On the Face of the Waters Part 26

A drowsy lump of a girl stirred, yawned, and answered sullenly, "Yea!

Yea! she is of us. She claims our right to kiss no cowards--no cowards."

The voice tailed off into sleep again, and Nargeeza lay back with a smile of content to wait also. So, after a time, folk began to stir in the bungalows. First in the rest-house, where, oddly enough, Jim Douglas occupied one end of the long low barrack of a place, and Herbert Erlton the other. The former having come back from the city in an evil temper to get something to eat before starting for Delhi, had found his horse, the Belooch, unaccountably indisposed; Jhungi, who had brought her there safely, professing entire ignorance of the cause, or, on pressure, suggesting the nefarious Bhungi. Tiddu a.s.serting--with a calm a.s.sumption of superior knowledge, for which Jim Douglas could have kicked him--that the mare had been drugged. As if anybody could not tell that? And that the drug had been opium. To which the old scoundrel had replied affably that in that case the effects would pa.s.s off during the night, and the mare be none the worse; no one be any the worse, since the Huzoor was quite comfortable in Meerut, and could _easily stay another day_. It was a nicer place than Delhi; there were more sahibs in it, and the presence of the "_ghora logue_" (_i. e_., English soldiers) kept everyone virtuous.

His hearer looked at him sharply. Here was some other trick, no doubt, to cozen him out of another five rupees; for something, maybe, as useless as the yellow fakir. And there was really no reason for delay; it was only a case of walking the mare quietly. For the matter of that, the exercise would do her good, and help her to work off the effects of the drug. So he would start sooner, that was all.

Nevertheless he gave an envious look at the Major's little Arab in the next stall. It would most likely be marching back to Delhi that night, and he would have given something to ride it again. But as he was returning from the stables, he learned by chance that the Major's plans had been altered. An orderly was coming from his room with letters and a telegram, and knowing the man, Jim Douglas asked him to take one for him also, and so save trouble. It did not take long to write, for it only contained one word, "No." It was in reply to one he had received a few hours before from the military magnate, asking him to do some more work. And as the orderly stowed away the accompanying rupee carefully, Jim Douglas--waiting to make over the paper--saw quite involuntarily that the Major's telegram also consisted of one word, "Come." And he saw the name also; big, black, bold, in the Major's handwriting. "Gissing, Delhi."

He gave a shrug of his shoulders as he turned away to get ready for his start. So that was it; and even Kate Erlton had not benefited by his sacrifice. No one had benefited. There had been no chance for any of them. "Come!" That ended Kate Erlton's hope of concealment, the Major's career. "No!" That ended his own vague ambitions. Still, it was a strange chance in itself that those two laconic renunciations should go the same day by the same hand. No stranger telegrams, he thought, could have left Meerut, or were likely to leave it that night.

He was wrong, however. An hour or two later, the strangest telegram that ever came as sole warning to an Empire that its very foundation was attacked, left Meerut for Agra; sent by the postmaster's niece.

"The Cavalry," it ran, "have risen, setting fire to their own houses besides having killed and wounded all European officers and soldiers they could find near the lines. If Aunt intends starting to-morrow, please detain her, as the van has been prevented from leaving the station."

For, as Jim Douglas paced slowly down the Mall toward Delhi, and Soma, his buckles gleaming, his belts pipe-clayed to dazzling whiteness, was swaggering through the bazaar on his way to the rest-house with his word of warning--the word which would have given Jim Douglas the power for which he had longed--another word was being spoken in that lane of l.u.s.t, where the time had come for which Nargeeza had waited all day.

But _she_ did not say it. It was only a big trollop of a girl hung with jasmine garlands, painted, giggling.

"We of the bazaar kiss no cowards," she said derisively. "Where are your comrades?"

The man to whom she said it, a young dissolute-faced trooper, dressed in the loose rakish muslins beloved of his cla.s.s--the very man, perchance, who had gone cityward that morning, and dropped an alms into the yellow fakir's bowl--stood for a second in the stifling, maddening atmosphere of musk and rose and orange-blossom; stood before all those insolent allurements, balked in his pa.s.sion, checked in his desires. Then, with an oath, he dashed from her insulting charms; dashed into the street with a cry:

"To horse! To horse, brothers! To the jail! to our comrades!"

The word had been spoken. The speech which brings more than speech, had come from the painted lips of a harlot.

The first clang of the church bell--which the chaplain had forgotten to postpone--came faintly audible across the dusty plain, making other men pause and look at each other. Why not? It was the hour of prayer--the appointed time. Their comrades could be easily rescued--there was but a native guard at the jail. And hark! from another pair of painted derisive lips came the same retort, flung from a balcony.

"_Trra! We of the bazaar kiss no cowards!_"

"To horse! To horse! Let the comrades be rescued first; and then----"

The word had been spoken. Nothing so very soul-stirring after all. No consideration of caste or religion, patriotism or ambition. Only a taunt from a pair of painted lips.

BOOK III.

FROM DUSK TO DAWN.

CHAPTER I.

NIGHT.

"To the rescue! To the rescue!"

The cry was no more than that at first. To the rescue of the eighty-five martyrs, the blows upon whose shackles still seemed to echo in their comrades' ears. Even so, the cry heard by Soma as he pa.s.sed through the bazaar meant insubordination--the greatest crime he knew--and sent him flying to his own lines to give the alarm. Sent him thence by instinct, oblivious of that promise for the 31st--or perhaps mindful of it and seeing in this outburst a mere riot--to his Colonel's house with twenty or thirty comrades clamoring for their arms, protesting that with them they would soon settle matters for the Huzoors. But suspicion was in the air, and even the Colonel of the 11th could not trust all his regiment. Ready for church, he flung himself on his horse and raced back with the clamoring men to the lines.

And by this time there was another race going on. Captain Craigie's faithful troop of the 3d Cavalry were racing after his shout of "_Dau-ro! bhai-yan, Dau-ro!_" (Ride, brothers, ride!) toward the jail in the hopes of averting the rescue of their comrades. For, as the records are careful to say, he and his troop "were dressed as for parade"--not a buckle or a belt awry--ready to combat the danger before others had grasped it, and swiftly, without a thought, went for the first offenders. Too late! the doors were open, the birds flown.

What next was to be done? What but to bring the troop back without a defaulter--despite the taunts of escaping convicts, the temptations of comrades flushed by success--to the parade ground for orders. But there was no one to give them, for when the 3d Cavalry led the van of mutiny at Meerut their Colonel was in the European cantonment as field officer of the week, and there he "conceived it his duty to remain."

Perhaps rightly. And it is also conceivable that his absence made no difference, since it is, palpably, an easier task to make a regiment mutiny than to bring it back to its allegiance.

Meanwhile the officers of the other regiments, the 11th and the 20th, were facing their men boldly; facing the problem how to keep them steady till that squadron of the Carabineers should sweep down, followed by a company or two of the Rifles at the double, and turn the balance in favor of loyalty. It could not be long now. Nearly an hour had pa.s.sed since the first wild stampede to the jail. The refuse and rabble of the town were by this time swarming out of it, armed with sticks and staves; the two thousand and odd felons released from the jails were swarming in, seeking weapons. The danger grew every second, and the officers of the 11th, though their men stood steady as rocks behind them, counted the moments as they sped. For on the other side of the road, on the parade ground of the 20th regiment, the sepoys, ordered, as the 11th had been, to turn out unarmed, were barely restrained from rus.h.i.+ng the bells by the entreaties of their native officers; the European ones being powerless.

"Keep the men steady for me," said Colonel Finnis to his second in command; "I'll go over and see what I can do."

He thought the voice of a man loved and trusted by one regiment, a man who could speak to his sepoys without an interpreter, might have power to steady another.

_Jai bahaduri!_ (Victory to courage!) muttered Soma under his breath as he watched his Colonel canter quietly into danger. And his finger hungered on that hot May evening for the cool of the trigger which was denied him.

_Jai bahaduri!_ A murmur seemed to run through the ranks, they dressed themselves firmer, squarer. Colonel Finnis, glancing back, saw a sight to gladden any commandant's heart. A regiment steady as a rock, drawn up as for parade, absolutely in hand despite that strange new sound in the air. The sound which above all others gets into men's brains like new wine. The sound of a file upon fetters--the sound of escape, of freedom, of license! It had been rising unchecked for half an hour from the lines of the 3d, whither the martyrs had been brought in triumph. It was rising now from the bazaar, the city, from every quiet corner where a prisoner might pause to hack and hammer at his leg-irons with the first tool he could find.

What was one man's voice against this sound, strengthened as it was by the cry of a trooper galloping madly from the north shouting that the English were in sight? What more likely? Had not ample time pa.s.sed for the whole British garrison to be coming with fixed bayonets and a whoop, to make short work of unarmed men who had not made up their minds?

That must be no longer!

"Quick! brothers. Quick! Kill! Kill! Down with the officers! Shoot ere the white faces come!"

It was a sudden wild yell of terror, of courage, of sheer cruelty. It drowned the scream of the Colonel's horse as it staggered under him.

It drowned his steady appealing voice, his faint sob, as he threw up his hands at the next shot, and fell, the first victim to the Great Revolt.

It drowned something else also. It drowned Soma's groan of wild, half-stupefied, helpless rage as he saw his Colonel fall,--the sahib who had led him to victory,--the sahib whom he loved, whom he was pledged to save. And his groan was echoed by many another brave man in those ranks, thus brought face to face suddenly with the necessity for decision.

"Steady, men, steady!"

That call, in the alien voice, echoed above the whistling of the bullets as they found a billet here and there among the ranks; for the men of the 20th, maddened by that fresh murder, now shot wildly at their officers.

"Steady, men! Steady, for G.o.d's sake!"

The entreaty was not in vain; they were steady still. Ay, steady, but unarmed! Steady as a rock still, but helpless!

Helpless, unarmed! By all the G.o.ds all men wors.h.i.+ped, men could not suffer that for long, when bullets were whistling into their ranks.

So there was a waver at last in the long line. A faint tremble, like the tremble of a curving wave ere it falls. Then, with a confused roar, an aimless sweeping away of all things in its path, it broke as a wave breaks upon a pebbly sh.o.r.e.

"To arms, brothers! Quick! fire! fire!"

Upon whom?[2] G.o.d knows! Not on their officers, for these were already being hustled to the rear, hustled into safety.

"Quick, brothers, quick! Kill! Kill!"

The cry rose on all sides now, as the wave of revolt surged on. But there was none left to kill; for the work was done in the 20th lines, and no new white faces came to stem the tide. Two thousand and odd Englishmen who might have stemmed it being still on the parade-ground by the church, waiting for orders, for ammunition, for a General, for everything save--thank Heaven!--for courage.