Part 2 (1/2)

'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 s.e.x, 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.

CHAPTER V.

'SUTTON'S FLYERS.'

Consider this--he had been bred i' the wars Since he could draw a sword.

'Sutton's Flyers' were well known in the Sandy Tracts as the best irregular cavalry in that part of the country. Formed originally in the Mutiny, when spirits of an especial hardihood and enterprise gathered instinctively around congenial leaders, they had retained ever since the _prestige_ then acquired and a standard of chivalry which turned every man in the regiment into something of a hero. Many a stalwart lad, bred in the wild uplands of the Province, had felt his blood stirred within him at the fame of exploits which appealed directly to instincts on which the pacific British rule had for years put an unwelcome pressure.

Around the fire of many an evening meal, in many a gossiping bazaar, in many a group at village well or ferry, the fame of the 'Flyers' was recounted, and 'Sutton Sahib' became a household word by which military enthusiasm could be speedily kindled to a blaze. With the lightest possible equipage, wiry country-bred horses, and a profound disregard for all baggage arrangements, Sutton had effected some marches which earned him the credit of being supernaturally ubiquitous. Again and again had Mutineer detachments, revelling in fancied security, found that the dreaded hors.e.m.e.n, whom they fancied a hundred miles away and marching in an opposite direction, had heard of their whereabouts and were close upon their track. Then the suddenness of the attack, the known prowess of the leader, the half-superst.i.tious reverence which his followers paid him, invested the troop with a tradition of invincibility, and had secured them, on more than one occasion, a brilliant success against odds which less fervent temperaments than Sutton's might have felt it wrong to encounter, and which certainly made success seem almost a miracle. To his own men Sutton was hardly less than a G.o.d, and there were few of them on whom he could not safely depend to gallop with him to their doom.

More than one of his officers had saved his life in hand-to-hand fight by reckless exposure of their own; and his adjutant had dragged him, stunned, crushed and bleeding, from under a fallen horse, and carried him through a storm of bullets to a place of safety. All of them, on the other hand, had experienced on a hundred occasions the benefit of his imperturbable calmness, his inspiring confidence and unshaken will. Once Sutton had gratified their pride--and perhaps, too, his own--by a display of prowess which, if somewhat theatrical, was nevertheless extremely effective. A fight was on hand, and the regiment was just going into action, when a Mohammedan trooper, famed as a swordsman on all the country-side, had ridden out from the enemy's lines, bawled out a defiance of the English rule, couched in the filthiest and most opprobrious terms, and dared Sutton to come out and fight, and let him throw his carcase to the dogs. There are moments when instinct becomes our safest, and indeed our only, guide. Sutton, for once in his life, felt a gust of downright fury: he gave the order to halt and sheathe swords, took his challenger at his word, rode out in front of his force and had a fair hand-to-hand duel with the hostile champion. The confronted troops looked on in breathless anxiety, while the fate of either combatant depended on a turn of the sword, and each fought as knowing that one or other was to die. Sutton at last saw his opportunity for a stroke which won him the honours of the day. It cost him a sabre-cut across his forehead, which to some eyes might have marred his beauty for ever; but the foul-mouthed Mussulman lay dead on the field, smitten through the heart, and Sutton rode back among his shouting followers the acknowledged first swordsman of the day.

Such a man stood in no need of Felicia's panegyrics to seem very impressive in the eyes of a girl like Maud. Despite his gentleness of manner and the sort of domestic footing on which everybody at the Vernons', down to the baby, evidently placed him, she felt a little awed. She was inclined to be romantic; but it was rather alarming to have a large, living, incarnate romance sitting next her at luncheon, cutting slices of mutton, and asking her, with a curiosity that seemed necessarily condescending, about all the details of the voyage. There seemed something incongruous and painfully below the mark in having to tell him that they had acted 'Woodc.o.c.k's Little Game,' and had played 'Bon Jour, Philippe,' on board; and Maud, when the revelation became necessary, made it with a blush. After luncheon, however, Sutton and the little girls had a game of 'Post,' and Maud begun to console herself with the rea.s.suring conviction that, after all, he was but a man, and a very pleasant one.

After he had gone, Felicia, who was the most indiscreet of match-makers, began one of her extravagant eulogiums. 'Like him!' she cried, in reply to Maud's inquiry; 'like is not the word. He is the best, n.o.blest, bravest, and most chivalrous of beings.'

'Not the handsomest!' interrupted Maud, tempted by Felicia's enthusiasm into feeling perversely indifferent.

'Yes, and the handsomest too,' Felicia said; 'tall, strong, with beautiful features, and eyes as soft and tender as a woman's; indeed a great deal softer than most women's.'

'Then,' objected Maud, 'why has he never' ----

'Because,' answered her companion, indignantly antic.i.p.ating the objection, 'there is no one half-a-quarter good enough for him.'

'Well,' said the other, by this time quite in a rebellious mood, 'all I can say is, that I don't think him in the least good-looking. I don't like that great scar across his forehead.'

'Don't you?' cried Felicia; and then she told her how the scar had come there, and Maud could no longer pretend not to be interested.

The next day Sutton came with them for a drive, and Maud, who had by this time shaken off her fears, began to find him decidedly interesting.

There was something extremely romantic in having a soldier, whose reputation was already almost historical, the hero of a dozen brilliant episodes, coming tame about the house, only too happy to do her bidding or Felicia's, and apparently perfectly contented with their society.

Felicia was in the highest spirits, for she found her pet project shaping itself with pleasant facility into a fair prospect of realisation; and when Felicia was in high spirits they infected all about her.

Sutton, innocently unconscious of the cause of her satisfaction, but realising only that she wanted Maud amused and befriended, lent himself with a ready zeal to further her wishes and let no leisure afternoon go by without suggesting some new scheme of pleasure. Maud's quick, impulsive, highly-strung temperament, her moods of joyousness or depression, hardly less transient than the shadows that flit across the fields in April, her keen appreciation of beauty and pathos, made her, child as she was in most of her thoughts and ways, an interesting companion to him. Her eagerness in enjoyment was a luxury to see; and Sutton, a good observer, knew before long, almost better than herself, what things she most enjoyed. Instead of the reluctant and unsympathetic permission which her late instructress had accorded to her poetical tastes, Sutton and Felicia completely understood what she felt, treated her taste on each occasion with a flattering consideration, and led her continually to 'fresh woods and pastures new,' where vistas of loveliness, fairer far than any she had yet discovered, seemed to break upon her.