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    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.

CHAPTER II.

MAUD.

    Nature said, 'A lovelier flower
    On earth was never sown:
    This child I to myself will take;
    She shall be mine, and I will make
    A lady of my own.'

When Vernon was appointed Under-Secretary to the Salt Board, he no doubt
imagined that it was in connection with that august body that he would
be known to fame and (as Strutt would grandiloquently have put it) leave
his mark on his epoch. He was destined, however, as the reader of these
pages will presently perceive, to become remarkable on the less unusual
ground of relationship to an extremely pretty girl. His cousin Maud, of
whom years before, in a rash moment of benevolence, he had consented to
become guardian and trustee, had been suddenly thrown upon his hands.
She was no longer a remote anxiety which could be disposed of by
cheques, letters to governesses, and instructions to solicitors, but an
immediate, living reality, with a highly effective pair of eyes, good
looks--as to which women might cavil, but every man would be a firm
believer--the manner of an eager child, and a joyousness which Vernon
was obliged to admit was at once deliciously infectious to the world at
large, and a very agreeable alternative to the state of mind produced by
Indian summers, salt statistics, letters polished by Whisp or
commonplaces enunciated by Fotheringham. With the timidity of indolence
he shuddered to think of the social entanglements and disturbances which
so new an element in his household was calculated to produce.

Maud, on the other hand, had come out to India with a very low opinion
of herself and of her claims upon the good-will of society. At Miss
Goodenough's establishment for young ladies, where her education had
been completed, her shortcomings had been impressed upon her in a manner
wholesome, perhaps, and necessary, but decidedly depressing. She had
been haunted by the awful consciousness that she was a 'Tomboy.' Her
general demeanour, her mode of expressing herself, her ignorance of many
things with which no one ought to be unfamiliar, had been the object of
the most unflattering comment. The elder Miss Goodenough--between whom
and Maud there existed a real though somewhat fitful attachment--used to
have her into a solemn little chamber and administer the most awful
lectures on her sins of commission and omission, and the disgrace and
suffering which they would justly entail. These interviews were
generally tearful and tender; for Miss Goodenough, to whom Maud had been
consigned as a child on her first arrival from India, loved her with a
sort of rapture which made itself felt amid all the vehement
fault-finding which Maud's delinquencies necessitated. Maud had always
regarded the old lady in something of a maternal light, and never could
be brought to abandon the familiar abbreviation of 'Goody,' by which she
had been allowed, as a child, to address her instructress. She accepted
her instructress's sentences accordingly with unquestioning faith and
submission. The two used to weep together over Maud's shortcomings. She
looked upon Miss Goodenough as a friend whose heart it was her unlucky
fate to lacerate. Miss Goodenough regarded Maud as a creature whose
alarming impulses and irregularities justified the darkest forebodings
as to her future, and succeeded in infecting her pupil with some of her
own apprehensions. Some judgment must, so both agreed, sooner or later
overtake one whose shoulders seemed guided by a hidden law to unequal
altitudes, whose toes defied every endeavour to keep them pointed in the
conventional direction, and whose impetuous behaviour was constantly
producing a scandal of more or less gravity.

'Dearest child,' Miss Goodenough would say, with an air of profound
commiseration, 'if you could see how you look, with one shoulder up to
your ears and the other near to what should be your waist!'

This taunt particularly grieved Maud, for she felt bitterly that her
form was unromantically plump, and not at all of the refined tenuity of
several of her companions.

'My shoulders!' she would exclaim, with the tears in her eyes; 'I wish
they were both at Jericho. I am sure I am made wrong, dearest Goody,
indeed I am.'

'Then, my dear,' Miss Goodenough would say, not encouragingly, 'we
should try all the more to remedy natural defects; at any rate, you
might know your Bible. Now, dear Maud, your ignorance is, you know,
simply shocking.'

'Yes I know,' said Maud, 'but I can't help it. Those horrid kings of
Israel and Judah! They made Israel to sin, they make me to sin, indeed
they do. Jehoshaphat, Jehoiakim, Jonadab, Jehu--all wicked--all
beginning with J--how can any one remember them?'

'Then, my dear,' her inexorable monitress would reply, 'you can never
know what every well-educated young lady, what every mere school-child,
is acquainted with. How can you be fit to go into the world?'

'I wish,' said Maud, passionately, in despair at the difficulties of
existence, 'that when the tribes got lost they had taken their histories
with them, and lost them too. Darling Goody, let me learn texts, hymns,
all the Sermon on the Mount, as much poetry as you please, only not
those dreadful Chronicles!' Maud used on these occasions to throw her
arms round Goody's neck in an outbreak of affectionate repentance, in a
way that the elder lady, who was absurdly impressionable, found it
difficult to resist.

But Miss Goodenough's kindness made Maud's conscience all the less at
ease. Calmness, self-restraint, composure, a well-stocked mind, and
sensible judgment were, Miss Goodenough told her, the great excellencies
of character to be aimed at. Maud looked into herself, and felt, with
agonies of self-reproach, that in every particular she fell miserably
short; that she was the very reverse of calm; the least thing roused her
into passion, or sent her spinning from the summit of serene high
spirits to the lowest depths of despair; as for self-restraint, Maud
felt she was just as capable of it as of flying to the moon.

From time to time she made violent efforts to be diligent, and set to
work with sudden zeal upon books which her instructress assured her were
most interesting and improving. These attempts, for the most part,
collapsed in grievous failure. Improvement, Maud felt ruefully, there
might be, though unbeknown to herself; interest, she was certain, there
was none. On the other hand, a chance novel, which had somehow or other
passed scatheless through the rigid blockade which Miss Goodenough
established around her young ladies, had filled her with a sort of
ecstacy of excitement; and no amount of poetry--no such amount, at any
rate, as came within the narrow limits of her mistress's literary
horizon--seemed capable of fatiguing or even of satisfying her.
Displaying the most complete inaptitude for every other form of
diligence, she was ready enough to learn any amount that any one liked
to give her. She even signalised her zeal by the spasmodic transcription
of her favourite passages into a precious volume marked with a solemn
'Private,' protected from profane eyes by a golden padlock and destined
by its proprietress to be the depository of all her intellectual
treasures.

Miss Goodenough, however, though admitting perforce the merits of the
great masters of English song, regarded the claims of poetry as
generally subordinate to those of history, geography, arithmetic, and
various other branches of useful and ornamental learning, and treated
Maud's passion for Sir Walter Scott as but another alarming symptom of
an excitable disposition and ill-regulated mind.

A crisis came at last. It happened at church, where Miss Goodenough's
young ladies used to sit just under the gallery, while the boys of 'The
Crescent House Academy' performed their devotions overhead. One fatal
Sunday in February, just as the Service was over, and the two Misses
Goodenough had already turned their backs to lead the way out, and the
young ladies were preparing to follow, a little missive came fluttering
down and fell almost into Maud's hands; at any rate, she slipped it into
her Prayer-book; and all would have gone well but for that horrid
Mademoiselle de Vert, who, turning sharply round, detected the
occurrence, and the moment Maud was outside the church demanded her
Prayer-book.

Maud turned fiery red in an instant, and surrendered her book.

'And the note,' said Mademoiselle de Vert.

'What note?' said Maud. But alas! her telltale cheeks rendered the
question useless, and made all evasion impossible. Maud was speedily
driven to open resistance.

'No, thank you,' she said, with an air that told Mademoiselle de Vert
that further attempts at coercion would be labour thrown away; 'it was
not intended for you; it was a valentine.'

After this appalling disclosure there was, of course, when they got
home, an explanation to be had with Miss Goodenough, who professed
herself, and probably really was, terrified at so new a phase of human
depravity.

Maud was presently in floods of tears, and was obliged to confess that
she and the offending culprit had on more than one occasion let each
other's eyes meet, had in fact exchanged looks, and even smiles; so
that, perhaps, she was the real occasion for this unhallowed act of
temerity.

'Forgive me, forgive me!' she cried; 'it was nothing wrong; it was only
a heart with an arrow and a Cupid!'

'A Cupid!' cried Miss Goodenough, in horror at each new revelation, 'and
some writing too, I suppose?'

'Yes,' said Maud, whose pleasure in the valentine was rapidly
surmounting the disgrace into which it had got her; 'really pretty
verses. Here it is!' And thereupon she produced the offending billet,
and proceeded to read with effusion:--

    I would thou wert a summer rose,
      And I a bird to hover o'er thee;
    And from the dawn to evening's close
      To warble only, 'I adore thee!'

'Stop!' cried Miss Goodenough, with great decision, and white with
indignation; 'do you know what you are reading? Do you know that that
vulgar rubbish is the sort of odious impertinence that shop-boys send to
their sweethearts, but which it is an insult to let a lady even see, and
which, transmitted in a church, is little less than sacrilege?'

So saying, Miss Goodenough took the offending letter and consigned it to
the flames, and poor Maud stood ruefully by, watching the conflagration
of the silver Cupid, mourning over Miss Goodenough's hard-heartedness,
and consoling herself with the reflection that at any rate she
remembered the verses.

'I must write to your aunt Felicia to remove you. What an example for
other girls!'

'Well,' said Maud resignedly, and blushing in anticipation at the
thought of such an exposure; 'do not, at any rate, tell her about the
valentine. Dear Goody, did you never have one sent to you when you were
my age?'

Miss Goodenough quite declined to gratify this audacious inquiry, and
made up her mind that it was high time for Maud to be under more
masterful guidance than her own. The result was that in the following
November Maud was a passenger on the P. & O. steamship 'Cockatrice,'
from Southampton to Calcutta, where her cousin Vernon was to meet her
and escort her to her new home in Dustypore.

She had been, it must be acknowledged, to a certain degree reassured by
the experience of her voyage. She found that the kings of Israel and
Judah did not occupy a prominent place in general conversation; that a
precise acquaintance with the queens of England was not expected of her;
and that nobody resented the impetuosity of her movements or her want of
self-restraint. On the contrary, several of her fellow-voyagers had
evinced the liveliest sympathy and interest in her, and had devoted
themselves successfully to keeping her amused. Maud, in fact, had gone
down to her cabin on more occasions than one during the voyage and shed
some tears at the approaching separation from friends, whom even those
few weeks of chance companionship had carried close to her heart. It had
been in truth a happy time. The captain, to whose special care she was
committed, had watched over her with a more than paternal interest. The
doctor insisted on her having champagne. The purser set all his occult
influences at work to increase her comfort. The stewards conspired to
spoil her. Maud felt that nothing she could do would at all adequately
express her feelings to all these good people who had ministered to her
wants and tried, with so much success, to please her. There are people,
no doubt, to whom a voyage to India is the height of boredom; but there
are other happier natures to whom it presents a continuous series of
excitements, interests, and joys. Maud, at any rate, enjoyed it with a
sort of rapture, and trembled to think how faintly Miss Goodenough's
admonitions even now began to fall upon her conscience's ear.

Then there had been some very charming fellow-passengers on board, with
whom she had formed the warmest friendship. There was a certain Mr.
Mowbray, for instance--a comely, curly-headed, beardless boy, on his way
to join his regiment--whom she found extremely interesting, and who lost
no time in becoming confidential. It was very pleasant to sit on deck
through long lazy mornings and play bésique with Mr. Mowbray; and
pleasant too, when the day was done, to sit with him in the moonlight
and watch the Southern Cross slowly wheeling up and the waves all ablaze
with phosphoric splendour, and to talk about home and Mr. Mowbray's
sisters, and the stations to which each of them were bound, never,
probably, to meet again. There was something mysterious about it, Maud
felt, and impressive, and very, very charming.

And then, on some evenings, the stewardess would declare that Maud
looked pale, or had a headache, and that she should have a little
dinner on deck; 'Just a bit of chicken, miss,' this benevolent being
would say, 'and a slice of ham, and the doctor will give you a glass of
champagne. The cabin is a deal too hot for you.' And then, by some happy
fatality, Mr. Mowbray would also have a headache that very afternoon,
and nothing but dining on deck would do for him; and so there would be a
very pleasant little repast going on over the heads of the hot, noisy
crowd who were gobbling up their food below; and the two invalids would
forget their maladies, fancied or real, in the innocent excitement of a
congenial _tête-à-tête_. On the whole, Maud had arrived at Dustypore
with the conviction that existence, though beset with almost innumerable
difficulties and dangers, was replete with enjoyments, which made it,
despite every drawback, most thoroughly well worth while to be alive.

CHAPTER III.

WAR AT THE SALT BOARD.

    Hos motus animorum atque hæc certamina tanta--

The Salt Board had excessively respectable traditions. Its commencement
dated far back in Indian history, long before the conquest of the Sandy
Tracts, and its _prestige_ had been maintained by a series of officials
all of whom had been in the habit of speaking of one another with the
utmost respect. The 'illustrious Jones,' 'the great administrator
Brown,' the 'sagacious and statesmanlike Robinson,' all threw the lustre
of their abilities over the institution, and were appealed to with
unhesitating faith by their successors in the department. When one
member referred to another he spoke of himself as 'sitting at his feet,'
or as 'formed in his school,' or as 'guided by his principles,' in
language that was perhaps a little unnecessarily grandiloquent, but
which had, at any rate, the effect of investing the Board with a sort of
moral grandeur with the uninitiated. Even the mistakes of the Board
acquired a sort of dignity and were not to be spoken of in an off-hand
or irreverential manner. They might seem mistakes, but it was not
prudent to be too sure that they were so. Many other decisions of the
Board had been cavilled at by rash critics, and time had shown their
wisdom. The Board, moreover, had a certain grand, misty way of its own
of talking, which made its proceedings somewhat hard to criticise.
Indeed, all outside criticism was resented as an impertinence, and those
rash critics who had the temerity to attempt it were put down with the
contemptuous decisiveness appropriate to ill-judged advisers. There was
a regular conventional way of crushing them: first it was contended
that, being outsiders, they could not, in the nature of things,
understand the matter; as if there was a sort of inner and spiritual
sense, by which the affairs of the Salt Board must be apprehended. Then
there were stereotyped phrases, which really meant nothing, but which
were understood and accepted in the Sandy Tracts as implying that the
Board considered the subject disposed of and did not want further
discussion. Arguments which could not be otherwise met were smothered in
an array of big names, or parried by pathetic references to the zeal of
the Salt officials and the conscientious manner in which they worked in
the sun. Whatever line was adopted, it was the invariable tradition that
Government should express its concurrence, and so the whole thing ended
comfortably to all parties concerned. All this was naturally regarded as
being highly satisfactory. But the maintenance of this agreeable
equilibrium depended on the persons concerned being tempered of the
right metal, imbued with the right spirit, and what Strutt used to call
'loyal.' The intrusion of an alien spirit could not fail to produce
deplorable disturbance, disquiet and the dissipation of all sorts of
agreeable illusions. And this was what happened when Blunt--who was an
outsider, the hardest, roughest, most matter-of-fact of commercial
Englishmen--was appointed to the Board. Blunt violated every tradition
in the most ruthless fashion, was unimpressed by all the solemnities
which awed conventional beholders, and had the most inconvenient way of
asking what things meant, and (as he used to say with a sort of horrid
glee) 'of picking out the heart of a thing.' Now, the Board did not at
all relish having its heart picked out in this unceremonious fashion,
and resented it with a sort of passionate dislike. Fotheringham felt
that he had indeed fallen on very evil times, and that the pleasant days
of peace were numbered. Cockshaw, when he found that Blunt would
neither smoke nor play whist, gave him up as a bore. The very clerks in
the office became agitated and depressed. When Blunt pulled out his
spectacles and produced his papers, and went ruthlessly into figures,
looking rigid and tough, and implacable and indefatigable, both
Fotheringham and Cockshaw knew that their places were not worth having
and that they must look for comfortable quarters elsewhere. Fotheringham
counted the months to the time when his pension would be due. Cockshaw,
who was a man of action, applied forthwith for the Chief
Commissionership of the Carraway Islands, which was just then in the
market.

Blunt had not been many weeks at Dustypore before he showed to
demonstration at the Board that the accounts were kept on an entirely
wrong footing, and that a vast sum of money, five or six lakhs, was not
traceable.

'It is the floating balance,' said Fotheringham, with an air of quiet
assurance, arising from his having given the same reply frequently
before, and always found it answer.

'Perhaps you will trace it, then,' said Blunt, pushing the papers across
to Fotheringham in the most unfeeling way. '_I_ cannot.'

'We had better send for Strutt,' said Cockshaw, who knew nothing about
the accounts himself, and had a nervous distrust of Fotheringham's
explanations. Thereupon Strutt appeared, radiant and self-satisfied, and
cleared up everything with the easy air of a man who is and who feels
himself thoroughly master of the situation.

'No,' he said, in reply to Fotheringham's inquiry, 'not in the floating
balance, but in Suspense Account A: here it is, you see: one item, 2
lakhs--85,000 rs. 15 annas 3 pie.'

'Of course,' said Fotheringham, ignoring his blunder with an air of
placid dignity, 'there, you see, it is!'

'Well,' said Blunt, insatiable of explanation, 'but you said it was in
the floating balance; and pray where are the other items, and what is
Suspense Account A, and how many other Suspense Accounts have you? Pray
go on, Mr. Strutt.'

So Mr. Strutt had to go on, and then it was sad to see the brightness
fade out of his face, and his pleasant swagger disappear, and his
answers get wilder and wilder as Blunt led him from figure to figure,
puzzled him by putting things in all sorts of new lights, and finally
took him completely out of his depth.

This was not the sort of treatment to which Strutt had been accustomed,
or for which he was constitutionally fitted. At last, in despair, he
sent down for Vernon and the Head Accountant, and these two brought up a
pile of ledgers, and traced the missing sums from one account into
another in a manner which baffled all Fotheringham's attempts to follow
them, and proved at last to their own satisfaction that all was right.

Still the horrible Blunt was only half convinced.

'All _may_ be right,' he said, 'and I will take your words that it _is_
so. But the figures do not prove it; nor do they prove anything except
that the system of accounts is deplorable. Any amount of fraud might be
perpetrated under them. I can't understand them: Strutt does not
understand them: not one of you gentlemen understands them. This may
suit you; but, as for me, I hate what I cannot understand.'

So no doubt did Fotheringham, and this was one reason why he so
cordially hated Blunt.

Another thing about Blunt that irritated his colleagues was his way of
coughing--a loud, harsh, strident cough--whenever he was vexed.

'His coughs are quite like oaths,' Fotheringham said with a shudder; and
it must be confessed that Blunt could throw an expression that sounded
horribly like 'damn it' into his mode of clearing his throat; and that
when Fotheringham was arguing with him he cleared his throat oftener and
more vigorously than can have been necessary.

CHAPTER IV.

FELICIA.

    The laws of marriage character'd in gold
    Upon the blanched tablets of her heart;
    A love still burning upward, giving light
    To read those laws; an accent very low
    In blandishment, but a most silver flow
      Of subtle-paced counsel in distress,
    Right to the heart and brain, tho' undescried,
      Winning its way with extreme gentleness
    Through all the outworks of suspicious pride.

The new home in which Maud found herself might well have contented a
more fastidious critic than she was at all inclined to be. The Vernons
were delightful hosts. Maud had established thoroughly comfortable
relations with her cousin during the long journey to Dustypore; and
though he was too indolent or perhaps too much absorbed in work for
anything but a sort of passive politeness, still this was, upon the
whole, satisfactory and reassuring, and Maud felt very much at her ease
with him. Mrs. Vernon, the 'Cousin Felicia,' whom Maud now realised in
flesh and blood for the first time, inspired her with a stronger, keener
feeling of admiration than any she had known before. She was beautiful,
as Maud had often heard; but beauty alone would not account for the
thrill of pleasure which something in Felicia's first greeting gave her.
The charm lay in an unstudied, unconscious cordiality of manner that
fascinated the new-comer with its sincerity and grace. Felicia
coruscated with cheerfulness, courage, mirth. She was bright, and
infected those about her with brightness. Transplanted from the quiet
luxury of an English country-house to the rough experiences of Indian
life, she bore through them all an air of calmness, joyousness,
refinement, which the troubles of life seemed incapable of disturbing.
When, years before, just fresh from the schoolroom and with all the
dazzling possibilities of a London season before her, she had admitted
her attachment to Vernon and her unalterable desire to go with him to
India, her father's face had looked darker than she had ever seen it
before, and a family chorus of indignation had proclaimed the unwisdom
of the choice. The rector's son and the squire's daughter, however, had
played about together as boy and girl, and long years of intimacy had
cemented a friendship too strong to be shattered by such feeble blows as
worldliness or prudence could inflict upon it. Vernon had nothing but
the slender portion which a country clergyman might be expected to leave
his children at his death--nothing, that is, except a long list of
school and college honours and a successful candidature for the Indian
Civil Service. Felicia, as her deploring aunts murmured amongst
themselves, 'was a girl who might have married _any one_;' and her
parents, without incurring the charge of a vulgar ambition, might
naturally complain of a match which gave them so little and cost them
the pang of so complete a separation. Felicia, at any rate, had never
repented of her choice; she was greatly in love with her husband, and
had the pleasant consciousness that his taste--fastidious, critical, and
not a little sarcastic--found in her nothing that was not absolute
perfection. India had developed in her a self-reliance and fortitude
which never could have been born in the safe tranquillity of her home.
The hot winds of Dustypore had not quite robbed her cheeks of their
English bloom; but there were lines of suffering, anxiety, and fatigue
which, when her face was at rest, let out the secret that her habitual
brightness was not as effortless as it seemed.

The fact was that life, with all its enjoyments, had been to her full of
pangs, of which, even at a safe distance, she could scarcely trust
herself to think. The separation from her home was a grief that long
usage made none the easier to bear. On the contrary, there was a sort of
aching want which was never appeased, and which the merest trifle--a
letter--a message--a word--was sufficient to light up into something
like anguish. Felicia never achieved the art of reading her home letters
with decent composure, and used to carry them, with a sort of nervous
uneasiness, to her own room, to be dealt with in solitude. Then four
children, all with an air of Indian fragility, and whose over-refined
looks their mother would thankfully have bartered for a little vigour
and robustness, had cost her many a heartache. On the horizon of all her
married life there loomed the dreadful certainty of a day when another
series of separations would begin, and the choice would lie between the
companionship of her husband in India, or the care of her children at
home.

From this horrid thought it was natural for such a temperament as
Felicia's to seek refuge in merriment, which, if sometimes a little
strained, was never wholly unnatural. Excitement was a pleasant cure for
gloomy thought, and it was to Felicia never hard to find. Every sort of
society amused her, and those who saw her only in public would have
pronounced her a being to whom melancholy was inconceivable. Her
husband, however, could have told that Felicia was often sad. There were
afternoons, too, when she was quite alone, when she would order the
carriage and drive away by an unfrequented road to the dreary, lonely
Station Cemetery, and weep passionate tears over a grave where years
before she and her husband had come one morning together and left a
precious little wasted form, and Felicia had felt that happiness was
over for her, and that life could never be the same again. Nor was it,
for there are some griefs which travel with us to our journey's end.

Charmed as Maud had been with her newly-found relation, she was
conscious of the stiffness of a perfectly unaccustomed life, and thought
wistfully of the pleasures of the voyage and even of her French and
geography with Miss Goodenough. Felicia, with all her kindness, just a
little alarmed her; she was so brilliant, so dignified, and quite
unconsciously, so much of a fine lady. Vernon was buried in his books or
away at office, and very seldom available for the purposes of
conversation. The days, despite the excitement of novelty, dragged
heavily, and Maud began to think that if every day was to be as long as
these, and there were three hundred and sixty-five of them in the year,
and fifty years, perhaps, in a lifetime, how terrific an affair
existence was!

Before, however, she had been a week at Dustypore the ice began to melt.
Felicia came in one morning from a long busy time with nurses, children,
servants and housekeeping, established herself in an easy-chair, close
to Maud, and was evidently bent upon a chat. Maud found herself
presently, she knew not how, pouring out all her most sacred secrets,
and giving her heart away in a most reckless fashion, to a companion
whom, so far as time went, she still regarded as almost a stranger. Such
a confession she had never made, even to Miss Goodenough, nor felt
inclined to make it. Now, however, it seemed to come easily and as a
matter of course. Felicia was sympathetic and greatly interested. Even
the episode of the valentine was not forgotten.

'There,' Maud cried, with a slightly nervous dread of telling something
either improper or ridiculous; 'that was my very last school-girl
scrape. Was it very bad?'

'Very bad!' cried Felicia, with a laugh, the joyousness of which was
entirely reassuring; 'it was that naughty boy who got you into trouble.
Fortunately there are no galleries in our church here, and no boys, so
there is nothing to fear.'

That evening Felicia was singing an old familiar favourite air, as she
was fond of doing, half in the dark, and unconscious of a listener.
Vernon was deep in his papers in the adjoining room. Maud, at the other
end of the piano, where she had been turning over the leaves of some
music, stood with her hand still resting on the page, gazing at the
singer and wrapt in attention. Something, she knew not what, nor stopped
to ask--the time, the place, the song or the tone of Felicia's
voice--touched her as with a sudden gust of feeling. When the song was
over Maud walked across, flung her arms round her companion and kissed
her with a sort of rapture.

Felicia, looking up, surprised, saw that the other's eyes were full of
tears.

'That is pretty, is it not?' she said, taking Maud's hand kindly in her
own.

'Sing it once more,' Maud petitioned. And so, while Vernon, unconscious
of the flow of sentiment so close about him, was still absorbed in the
vicissitudes of Orissa, Felicia's performance was encored, and two
sympathetic natures had found each other out and worked into unison.

Afterwards, when Maud had departed, Felicia, with characteristic
impulsiveness, broke out into vehement panegyric:

'Come, George,' she said, 'don't be stupid, please, and uninterested;
don't you think she is quite charming?'

'Felicia,' said her husband, 'you are for ever falling in love with some
one or other, and now you have lost your heart to Maud. No, I don't
think her charming; but I dare say a great many other people will. She
will be the plague of our lives, you will see. I wish we had left her
at Miss Goodenough's.'

'Of course everybody will fall in love with her,' cried Felicia, quite
undaunted by her husband's gloomy forebodings; 'and I will tell you
what, George--she will do delightfully for Jem.'

'Jem!' exclaimed her husband, with a tone of horror. 'Felicia, you are
match-making already--and Jem too, poor fellow!'

Now, Jem Sutton was Vernon's oldest friend, and Felicia's kinsman,
faithful servant and ally. Years before, the two men had boated and
cricketed together at Eton, and spent pleasant weeks at each other's
homes; and when they met in India, each seemed to waken up the other to
a host of affectionate recollections about their golden youth. Sutton,
in fact, was still a thorough schoolboy, and as delighted with finding
his old chum as if he had just come back from the holidays. He had
contrived to get as much marching, fighting, and adventuring into his
ten years' service as a man could wish; had led several border forays
with daring and success; had received several desperate wounds, of which
a great scar across the forehead was the most conspicuous; had
established a reputation as a rider and a swordsman, and had received
from his Sovereign the brilliant distinction of the Victoria Cross,
which, along with a great many other honourable badges, covered the
wide expanse of his chest on state occasions.

Despite his fighting proclivities, Sutton had the softest possible pair
of blue eyes, his hair was still as bright a brown as when he was a
curly-headed boy at his mother's side; nor did the copious growth of his
moustache quite conceal a smile that was sweetness and honesty itself.
Felicia's two little girls regarded him as their especial property and
made the tenderest avowals of devotion to him. Sutton treated them, as
all their sex, with a kindness that was chivalrously polite, and which
they were already women enough to appreciate.

Lastly, among other accomplishments, which rendered him especially
welcome at the Vernons' house, he possessed a tuneful tenor voice, and
sang Moore's Melodies with a pathos which was more than artistic. On the
whole, it is easy to understand how natural it seemed to Felicia that
two such charming people as Sutton and Maud should be destined by Heaven
for each other, and that hers should be the hand to lead them to their
happy fate.

CHAPTER V.

'SUTTON'S FLYERS.'

    Consider this--he had been bred i' the wars
    Since he could draw a sword.

'Sutton's Flyers' were well known in the Sandy Tracts as the best
irregular cavalry in that part of the country. Formed originally in the
Mutiny, when spirits of an especial hardihood and enterprise gathered
instinctively around congenial leaders, they had retained ever since the
_prestige_ then acquired and a standard of chivalry which turned every
man in the regiment into something of a hero. Many a stalwart lad, bred
in the wild uplands of the Province, had felt his blood stirred within
him at the fame of exploits which appealed directly to instincts on
which the pacific British rule had for years put an unwelcome pressure.
Around the fire of many an evening meal, in many a gossiping bazaar, in
many a group at village well or ferry, the fame of the 'Flyers' was
recounted, and 'Sutton Sahib' became a household word by which military
enthusiasm could be speedily kindled to a blaze. With the lightest
possible equipage, wiry country-bred horses, and a profound disregard
for all baggage arrangements, Sutton had effected some marches which
earned him the credit of being supernaturally ubiquitous. Again and
again had Mutineer detachments, revelling in fancied security, found
that the dreaded horsemen, whom they fancied a hundred miles away and
marching in an opposite direction, had heard of their whereabouts and
were close upon their track. Then the suddenness of the attack, the
known prowess of the leader, the half-superstitious reverence which his
followers paid him, invested the troop with a tradition of
invincibility, and had secured them, on more than one occasion, a
brilliant success against odds which less fervent temperaments than
Sutton's might have felt it wrong to encounter, and which certainly made
success seem almost a miracle. To his own men Sutton was hardly less
than a god, and there were few of them on whom he could not safely
depend to gallop with him to their doom.

More than one of his officers had saved his life in hand-to-hand fight
by reckless exposure of their own; and his adjutant had dragged him,
stunned, crushed and bleeding, from under a fallen horse, and carried
him through a storm of bullets to a place of safety. All of them, on the
other hand, had experienced on a hundred occasions the benefit of his
imperturbable calmness, his inspiring confidence and unshaken will. Once
Sutton had gratified their pride--and perhaps, too, his own--by a
display of prowess which, if somewhat theatrical, was nevertheless
extremely effective. A fight was on hand, and the regiment was just
going into action, when a Mohammedan trooper, famed as a swordsman on
all the country-side, had ridden out from the enemy's lines, bawled out
a defiance of the English rule, couched in the filthiest and most
opprobrious terms, and dared Sutton to come out and fight, and let him
throw his carcase to the dogs. There are moments when instinct becomes
our safest, and indeed our only, guide. Sutton, for once in his life,
felt a gust of downright fury: he gave the order to halt and sheathe
swords, took his challenger at his word, rode out in front of his force
and had a fair hand-to-hand duel with the hostile champion. The
confronted troops looked on in breathless anxiety, while the fate of
either combatant depended on a turn of the sword, and each fought as
knowing that one or other was to die. Sutton at last saw his opportunity
for a stroke which won him the honours of the day. It cost him a
sabre-cut across his forehead, which to some eyes might have marred his
beauty for ever; but the foul-mouthed Mussulman lay dead on the field,
smitten through the heart, and Sutton rode back among his shouting
followers the acknowledged first swordsman of the day.

Such a man stood in no need of Felicia's panegyrics to seem very
impressive in the eyes of a girl like Maud. Despite his gentleness of
manner and the sort of domestic footing on which everybody at the
Vernons', down to the baby, evidently placed him, she felt a little
awed. She was inclined to be romantic; but it was rather alarming to
have a large, living, incarnate romance sitting next her at luncheon,
cutting slices of mutton, and asking her, with a curiosity that seemed
necessarily condescending, about all the details of the voyage. There
seemed something incongruous and painfully below the mark in having to
tell him that they had acted 'Woodcock's Little Game,' and had played
'Bon Jour, Philippe,' on board; and Maud, when the revelation became
necessary, made it with a blush. After luncheon, however, Sutton and the
little girls had a game of 'Post,' and Maud begun to console herself
with the reassuring conviction that, after all, he was but a man, and a
very pleasant one.

After he had gone, Felicia, who was the most indiscreet of match-makers,
began one of her extravagant eulogiums. 'Like him!' she cried, in reply
to Maud's inquiry; 'like is not the word. He is the best, noblest,
bravest, and most chivalrous of beings.'

'Not the handsomest!' interrupted Maud, tempted by Felicia's enthusiasm
into feeling perversely indifferent.

'Yes, and the handsomest too,' Felicia said; 'tall, strong, with
beautiful features, and eyes as soft and tender as a woman's; indeed a
great deal softer than most women's.'

'Then,' objected Maud, 'why has he never' ----

'Because,' answered her companion, indignantly anticipating the
objection, 'there is no one half-a-quarter good enough for him.'

'Well,' said the other, by this time quite in a rebellious mood, 'all I
can say is, that I don't think him in the least good-looking. I don't
like that great scar across his forehead.'

'Don't you?' cried Felicia; and then she told her how the scar had come
there, and Maud could no longer pretend not to be interested.

The next day Sutton came with them for a drive, and Maud, who had by
this time shaken off her fears, began to find him decidedly interesting.
There was something extremely romantic in having a soldier, whose
reputation was already almost historical, the hero of a dozen brilliant
episodes, coming tame about the house, only too happy to do her bidding
or Felicia's, and apparently perfectly contented with their society.
Felicia was in the highest spirits, for she found her pet project
shaping itself with pleasant facility into a fair prospect of
realisation; and when Felicia was in high spirits they infected all
about her.

Sutton, innocently unconscious of the cause of her satisfaction, but
realising only that she wanted Maud amused and befriended, lent himself
with a ready zeal to further her wishes and let no leisure afternoon go
by without suggesting some new scheme of pleasure. Maud's quick,
impulsive, highly-strung temperament, her moods of joyousness or
depression, hardly less transient than the shadows that flit across the
fields in April, her keen appreciation of beauty and pathos, made her,
child as she was in most of her thoughts and ways, an interesting
companion to him. Her eagerness in enjoyment was a luxury to see; and
Sutton, a good observer, knew before long, almost better than herself,
what things she most enjoyed. Instead of the reluctant and unsympathetic
permission which her late instructress had accorded to her poetical
tastes, Sutton and Felicia completely understood what she felt, treated
her taste on each occasion with a flattering consideration, and led her
continually to 'fresh woods and pastures new,' where vistas of
loveliness, fairer far than any she had yet discovered, seemed to break
upon her.

Vernon's library, his one extravagance, was all that the most fastidious
scholar could desire; any choice edition of a favourite poet was on his
table almost before his English friends had got it. A beautiful book,
like a beautiful woman, deserves the best attire that art can give it,
and Maud felt a thrill of satisfaction at all the finery of gilt and
Russian leather in which she could now behold her well-beloved poems
arrayed. Sutton told her, with a decisiveness which carried conviction,
what things she would like and what she might neglect; and she soon
followed his directions with unquestioning faith. He used to come and
read to them sometimes, in a sweet, impressive manner, Maud felt; and
the passage, as he had read it, lived on in her thoughts with the
precise shade of feeling which his voice had given it.

One happy week was consecrated to the 'Idylls of the King,' and this had
been so especially delightful as to make a little epoch in her
existence--so rich was the picture--so great a revelation of
beauty--such depths of sorrow--such agonies of repentance--such calm,
quiet, ethereal scenes of loveliness.

More than once Sutton, in reading, had looked up suddenly and found her
eyes bent full upon him, and swimming with tears; and Maud had stooped
over her work, the sudden scarlet dyeing her cheek, yet almost too much
moved to care about detection.

How true, how real, how living it all seemed! Did it, in truth, belong
to the far-off, misty, fabulous kingdom over which the mystic Arthur
ruled, or was she herself Elaine, and Lancelot sitting close before her,
and all the harrowing story playing itself out in her own little
troubled world? Anyhow, it struck a chord which vibrated pleasurably,
yet with a half-painful vehemence, through her mind and filled it with
harmonies and discords unheard before. Certainly, she confessed to
herself, there was a something about Sutton that touched one to the
heart.

CHAPTER VI.

'A COMPETITION-WALLAH.'

    Ainsi doit être
    Un petit-maître;
    Léger, amusant,
    Vif, complaisant,
            Plaisant,
    Railleur aimable,
    Traître adorable;
    C'est l'homme du jour,
    Fait pour l'amour.

One of the stupid things that people do in India is to select the two
hottest hours of the day for calling on each other. How such an idiotic
idea first found its way into existence, by what strange fate it became
part of the social law of Anglo-Indians, and how it is that no one has
yet been found with courage or strength enough to break down a custom so
detrimental to the health and comfort of mankind, are among the numerous
mysteries which the historian of India must be content to leave
unsolved. Like Chinese ladies' feet, the high heels on which fashionable
Europe at present does penance, suttee of Hindu widows, and infanticide
among the Rajpoot nobles, it is merely a curious instance that there is
nothing so foolish and so disagreeable that human beings will not do or
endure if it only becomes the fashion.

At any rate, the ladies and gentlemen of Dustypore were resolved not to
be a whit less fashionable and uncomfortable than their neighbours, and
religiously exchanged visits from twelve to two.

Maud's arrival was the signal for a burst of callers, and a goodly
stream of soldiers and civilians arrived day by day to pay their homage
to the newly-arrived beauty and her chaperon. Felicia's house was always
popular, and all that was pleasantest and best in Dustypore assembled at
her parties. Young London dandies fresh from home, and exploring the
Sandy Tracts under the impression of having left the _Ultima Thule_ of
civilisation far behind them, were sometimes startled to find her
drawing-room as full of taste, luxury, and refinement as if they had
suddenly been transported to Eaton Square.

What is the nameless grace that some women have the art of putting into
chairs and tables, which turns them from mere bits of upholstery into
something hardly short of poetry? How is it that in some rooms there
breathes a subtle charm, an aroma of delicacy and culture, a propriety
in the behaviour of the sofas and ottomans to one another, a pleasant
negligence apparent through the general order, a courageous simplicity
amid elaborated comfort, which, in the absence of the mistress, tells
the expectant visitor that he is about to meet a thoroughbred lady?

Some such fascination, at any rate, there lingered about the cool,
carefully-shaded room in which Felicia received her guests. It was by no
means smart, and not especially tidy, for it was often invaded and
occupied by a victorious horde from the nursery, and bore many a sign of
the commonplace routine of daily life. But to Felicia's friends it was
an enchanted abode, where a certain refuge might be found from whatever
disagreeable things or people prevailed outside, and where Felicia, who,
whatever she might feel, always looked calm and radiant and cool,
presided as the _genius loci_, to forbid the possibility of profane
intrusion.

One thing that made it picturesque was that at all times and seasons it
abounded in flowers. Felicia was an enthusiastic gardener, and her
loving skill and care could save many a tender plant which would, in a
less experienced hand, have withered and sunk under the burning heat and
dust that prevailed everywhere but in the confines of Felicia's kingdom.
Her garden gave her a more home-like feeling than any other Indian
experience. It refreshed her to go out early in the morning, while the
children were yet asleep, and the sun's rays had barely surmounted the
tall rows of plantains that marked the garden's boundary, and guarded
her treasures from the sultry air. It soothed her to superintend ferns
and roses, cuttings from some Himalayan shrub, or precious little
seedlings from England. By dint of infinite care she had created a patch
of turf, which, if not quite as green, fresh and dewy as the lawn at
home, was at any rate a rest to eyes weary with dazzling wastes and the
bright blazing air. There Felicia had a shady corner, where pots and
sticks and garden-tools attested the progress of many a new gardening
experiment, and where the water forced up from the well at the garden's
end went rippling by with a pleasant sound, cooling and softening all
the air around. Oftentimes, as she lingered here, her fancies would
wander to the pleasant Manor House, where her taste for flowers had been
acquired in her father's company, and she would be again fern-hunting
with him through some cool mossy woodland, or roaming through a paradise
of bluebells, with the well-loved beeches towering overhead, while the
sweet summer evening died slowly away.

Early amongst the visitors Mr. Desvoeux was announced, and Felicia, when
she saw his card, told Maud that she would be sure now to be very much
amused.

'He is the most brilliant of all the young civilians,' she said, 'and is
to do great things. But he talks great nonsense and abuses everybody. So
do not be astonished at anything you hear.'

'And is he nice?' inquired Maud.

Felicia made a little face, not altogether of approval:

'Well,' she said, 'he is more curious than nice;' and then Desvoeux made
his appearance, and while he was exchanging preliminary commonplaces
with Felicia, Maud had an opportunity of observing the visitor's
exterior claims, which were not inconsiderable, to the regard of
womankind.

He was certainly, Maud felt at once, extremely handsome and, apparently,
extremely anxious to be thought so. The general effect which he produced
was that of a poetical dandy. He was dressed with a sort of effeminate
finery, with here and there a careless touch which redeemed it all from
utter fopdom. He was far too profusely set about with pretty things,
lockets and rings and costly knickknacks; on the other hand his
handkerchief was tied with a more than Byronic negligence. The flower in
his button-hole was exquisite, but it was stuck in with a carelessness
which, if studied, was none the less artistic. On the whole he was
over-dressed; but he walked into the room with the air of a man who had
forgotten all about it, and who had no eyes or thoughts for anything
but his present company.

Maud soon began to think him very entertaining, but, as Felicia had
said, 'curious.' He was full of fun, extravagant, joyous,
unconventional; he had turned, after the first few sentences, straight
upon Maud and pointedly invited her into the conversation; and she soon
felt her spirits rising.

'I saw you this morning,' he said, 'in the distance, riding with Sutton.
I should have asked to be allowed to join you, but that I was too shy,
and Sutton would have hated me for spoiling his _tête-à-tête_.'

'Three is an odious number, is it not, Mr. Desvoeux?' said Felicia, 'and
should be expunged from the arithmetic books. Why was it ever invented?'

'In order, I suppose,' said Desvoeux, 'that we three might meet this
morning, and that there might be three Graces and three witches in
Macbeth, and three members of the Salt Board. Three is evidently a
necessity; but when I am of the trio, and two of us are men, I confess I
don't like it. It is so nice to have one's lady all to one's self. But,
Miss Vernon, you are alarmed, I know, and naturally; you think that I am
going to ask, what I suppose fifty people have been asking you all the
week, whether you enjoyed the voyage to India, and how you like the
looks of Dustypore. But I will be considerate, and spare you. Enjoyed
the voyage, indeed! What a horrid mockery the question seems!'

'But I _did_ enjoy it,' cried Maud; 'so you see that you might have
asked me after all. It was very exciting.'

'Yes, all the excitement of wondering every day what new mysteries of
horror the ship's cooks will devise for dinner; whether the sinews of
Sunday's turkey can rival those of Saturday's goose; the excitement of
going to bed in the dark and treading on a black-beetle; the excitement
of shaving in a gale of wind and cutting one's nose off, as I very
nearly did; the excitement of the young ladies who are expecting their
lovers at Bombay, and of the young ladies who will not wait till Bombay
but manufacture their lovers out of hand. It is too thrilling!'

'Well,' said Maud, 'we had theatricals and readings and dances, and a
gentleman who played the most lovely variations on the violin, and I
enjoyed it all immensely!'

'Ah,' said Desvoeux, as if suddenly convinced, 'then perhaps you are
even capable of liking Dustypore!'

'Poor Mr. Desvoeux!' said Felicia; 'how sorry you must be to have
finished your march, and be back again at stupid Dustypore!'

'No place is stupid where Mrs. Vernon is,' said Desvoeux, gallantly;
'or rather no place would be, if she were not so often "not at home."'

'That must be,' Felicia said, 'because you call on mail-days, when I am
busy with my home despatches.'

The real truth was that Felicia considered Desvoeux in need of frequent
setting down, and closed her door inhospitably against him, whenever he
showed the least inclination to be intimate.

'Well,' said Desvoeux, 'the days that you are busy with your despatches
and when I have written the Agent's, I do not find it lively, I admit.
Come, Mrs. Vernon, the Fotheringhams, for instance--does not the very
thought of them leave a sort of damp upon your mind? It makes one
shudder.' Then Desvoeux passed on to the other officials, upon whom he
poured the most vehement contempt.

The Salt Board, he told Maud, always from time immemorial consisted of
the three greatest fogies in the Service; that was the traditionary
rule; it was only when you were half-idiotic that you could do the work
properly. As for Mr. Fotheringham, he was a lucky fellow; his idiocy had
developed early and strong.

'That is why Mrs. Vernon detests him so.'

'I don't detest him at all,' said Felicia; 'but I think him rather
dull.'

'Yes,' said Desvoeux, with fervour; 'as Dr. Johnson said of some one,
he was, no doubt, dull naturally, but he must have taken a great deal of
pains to become as dull as he is now. Now, Miss Vernon, would you like
to see what the Board is like? First, you must know that I am the
Agent's private secretary, and part of my business is to knock his and
their heads together and try to get a spark out. That is how I come to
know about them. First I will show you how Vernon puts on his air of
Under-Secretary and looks at me with a sort of serious, bored, official
air, as if he were a bishop and thought I was going to say something
impertinent.'

'As I dare say you generally are,' said Felicia, quite prepared to do
battle for her husband.

'Well,' said Desvoeux, 'this is how he sits and looks--gravity and
fatigue personified.'

'Yes,' cried Maud, clapping her hands with pleasure; 'I can exactly
fancy him.'

'Then,' continued Desvoeux, who was really a good mimic and warming
rapidly into the work, 'in comes the Board. First Fotheringham,
condescending and serene and wishing us all "Good-morning," as if he
were the Pope dispensing a blessing. You know his way--like this? Then
here is Cockshaw, looking sagacious, but really pondering over his last
night's rubber, and wishing the Board were finished.'

Felicia was forced to burst out laughing at the imitation.

'And now,' cried Maud, 'give us Mr. Blunt.'

Desvoeux put on Blunt's square awkward manner and coughed an imprecatory
cough.

'Gentlemen,' he said, 'your figures are wrong, your arguments false and
your conclusions childish. I don't want to be offensive or personal, and
I have the highest possible opinion of your service; but you must allow
me to observe that you are all a pack of fools!'

'Capital,' cried Maud; 'and what do you do all the time, Mr.
Desvoeux?'

'Oh, Vernon and I sit still and wink at each other and hope for the time
when we shall have become idiotic enough to be on the Board ourselves.
We are of the new _régime_, and are supposed to have wits, and we have a
great deal of intelligence to get over. But you know how the old ones
were chosen. All the stupidest sons of the stupidest families in England
for several generations, like the pedigree-wheat, you know, on the
principle of selection; none but the blockheads of course would have
anything to do with India.'

'Don't abuse the bridge that carries you over,' Felicia said: 'No
treason to India--it has many advantages.'

'Innumerable,' cried Desvoeux: 'first, a decent excuse for separation
between husbands and wives who happen to be uncongenial--no other
society has anything to compare with it. You quarrel, you know----'

'No, we don't,' said Felicia, 'thank you. Speak for yourself.'

'Well, I quarrel with Mrs. Desvoeux, we'll say--though, by the way, I
could not quarrel even with my wife--but suppose a quarrel, and we
become mutually insupportable: there is no trouble, no scandal, no
inconvenience. Mrs. Desvoeux's health has long required change of air; I
secure a berth for her on the P. & Q., escort her with the utmost
politeness to Bombay, have a most affectionate parting, remit once a
quarter, write once a fortnight--what can be more perfect?'

'But suppose,' said Maud, 'for the sake of argument, that you don't
quarrel and don't want to separate?'

'Or suppose,' said Felicia, who knew that the conversation was taking
just the turn she hated, 'that we try our duet, Mr. Desvoeux? You know
that you are a difficult person to catch.'

'That is one of your unjust speeches,' said Desvoeux, dropping his voice
as they approached the piano and becoming suddenly serious: 'You know
that I come quite as often as I think I have a chance of being
welcome.'

Felicia ignored the remark and began playing the accompaniment with the
utmost unconcern. The fact was that Desvoeux, though not quite such a
Don Juan as he liked to be thought, had a large amount of affection to
dispose of, and had given Felicia to understand upon twenty occasions
that he would like to begin a flirtation with her if he dared.

CHAPTER VII.

THE RUMBLE CHUNDER GRANT.

    Monstrum horrendum--informe--ingens----

There were many things which a man was expected to know about in
official circles at Dustypore, and first and foremost was the 'Rumble
Chunder Grant.' Not to know this argued one's self not only unknown but
ignorant of the first principles of society and the common basis on
which thought and conversation proceeded. It was like not having read
Mr. Trollope's novels or knowing nothing about the Tichborne Trial or
being in any other way out of tune with the times. One of the things
that gave the old civilians such a sense of immeasurable superiority
over all outsiders and new-comers was the consciousness that with them
rested this priceless secret, this mystery of mysteries.

One inconvenient consequence, however, of everybody being expected to
know was, that everybody took for granted that everybody else did know,
and that those who did not know veiled their ignorance under a decent
mask of familiarity and by talking about it in a vague, shadowy sort of
phraseology which conveniently concealed any little inaccuracies. It had
to do with salt, moreover, and it was at the Salt Board that the
unsearchable depths of the subject were best appreciated and this
vagueness of language was most in vogue.

The facts were something of this sort. When the English took the country
we found particular families and villages in Rumble Chunder in enjoyment
of various rights in connection with salt; some had little monopolies;
others might manufacture for themselves at a quit rent, others might
quarry for themselves at particular times and places, and so forth.

The Gazette, which announced the annexation of the province, had
declared in tones of splendid generosity that the British Government,
though inexorable to its foes, would temper justice with mercy so far as
to respect existing rights of property and would protect the loyal
proprietor in the enjoyment of his own. The sonorous phrases of a
rhetorical Viceroy had entailed on his successors a never-ending series
of disputes, and had saddled the Empire with an obligation which was
all the more burthensome for being undefined. Ever since that unlucky
Gazette, officials had been hard at work to find out what it was that
the Governor-General had promised to do and how much it would cost to do
it. One diligent civilian after another went down to Rumble Chunder and
made out a list of people who were or who pretended to be, entitled to
interests in salt. Then these lists had been submitted and discussed,
and minuted upon, and objected to, and returned for further
investigation, and one set of officers had given place to another, and
the chance of clearing up the matter had grown fainter every day.
Meanwhile the Rumble Chunder people had gone their ways, exercising what
rights they could, and happy in the possession of an interminable
controversy. In course of time most of the original documents got
destroyed in the Mutiny, or eaten by white ants, and a fresh element of
uncertainty was introduced by the question of the authenticity of all
existing copies. Then there had come a new Secretary of State at home,
whose views as to the grantees were diametrically opposed to all his
predecessors, and who sent peremptory orders to carry out the new policy
with the least possible delay. Thus the subject had gradually got itself
into a sort of hopeless tangle, for which Desvoeux used to say that the
only effectual remedy would be the end of the world. No one knew exactly
what his rights were, and every one was afraid of endangering his
position by too rigid an inquiry or too bold an assertion.

One peculiarity of this, as of most Indian controversies, was the
unnatural bitterness of spirit to which it gave rise. The most amiable
officials turned to gall and wormwood at its very mention, and abused
each other over it with the vehemence of vexed theologians.

Whether vain attempts to understand it had engendered an artificial
spitefulness, or whether discussion, like beer-drinking, is a luxury too
strong for natures enfeebled by an Eastern climate, sure enough it was
that, directly this wretched question came to the fore, good-nature,
moderation and politeness were forgotten, and the antagonists made up
for the confusion of their ideas by the violence of the language in
which they expressed them.

The last phase of the story was that some of the descendants of the
original grantees, thinking the plum was now about ripe for picking,
took up the question in a wily, patient, vexatious sort of way, and
produced a tremendous lawsuit. Then a Member of Parliament, whose
ideas, by some sudden process (on which his banker's book would probably
have thrown some light), had been suddenly turned Indiawards, made the
most telling speech in the House, depicting in vivid colours the wrongs
of the Rumble Chunder people and the satanic ruthlessness of British
rule. Then pamphlets began to appear, which showed to demonstration that
all the Viceroys had been either liars or thieves, except a few who had
been both, and asked how long this Rumble Chunder swindle was to last.
The whole subject, in fact, began to be ventilated. Now, ventilation,
though a good thing in its time and place, is bad for such veteran
institutions as the Salt Board, or controversies as delicate as the
Rumble Chunder Grant. Every new ray of daylight let in disclosed an ugly
flaw, and the fresh air nearly brought the tottering edifice about the
ears of its inhabitants. It needed, as Fotheringham ruefully felt, but
the rude, trenchant, uncompromising spirit of a man like Blunt to
produce an imbroglio which could neither be endured, concealed, or
disposed of in any of the usual methods known to Indian officialdom; and
Blunt was known to be hard at work at the statistics, and already to
have assumed an attitude of obtrusive hostility. Fotheringham could only
fortify himself with the reflection that the Providence which had seen
him through a long series of official scrapes would probably not desert
him at this last stage of his career. He wished, nevertheless, that he
had forestalled Cockshaw in his application for the Carraways.

CHAPTER VIII.

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!

CHAPTER IX.

THE FIRST BALL.

    Il est amiable, car on se sent toujours en danger avec lui.

Before Maud had been many weeks with the Vernons there was a Garrison
Ball, and at this it was fated that she should make her first public
appearance in Dustypore society. That night was certainly the most
eventful and exciting one that she had ever passed. To wake and find
one's self famous is no doubt an agreeable sensation; but to put on for
the first time in one's life a lovely ball-dress, bright, cloudlike,
ambrosial--to be suddenly elevated to a pinnacle to receive the homage
of mankind--to exercise a pleasant little capricious tyranny in the
selection of partners--to be seized upon by one anxious adorer after
another, all striving to please, each with a little flattering tale of
his own--to read in a hundred eyes that one is very pretty--to find at
last a partner who, from some mysterious reason, is not like other
partners, but just perfection--to know that one's views about him are
entirely reciprocated--it was, as Maud, on going to bed, acknowledged to
herself with a sigh, which was half fatigue and half the utterance of an
over-excited temperament, too much enjoyment for a single human soul to
carry!

In the first place, Sutton, all ablaze with medals, tall, majestic,
impressive, and as Maud had come to think with Felicia, undeniably
handsome, had begged her in the morning to keep several dances for him.
The prospect of this among other things had put her in a flutter. She
would have preferred some of the ensigns. It seemed a sort of alarming
familiarity. Could such a being valse and bend, as ordinary mortals do,
to the commonplace movements of a mere quadrille? It was one thing to go
spinning round with another school-girl, under the superintendence of
Madame Millville, to the accompaniment of her husband's violin: but to
be taken possession of by a being like Sutton--to have to write his name
down for two valses and a set of Lancers--to know that in five minutes
one will be whirling about under his guidance--the idea was delightful,
but not without a touch of awe! Sutton, however, quieted these alarms by
dancing in a rather ponderous and old-fashioned manner, and finally
tearing her dress with his spur. Maud had accordingly to be carried off,
in order that the damage might be repaired; and--her mind somewhat
lightened by the sense of responsibility discharged and the ice
satisfactorily broken--looked forward to the rest of the evening with
ummingled pleasure. While her torn dress was being set to rights she
scanned her card, saw Sutton's name duly registered for his promised
dances, and made up her mind, as she compared him with the rest, that
there was no one in the room she liked one-half as well.

But then she had not danced with Desvoeux; and Desvoeux was now waiting
at the door and imploring her not to curtail the rapture of a valse, the
first notes of which had already sounded. Desvoeux's dancing, Maud
speedily acknowledged to herself, bore about the same relation to
Sutton's that her Arab pony's canter did to the imposing movements of
the latter gentleman's first charger. His tongue, too, seemed as nimble
as his feet. He was in the highest possible spirits, and the careless,
joyous extravagance of his talk struck a sympathetic chord in his
companion's nature.

'There!' he cried, as the last notes of the music died away and he
brought his companion to a standstill at a comfortable sofa, 'Such a
valse as that is a joy for ever--a thing to dream of, is it not? Some
ladies, you know, Miss Vernon, dance in epic poems, some in the sternest
prose--Carlyle, for instance--some in sweet-flowing, undulating,
rippling lyrics: Yours is (what shall I say?) an ode of Shelley's or a
song from Tennyson, a smile from Paradise! Where can you have learnt
it?'

'Monsieur Millville taught us all at my school,' said Maud, prosaically
mindful of the many battles she had had in former days with that
gentleman: 'a horrid little wizened Frenchman, with a fiddle. We all
hated him. He was always going on at me about my toes.'

'Your toes!' cried Desvoeux, with effusion: 'He wanted to adore them, as
I do--sweet points where all the concentrated poetry of your being
gathers. Put out that fairy little satin shoe and let me adore them
too!'

'No, thank you!' cried Maud, greatly taken aback at so unexpected a
request, gathering her feet instinctively beneath her; 'it's not the
fashion!'

'You will not?' Desvoeux said, with a tone of sincere disappointment.
'Is not that unkind? Suppose it was the fashion to cover up your hands
in tulle and satin and never to show them?'

'Then,' Maud said, laughing, 'you would not be able to adore them
either; as it is, you see, you may worship them as much as you please!'

'I have been worshipping them all the evening. They are lovely--a little
pair of sprites.'

'Stop!' cried Maud, 'and let me see. My shoes are fairies, and my
dancing a poem, and my fingers sprites! How very poetical! And, pray, is
this the sort of way that people always talk at balls?'

'Not most people,' said Desvoeux, unabashed, 'because they are geese and
talk in grooves--about the weather and the last appointment and the
freshest bit of stale gossip; but it is the way _I_ talk, because I only
say what I feel and am perfectly natural.'

'Natural!' said Maud, in a tone of some surprise, for her companion's
romantic extravagance seemed to her to be the very climax of unreality.

'Yes,' said Desvoeux, coolly, 'and that is one reason why all women like
me; partly it is for my good looks, of course, and partly for my
dancing, but mostly because I am natural and tell the truth to them.'

'And partly, I suppose,' said Maud, who began to think her companion was
in great need of setting down, 'because you are so modest?'

'As to that, I am just as modest as my neighbours, only I speak out. One
knows when one is good-looking, does one not? and why pretend to be a
simpleton? You know, for instance, how very, very pretty you are looking
to-night!'

'We were talking about _you_, if you please,' said Maud, blushing
scarlet, and conscious of a truth of which her mirror had informed her.

'Agreeable topic,' said the other gaily; 'let us return to it by all
means! Well, now, I pique myself on being natural. When I am bored I
yawn or go away; when I dislike people I show my teeth and snarl; and
when I lose my heart I don't suffer in silence, but inform the fair
purloiner of that valuable organ of the theft without hesitation. That
is honest, at any rate. For instance, I pressed your hand to-night, when
you came in first, to tell you how delighted I was that you were come to
be the belle of the party. You did not mind it, you know!'

'I thought you very impertinent,' said Maud, laughing in spite of
herself; 'and so I think you now, and very conceited into the bargain.
Will you take me to have some tea, please?'

'With all my heart,' said the other; 'but we can go on with our talk.
How nice it is that we are such friends, is it not?'

'I did not know that we were friends,' said Maud, 'and I have not even
made up my mind if I like you.'

'Hypocrite!' answered her companion; 'you know you took a great fancy to
me the first morning I came to call on you, and Mrs. Vernon scolded you
for it after my departure.'

'It is not true,' said Maud, with a stammer and a blush, for Desvoeux's
shot was, unfortunately, near the mark; 'and anyhow, first impressions
are generally wrong.'

'Wrong!' cried the other, 'never, never! always infallible. Mrs. Vernon
abused me directly I was gone. She always does; it is her one fault,
that prevents her from being absolute perfection. She does not like me,
and is always putting me down. It is a great shame, because she has been
till now the one lady in India whom I really admire. But let us
establish ourselves on this nice ottoman, and I will show you some of
our celebrities. Look at that handsome couple talking so mysteriously on
the sofa: that is General Beau and Mrs. Vereker, and they are talking
about nothing more mysterious than the weather; but it is the General's
fancy to look mysterious. Do you see how he is shrugging his shoulders?
Well, to that shrug he owes everything in life. Whatever happens, he
either shrugs his shoulders, or arches his eyebrows, or says "Ah!"
Beyond these utterances he never goes; but he knows exactly when to do
each, and does it so judiciously that he has become a great man. He is
great at nothing, however, but flirtation; and Mrs. Vereker is just now
the reigning deity.'

'No wonder,' cried Maud. 'How lovely she is! such beautiful violet
eyes!'

'Yes,' said the other, with a most pathetic air, 'most dangerous eyes
they are, I assure you. You don't feel it, not being a man, but they go
through and through me. She always has a numerous following, especially
of boys, and has broken a host of hearts, which is all the more unfair,
as she does not happen to possess one of her own.'

'She must have a heart, with those eyes and such a smile,' objected
Maud.

'Not the least atom, I assure you,' said the other. 'Nature, in
lavishing every other grace and charm upon her, made this single
omission, much, no doubt, to the lady's own peace of mind. It is all
right in the present instance, because Beau does not happen to have any
heart either.'

'I don't believe you in the least,' said Maud, 'and I shall get my
cousin to take me to call upon her.'

'You are fascinated, you see, already,' said Desvoeux, 'though you are a
woman. You will find her a perfect Circe. Her drawing-room is an
enchanted cell hung round with votive offerings from former victims. She
lives on the gifts of worshippers, and will accept everything, from a
sealskin jacket to a pair of gloves. I used to be an adorer once, but I
could not afford it. Now I will introduce you.' Thereupon he presented
Maud in due form.

General Beau arched his handsome brow, and said, 'Ah! how dy'e do, Miss
Vernon?' in his inscrutable way; and Mrs. Vereker, who, as a reigning
beauty, felt an especial interest in one who seemed likely to endanger
her ascendency, was bent on being polite. She gave Maud the sweetest of
smiles, scolded Desvoeux with the prettiest little pout for not having
been to see her for an age; and, if she felt jealous, was determined, at
any rate, not to show it. She observed, however, with the eye of a
connoisseur, how Maud's hair was done, and took a mental note of a
little mystery of lace and feathers, just then the fashionable
head-dress, which she thought would be immensely becoming to herself.
She pressed Maud affectionately to come some day to lunch and inwardly
resolved to spoil the pretty _ingénue_ of her novelty.

Mrs. Vereker was a type of character which Indian life brings into
especial prominence and develops into fuller perfection than is to be
found in less artificial communities. Herself the child of Indian
parents, whom she had scarcely ever seen, with the slenderest possible
stock of home associations, accustomed from the outset to have to look
out for herself, she had come to India while still almost a child, and
in a few months, long before thought or feeling had approached
maturity, had found herself the belle of a Station, and presently a
bride. Then circumstances separated her frequently from her husband, and
she learnt to bear separation heroically. The sweet incense of flattery
was for ever rising about her, and she learnt to love it better every
day. Any number of men were for ever ready to throw themselves at her
feet and proclaim her adorable, and she came to feel it right that they
should do so. She found that she could conjure with her eyes and mouth
and exercise a little despotism by simply using them as Nature told her.
The coldness of her heart enabled her to venture with impunity into
dangers where an ardent temperament could scarcely but have gone astray:
she, however, was content so long as she lived in a stream of flattery
and half-a-dozen men declared themselves heartbroken about her; strict
people called her a flirt, but friends and foes alike declared her
innocence itself.

Beau was devoting himself to her partly because her good looks gave him
a slight sense of gratification, partly because he considered it the
proper thing to be seen on confidential terms with the handsomest woman
in the room, partly to have the pleasure of holding his own against the
younger men.

Desvoeux, delighted with his new-found treasure, was only too happy to
leave a quondam rival in possession of the field, and to have a decent
excuse for abandoning a shrine at which it was no longer convenient to
worship.

CHAPTER X.

THE WOES OF A CHAPERON.

    The time is out of joint--O cursed spite,
    That ever I was born to set it right!

Felicia came home from the ball in far less high spirits than her
_protégée_. Things had not gone as she wished, nor had Maud behaved at
all in the manner which Felicia had pictured to herself as natural and
appropriate to a young lady making her _début_ in polite society.
Instead of displaying an interesting timidity and clinging to her
chaperon for guidance and protection, Maud had taken wing boldly at
once, as in a congenial atmosphere, had been far too excited to be in
the least degree shy and had lent herself with indiscreet facility to a
very pronounced flirtation. Felicia began to realise how hard it is to
make the people about one be what one wants them to be, and how full of
disappointment is the task of managing mankind, even though the fraction
operated upon be no larger than a wayward school-girl's heart. Maud,
whose rapidly-increasing devotion to Sutton had for days past been a
theme of secret congratulation in Felicia's thoughts, had been behaving
all the evening just in the way which Sutton would, she knew, most
dislike, and showing the most transparent liking for the person of whom,
of all others, he especially disapproved. Sutton, too, Felicia
considered, was not comporting himself at all as she would have had him:
he lavished every possible kindness on Maud, but then it was less for
Maud's sake than her own; he would have done, she felt an annoying
conviction, exactly the same for either of her little girls; and though
he agreed with her in thinking Maud decidedly picturesque, and in being
amused and interested in the fresh, eager, childlike impulsiveness of
her character, his thoughts about her, alas! appeared to go no further.

'Why that profound sigh, Felicia?' her husband asked, when Maud had gone
away to bed, leaving the two together for the first time during the
evening. 'Does it mean that some one has been boring you or what?'

'It means,' said Felicia, 'that I am very cross and that Mr. Desvoeux is
a very odious person.'

'And Maud a very silly one, _n'est-ce pas_? Did not I tell you what a
deal of trouble our good-nature in having her out would be sure to give
us? Never let us do a good-natured act again! I tell you Maud is
already a finished coquette and, I believe, would be quite prepared to
flirt with me.'

'I am sure I wish she would,' said Felicia in a despairing tone. 'Do you
know, George, I do not like these balls at all?'

'Come, come, Felicia, how many valses did you dance to-night?' her
husband asked incredulously, for Felicia was an enthusiastic
Terpsichorean.

'That has nothing to do with it,' she said. 'All the people should be
nice, and so many people are not nice at all. It is too close quarters.
There are some men whose very politeness one resents.'

'Courtesy with a touch of traitor in it,' said her husband, 'for
instance?'

'For instance, General Beau,' said Felicia. 'He looks up in the pauses
of his devotions to Mrs. Vereker and turns his eyes upon one as if to
say, "Poor victim! your turn will be the next."'

'I saw you playing "Lady Disdain" to him with great success to-night,'
her husband answered. And indeed it must be confessed that Beau's
advances to Felicia, with whom he was always anxious to stand well, were
received by that lady with a slightly contemptuous dignity, very unlike
her usual joyous cordiality.

'Yes,' said Felicia; 'General Beau's compliments are more than I can
stand. But, George, what can I do with Maud? Is not Mr. Desvoeux
insufferable?'

'Well,' said her husband, 'if a man's ambition is to be thought a
_mauvais sujet_, and to dress like a shopboy _endimanché_, it does not
hurt us.'

'But it may hurt Maud,' said Felicia, 'if, indeed, it has not hurt her
already. Oh dear, how I wish she was safely married!'

From the above conversation it may be inferred that the responsibilities
of her new charge were beginning to weigh upon Felicia's spirits. Sutton
too slow, and Desvoeux too prompt, and Maud's fickle fancies inclining
now this way, now that--what benevolent custodian of other people's
happiness had ever more harassing task upon her hands?

It is probable, however, that had Felicia's insight or experience been
greater, the position of affairs would have seemed less fraught with
anxiety. Maud's liking for Desvoeux was a sentiment of the lightest
possible texture; its very lightness was, perhaps, its charm. With him
she was completely at her ease and experienced the high spirits which
being at one's ease engenders. She was certain of pleasing him, but
careless whether she did so or not. His extravagant protestations amused
her and were flattering in a pleasant sort of way, and his high spirits
made him an excellent companion; but nothing about him touched her with
the keen deep interest that every word or look of Sutton's inspired, or
with the same strong anxiety to retain his friendship. Desvoeux might
come and go, and Maud would have treated either event with the same
indifference; but if Sutton should ever begin to neglect her, she was
already conscious of a sort of pang which the very idea inflicted.

Upon the whole it is probable that Felicia's apprehensions were
groundless. Not the less, however, did she feel disconcerted and
aggrieved when the very next morning after the ball Desvoeux made his
appearance, in the highest possible spirits, evidently on the best terms
with Maud and politely ignoring all Felicia's attempts to put him down.
He was, as it seemed to her, in his very most objectionable mood, and
she felt glad that, at any rate, her husband was at home and that she
was not left to do battle by herself. She resolved to be as
unconciliatory as possible. As for Maud it never occurred to her to
conceal the pleasure which Desvoeux's arrival gave her, and she soon let
out the secret that his visit had been prearranged.

'I did not think that you really would come, Mr. Desvoeux; it is so nice
of you, because we are both of us far too tired to do anything but be
idle, and you can amuse us.'

'You forget, Maud,' said Vernon, 'that Desvoeux may be too tired to be
amusing.'

'And I,' said Felicia, with a slight shade of contempt in her tones, 'am
too tired even to be amused. I feel that Mr. Desvoeux's witticisms would
only fatigue me. I intend to give up balls.'

'Then,' said Desvoeux, with an air of admiring deference which Felicia
felt especially irritating, 'balls will have to give up me. I should not
think it in the least worth while to be a steward and to do all the
horrid things one has to do--polish the floor and audit the accounts and
dance official quadrilles with Mrs. Blunt--if our chief patroness chose
to patronise no more. A ball without Mrs. Vernon would be a May morning
without the sunshine.'

'Or a moonlight night without the moon,' said Felicia: 'Allow me to help
you to a simile.'

'You see he _is_ tired,' said Vernon, 'poor fellow, and for the first
time in his life in need of a pretty phrase.'

'Not at all,' said Desvoeux, with imperturbable good-nature; 'I am
constantly at a loss, like the rest of the world, for words to tell Mrs.
Vernon how much we all admire her. It is only fair that the person who
inspires the sentiment should assist us to express it.'

'But,' cried Maud, 'you are forgetting poor me. Who is to take care of
me, if you please, in the balls of the future?'

'Yes, Felicia,' said Vernon, 'you cannot abdicate just yet, I fear. As
for me, I feel already far too old.'

'Then,' cried Desvoeux, 'you must look at General Beau and learn that
youth is eternal. How nice it is to see him adoring Mrs. Vereker, and to
remember that we, too, may be adored some thirty years to come!'

'Beau's manner is very compromising,' said Vernon; 'it is a curious
trick. His first object, when he likes a lady, is to endanger her
reputation.'

'Yes,' answered Desvoeux, 'he leads her with a serious air to a sofa or
hides himself with her in a balcony; looks gravely into her eyes and
says, "How hot it has been this afternoon!" or something equally
interesting; and all the world thinks that he is asking her to elope at
least.'

'His manners appear to me to be insufferable,' Felicia said, in her
loftiest style; 'just the sort of familiarity that breeds contempt.'

'Poor fellow!' said Desvoeux, who knew perfectly that Felicia's
observations were half-intended for himself, 'it is all his enthusiasm.
He is as proud of every fresh flirtation as if it were a new
experience--like a young hen that has just laid its first egg. He
always seems to me to be chuckling and crowing to the universe, "Behold!
heaven and earth! I have hatched another scandal." Now,' he added,
'Miss Vernon, if ever you and I had a flirtation we should not wish all
the world to "assist," as the French people say, should we? People might
suspect our devotion, and guess and gossip; but there would not be this
revolting matter-of-fact publicity; and we should be for ever putting
people off the scent: I should still look into the Misses Blunt's eyes,
still dance a state quadrille with their mamma, still talk to Mrs.
Vereker about the stars, still feel the poetry of Miss Fotheringham's
new Paris dresses: you would continue to fascinate mankind at large;
only we two between ourselves should know how mutually broken-hearted we
had become.'

'That is a contingency,' Felicia said, in a manner which Desvoeux
understood as a command to abandon the topic, which, happily, there is
no need to discuss.' The conversation turned to something else; but
Felicia made up her mind more than ever that their visitor was a very
impertinent fellow, and more than ever resolved to guard Maud's heart
from every form of attack which he could bring to bear against it. No
protection could, she felt, be half so satisfactory as the
counter-attraction of a lover who would be everything that Desvoeux was
not, and whom all the world acknowledged to be alike _sans peur_ and
_sans reproche_.

CHAPTER XI.

FRIENDS IN COUNCIL.

              After short silence then,
    And summons sent, the great debate began.

A body constituted of as discordant elements as the three members of the
Salt Board was not likely to remain very long at peace with itself; and
for weeks past, Blunt's increasing truculence of deportment had warned
his colleagues of an approaching outbreak.

Since his successful raid upon the Board's accounts this gentleman had
made the lives of Fotheringham and Cockshaw a burden to them. His
insatiable curiosity plunged in the most ruthless manner into matters
which the others knew instinctively would not bear investigation. He
proposed reforms in an offhand manner which made poor Fotheringham's
hair stand on end; and the very perusal of his memoranda was more than
Cockshaw's industry could achieve. He had a sturdy cob on which he used
to ride about in the mornings, acquiring health and strength to be
disagreeable the entire day, and devising schemes of revolution as he
went. Poor Cockshaw's application for the Carraways had been refused;
General Beau had got the appointment and was actually in course of a
series of valedictory visits to various ladies whom he believed
broken-hearted at his departure. Fotheringham grew greyer and sadder day
by day and prepared himself as best he might to meet the blows of fate
in an attitude of dignified martyrdom. Matters at last reached a crisis
in a proposal of Blunt's, brought out in his usual uncompromising
fashion and thrust upon the Board, as Fotheringham acknowledged with a
shudder, with a horrid point-blank directness which rendered evasion and
suppression (the only two modes of dealing with questions which his
experience had taught him) alike impossible. In the first place Blunt
demonstrated by statistics that not enough salt was produced at the
Rumble Chunder quarries to enable the inhabitants to get enough to keep
them healthy. Nothing could be more convincing than his figures: so many
millions of people--so many thousands of tons of salt--so much salt
necessary per annum for each individual, and so forth. Then Blunt went
on to show that the classes of diseases prevalent in the Sandy Tracts
were precisely those which want of salt produces; then he demonstrated
that there was wholesale smuggling. From all this it followed obviously
that the great thing wanted was to buy up existing interests, develop
the quarries, improve the roads, and increase the production. If this
were done salt might be sold at a rate which would bring it within the
reach of all classes, and yet the gains of Government would be
increased. This was Blunt's view. The opposite party urged that to vary
the salt-supply would interfere with the laws of political economy,
would derange the natural interaction of supply and demand (this was one
of Fotheringham's favourite phrases), would depress internal trade,
paralyse existing industries, cause all sorts of unlooked-for results
and not benefit the consumer a whit; and that, even if it would, ready
money was not to be had at any price. Blunt, however, was not to be put
off with generalities and claimed to record his opinions, that his
colleagues should record theirs, and that the whole matter should be
submitted to the Agent. Cockshaw gave a suppressed groan, lit a cheroot,
and mentally resolved that nothing should tempt _him_ into writing a
memorandum, or, if possible, into allowing anybody else to do so. 'For
God's sake,' he said, 'don't let us begin minuting upon it; if the
matter must go to Empson, let us ask him to attend the Board, and have
it out once for all.' Now Mr. Empson was at this time Agent at
Dustypore. The custom was that he came to the Board only on very solemn
occasions, and only when the division of opinion was hopeless; then he
sat as Chairman and his casting-vote decided the fortunes of the day.

The next Board day, accordingly, Empson appeared, and it soon became
evident that Blunt was to have his vote.

Fotheringham was calm, passive, and behaved throughout with the air of a
man who thought it due to his colleagues to go patiently through with
the discussion, but whose mind was thoroughly made up. The fight soon
waxed vehement.

'Look,' said Blunt, 'at the case of cotton in the Kutchpurwanee
District.'

'Really,' said Fotheringham, 'I fail to see the analogy between cotton
and salt.' This was one of Fotheringham's stupid remarks, which
exasperated both Empson and Blunt and made them flash looks of
intelligence across the table at each other.

'Then,' Blunt said with emphasis, 'I'll explain the analogy. Cotton was
twopence-halfpenny per pound and hard to get at that. What did we do? We
laid out ten lakhs in irrigation, another five lakhs in roads, a vast
deal more in introducing European machinery and supervision; raised the
whole sum by an average rate on cotton cultivation--and what is the
result? Why, last year the outcome was more than double what it was
before, and the price a halfpenny a pound lower at least.'

'And what does that prove?' asked Fotheringham, who never could be made
to see anything that he chose not to see; 'As I said before, where is
the analogy?' Blunt gave a cough which meant that he was uttering
execrations internally, and took a large pinch of snuff. Fotheringham
looked round with the satisfied air of a man who had given a clencher to
his argument, and whose opponents could not with decency profess any
longer to be unconvinced.

'I am against it,' said Cockshaw, 'because I am against everything. We
are over-governing the country. The one thing that India wants is to be
let alone. We should take a leaf out of the books of our
predecessors--collect our revenue, as small an one as possible, shun all
changes like the devil--and let the people be.'

'That is out of the question,' said Empson, whom thirty years of
officialdom had still left an enthusiast at heart; '"Rest for India" is
the worst of all the false cries which beset and bewilder us; it means,
for one thing, a famine every ten years at least; and famines, you know,
mean death to them and insolvency to us.'

'Of course,' said Fotheringham, sententiously, with the grand air of
Æolus soothing the discordant winds; 'when Cockshaw said he was against
everything, he did not mean any indifference to the country. But we are
running up terrible bills; you know, Empson, we got an awful snubbing
from home about our deficit last year.'

'Well, but now about the Salt,' put in Blunt, whose task seemed to be to
keep everybody to the point in hand; 'this is no question of deficit. I
say it will pay, and the Government of India will lend us the money fast
enough if they can be made to think so too.'

'Well,' said Cockshaw, stubbornly lighting another cheroot, and getting
out his words between rapid puffs of smoke, 'it won't pay, you'll see,
and Government will think as I do.'

'Then,' replied Blunt, 'you will excuse me for saying Government will
think wrong, and you will have helped them. Have you examined the
figures?'

'Yes,' said Cockshaw, with provoking placidity, 'and I think them, like
all other statistics, completely fallacious. You have not been out here,
Blunt, as long as we have.'

'No; but the laws of arithmetic are the same, whether I am here or not.'

'Well,' observed Fotheringham, 'I really do not see--forgive me, pray,
for saying it--but, as senior member, I may perhaps be allowed the
observation--I really do not see how Blunt can pretend to know anything
about our Salt.'

'There is one thing I know about it,' said Blunt to Empson as they drove
home together from the Board; 'whatever it is, it is not Attic!'

While thus the battle raged within, Desvoeux, who had come with the
Agent to the Board, took an afternoon's holiday, and found himself, by
one of those lucky accidents with which Fortune favours every
flirtation, in Mrs. Vereker's drawing-room, where Maud had just arrived
to have luncheon and to spend the afternoon.

Now Mrs. Vereker was a beauty, and, as a beauty should, kept a little
court of her own in Dustypore, which in its own way was quite as
distinct an authority as the Salt Board or the Agency itself. Her claims
to sovereignty were considerable. She had the figure of a sylph, hair
golden and profuse and real. She had lovely, liquid, purple eyes, into
which whoever was rash enough to look was lost forthwith; and a
smile--but as to this the position of the present chronicler, as a
married man and the father of a family, renders it impossible for him to
describe it as it deserved. Suffice it to say that, even in a faded
photograph, it has occasioned the partner of his bosom the acutest
pangs, and it would be bad taste and inexpedient to say more than that
gentlemen considered it bewitching, while many married ladies condemned
it as an unmeaning simper of a very silly woman.

Mrs. Vereker affected to be greatly surprised at Desvoeux's arrival, and
even to hesitate about letting him in; but the slight constraint of her
manner, and the flush that tinged her cheek, suggested the suspicion
that the call was not altogether fortuitous.

'How provoking,' she said, when Desvoeux made his appearance, 'that you
should just come this morning to spoil our _tête-à-tête!_ Don't you
find, Miss Vernon, that whatever one does in life, there is invariably a
man _de trop?_'

'No,' cried Desvoeux gaily; 'Providence has kindly sent me to rescue you
both from a dull morning. Ladies have often told me that under such
circumstances it is quite a relief to have a man come in to break the
even flow of feminine gossip. Come, now, Miss Vernon, were you not
pleased to see my carriage come up the drive?'

'No, indeed,' said Maud; 'nothing could be more _mal à propos_. Mrs.
Vereker was just going to show me a lovely new Paris bonnet, and now,
you see, we must wait till you are gone!'

'Then, indeed, you would hate me,' answered Desvoeux; 'but happily there
is no necessity for that, as I happen to be a connoisseur in bonnets,
and Mrs. Vereker would not be quite happy in wearing one till I had
given my approval. She will go away now, you will see, and put it on for
us to look at.'

'Is not he conceited?' said Mrs. Vereker, raining the influence of a
bewitching smile upon her guests, and summoning, as she could at
pleasure, the most ingenuous of blushes to her cheeks; 'he thinks he is
quite a first-rate judge of everything.'

'Not of _everything_,' said the other, 'but of some things--Mrs.
Vereker's good looks, for instance--yes, from long and admiring
contemplation of the subject! It would be hard indeed if one could not
have an opinion about what has given one so much pleasure, and, alas! so
much suffering!'

Desvoeux said this with the most sentimental air, and Mrs. Vereker
seemed to take it quite as a matter of course.

'Poor fellow!' she said; 'well, perhaps I will show you the bonnet after
all, just to console you; am I not kind?'

'You know,' said Desvoeux, 'that you are dying to put it on. Pray defer
your and our delectation no longer!'

'Rude and disagreeable person!' cried the other, 'Suppose, Miss Vernon,
we go off and look at it by ourselves and have a good long chat, leaving
him alone here to cultivate politeness?'

'Yes,' cried Maud, 'let us. Here, Mr. Desvoeux, is a very interesting
report on something--Education--no, Irrigation--with nice tables and
plenty of figures. That will amuse you till we come back.'

'At any rate, don't turn a poor fellow out into such a hurricane as
this,' said Desvoeux, going to the window and looking into the garden,
where by this time a sand-storm was raging and all the atmosphere thick
and murky with great swirls of dust. 'I should spoil my complexion and
my gloves, and very likely be choked into the bargain.'

'But it was just as bad when you came, and you did not mind it.'

'Hope irradiated the horizon,' cried Desvoeux; 'but it was horrible. I
have a perfect horror of sand--like the people in "Alice," you know--

    They wept like anything to see
      Such quantities of sand.
    "If this were only cleared away,"
      They said, "it would be grand."
    "If seven maids with seven mops
      Swept it for half a year,
    Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
      "That they could get it clear?"
    "I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
      And shed a bitter tear.

And I shall shed a bitter tear if you send me away. At any rate, let me
stay to lunch, please, and have my horses sent round to the stable.'

'Shall we let him?' cried Mrs. Vereker teasingly. 'Well, if you do, you
will have nothing but poached eggs and bottled beer. There is a little
pudding, but only just big enough for Miss Vernon and me.'

'I will give him a bit of mine,' said Maud. 'I vote that we let him
stay, if he promises not to be impertinent.'

'And I will show him my bonnet,' cried the other, whose impatience to
display her new finery was rapidly making way. 'It is just as well to
see how things strike men, you know, and my _caro sposo_, among his
thousand virtues, happens to be a perfect ignoramus on the point of
dress. He knows and cares nothing about all my loveliest things.'

'Except,' said Desvoeux, 'how much they cost. Well, there is a practical
side which somebody must know about, I suppose, and a husband is just
the person; but it is highly inartistic.'

'How did you know that I was here?' Maud asked, when Mrs. Vereker had
left the room. 'And why are you not at the Agency doing your lessons?'

'Because we have an aviary of little birds at the Agency,' answered
Desvoeux, his manner instantly becoming several shades quieter and more
affectionate, 'and one of them came and sung me a tune this morning,
and told me to go and take a holiday and meet the person I like the best
in the world.'

'Now,' said Mrs. Vereker, gleefully re-entering the room, with a cluster
of lace and flowers artistically poised upon her shapely little head,
'is not that a duck, and don't I look adorable?'

'Quite a work of art,' cried Desvoeux, with enthusiasm. 'Siren! why,
already too dangerously fair, why deck yourself with fresh allurements
for the fascination of a broken-hearted world? I am convinced Saint
Simon Stylites would have come down from his pillar on the spot if he
could but have seen it!'

'And confessed himself a gone coon from a moral point of view,' laughed
Mrs. Vereker, despoiling herself of the work of art in question. 'And
now let us have some lunch; and mind, Mr. Desvoeux, you can only have a
very little, because, you see, we did not expect you.'

Afterwards, when it was time for Maud to go, it was discovered that no
carriage had arrived to take her home. 'What can I do?' she said, in
despair. 'Felicia will be waiting to take me to the Camp. George
promised to send back his office-carriage here the moment he got to the
Board.'

'Then,' said Desvoeux, with great presence of mind, 'he has obviously
forgotten it, and I will drive you home. Let me order my horses; they
are quite steady.'

Maud looked at Mrs. Vereker--she felt a burning wish to go, and needed
but the faintest encouragement. Felicia would, she knew, be not well
pleased; but then it was George's fault that she was unprovided for, and
it seemed hardly good-natured to reject so easy an escape from the
embarrassment which his carelessness had produced.

'I would come and sit in the back seat, to make it proper,' cried Mrs.
Vereker, 'but that I am afraid of the sun. I tell you what: I will
drive, and you can sit in the back seat, Mr. Desvoeux; that will do
capitally.'

'Thank you,' said Desvoeux, with the most melancholy attempt at
politeness and his face sinking to zero.

'Indeed, that is impossible!' cried Maud. 'I know you want to stay at
home. I will go with Mr. Desvoeux.' And go accordingly they did, and on
the way home Desvoeux became, as was but natural, increasingly
confidential. 'This is my carriage,' he explained, 'for driving married
ladies in: you see there is a seat behind--very far behind--and well
railed off, to put the husbands in and keep them in their proper
place--quite in the background. It is so disagreeable when they lean
over and try to join in the conversation; and people never know when
they are _de trop_.'

'Ah, but,' said Maud, 'I don't like driving with you alone. I hear you
are a very terrible person. People give you a very bad character.'

'I know,' answered her companion; 'girls are always jilting me and
treating me horribly badly, and then they say that it is all my fault. I
dare say they have been telling you about Miss Fotheringham's affair,
and making me out a monster; but it was she that was alone to blame.'

'Indeed,' said Maud, 'I heard that it made her very ill, and she had to
be sent to England, to be kept out of a consumption.'

'This was how it was,' said Desvoeux; 'I adored her--quite adored her; I
thought her an angel, and I think her one still, but with one defect--a
sort of frantic jealousy, quite a mania. Well, I had a friend--it
happened to be a lady--for whom I had all the feelings of a brother. We
had corresponded for years. I had sent her innumerable notes, letters,
flowers, presents, you know. I had a few things that she had given me--a
note or two, a glove, a flower, a photograph, perhaps--just the sort of
thing, you know, that one sends----'

'To one's brother,' put in Maud. 'Yes; I know exactly.'

'Yes,' said Desvoeux, in the most injured tone, 'and I used to lend her
my ponies, and, when she wanted me, to drive her. And what do you think
that Miss Fotheringham was cruel, wild enough to ask? To give back all
my little mementoes to write no more notes, have no more drives; in
fact, discard my oldest, dearest friend!--I told her, of course, that it
was impossible, impossible!' Desvoeux cried, getting quite excited over
his wrongs: '"Cruel girl," I said, "am I to seal my devotion to you by
an infidelity to the kindest, tenderest, sweetest of beings?" Thereupon
Miss Fotheringham became quite unreasonable, went into hysterics, sent
me back a most lovely locket which I had sent her only that morning; and
Fotheringham _père_ wrote me the most odious note, in his worst style,