BAD TIMES IN THE PLAINS.
Where nature sickens, and each air is death.
While the fortunate Elysians were thus bravely keeping up their own and
one another's spirits by a round of gaieties, the people in the Plains
were busy with a round of work of quite a different description. Cholera
having broken out, all leave in the infected regiments had been
cancelled, and many a luckless officer had come back to his cantonment,
grumbling at a curtailed holiday and the stern mandate which recalled
him just as he had reached the snow scenery of which he had dreamed for
months, or established himself in some happy hunting-ground for a two
months' campaign against ibex or bison. Back they all came, however,
poor fellows, to take their equal chance with rank and file against an
enemy of whom even the bravest men are not ashamed to be afraid.
The prevalence of illness and the precautions ordered to prevent its
increase entailed a deal of extra labour, and kept all the officers
busily employed. The hospitals required constant visiting, for the men
were moody and disheartened, and stood in need of all the encouragement
that their leaders could give them. Sutton, always thinking of every one
but himself, had ordered two of his 'boys' away to an outpost forty
miles off, nominally to look after a turbulent Zámindar, really to be
out of harm's way. This threw all the more work on his hands, and it was
work that he felt himself specially capable of doing with good effect.
His visits at the hospital were, he knew, eagerly looked for, and a few
kind words from the Colonel Sahib often inspired cheerfulness and hope
at a moment when gloom and despondency were telling with mortal effect
on men's minds and bodies. His regiment had already lost several men,
and they had died happy in the thought that the well-loved leader was
ever close at hand, and ever on the look-out for something to alleviate
their suffering. Many a gaunt visage, with death already written in each
ghastly feature, lighted up with sudden brightness as he came, and, when
exhaustion had gone too far for speech, smiled him a heartfelt
benediction of gratitude and love. The scene was, indeed, one full of
pathos, even to a less interested looker-on than the Colonel. It was
horrible to see these sturdy, joyous, much-enduring, dare-devil troopers
lying so utterly prostrated, unnerved and helpless. Death, it seemed,
should have come to them in the form of steel or bullet, the thrust of
lance, the crashing sword-cut or wild cavalry charge; not as a
pestilence, creeping on them unawares and slaying them in their beds.
Sutton, who had looked death in the face a hundred times with perfect
indifference, began to understand why people feared it. After all some
aspects of life are, he felt, too delightful to leave without a sigh.
For the last few months he had been, for the first time in his life,
completely happy. A new era had begun for him, new vistas of pleasure
had opened up. All that had gone before had been duty, excitement, hard
work; not, indeed, without its enjoyment, but, after all, something far
from happiness in the sense in which Sutton had now begun to understand
it. Fighting was all well enough, and the hazardous ambition of a
soldier's career delightfully spirit-stirring; but it was not here that
the real end of life was to be found. Sutton's real end of life was now
the little being who was flirting away at the Hills, in happy
forgetfulness of all but the present moment. Sutton, however, thought of
her only as he had seen her, tender, affectionate, devoted to himself.
Since the half-quarrel about her departure for the Hills and the
reconciliation which followed it, his life with her had been one of
perfect happiness. Maud had been raised by her conquest over herself
into a sweeter, nobler mood, and was more than ever mistress of her
husband's heart. Her departure, peremptorily insisted on by her husband,
had none the less cost them both a bitter pang; though Sutton promised
that it should be for a few weeks at the utmost, a promise which cheered
Maud more than it did himself, as she knew not, as he did, how easily
its fulfilment might be rendered impossible. So Sutton went about his
work in his own determined, loyal fashion, but with his heart no longer
in it. His treasure was elsewhere and his heart with it. The collection
of materials for his Report gave him a deal of trouble and involved many
weary rides. He had to see District officers, Zámindars, police
inspectors, heads of villages, spies, and then to determine what the
real necessities of the case were and where the posts should be fixed.
Everything depended on his work being well, wisely, and thoroughly done.
The responsibility weighed on him: the peace, safety, prosperity of a
whole District was hanging on his judgment. This is the kind of work
which tries conscientious and loyal men far more than physical exertion.
Then the cholera, which had shown symptoms of abatement, broke out all
of a sudden with more violence than ever, and it became apparent that
Sutton's regiment was thoroughly infected. Then all real hopes of his
getting up to the Hills for the present, at any rate, had to be
abandoned; but of this he said nothing to his wife. It was of no use to
distress her beforehand with bad news, which she would be certain to
learn quite soon enough.
One evening, when Sutton had returned, thoroughly tired with a long, hot
expedition, the orderly, whose task it was to bring him the returns of
the sick for the day, told him that in the list of seizures for that
afternoon was a Pathan boy, who had been picked up years before by some
of the troopers in a suddenly deserted village, and who had lived as a
pet child of the regiment ever since. Sutton had been kind to the lad,
had defrayed such small charges as his maintenance in the lines
involved, and had secured him the beginning of an education in the
regimental school. Sutton on hearing the news went off at once to the
hospital. Already the disease had made fearful progress, and he saw in a
moment that the boy was in the most critical condition. He bent over the
exhausted, helpless form, and said a few kind words of hopefulness and
sympathy. The boy listened with glistening eyes and lips quivering with
agitation; and as Sutton turned to go he sprang up in bed, forgetful of
everything but the master-feeling which overpowered him, and clasped his
protector round the neck with a single outburst of affection: 'Ma-Bap,'
'My father and mother!'
Two hours later they came to say that the boy was dead, and before the
next morning Sutton began to be aware that that last embrace had been a
deadly one, and that the dread malady had laid its hand upon himself.