Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer——
Leaving the celestials to their business and pleasures in the upper regions, the Historic Muse must now descend into the plains and record the wrath of Blunt and the more than Homeric combats which, stirred by Até in her most malignant mood, that irrepressible official waged against his luckless compeers at the Board. The outbreak was horribly inopportune. The weather was becoming disagreeably hot; Cockshaw was looking up his rifles and fishing-rods for a month's run into Cashmir; Fotheringham was preparing to retire behind his cuscus entrenchments and æstivate in placidity till the moment arrived for going to the Hills. But the black soul of Blunt was impervious to climatic influences; his craving for information became more insatiable, his contempt for Fotheringham's platitudes and Strutt's tall writing less and less disguised. The further Blunt looked into the Rumble Chunder affair the keener grew his sense of the feeble, roundabout, inaccurate, unthorough way in which it had been treated by every one who had essayed to take it in hand. 'The way to handle nettles,' he said, roughly, 'is to take tight hold of them and bear what stinging you get and have done with it.'
Neither Fotheringham nor Cockshaw were in the least disposed to handle official nettles or to admit the force of Blunt's logic as applied to themselves.
'Some nettles,' Fotheringham said, with dignified composure, 'will not bear handling at all. Many of our Indian maladies you will find, Blunt, require a course of treatment always unpopular with ardent physicians, that, namely, of being left alone.'
'Ay,' said Cockshaw, blowing a great stream of smoke from his mouth, as if he wished he could treat Blunt and his schemes in like fashion; 'leave well alone, Blunt. What the deuce is it you are driving at?'
'I'll tell you what I am driving at,' said Blunt, 'I want to be out of the muddle in which we have been going on all these years, just for want of a little explicitness and courage.'
'Excuse me,' said Fotheringham testily; 'I am not aware that the conquerors and administrators of the Sandy Tracts have ever been accused of deficiency in courage, at any rate.'
'Of course not,' answered the other; 'no one supposes anything of the sort; but what I mean is that no one has faced the consequences of that confounded Proclamation of the Governor-General in a plain, business-like way, and seen what it really comes to.'
Now the Governor-General's Proclamation was regarded in official circles at Dustypore with a sort of traditional awe, as something almost sacred. Fotheringham had often spoken of it as the Magna Charta of the Sandy Tracts, and Strutt generally quoted it in the peroration of his Annual Report. Nothing, accordingly, could be less congenial to his audience than Blunt's coarse, offhanded, disrespectful way of referring to it. Fotheringham's whole nature rose in arms against the idea of this rash, irreverential intruder handling with such jaunty freedom and contempt the things which he had all his life been accustomed to treat and to see treated with profound respect. The moment had now come when to put up with Blunt any longer would, he thought, be simple weakness; the cup of Blunt's misdeeds at last was full; and Fotheringham, his patience fairly at an end, pale and excited, spoke, and spoke in wrath.
'I must beg,' he said, in a tone of aggrieved dignity which Blunt especially resented, 'to remind our junior colleague that there are some things of which his inexperience of the country renders it impossible for him to be a competent judge, and of which, when he knows them better, he will probably think and speak with more respect. This Rumble Chunder Grant is one of them. Cockshaw and I have been at work at it for twenty years: we know the places, the people, the language, the feeling it excites, the dangers it may provoke. The Proclamation, which Blunt is pleased to describe as "confounded," was, we know, a high-minded, well-considered act of a great statesman and has been the foundation stone of all peace, prosperity, and civilisation in the province. It all seems clear to you, my good sir, because—forgive me for saying it—you do not see the intricacies of the matter, and are incapable of appreciating its bearings. For my part'——