[134]. Regiments.
Next day they left Dehra, dropping the first of its October rose-leaves. Thinking of the planter in his grave, Helen wondered how he could have been so indifferent as to close his eyes wilfully and intentionally on such a place. It was the morning, there was a sweet and pungent gaiety in the air, the long road they had to travel stretched before them in the pleasaunce of leaf-checkered sunshine. Little striped squirrels played on the boles of the trees—they were English-looking trees—that met over their heads. Young Browne thanked God audibly that they were out of the region of palms and plantains.
Tiny green fly-catchers swung on the rushes of an occasional pool, pink-breasted ring-doves sidled out of their way, thieving parrots flew by sixes and sevens screaming up from the kharif crops.[[135]] Very green were the kharif crops, with the rain still about their roots, surging up under the lowest branches of the trees as far as these travellers could see before them. But for the teeming luxuriance of everything, the sense of breadth and brightness and the caressing sun, it might have been a road in Devonshire. But for the wayfarers too. There were neither smocks nor gigs; the ryot went by, chiefly dressed in his own brown skin, urging his lean oxen; all the gentle cows had curious humps between their shoulders. And here by the wayside they saw the tiny dome of a battered white praying place, and there the square slab of a Mahomedan tomb.
[135]. Cold weather crops.
The sun grew hot as they scrambled with the road down to the bridge across a broad river bed full of round white stones and boulders, with a narrow shallow brown stream hurrying along the middle. Further away it trickled into the Jumna; here it played with pebbles and crabs, but now and then in the rains it brought the boulders down from the mountains swirling, and threw stones at the Department of Public Works, and shook the bridges. Looking one way as they crossed the bridge, it was a piled-up picture, the blue hills massed behind, the big white stones huddled and stranded in the glistening grey sand, the foolish little stream in the middle. Looking the other, the picture went to pieces, the hills sloped further away, the sky came down, the big stones rounded themselves into little ones, and spread indistinguishably far. Either way it was beautiful in the crisp Indian sunlight; it had a gay untroubled life, like porcelain.
After that there were miles of irresponsible curving, weedy road, that led them sometimes past the sirkar’s[[136]] sarl forest, and sometimes past a little village gathered together under a mango-tree, but oftenest it straggled through wide, sunny, stony country, full of pale half-tints, where only wild grasses grew. Such tall wild grasses, purple and yellow and white, bending and tufting above their heads on either side of the way. “They would make Aunt Plovtree happy for life,” Helen said. They would indeed, and many another estimable lady resident in Great Britain. It was a sorrowful waste that they should be growing there far from the solemn interiors that yearned for their dusty charms. Helen was so much of this opinion that she dismounted and gathered a bunch, compelling her husband to do the same, to send by parcel post to Aunt Plovtree. She flicked the flies off the Diagram’s ears with them for three miles, then she lost a third of them in a canter, and young Browne arranged that the rest should be carefully forgotten at Kalsi dâk-bungalow. He was of opinion that in undertaking an ascent of nine thousand feet on a bazar tat in India you couldn’t be expected to gather and preserve wild grasses for your aunt in England.
[136]. Government’s.
CHAPTER XXV.
