On the Face of the Waters Part 52

And swift as an echo a young voice beside him came jibingly:

"It's me, Pandy! Take that."

It's me! Just so; me with a vengeance. For the right attack and the left were both well up. There was a short, sharp volley; then the welcome familiar order. A cheer, a clatter, a rush and clas.h.i.+ng with the bayonets. It seemed but half a minute before Jim Douglas found himself among the guns slas.h.i.+ng at a dazed artilleryman who had a port-fire in his hand. So the artillery on either side never had a chance, and Major Erlton, riding up with the 9th Lancers as the central attack, found that bit of the fighting over. The picket was taken, the mutineers had fled cityward leaving four guns behind them.

And against one of these, as the Major rode close to gloat over it, leaned a man whom he recognized at once.

"My G.o.d! Douglas," he said, "where--where's Kate?--where's my wife?"

It was rather an abrupt transition of thought, and Jim Douglas, who was feeling rather queer from something, he scarcely knew what, looked up at the speaker doubtfully.

"Oh, it is you, Major Erlton," he said slowly. "I thought--I mean I hoped she was here--if she isn't--why, I suppose I'd better go back."

He took his arm off the gun and half-stumbled forward, when Major Erlton flung himself from his horse and laid hold of him.

"You're hit, man--the blood's pouring from your sleeve. Here, off with your coat, sharp!"

"I can't think why it bleeds so?" said Jim Douglas feebly, looking down at a clean cut at the inside of the elbow from which the blood was literally spouting. "It is nothing--nothing at all."

The Major gave a short laugh. "Take the go out of you a bit, though.

I'll get a tourniquet on sharp, and send you up in a dhooli."

"What an unlucky devil I am!" muttered Jim Douglas to himself, and the Major did not deny it: he was in a hurry to be off again with the party told to clear the Koodsia Gardens. Which they did successfully before sunrise, when the expedition returned to camp cheering like demons and dragging in the captured guns, on which some of the wounded men sat triumphantly. It was their first real success since Budli-ke-serai, two months before; and they were in wild spirits.

Even the Doctor, fresh from shaking his head over many a form lifted helplessly from the dhoolis, was jubilant as he sorted Jim Douglas'

arm.

"Keep you here ten days or so I should say. There's always a chance of its breaking out again till the wound is quite healed. Never mind! You can go into Delhi with the rest of us, before then."

"Yoicks forward!" cried a wounded lad in the cot close by. The Doctor turned sharply.

"If you don't keep quiet, Jones, I'll send you back to Meerut. And you too, Maloney. I've told you to lie still a dozen times."

"Sure, Docther dear, ye couldn't be so cruel," said a big Irishman sitting at the foot of his bed so as to get nearer to a new arrival who was telling the tale of the fight. "And me able-bodied and spoiling to be at me wurrk this three days."

"It's a curious fact," remarked the Doctor to Jim Douglas as he finished bandaging him, "the hospital has been twice as insubordinate since Nicholson came in. The men seem to think we are to a.s.sault Delhi tomorrow. But we can't till the siege train comes, of course. So you may be in at the death!"

Jim Douglas felt glad and sorry in a breath.

Finally he told himself he could let decision stand over for a day or two. He must see Hodson first, and find out if the letter he had had from his spies about an Englishwoman, concealed in Delhi, referred to Kate Erlton.

CHAPTER II.

BITS, BRIDLES, SPURS.

The letter, however, did not refer to Kate; though, curiously enough, the Englishwoman it concerned had been, and still was concealed in an Afghan's house. Kate, then, had not been the only Englishwoman in Delhi. There was a certain consolation in the thought, since what was being done for one person by kindly natives might very well be done for another. Besides, removed as he was now from the fret and strain of actual search, Jim Douglas admitted frankly to Major Hodson that he was right in saying that Mrs. Erlton must either have come to an end of her troubles altogether, or have found friends better able, perhaps, than he to protect her.

Regarding the first possibility also Major Hodson was skeptical. He had hundreds of spies in the city. Such a piece of good luck as the discovery of a Christian must have been noised abroad. They had not mentioned it; he did not, therefore, believe it had occurred. He would, however, inquire, and till the answer came it would be foolish to go back to the city. Jim Douglas admitted this also; but as the days pa.s.sed, the desire to return increased; especially when Major Erlton came to see him, which he did with dutiful regularity. Jim Douglas could not help admiring him when he stood, stiff and square, thanking him as Englishmen thank their fellows for what they know to be beyond thanks.

"I am sure no one could have done more, and I know I couldn't have done a quarter so much; and I'm grateful," he said awkwardly. Then with the best intentions, born from a real pity for the haggard man who sat on the edge of his cot looking as men do after a struggle of weeks with malarial fever, he added, "And the luck has been a bit against you all the time, hasn't it?"

"As yet, perhaps," replied Jim Douglas, feeling inclined then and there to start cityward, "but the game isn't over. When I go back----"

"Hodson says you could do no good," continued the big man, still with the best intentions.

"I don't agree with him," retorted the other sharply.

"Perhaps not--but--but I wouldn't, if I were you. Or--rather--_I_ should of course--only--you see it is different for me. She----" Major Erlton paused, finding it difficult to explain himself. The memory of that last letter he had written to Kate was always with him, making him feel she was not, in a way, his wife. He had never regretted it.

He had scarcely thought what would happen if she came back from the dead, as it were, to answer it; for he hated thought. Even now the complexity of his emotions irritated him, and he broke through them almost brutally. "She was my wife, you see. But you had nothing to do with it; so you had better leave it alone. You've done enough already.

And as I said before, I'm grateful."

So he had stalked away, leaving his hearer frowning. It was true. The luck had been against him. But what right had it to be so? Above all, what right had that big brutal fellow to say so? There he was going off to win more distinction, no doubt. He would end by getting the Victoria Cross, and confound him! from what people said of him, he would well deserve it.

While he? Even these two days had brought his failure home to him. And yet he told himself, that if he had failed to save one Englishwoman, others had failed to save hundreds. Fresh as he was to the facts, they seemed to him almost incredible. As he wandered round the Ridge inspecting that rear-guard of graves, or sat talking to some of the thousand-and-odd sick and wounded in hospital, listening to endless tales of courage, pluck, sheer dogged resistance, he realized at what a terrible cost that armed force, varying from three to six thousand men, had simply clung to the rocks and looked at the city. There seemed enough heroism in it to have removed mountains; and coming upon him, not in the monotonous sequence of day-to-day experience, but in a single impression, the futility of it left him appalled. So did the news of the world beyond Delhi, heard, reliably, for the first time.

Briefly, England was everywhere on her defense. It seemed to him as if from that mad dream of conquest within the city he had pa.s.sed to as strange a dream of defeat. And why? The fire, unchecked at first, had blazed up with fresh fuel in place after place and left?--Nothing. Not a single attempt to wrest the government of the country from us; not even an organized resistance, when once the order to advance had been given. Had there been some mysterious influence abroad making men blind to the truth?

It was about to pa.s.s away if there had been, he felt, when on the 14th, he watched John Nicholson re-enter the Ridge at the head of his column. And many others felt the same, without in any way disparaging those who for long months of defense had borne the burden and heat of the day. They simply saw that Fate had sent a new factor into the problem, that the old order was changing. The defense was to be attack.

And why not, with that reinforcement of fine fighting men? Played in by the band of the 8th, amid cheering and counter-cheering, which almost drowned the music, it seemed fit--as the joke ran--if not to face h.e.l.l itself, at any rate to take _Pandymonium_. The 52d Regiment looked like the mastiff to which its leader had likened it. The 2d Sikhs were admittedly the biggest fellows ever seen. The wild Mooltanee Horse sat their lean Beloochees with the loose security of seat which tells of men born to the saddle.

Jim Douglas noted these things like his fellows; but what sent that thrill of confidence through him was the look on many a face, as at some pause or turn it caught a glimpse of the General's figure. It was that heroic figure itself, seen for the first time, riding ahead of all with no unconsciousness of the attention it attracted! but with a self-reliant acceptance of the fact--as far from modesty as it was from vanity--that here rode John Nicholson ready to do what John Nicholson could do. But in the pale face, made paler by the darkness of the beard, there was more than this. There was an almost languid patience as if the owner knew that the men around him said of him, "If ever there is a desperate deed to do in India, John Nicholson is the man to do it," and was biding his time to fulfill their hopes.

The look haunted Jim Douglas all day, stimulating him strangely. Here was a man, he felt, who was in the grip of Fate, but who gave back the grip so firmly that his Fate could not escape him. Gave it back frankly, freely, as one man might grip another's hand in friends.h.i.+p.

And then he smiled, thinking that John Nicholson's hand-clasp would go a long way in giving anyone a help over a hard stile. If he had had a lead-over like that after the smash came; if even now---- Idle thoughts, he told himself; and all because the picturesqueness of a man's outward appearance had taken his fancy, his imagination. For all he knew, or was ever likely to know----

He had been sitting idly on the edge of his cot in the tiny tent Major Erlton had lent him, having in truth nothing better to do, and now a voice from the blaze and blare of the heat and light outside startled him.

"May I come in--John Nicholson?"

He almost stammered in his surprise; but without waiting for more than a word the General walked in, alone. He was still in full uniform; and surely no man could become it more, thought Jim Douglas involuntarily.

"I have heard your story, Mr. Douglas," he began in a sonorous but very pleasant voice. "It is a curious one. And I was curious to see you. You must know so much." He paused, fixed his eyes in a perfectly unembara.s.sed stare on his host's face, then said suddenly, with a sort of old-fas.h.i.+oned courtesy: "Sit you down again, please; there isn't a chair, I see; but the cot will stand two of us. If it doesn't it will be clearly my fault." He smiled kindly. "Wounded too--I didn't know that."

"A scratch, sir," put in his hearer hastily, fighting shy even of that commiseration. "I had a little fever in the city; that is all."

The bright hazel eyes, with a hint of sunlight in them, took rather an absent look. "I should like to have done it myself. I've tried that sort of thing; but they always find me out."

"I fancy you must be rather difficult to disguise," began Jim Douglas with a smile, when John Nicholson plunged straight into the heart of things.

"You must know a lot I want to know. Of course I've seen Hodson and his letters; but this is different. First: Will the city fight?"

"As well as it knows how, and it knows better than it did."

"So I fancied. Hodson said not. By the way, he told me that you declared his Intelligence Department was simply perfect. And his accounts--I mean his information--wonderfully accurate."