The Dilemma/Chapter XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Mustaphabad was reached at last, some time after the rainy season had set in. It was still very hot, but the country had now put on its green mantle again, and was no longer a wilderness; and it seemed to Yorke another good omen that on the very day of their marching in, the English mail arrived with another batch of honours; Kirke was promoted to a full colonel, and Yorke made a C.B. The regiment was met on arrival by the general — for Mustaphabad was now the headquarters of a division — no less a person than our old friend Tartar, now Sir Montague Tartar, K.C.B., who came out to meet it at the head of his staff as a compliment to this distinguished corps: and after a brief inspection, and some praise bestowed for the excellent appearance of both men and horses after the long march, the regiment proceeded to occupy the quarters allotted them, the native cavalry lines on the right flank of the station, the officers taking possession of such of the vacant bungalows as they had engaged beforehand, — comfortable houses enough, especially by contrast with tents, which had been lately rethatched and repaired, and, with their neat gardens, looked none the worse for the mutiny damages. Kirke alone of the officers had not been able to make up his mind about hiring a house beforehand, and took possession of a couple of rooms in the mess-house until he could choose one for himself.
During the first few days after their arrival, regimental business kept all the officers employed. Horses had to be cast, and men's furlough papers made out, and arms overhauled and replaced: but when this was all set in train, and Yorke thought he could be spared, he asked Kirke to forward his application for the usual sixty days' leave.
"I can't let you go just now, my dear fellow," said Kirke, "for I am just going to take privilege leave myself, and we can't both be absent together. But you shall have your leave as soon as ever I come back."
Yorke thought this a little selfish, as Kirke had had long leave the previous season, and he not a day; however, the latter was commanding officer and could please himself, so there was no more to be said about it. And Yorke set himself to getting as best he could through the sixty days which had to be passed till his turn should come. It was pleasant to find that the station had quite recovered its ordinary aspect, for the ravages of the mutineers and plunderers who followed in their train, although awful to witness, had but a limited scope to work upon. The Anglo-Indian bungalow consists of substantial walls supporting a thatched roof, which, if it could be easily burnt, could also be easily replaced; this done and the walls whitewashed, the house looks as good as new, while the rapid growth of Indian vegetation soon obliterates any damage done to Indian gardens by trampling over the shrubs. The little bungalow at the other end of the station in the lines formerly occupied by the 76th Native Infantry, which Spragge and he used to live in, looked just the same as ever; it was occupied again, and there, standing by the stable-door in the corner of the garden, as Yorke rode by on the evening of his arrival, was the new tenant smoking a cigar and superintending the littering-up of his horse, just as he used to do in the days of the gallant Devotion — evidently a subaltern as he had been, but who probably surveyed life like a veteran from the vantage-ground of one or two campaigns. The residency, too, which of course he rode out to see on his first spare evening, had been completely restored, and with a fresh coat of plaster on the walls was looking quite smart; while half a score of scarlet-clad messengers lounged about the portico, just as in the old pre-mutiny days. The new commissioner, a civilian, from another part of the country, being out for his evening drive, Yorke took the liberty of dismounting and walking over the grounds, recalling the different points rendered memorable in his mind by incidents of the siege. There, for example, was the bush behind which the fellow was crouching whom Egan shot, the first man he saw hit. Hard by, a stone with an inscription recorded that the body of Major Peart had been disinterred from underneath that spot, and removed to the cantonment cemetary. The bodies of the rebels, too, he learnt, had been exhumed from the well into which they were cast, and the interior filled up. He walked into the west veranda. The family of the new commissioner was in England, and the rooms on this side were unoccupied. Here was her room. How neat and trim she always looked when she stepped forth, even in those times! And here was the spot where was the old beer-chest on which he used to sit when on guard, and when she would come and sit down too sometimes of an evening, and Falkland would look in and join in a few minutes' chat. How sweet her gentle laugh was that evening when Spragge was hunting the scorpion! Only two years ago, and it seems like twenty. But ah! if the end of my pilgrimage should now be near at hand!
For the present, however, there was nothing for it but patience, and it happened that there was plenty of employment to occupy his time, in the task which now devolved on him of unravelling the regimental accounts. The financial economy of a native cavalry regiment, in which the men find their own horses, and a quasi-feudal system used to obtain, some of the wealthier sort bringing their own retainers at contract rates, is always more or less complicated, involving the need for the employment of a native banker, who forms a regular part of its establishment. The fact that the regiment had been raised in a hurry and been almost constantly on active service did not tend to make matters simpler, the men having scarcely ever had a regular issue of pay, but having been maintained from allowances made from time to time on account, which had still to be adjusted. Kirke, who had kept these affairs entirely in his own hands, was moreover not a good man of business, and Yorke found the regimental accounts in such confusion that he would fain have abstained from taking them up during his temporary command; but the discharges had to be made out of some disabled men, and to square their accounts involved going into those of the whole regiment. So he was obliged to apply himself to the troublesome task.
But business and day-dreams were both interrupted by the news he received one day. It was in a letter from Spragge, who, like himself, had been campaigning during the past season, leaving his young wife in the hills for her confinement, and had now rejoined her on leave soon after the birth of his child. "I found my dear little wife," said the writer, "making a good recovery, and baby nearly a month old. Both Kitty and I want you to be godfather to the youngster, who is to be called Arthur Yorke Christopher — her poor father was called Christopher, you know. I am sure you won't refuse us. It does seem so funny to be a papa, and to think that only two years ago I was merely a poor beggar of an ensign, without a rupee to bless myself with, and about as much idea of being able to marry as of being made governor-general. I tell Kitty she wouldn't have looked at me in those days. What a wonderful event this mutiny has been, to be sure! It has been the making of us all, hasn't it? They were jolly days too, though, when we were chumming together with the old 76th, weren't they? though I was so awfully hard up then. But the married state is the happy one, after all; I never could have supposed that any girl would have got to care for a rum-looking fellow like me — and Kitty is a wife beyond what words can express. You ought to follow my example, my dear fellow; why don't you come up and pay us a visit? There are no end of nice girls up here, and a swell like you might have his choice. By the way, your old flame is about to console herself immediately, as of course you have heard. The wedding is to take place to-morrow, I believe, but it has been kept very quiet, and no one is invited — I suppose because the lady lost her father such a short time ago. Kitty says she was sure your C.O. was very sweet on her — I don't mean Kitty, but the other — when he was up here last rains; but I always thought he was such a tremendous soldier, and woman-hater into the bargain, that matrimony was quite out of his line. However, my little wife is more knowing in these things than me."
As Yorke, stopping in his reading of the letter at this point, looked round the room, he felt that while nothing in it had changed, he had entered in these few moments on another world. There on the table lay the shabby books of regimental accounts, the floor was littered with Hindustani vouchers and figured statements, squatting by which sat the patient moonshee, figured abstract in hand, waiting the sahib's pleasure to proceed with the addition; the punkah flapped to and fro lazily overhead; outside the door a couple of orderlies were chatting in undertones, discussing probably, as usual, the price of wheat in the bazaar. Everything about him denoted the same monotonous workaday world as it had been a few moments before, but a world from which all hope and pleasure had fled — a world now inexpressibly flat and dreary for the future. Summoning up courage, however, he called to the moonshee to proceed with the reading of his vernacular abstract, while he checked off the corresponding English account before him, keeping his attention to it and yet wondering at his own calmness. "Is it that I have really no heart," he asked himself the while, "that I am about to do these things?" But no; the crushed feeling and the utter desolation that possessed him gave up a plain answer on this point. For an hour he continued the plodding occupation in hand before dismissing the moonshee, and then, pacing up and down the room, could think over the announcement in the bitterness of his heart. Once he stopped and took up the letter from the table to see if any doubt could be gleaned from it; but the facts were too plain to admit of consolation on this score. This was not mere station gossip; besides, it was only too plainly corroborated by what had gone before. Olivia's silence, Kirke's sarcastic, triumphant manner, were now plainly accounted for. "People call me the lucky major," he said bitterly; "and I am the object of envy to half the youngsters in the country — what a satire is this on the falseness of appearances! no whipped cuckold could feel meaner than I do now." Then the thought came up whether he was not paying the penalty for his modesty. Could it be that Olivia had accepted her cousin out of pique because he had not declared himself? This foolish idea, however, was soon dismissed; though the young man said to himself, with a sort of savage joy, that after all the real Olivia was something less noble than the image he had carried so long in his heart. "I kept back my tale of love because I thought it would offend her gentle breast to hear it while mourning for her husband; and lo! all the while she was already consoling herself with another. Nor is it my Olivia who would be satisfied with the love of such a man as Kirke so hard, narrow, and selfish." Here his better judgment told him that he was talking nonsense; it was no wonder a woman and a cousin should fall in love with so splendid a soldier. "By heaven, if he is unkind to her, I will kill him!" But no; Yorke's conscience told him that this would not happen. He was hard and cruel, but not to his own kind.
"Well," he said at last, "what does it matter? My idol is shattered; but I was a fool to carry about so unsubstantial a thing. I have my profession, and I suppose, like everybody else, I shall get over the disappointment. At any rate, there is no need to pose in the character of the jilted lover. No one knows what a fool I have been; even Spragge thinks my old flame, as he calls it, was burnt out long ago; and no one shall now discover my secret."
Nevertheless he felt that he could not have faced the regimental mess-dinner that evening, where the approaching marriage of the commanding officer would certainly be the engrossing topic, and was glad that he had an engagement to dine out with his old friend General Tartar, at whose house he found himself taking an unconcerned share in the conversation, and a steady hand at whist afterwards.
Only one allusion was made to the approaching event, when his host, next to whom Yorke sat, said to him, "So our pretty widow is about to console herself. Well, I shouldn't have thought Kirke was a marrying man; but if he was to commit himself in this way at all, he couldn't have done better." Tartar was a confirmed old bachelor himself, who married, a few years afterwards, a widow with a large family.
Yorke replied, in an unconcerned voice, that he supposed Mrs. Falkland would be well off, as she had her first husband's property as well as her father's.
"Falkland didn't leave a penny — he was notoriously liberal to prodigality — but her father must have saved something; although you mustn't suppose," continued Sir Montague, who had the reputation of being very fond of money, and to be serving in India because it was such a favourable field for profitable investments, "that a man living by himself in India cant spend his income easily enough. Well, Kirke will find the money useful; he won't have a rupee more than he has need for."
This was an allusion to the fact that Kirke was supposed to be heavily in debt; but Yorke did not care to discuss the private affairs of his commanding officer with a third party, and the conversation dropped.