Maud never afterwards forgot that little scene—the kind, gentle eyes, the sorrowful furrowed brow, the tender solemn voice; in front the wide mysterious plains, stretching far below, all the horizon still aglow with the expiring glory of the sunset; behind her a cold blue darkening world—the gathering vapours, no longer irradiated, settling in solid masses on the solemn mountain-tops. As she came to a bend in the path she turned to wish her companion a last farewell, for she knew that he was watching her departure. Then she rode homewards through the gloom, moved, agitated, frightened, yet on the whole happier—with a deeper kind of happiness than she had ever known before.
CHAPTER XXII.
LOVE IS BEGUN.
Love is begun—thus much is come to pass;
The rest is easy.
Sutton rode onward in a condition of happy bewilderment. He recalled the conversation, every word Maud had spoken—her look, her tone: and as he did so the result of the whole seemed to take a deeper hold upon his mind. An afternoon's ride with a pretty girl—what was there in it to a man like Sutton, the experienced companion of so many who had both the power and the will to charm? What was there in this child to whom he had shown the mere ordinary good-nature due to her circumstances, that all of a sudden, he hardly knew whether by her doing or his own, he should find himself completely fascinated? How was it, too, that the first woman with whom he really felt in love should be so different from the ideal which all his life he had set before himself of what was especially lovable? In his childhood he had loved Felicia with the spontaneous and unconcealed attachment of a near relation. Then had followed years of school, long expeditions abroad, a life which soon became adventurous, grave cares, anxieties and interests at a time when most lads are still trifling over their lessons. Sutton had not only to push his own way in life, but to keep guard over others less capable than himself, of whom he found himself, while still a boy, constituted the natural protector. His mother, suddenly left a widow, had looked to him unhesitatingly for counsel, protection and—so Sutton's account book would have testified—supplies, which he was ill able to contribute. Brothers had had to be set a-going, and kept a-going, in that troublesome and anxious process of making a livelihood in a world where no one is in the least want of one's services. Then Fortune and Valour had combined to push Sutton forward as a soldier, and one or two adventures, brilliant because they were not disastrous, made him a reputation which secured him constant employment. When, years later, he had met Felicia again, a newly-arrived bride, in the Sandy Tracts, though he felt towards her the same affection as ever, it had not occurred to him to envy the man who was now lawful possessor of that to which he might have seemed, had circumstances allowed, a natural pretender. He had remained the loyal friend of both. None the less was Felicia the typical conception in his mind of what a woman ought to be. Her grave, refined serenity; her unstudied dignity of form and gesture; her mirthfulness flashing all about a melancholy mood; her sorrows so acutely felt, so bravely borne, so sedulously concealed; the prompt excitability that made the world full of pleasures and interests to her, and her a moving influence in the world; the tenderness of sympathy which, beginning in the little home centre, spread in increasing circles to all who came within her range of thought or action and enthroned her mistress of a hundred hearts,—made up the type which his imagination had adored. Now he was startled to find himself kneeling at quite another shrine, adoring quite another deity, and adoring it, as he was constrained to confess to himself, with a sudden, vehement devotion, characteristic rather of boyish enthusiasm than of the mature sobriety of middle age.
Anyhow, as Sutton rode into the yard of the little inn where dinner awaited him, he wished, for the first time in his life, that the campaign was well over and himself safe back again at the pacific pursuits on which duty was just now sternly calling him to turn his back.
Here he found the Agent and Desvœux, who had been busy all the afternoon with despatches and were waiting now for the moonlight to allow them to get forward on their journey.
Desvœux, as was always the case in times of difficulty, had risen to the occasion and fully justified the confidence of those who placed a seeming fop in a responsible position. He had been working all day like a slave, and he was now dining like an Epicurean, and in higher spirits than Epicureans mostly are. The Agent, who kept him in thorough order and got an inordinate amount of first-rate work out of him at times, rewarded him by a generous confidence and a liberty of speech in private, which no other subordinate enjoyed. A jaded, weary official, with an uncomfortably lively scepticism as to the usefulness of himself and his system to the world, forced into all sorts of new and uncomfortable conditions, could not but be grateful to an assistant whose spirits, like Desvœux's, were always in inverse ratio to the darkness of surrounding things, whose cynicism was always amusing, and whose observations on the world around and above him, if frequently somewhat impertinent, were never without good sense and insight.