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 Fotheringham
about this unlucky frontier outbreak was the cool way in which Blunt
took it. He quite ignored all responsibility in the matter. This was
more than Fotheringham could forgive. When he had to come post-haste
back to Dustypore, with his tail, so to speak, between his legs, leaving
the country in a blaze behind him, with an escort of cavalry to protect
him from the animosities which his proceedings had provoked, the least
that could be expected of him was to wear the penitent air of a man who
has had his own way and come to grief. Blunt, however, was as unabashed
and uncompromising as before, and it had never, it was evident, crossed
his mind that he could be the person to blame. The whole affair was gall
and wormwood to Fotheringham: it was improper, incongruous, and a shock
to his perceptions of the eternal fitness of things. It never ought to
have happened--never, so his fine instincts told him, would have
happened--but for this rough, self-confident, inexperienced outsider. It
came too at the most horrid time of year, just when almost every one was
at the hills and the few whose ill-luck compelled them to remain in the
plains were exhausted with the summer and in need of repose. The Misses
Fotheringham and their mamma had been all the summer at Elysium, and
poor Fotheringham had been meaning to join them for a few weeks'
autumnal holiday; and this was now out of the question. This in itself
was no small grievance. And then, on public grounds, Fotheringham felt
the outbreak a sort of stain on himself and the institution which he
cared 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 a
sort of fondness. Now Blunt's mismanagement exhibited the Board in a
perfectly false light, as political incendiaries. The Rumble Chunder
Grant was made to figure as a stone of stumbling and rock of political
offence, instead of, as its advocates felt it to be, a sort of moral
buffer on which any little unpleasantness which the wear and tear of
government engendered, was allowed to vent itself in safety.
Fotheringham had exactly foretold the result, and felt, it must be
supposed, that kind of melancholy satisfaction which the most
good-natured prophets of evil cannot but experience when their
prophecies 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 and
graver aspects of the affair to make him treat Blunt in a manner, which,
no doubt, the latter gentleman, pachydermatous as he was, found the
reverse of soothing.
Cockshaw, too, in his idle way, was greatly put out and not at all
inclined to make himself pleasant. He smoked more cheroots than
ever--was more impatient of discussion--fidgeted worse when Fotheringham
was settling down into nicely-rounded periods and getting real relief
from doing so, and altogether did not behave as Fotheringham felt that
he ought at a trying time.
Of his two colleagues Cockshaw had come to dislike Blunt by far the
worst. Fotheringham, he knew, was an ass; but then he had known him as
such ever since they were at Haileybury together as lads, and his being
asinine 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 in
his order, an enthusiasm about his work, a professional sympathy with
his colleagues, which bound him to his brother-civilians. Blunt was a
stranger to all this and was known to talk about the Civil Service in a
way 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 article
appeared in the 'Edinburgh Review' about the Government of India, which
Cockshaw felt certain from its style was Blunt's, and which spoke of the
administrators of the country with undisguised contempt. There was a
phrase about 'one dead level of mediocrity,' which some angry
Governor-General had used, and which the article quoted with an approval
which Cockshaw could neither forgive nor forget. The Rumble Chunder
Grant was quoted as a specimen of the gigantic messes which ensue, when
second and third rate men have the management of first-rate questions.
The local Governments were described as costly bureaux, with all the
natural defects of a bureau and some peculiar evils of their own to
boot--now meddlesome and fussy, now indolent and obstructive, frequently
unprincipled and insubordinate. The three separate War establishments
were disposed of with a sneer as the most expensive folly in existence.
The vile corruption which characterised the East India Company in its
earlier days, the scandalous exhibitions of public and private
wickedness which fired the righteous wrath of Burke, had, the writer
admitted, been rendered impossible by the increased communication with
home and the generally improved tone of English manners; but Indian
Governments had long remained the home of jobbery. The stringent remedy
of the Competitive System had been necessary to deal with the
accumulated dulness with which years of licensed favouritism had crowded
the ranks of the service. On the whole it was not true, or anything like
true, that India was well administered. The wonder, however, was,
considering the class of men to whom the job had been entrusted, that it
had ever got administered at all.
'D---- his impudence!' exclaimed Cockshaw with all the fervour of an
indignation which had been gaining strength through a dozen pages of
unpalatable reading; and the expression may be taken as representing in
a concise formula the view which Cockshaw had come to take of his
colleague's mental attitude, and of the respect or consideration to
which he and his proposals were entitled.
The meetings of the board grew very stern and stiff. Unluckily, too, at
this very time the Board's Annual Report had to be written, and the
conflicting views of the members as to the cause of the disaster could
scarcely fail to be brought prominently forward. It was one of the
occasions which Strutt had been accustomed to treat historically, and
which called, he felt, for something grander than Whisp's businesslike
and unpretentious style. 'My good sir,' he would say, 'I have no time to
read history: I am _making_ it.' In the good old days, when Strutt had
his own way, he would have knocked the affair off in half-a-dozen
well-rounded, vague, magniloquent phrases; have left the connection of
the Board with the whole thing in obscurity; have congratulated the
Government on the excellent behaviour of the troops; applauded the
accuracy and range of the Armstrong battery, and paid Providence a
handsome compliment on the fortunate turn which events had taken.
But now Strutt felt a painful misgiving that this sort of thing would
not do. When he began the paragraph--'The sun of the official year has
set in blood,' he saw Blunt's horrid cynical look, and knew that he
would never stand it. Any allusion to Providence--and Strutt felt that
one was quite essential to anything like a proper peroration--Blunt
would, he was sure, ruthlessly draw his pen through. Nor was it only as
to matters of taste and style that Strutt felt embarrassed. Fotheringham
would, he was certain, deprecate any reference to a connection between
the outbreak and the Rumble Chunder Grant. 'Policy,' he would say, in a
mysterious way, 'calls for reticence. We may be misconstrued, but we
cannot afford to show all the world our hand; we don't want the hillmen
to imagine that we admit them to have a grievance.' Blunt, on the other
hand, would be for having it all down in black and white--for describing
the outbreak as the natural result of indistinctness, cowardice and
idleness. Altogether Strutt felt that his lines had been cast in rough
places, and began to agree with Fotheringham that outsiders like Blunt
were a mistake.
While things stood thus, one of those events occurred which form so
constant a characteristic of Indian life and add so formidable a
contribution to the difficulties of government. How is it possible to
have continuity of action, settled policy, completeness of design, when
existence is so shifting that no man who begins a work is likely to see
its close? Promotion or leave or the chances of health keep the
hierarchy of Indian officials for ever on the move. One man goes home to
Europe, and his departure involves the change of a dozen others, each of
whom is waiting anxiously for an advance and is entitled to step into
his fellow's shoes. One of these vicissitudes befell the Board, for poor
Fotheringham fell violently ill, and for some time seemed likely to
create a permanent vacancy. A week's fever left him a skeleton, but a
live one, and his only chance of re-established health was immediate
flight for home. Accordingly, in fewer hours than it takes an English
lady days to determine where she will spend her summer holiday, the
Fotheringham establishment had moved off the scene. The fine
barouche--the Australian carriage-horses--the lovely Arabs on which the
Miss Fotheringhams took their morning exercise--the pretty garden
where their mamma received society to tea and croquet--the dining-room
where the Senior Member had regaled his friends--the library where he
assailed his enemies--the piano at which the young ladies sang tremulous
duets--the arm-chair in which Fotheringham had sate and thought or
seemed to think--all became matters of the past. A neat paper, copied
out by the elder Miss Fotheringham and containing the scanty catalogue
of an Indian official's worldly belongings, was circulated in the
Station, each item at so many rupees for those who liked to buy. Before
the week was over the house was stripped, the simple treasures were
scattered to a dozen new possessors, and the Fotheringhams, as the Arab
folds his tent and glides silently away, had departed. The waters of the
official life rolled smoothly over them, and next day the 'Dustypore
Gazette' announced with laconic severity that Mr. Snaply had on such and
such a morning taken over charge, as Member of the Salt Board, from Mr.
Fotheringham, during the absence of the latter on sick leave, or pending
further orders.
Now Snaply was known as the crossest man in the Service, and it cheered
poor Fotheringham, who was almost too ill and weak to care about
anything, to know that his _locum tenens_ would not allow Blunt to
repose on a bed of roses if he could help it.
Felicia, meanwhile, had carried Maud off to the 'Gully,' a mountain
retreat some twenty miles away, where purer air and a less constrained
life were to be had than at Elysium. It was, in fact, nothing more than
one of a cluster of log-huts, built years before, when a working party
of soldiers had been cutting one of the grand military roads that
traverse the mountains in these parts, and sold offhand, when the work
was done, for what they would fetch to the first comer. Felicia and her
husband had been encamped in the neighbourhood, and had fallen in love
with the wildness of the place, the exquisitely pure air, the huge
towering pines, which gave the scene a character of its own, and,
moreover, with the unfamiliar idea of owning a part of the Himalayas in
freehold.
For a few hundred rupees, accordingly, Vernon had become possessor of
the huts and some adjoining acres, and since then Felicia's embellishing
hand had worked wonders. Nature, as if in gratitude for unaccustomed
devotion, lent herself in a lavish mood to beautify the little
structure. A profuse growth of creepers festooned the porch; a delicious
piece of turf, bright, smooth and soft, and broken only by one or two
projecting crags, stretched down the mountain-side in front; inside the
rough deodar paling the beds were all ablaze with English flowers that
not even Felicia's tenderness could coax into healthiness in the plain
below. 'These are my invalids,' Felicia said, to whom this spot was
always full of charms: 'I send them up with the babies to breathe a
little wholesome air. Shut your eyes, Maud, and smell this--cannot you
fancy yourself in a sweet English wood in June?'
There were other beauties, moreover, about the place than those of an
English summer. They were hanging in a little picturesque nook of
safety, but all around them was sublime. Storms gathered and crashed and
spent their fury as if this was their very home where they could play at
ease. An inky mass came lowering over the heights above and shed itself
in one angry deluge on the mountain-side; the thunder crashed in fierce
echoes from crag to crag, and all the heavens blazed from end to end as
the fearful fiery zig-zags came darting out of the gloom; then the
tempest would pass away and nothing be heard but the distant rumble and
the hundred muddy torrents roaring downwards. The great folds of mist
came swirling up the precipice, wrapping everything for a few moments in
gloom; then they would pass on, and presently again the sky be serene
and bright, and the reeking mountains sun themselves gleefully in the
brightness and warmth that were everywhere present.
'It is beautiful,' Maud said, 'but too grand to be quite pleasant; it is
rather awful. That black mountain opposite, with its army of skeleton
deodars, makes me shudder.'
Across the gorge the forest had been burnt--the first rude attempt by
the mountaineers at reclaiming the soil. For weeks together these
blazing patches may be seen on the hillside, hidden in a cloud of smoke
by day, and at night lighting up the landscape with a lurid, fitful
glare. When, by a change in the wind or sudden downpour, the
conflagration ceases, nothing remains but a gloomy array of charred
stumps, with here and there some monstrous stem towering above, which
the flames, though they were able to kill, have not succeeded in
devouring. Then among the ruins of the forest comes the primitive
cultivator, with his tiny plough and scrambling goat-like bullocks, and
wrings a scanty crop of oats or potatoes from each ridge and cranny of
the rocky steep; and so the reign of agriculture has begun. The effect,
however, from the picturesque point of view is weird and gloomy; it was
so, at any rate, in Maud's thoughts, for she ever after associated it
with the first piece of really bad news that had ever come to her in the
whole of her sunshiny existence. A note arrived one morning from Vernon
at Dustypore, and Felicia read it out before she was well aware of its
import. He was just starting, Vernon said, for the head-quarters of the
expedition. 'There has been a fight, and the entrenched village has
been carried by a _coup de main_, and----'
'And what?' said Maud, who felt herself turning deadly cold and her
heart 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. I
am going out to look after him. More news to-morrow."'
Maud rose and fled, without a word, to her bedroom, to deal with this
agitating piece of news as best she might. She did not feel sure enough
of her composure to trust herself to the chances of a break-down even
before Felicia. There was something in herself, she knew, that she did
not wish even Felicia's eye to read. To Felicia her husband's letter
spoke only of the fortunes of their common friend; to Maud it was, as a
quick, agonising pang told her, an affair of life or death. A serious
wound--a fall from horseback--terrible, vague words that might mean
anything--that might mean something that would eclipse all Maud's
existence in the gloom of a lifelong disaster. She had thought over
their last ride together often; but she knew now, and now only, to the
full what it had really been to her. She had recalled his last acts and
words--they had been sweet and tender words, such as would keep their
fragrance through a lifetime; but, supposing that they were to be
really 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's
passing wing: a dark shadow, black and fateful as the storms which came
raging up the valley, seemed to be gathering across her life. Life
itself seemed to hang on a slender thread, the tidings which to-morrow's
messenger should bring--perhaps even now life was over for her.
Felicia did not leave her long in solitude; she came in presently, with
her kind considerate air, knowing and feeling all, as Maud instinctively
was aware, but speaking only just what should be spoken, and guarded by
a 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 to
be frightened. To-morrow, dear Maud, there will be good news for both of
us.'
Maud took her companion's hand in a helpless, imploring way that went to
Felicia's very heart; but, if her life had depended on it, no spoken
word would come.
There are some things in life, some desperate chances, some horrible
possibilities of suffering, which seem to strike one mute. Maud seemed
now to have come across some such crisis of existence. She followed
Felicia about; they took the children for a walk; she went almost
unconsciously about the little routine of their home life; all the time
she seemed to herself in a sort of dreadful dream; she turned faint and
chill as the messengers now and again came clambering up the gorge, each
with his fresh item of news from the world below, some one of them, as
she knew must be the case, carrying with him the sentence of her fate.
'It makes my blood run cold,' she told Felicia afterwards, 'to see one
of them coming even now.'
Sutton's words of farewell to her were not, however, destined to be his
last. The next day a good friend at Government House sent them across
the Hills a copy of a telegram from head-quarters, which showed that
Sutton's life was at any rate in no immediate danger. Then came a letter
to 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; there
was a bullet lodged in his side, which had been troublesome, and he had
been much bruised by his horse rolling across him. But there was no
danger; in a week or two he would be able to move, and meanwhile he was
in splendid air, and well looked after.
Then Maud went to her precious locket once again, and wept over it tears
of joy, gratitude and love. The mists had cleared away, the world was
irradiated with happiness and hope; even the blackened hillside opposite
had caught a ray of sunshine and seemed to smile back at her. She felt a
very child again in the lightness of her heart; and Felicia, in a graver
but not less happy mood, breathed a deep prayer of fervent gratitude
that the calamity so near and terrible had passed away, leaving this
young bright life as bright as ever.