CHAPTER XVIII.
GAUDIA IN EXCELSIS.
Quis non malarum quas Amor curas habet
Hæc inter obliviscitur?
Before many weeks had passed Sutton and Desvœux came up to Elysium for their holidays, and Maud's cup of pleasure began to overflow. Boldero moreover, to the great surprise of every one, discovered that the plains were telling seriously on his constitution, and, despite the lamentations of his Commissioner, who was at his wits' end to find a satisfactory substitute, insisted on carrying out the doctor's recommendation to try a change of air.
'I am sorry you are ill,' the Commissioner said, 'and overworked, but what on earth am I to do without you? No one understands anything about our arterial drainage scheme but you; and who is to open the new cattle fair? And then there is that lakh of saplings we had determined to plant out in the rains—my dear fellow, don't go till October, at any rate.'
But Boldero was inexorable: the arterial drainage of the Sandy Tracts, new cattle fairs, and even the delicious prospect of planting out a hundred thousand trees in a region where a tree was almost as great a phenomenon as Dr. Johnson found it in the Hebrides—all seemed to him but as hollow dreams, which fell meaningless on the ear, when compared with the solid reality of a personal romance. To go to Elysium, to see Maud again, to hear her joyous laugh, to watch her eyes light up with pleasure, and the colour coming and going in her cheeks, as each new turn of feeling swayed her this way or that; to hold her hand in his and feel a subtle, electric influence flashing from her to him and stirring every nerve and fibre of his being into new existence; and then to win this sweet creature to himself with a tender avowal of devotion and the sweet coercion of passionate attachment; to bring her to irradiate a dreary, solitary life with youth, beauty, freshness, everything that Boldero now discovered that his own existence wanted; this was the dream which filled his waking and sleeping thoughts, or, rather, this was the reality, and everything else was dreamland, far off, unsubstantial, unsatisfying. What, to a man in this mood, are reclamation schemes and irrigation projects and all the vexatious details involved in improving thankless people against their wills, educating those who do not want to be taught, and aiming at a chimerical Golden Age, which no one is sure can ever come, and which, at any rate, we shall never see? Boldero confessed to himself that a morning's sketching on the mountain's side with Maud was, as far as his interest about the matter went, worth more than all the Golden Ages that poets have sung or philanthropists devised. The utmost concession that the Commissioner could get out of him was that he would go only for a fortnight. And so to Elysium he came among the rest.
There may be natures to whom, according to Sir Cornewall Lewis's dictum, life would be tolerable but for its enjoyments; but the Elysians assuredly are not of the number. They go about pleasure-hunting with a vehemence the stronger and keener for the long period of partial or total abstinence from amusement which most of them have undergone. The soldier who has been for months marching up and down a desert frontier, with no attainable form of excitement but the agreeable possibility of having one's throat cut in the night or a bullet cleverly lodged in one from behind a rock overhead—the engineer who has been for months out in camp with little companionship but that of theodolites and maps—the forest superintendent who has spent a twelvemonth among the deodars in some nameless Himalayan gorge—the civilian who has carried off his bride to a solitary existence in some far-off Mofussil station, where the only European is perhaps an excise officer or policeman—people like these acquire a keen relish for any change of scene and rush into a holiday with the enthusiasm of long-imprisoned schoolboys. Nothing damps their ardour—not even Himalayan rain, which effectually damps everything else. There is a ball, for instance, at the Club House; it is raining cataracts and has been doing so for twenty hours. The mountain paths are knee-deep in mud, and swept by many a turgid torrent rattling from above. Great masses of thunder-cloud come looming up, rumbling, crashing and blazing upon a sodden, reeking world. The night is black as Tartarus, save when the frequent flashes light it up with a momentary glare. The road is steep, rough and not too safe. Carriages, of course, there are none. A false step might send you several thousand feet down the precipice into the valley below. Will all this prevent Jones the Collector and Brown the Policeman and Smith of the Irregular Cavalry putting their respective ladies into palanquins, mounting their ponies like men and finding their way, through field and flood, to the scene of dissipation? Each will ensconce himself in a panoply of indiarubber and require a great deal of peeling before becoming presentable in a ballroom; but each will get himself peeled, and dance till four o'clock. The ladies will emerge from their palanquins as fresh and bright and ambrosial as lace and tarlatan can make them. Mrs. Jones, if she would only tell the truth, has already more than half-filled up her card with engagements. Smith and his wife have never been at a dance since the night he proposed to her at the Woolwich ball, and feel quite romantic at the prospect of a valse together. Mrs. Brown will meet half-a-dozen particular friends who are dying to see her, and whom she is not averse to see. The night outside is Tartarean, certainly, but within there is nothing but light, music and mirth. The band crashes out and drowns the patter of the rain above. 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.
Is this the race which proclaims itself inadept at amusements, and which, historians gravely assure us, loves to take its very pleasures sadly? Are these the melancholy beings whose gloom is supposed to have acquired a still sadder tinge from the sad routine of Eastern life? Say, rather, a race with healthy instincts and conscious energy and the ready joyousness of youth—fittest rulers of a world where much hard work is to be done, where many things tend to melancholy and all things to fatigue.