
of observation which made him so nice a judge of character extended
itself to all the scene about him and revealed a hundred touches of
interest or beauty which, to coarser or less careful vision, would have
lain obscure. Maud felt that she had never known how beautiful Nature
was till Sutton told her.
'There,' he would say, 'I brought you round this wood that we might not
miss that pretty bend of the river, with Humayoun's Tomb and the palms
beyond. See what a beautiful blue background the sky makes to the red
dome and that nice old bit of crumbling wall. The bright Indian
atmospheres have their own beauty, have they not? And see that little
wreath of smoke hanging over the village. This is my pet morning
landscape.'
'And those peach-groves,' cried Maud, 'all ablaze with blossom, and
those delicious shady mulberries and the great stretch of green beyond.
It is quite enchanting: a sort of dream of peace.'
'We had a fine gallop across here once,' Sutton said, 'when first we
took the Sandy Tracts.' And then Maud learnt that they were riding over
a battle-field, and that for a long summer's afternoon men had fought
and fallen all along the path where now they stood, and that a battery
of artillery had been posted at the very corner of the village to which
her guide had brought her. 'I remember when they knocked that hole in
the old wall yonder and how all the fellows behind it took to their
heels. Then, afterwards we stormed the Tomb and had to finish our
fighting by moonlight.'
'Was that when you got your Victoria Cross?' asked Maud, who was
possessed by a spirit of insatiable curiosity about Sutton's badges,
which he was slow to gratify.
'Oh no,' said Sutton, laughing; 'I got nothing then but a bullet through
my shoulder and a knock on the head from a musket-stock which very
nearly ended my soldiering then and there. Look now how quickly the
scene changes as the sun gets up--half its beauty is gone already! Let
us have a good canter over this soft ground and get home before it grows
too hot.'
Maud, who had never thought of a battle except as one of the afflicting
details that had to be remembered at an historical class, and if
possible to be hooked on to its proper site and date, felt a delicious
thrill in actually realising with her own eyes the place where one of
the troublesome events took place, and in talking to a person who had
actually taken part in it. 'And what became of the bullet in your
shoulder?' she asked.
'It was a very troublesome bullet,' said Sutton, 'and a great deal
harder to dislodge than the people from the Tomb. But I was unlucky when
I was a lad and never came out of action without a _souvenir_ of some
sort or other.'
When Maud got home she asked Felicia about this storming of the Tomb,
and learnt that Sutton's account was not as truthful as it might have
been. He and half-a-dozen others had, Felicia told her, volunteered for
the storming-party, had made a rush for the walls through a shower of
bullets; and Sutton and two companions, getting separated from the
others, had been left for some seconds to hold their own as best they
could against the angry, frightened mob within. No one, perhaps scarcely
Sutton himself, knew exactly what had happened. The rest of the party,
however, when they made their way in, found him standing at bay over a
dead comrade's body, and his antagonists too completely taken aback at
his audacity to venture, at any odds, within reach of his sword. In the
scuffle which ensued Sutton received the wounds of which Maud had been
informed; but his exploits on that day were for ever after quoted by his
followers as a proof that there is nothing which a man may not do, if
only he have pluck and will enough to do it.
Maud felt all this very impressive and Sutton's society more and more
delightful. Her enjoyment of it, however--by this time by no means
small--began to be seriously qualified by an anxiety, increasingly
present to her mind, as to her fitness for the dignified companionship
thus thrust upon her. She felt passionately anxious to please Sutton,
and more and more distrustful of her power to do so. He was good, noble,
chivalrous, everything that Felicia had said, and how hopelessly above
herself! What must he think of one who was, as Miss Goodenough had often
told her, a mere congeries of defects? True, he never seemed shocked or
annoyed at anything she said, and professed to like the rides as much as
she did; but might not this be from mere good-nature, or the charm of
novelty, or the wish to oblige Felicia, or any transitory or accidental
cause? Terrifying thought, if some day he should find her wanting, and
banish her from his regards! Meanwhile, happy, happy mornings, and
sweet, bright world, in which such pleasure can be found, even if
haunted by a doubt as to whether it is really ours or not!