Читать книгу Chronicles of Dustypore: A Tale of Modern Anglo-Indian Society - Sir H. S. Cunningham - Страница 12

The laws of marriage character'd in gold

Upon the blanched tablets of her heart;

A love still burning upward, giving light

To read those laws; an accent very low

In blandishment, but a most silver flow

Of subtle-paced counsel in distress,

Right to the heart and brain, tho' undescried,

Winning its way with extreme gentleness

Through all the outworks of suspicious pride.

The new home in which Maud found herself might well have contented a more fastidious critic than she was at all inclined to be. The Vernons were delightful hosts. Maud had established thoroughly comfortable relations with her cousin during the long journey to Dustypore; and though he was too indolent or perhaps too much absorbed in work for anything but a sort of passive politeness, still this was, upon the whole, satisfactory and reassuring, and Maud felt very much at her ease with him. Mrs. Vernon, the 'Cousin Felicia,' whom Maud now realised in flesh and blood for the first time, inspired her with a stronger, keener feeling of admiration than any she had known before. She was beautiful, as Maud had often heard; but beauty alone would not account for the thrill of pleasure which something in Felicia's first greeting gave her. The charm lay in an unstudied, unconscious cordiality of manner that fascinated the new-comer with its sincerity and grace. Felicia coruscated with cheerfulness, courage, mirth. She was bright, and infected those about her with brightness. Transplanted from the quiet luxury of an English country-house to the rough experiences of Indian life, she bore through them all an air of calmness, joyousness, refinement, which the troubles of life seemed incapable of disturbing. When, years before, just fresh from the schoolroom and with all the dazzling possibilities of a London season before her, she had admitted her attachment to Vernon and her unalterable desire to go with him to India, her father's face had looked darker than she had ever seen it before, and a family chorus of indignation had proclaimed the unwisdom of the choice. The rector's son and the squire's daughter, however, had played about together as boy and girl, and long years of intimacy had cemented a friendship too strong to be shattered by such feeble blows as worldliness or prudence could inflict upon it. Vernon had nothing but the slender portion which a country clergyman might be expected to leave his children at his death—nothing, that is, except a long list of school and college honours and a successful candidature for the Indian Civil Service. Felicia, as her deploring aunts murmured amongst themselves, 'was a girl who might have married any one;' and her parents, without incurring the charge of a vulgar ambition, might naturally complain of a match which gave them so little and cost them the pang of so complete a separation. Felicia, at any rate, had never repented of her choice; she was greatly in love with her husband, and had the pleasant consciousness that his taste—fastidious, critical, and not a little sarcastic—found in her nothing that was not absolute perfection. India had developed in her a self-reliance and fortitude which never could have been born in the safe tranquillity of her home. The hot winds of Dustypore had not quite robbed her cheeks of their English bloom; but there were lines of suffering, anxiety, and fatigue which, when her face was at rest, let out the secret that her habitual brightness was not as effortless as it seemed.

The fact was that life, with all its enjoyments, had been to her full of pangs, of which, even at a safe distance, she could scarcely trust herself to think. The separation from her home was a grief that long usage made none the easier to bear. On the contrary, there was a sort of aching want which was never appeased, and which the merest trifle—a letter—a message—a word—was sufficient to light up into something like anguish. Felicia never achieved the art of reading her home letters with decent composure, and used to carry them, with a sort of nervous uneasiness, to her own room, to be dealt with in solitude. Then four children, all with an air of Indian fragility, and whose over-refined looks their mother would thankfully have bartered for a little vigour and robustness, had cost her many a heartache. On the horizon of all her married life there loomed the dreadful certainty of a day when another series of separations would begin, and the choice would lie between the companionship of her husband in India, or the care of her children at home.

From this horrid thought it was natural for such a temperament as Felicia's to seek refuge in merriment, which, if sometimes a little strained, was never wholly unnatural. Excitement was a pleasant cure for gloomy thought, and it was to Felicia never hard to find. Every sort of society amused her, and those who saw her only in public would have pronounced her a being to whom melancholy was inconceivable. Her husband, however, could have told that Felicia was often sad. There were afternoons, too, when she was quite alone, when she would order the carriage and drive away by an unfrequented road to the dreary, lonely Station Cemetery, and weep passionate tears over a grave where years before she and her husband had come one morning together and left a precious little wasted form, and Felicia had felt that happiness was over for her, and that life could never be the same again. Nor was it, for there are some griefs which travel with us to our journey's end.

Charmed as Maud had been with her newly-found relation, she was conscious of the stiffness of a perfectly unaccustomed life, and thought wistfully of the pleasures of the voyage and even of her French and geography with Miss Goodenough. Felicia, with all her kindness, just a little alarmed her; she was so brilliant, so dignified, and quite unconsciously, so much of a fine lady. Vernon was buried in his books or away at office, and very seldom available for the purposes of conversation. The days, despite the excitement of novelty, dragged heavily, and Maud began to think that if every day was to be as long as these, and there were three hundred and sixty-five of them in the year, and fifty years, perhaps, in a lifetime, how terrific an affair existence was!

Before, however, she had been a week at Dustypore the ice began to melt. Felicia came in one morning from a long busy time with nurses, children, servants and housekeeping, established herself in an easy-chair, close to Maud, and was evidently bent upon a chat. Maud found herself presently, she knew not how, pouring out all her most sacred secrets, and giving her heart away in a most reckless fashion, to a companion whom, so far as time went, she still regarded as almost a stranger. Such a confession she had never made, even to Miss Goodenough, nor felt inclined to make it. Now, however, it seemed to come easily and as a matter of course. Felicia was sympathetic and greatly interested. Even the episode of the valentine was not forgotten.

'There,' Maud cried, with a slightly nervous dread of telling something either improper or ridiculous; 'that was my very last school-girl scrape. Was it very bad?'

'Very bad!' cried Felicia, with a laugh, the joyousness of which was entirely reassuring; 'it was that naughty boy who got you into trouble. Fortunately there are no galleries in our church here, and no boys, so there is nothing to fear.'

That evening Felicia was singing an old familiar favourite air, as she was fond of doing, half in the dark, and unconscious of a listener. Vernon was deep in his papers in the adjoining room. Maud, at the other end of the piano, where she had been turning over the leaves of some music, stood with her hand still resting on the page, gazing at the singer and wrapt in attention. Something, she knew not what, nor stopped to ask—the time, the place, the song or the tone of Felicia's voice—touched her as with a sudden gust of feeling. When the song was over Maud walked across, flung her arms round her companion and kissed her with a sort of rapture.

Felicia, looking up, surprised, saw that the other's eyes were full of tears.

'That is pretty, is it not?' she said, taking Maud's hand kindly in her own.

'Sing it once more,' Maud petitioned. And so, while Vernon, unconscious of the flow of sentiment so close about him, was still absorbed in the vicissitudes of Orissa, Felicia's performance was encored, and two sympathetic natures had found each other out and worked into unison.

Afterwards, when Maud had departed, Felicia, with characteristic impulsiveness, broke out into vehement panegyric:

'Come, George,' she said, 'don't be stupid, please, and uninterested; don't you think she is quite charming?'

'Felicia,' said her husband, 'you are for ever falling in love with some one or other, and now you have lost your heart to Maud. No, I don't think her charming; but I dare say a great many other people will. She will be the plague of our lives, you will see. I wish we had left her at Miss Goodenough's.'

'Of course everybody will fall in love with her,' cried Felicia, quite undaunted by her husband's gloomy forebodings; 'and I will tell you what, George—she will do delightfully for Jem.'

'Jem!' exclaimed her husband, with a tone of horror. 'Felicia, you are match-making already—and Jem too, poor fellow!'

Now, Jem Sutton was Vernon's oldest friend, and Felicia's kinsman, faithful servant and ally. Years before, the two men had boated and cricketed together at Eton, and spent pleasant weeks at each other's homes; and when they met in India, each seemed to waken up the other to a host of affectionate recollections about their golden youth. Sutton, in fact, was still a thorough schoolboy, and as delighted with finding his old chum as if he had just come back from the holidays. He had contrived to get as much marching, fighting, and adventuring into his ten years' service as a man could wish; had led several border forays with daring and success; had received several desperate wounds, of which a great scar across the forehead was the most conspicuous; had established a reputation as a rider and a swordsman, and had received from his Sovereign the brilliant distinction of the Victoria Cross, which, along with a great many other honourable badges, covered the wide expanse of his chest on state occasions.

Despite his fighting proclivities, Sutton had the softest possible pair of blue eyes, his hair was still as bright a brown as when he was a curly-headed boy at his mother's side; nor did the copious growth of his moustache quite conceal a smile that was sweetness and honesty itself. Felicia's two little girls regarded him as their especial property and made the tenderest avowals of devotion to him. Sutton treated them, as all their sex, with a kindness that was chivalrously polite, and which they were already women enough to appreciate.

Lastly, among other accomplishments, which rendered him especially welcome at the Vernons' house, he possessed a tuneful tenor voice, and sang Moore's Melodies with a pathos which was more than artistic. On the whole, it is easy to understand how natural it seemed to Felicia that two such charming people as Sutton and Maud should be destined by Heaven for each other, and that hers should be the hand to lead them to their happy fate.