Sir H. S. Cunningham

“ Gentlemen never say things that hurt you or offend your taste. Now with Mr. Desvœux I feel for ever in a fright lest he should say something I dislike; and I know he thinks things that I dislike.'
'I think you are prejudiced, Felicia. What he says seems to me all very nice.'
'Perhaps it is prejudice,' Felicia answered, 'but I think it all the same. I feel the difference with other people; Major Sutton, for instance.'
'He is your ideal, is he not?' cried Maud, blushing and laughing, for somehow she was beginning to feel that Felicia had designs upon her. ”

“ The Viceroy, towering like a Homeric chief among his peers, mingles with the throng, and is valsing with Felicia. Boldero has reached the seventh heaven of his hopes, is actually in possession of Maud's hand and has her heart beating close to his own. Desvœux looks reproachfully at her over Mrs. Vereker's shoulder as they go whirling by. A hundred happy hearts are pulsating with excitement and pleasure, drowning the cares of existence in such transient oblivion as may be manufactured out of fiddlers and champagne. ”

“ Desvœux had galloped away with his heart in a tumult from queries such as these, cursing the cruel fate which obliged him to be at his master's camp, full thirty miles away, with endless boxes of despatches ready for disposal before to-morrow morning.
Thus it was that Maud's early married life had not been without its morning clouds and sorrows. Then, as people do when they are unhappy, casting about for a cause of her unhappiness, she began to reproach herself. The old doubts of her fitness, her worthiness for her position, her power to retain her husband's love, began to haunt her. ”

“ He is one of the people whom I completely trust.'
Maud felt her cheek glowing with pleasure, yet the pleasure was not without a sting. Everybody conspired to speak of her husband as some one beyond the usual flight in goodness, chivalry, nobility of soul. Was she behaving as became the wife of such a man? Was she loving, honouring, and obeying in the full spirit of her vow? Was it honourable or right that half-a-dozen foolish lads should be competing for familiarity with her, and a man like Desvœux be her habitual companion? Ought her husband to hear such things of her? ”

“ And what nectar the air is! And, George, actually, strawberries!'
'Yes,' said Vernon, 'and cream, and plenty of both. Is it not enchanting?'
'You shall have some flowers too, dear,' cried Maud, who seldom missed an opportunity of petting Felicia and letting her love run out in some pretty act or speech. 'See, this rose was made for me to deck you with. Does she not look charming, George?'
'Hush!' said George; 'we shall make her and the little girls too as vain as possible. ”

“ I minded leaving you at Dustypore when we came away, and now to-day I am sad because you are leaving us.'
'That makes me sad too,' said Sutton, grieved, and yet not wholly grieved, at each new phase of sentiment which the childish frankness of his companion revealed to him; 'but, you know, we soldiers are for ever on the move, and nobody is surprised or sad when we are ordered off. You love Felicia, do you not?'
'Yes,' said Maud, seriously; 'I feel a sort of worship for her. Who could be so sweet, noble and pure without being adored? ”

“ Sutton's duties would never take him away for more than a few hours; and camp life is idyllic in its freedom, unconstraint and tranquillity. Existence has something charming about it when each morning's ride takes you through new scenes to a new home, in which you live as comfortably for the next twenty-four hours as if you had been there all your life. Maud was in rapture at the prospect, nor was her happiness lessened by the arrival of the most perfect Arab to be found in Bombay—her husband's wedding gift to her—on which her long journey was to be performed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was not so much fickleness as the keen pleasure of success, the most natural and pleasantest, probably, of all human successes,—the proved capacity to charm mankind. What faint adumbration of love had darkened the sunshine of her heart was all for Sutton; and even this was a sort of transient pang, which the excitement of daily life made it easy to [174] forget. Knowing but faintly what love meant, she mistook, as women often do, the thrill of flattered vanity for solid feeling. Boldero had not disguised his admiration, nor Maud the pleasure which it gave her. ”

“ The scene was, indeed, one full of pathos, even to a less interested [316] looker-on than the Colonel. It was horrible to see these sturdy, joyous, much-enduring, dare-devil troopers lying so utterly prostrated, unnerved and helpless. Death, it seemed, should have come to them in the form of steel or bullet, the thrust of lance, the crashing sword-cut or wild cavalry charge; not as a pestilence, creeping on them unawares and slaying them in their beds. Sutton, who had looked death in the face a hundred times with perfect indifference, began to understand why people feared it. ”

“ These Indian festivities are, perhaps, none the less festive, and certainly the more touching, for the fact that at least half the holiday-makers have a dark, sad corner in their hearts which has to be hidden from the world's eye and to be ignored in the common intercourse of life. Separation is the dark cloud which hangs over an Indian existence: husbands and wives, mothers and children, forced asunder, perhaps at the very time when union is most delightful, and living (how maimed and sad a life!) ”

“ 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 [30] 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. ”

“ So Maud and Desvœux found themselves travelling home together in the moonlight and falling behind the crowd of riders, to enjoy, undisturbed, the pleasure of a tête-à-tête. One of the great dangers of the Hills is that the paths admit only of two people riding abreast; the terzo incomodo must ride behind, and might, so far as prudence is concerned, just as well not be there at all. No such inconvenient intruder, however, threatened Desvœux's enjoyment of the present occasion or aided the faltering monitions which Maud's half-silenced conscience whispered to her. ”

“ But then she had not danced with Desvœux; and Desvœux 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. Desvœux'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. ”

“ Now I am going to try to do better, if only I can get the chance—if only God in His goodness will grant me that.'
'I am hopeful,' said Boldero, 'for both of you. Sutton, I feel, has something greater yet to do. We have often laughed and said that nothing can kill him. You know in cholera it is as much mind as body: courage, calmness, and determination are half the battle.'
'Then,' said Maud, with enthusiasm, faith, and hopefulness glowing in her face, 'I am sure he will do well. His body is his soul's servant, you cannot fancy how completely; it does its bidding as a matter of course. ”

“ Surely there must be something wrong in the constitution of a world where such woes could come to pass.
So while Desvœux, in a sort of half-rage, was hustling his pony down the hillside as if he really did mean to break his neck once for all and have done with a life in which Maud could not continually figure, Maud herself was in affliction for quite another cause; and Sutton, his mind too full of warlike schemes to think of love, was busy with a map spread out on the Viceroy's table, pointing out exactly the route through the Hills which the expedition was to take. ”

“ Every now and then a distant vista reminds you that you are climbing some of the wildest and steepest hill sides in the world. The mountaineers may well cower and fly before a foe who begins with so impressive an achievement, and who cuts his way—resistless as fate itself—across the rocky brow of barriers which it seems half-mad, half-impious to try to scale.
The expedition, Sutton found, was in every way complete. His own regiment was always ready to march at twenty minutes' notice, and the General at Dustypore seemed to have been equally well prepared. ”