Chronicles of Dustypore: A Tale of Modern Anglo-Indian Society

by Sir H. S. Cunningham

For a few hundred rupees, accordingly, Vernon had become possessor of the huts and some adjoining acres, and since then Felicia's embellishing hand had worked wonders. Nature, as if in gratitude for unaccustomed devotion, lent herself in a lavish mood to beautify the little structure. A profuse growth of creepers festooned the porch; a delicious piece of turf, bright, smooth and soft, and broken only by one or two projecting crags, stretched down the mountain-side in front; inside the rough deodar paling the beds were all ablaze with English flowers that not even Felicia's tenderness could coax into healthiness in the plain below. 'These are my invalids,' Felicia said, to whom this spot was always full of charms: 'I send them up with the babies to breathe a little wholesome air. Shut your eyes, Maud, and smell this—cannot you fancy yourself in a sweet English wood in June?'

There were other beauties, moreover, about the place than those of an English summer. They were hanging in a little picturesque nook of safety, but all around them was sublime. Storms gathered and crashed and spent their fury as if this was their very home where they could play at ease. An inky mass came lowering over the heights above and shed itself in one angry deluge on the mountain-side; the thunder crashed in fierce echoes from crag to crag, and all the heavens blazed from end to end as the fearful fiery zig-zags came darting out of the gloom; then the tempest would pass away and nothing be heard but the distant rumble and the hundred muddy torrents roaring downwards. The great folds of mist came swirling up the precipice, wrapping everything for a few moments in gloom; then they would pass on, and presently again the sky be serene and bright, and the reeking mountains sun themselves gleefully in the brightness and warmth that were everywhere present.

'It is beautiful,' Maud said, 'but too grand to be quite pleasant; it is rather awful. That black mountain opposite, with its army of skeleton deodars, makes me shudder.'

Across the gorge the forest had been burnt—the first rude attempt by the mountaineers at reclaiming the soil. For weeks together these blazing patches may be seen on the hillside, hidden in a cloud of smoke by day, and at night lighting up the landscape with a lurid, fitful glare. When, by a change in the wind or sudden downpour, the conflagration ceases, nothing remains but a gloomy array of charred stumps, with here and there some monstrous stem towering above, which the flames, though they were able to kill, have not succeeded in devouring. Then among the ruins of the forest comes the primitive cultivator, with his tiny plough and scrambling goat-like bullocks, and wrings a scanty crop of oats or potatoes from each ridge and cranny of the rocky steep; and so the reign of agriculture has begun. The effect, however, from the picturesque point of view is weird and gloomy; it was so, at any rate, in Maud's thoughts, for she ever after associated it with the first piece of really bad news that had ever come to her in the whole of her sunshiny existence. A note arrived one morning from Vernon at Dustypore, and Felicia read it out before she was well aware of its import. He was just starting, Vernon said, for the head-quarters of the expedition. 'There has been a fight, and the entrenched village has been carried by a coup de main, and——'

'And what?' said Maud, who felt herself turning deadly cold and her heart beating so that she could scarcely speak, 'Go on, Felicia, please.'

'"Sutton, I fear, has had a serious wound and a fall from his horse. I am going out to look after him. More news to-morrow."'

Maud rose and fled, without a word, to her bedroom, to deal with this agitating piece of news as best she might. She did not feel sure enough of her composure to trust herself to the chances of a break-down even before Felicia. There was something in herself, she knew, that she did not wish even Felicia's eye to read. To Felicia her husband's letter spoke only of the fortunes of their common friend; to Maud it was, as a quick, agonising pang told her, an affair of life or death. A serious wound—a fall from horseback—terrible, vague words that might mean anything—that might mean something that would eclipse all Maud's existence in the gloom of a lifelong disaster. She had thought over their last ride together often; but she knew now, and now only, to the full what it had really been to her. She had recalled his last acts and words—they had been sweet and tender words, such as would keep their fragrance through a lifetime; but, supposing that they were to be really last words, the long farewell of a man who was going to his doom! Maud sat still, crushed and stunned at this first brush of misfortune's passing wing: a dark shadow, black and fateful as the storms which came raging up the valley, seemed to be gathering across her life. Life itself seemed to hang on a slender thread, the tidings which to-morrow's messenger should bring—perhaps even now life was over for her.

Felicia did not leave her long in solitude; she came in presently, with her kind considerate air, knowing and feeling all, as Maud instinctively was aware, but speaking only just what should be spoken, and guarded by a delicate tact (rare attribute of only the most finely-moulded natures) from the possibility of a word too much.

'Courage,' she said; 'I know the meaning of George's letter too well to be frightened. To-morrow, dear Maud, there will be good news for both of us.'

Maud took her companion's hand in a helpless, imploring way that went to Felicia's very heart; but, if her life had depended on it, no spoken word would come.