The Red Year Part 25

And that was all that Winifred would say about "Mr. Malcolm," who would have been the most miserable and the most astonished person in India that night had he known how bitter was the girl's heart against him.

Though Winifred was not to blame, for the necklace and the pa.s.s offered strong evidence of double-dealing on her lover's part, her unjust suspicions were doomed to receive a severe shock.

In the morning she heard that Captain Fulton wished to see her. She left her quarters by a covered way and waited outside the Begum Kotee until a soldier found Fulton.

He came, bringing with him a native.

"This is the man who arrived from Cawnpore last night, Miss Mayne," he said. "He has a letter for you, but he refuses to deliver it to any one but yourself. I fancy," added the gallant engineer officer with a smile, "that the sender impressed on him the importance of its reaching the right hands."

Winifred caught a glimpse of Frank's handwriting. Her face grew scarlet.

For one delightful instant she forgot the harsh thoughts she had harbored against him. Then the scourge of memory tortured her. Fulton's kindly a.s.sumption that Malcolm was her fiance must be dispelled and she bit her lower lip in vexation at the tell-tale rush of color that had mantled her cheeks when Ungud discharged his trust and gave her the letter.

"It is from Captain Malcolm," she said coldly. "I suppose he wishes his personal belongings to be safeguarded. I am surprised he did not write to my uncle rather than to me."

Fulton was surprised, but he laughed lightly.

"Every one to his taste," he said; "but from what little I have seen of Malcolm I should wager that nine out of ten letters addressed to the Mayne family would be intended for you, Miss Winifred. By the way, a word in your ear. General Inglis hopes to persuade our friend here to try his luck on a return journey to-night. Perhaps you may have a note to send on your own account. No one else must know. This is a special favor, conferred because Malcolm himself procured Ungud's services, but we cannot ask the man to act as general postman. Good-by."

He hurried away. Winifred, after the manner of woman, fingered the unopened letter.

"Kuch joab hai, miss-sahib?" asked Ungud.

"There is no answer--yet. I will give you one later."

The girl's Hindustani went far enough to enable her to frame the reply intelligibly. Ungud salaamed and left her, probably contrasting in his own mind the lady's frigidity with the fervid instructions given him by the officer-sahib.

Then Winifred went to her own room and opened her letter, and her woman's heart gleaned the truth from its candor. Of course she cried.

What girl wouldn't? But she smiled through her tears and read the nice bits over and over again. Not for twenty necklaces and a whole file of hieroglyphic pa.s.ses would she doubt Frank any more.

The reference to Chumru puzzled her and that was a gratifying thing in itself, for if Frank could be mistaken about her share in Chumru's departure from Lucknow, why should not she be wrong in her interpretation of the mysterious presence of the necklace?

When her uncle came she wept again, being hysterical with the sheer joy of watching his face while he perused Frank's note.

A man's bewilderment finds different expression to a woman's. A man trusts his brain, a woman her heart.

"If there is one thing absolutely clear in this letter it is that Frank knows nothing whatever about the pearls you produced from his turban,"

said Mr. Mayne, with the frown of a judge who is dealing with a knotty point in equity.

"There are--several things--quite clear in it--to me," fluttered Winifred.

"Ah, hum, yes. But I mean that it is ridiculous to suppose he would knowingly leave such a valuable article exposed to the chances and changes of barrack-room life in a siege. Whatever motive he may have had in concealing the necklace earlier he would surely have said something about it now, given some hint as to its value, asked you to take care of his baggage, or something of the sort."

"In my heart of hearts I always felt that we were misjudging Frank,"

said she.

Mayne's eyebrows lifted a trifle, but he pa.s.sed no comment.

"By the way," he said, "where is the necklace?"

"Here," she said, pulling a box out of a cupboard. The string of pearls was coiled up in the midst of the roll of soiled muslin and the badge was pinned to one of the folds.

"That is a very unsafe place," said Mayne. "If I were you I would wear it beneath your bodice."

"Would you really?"

"Yes. I can think of no other explanation of the mystery now than that Frank meant to surprise you with it. You may be sure he obtained it honorably, so you will only be meeting his wishes by wearing it. At any rate it will be safer in your possession than in that cupboard."

"Perhaps you are right," said she. And while she clasped the diamond-studded brooch in front of her white throat she glanced round the room for a mirror.

Her uncle smiled. He was glad that this little cloud had lifted off Winifred's sky. The sufferings and positive dangers of the siege were bad enough already without being added to by a private grief.

He stooped to pick up the turban and his eye fell on the regimental device of the metal badge.

"This is not an officer's head-dress," he cried. "And Malcolm belongs to the 3d Cavalry, whereas this badge was worn by a trooper in the 2d."

Winifred, who was turning her neck and shoulders this way and that to get different angles of light, stopped admiring herself and ran to his side.

"That is the turban Frank wore during our ride from Cawnpore," she whispered breathlessly.

"It may be. But don't you remember that he was bareheaded when we met him in Nana Sahib's garden? I was knocked almost insensible during the fight for the boat so I am not sure what happened during the next few minutes. Nevertheless, I can recall that prior fact beyond cavil. If it were not for the safe-conduct you found at the same time as the pearls, I would incline strongly to the belief that Frank obtained this turban by accident, and is wholly ignorant of its extraordinary contents."

"I must write at once and tell him how sorry I am that I misjudged him."

"You dear little goose," cried her uncle amusedly, "Frank will begin to wonder then what the judging was about. No. Wait until you meet. Write, by all means, but leave problems for settlement during your first tete-a-tete."

So Ungud carried in his turban a loving and sympathetic note, which Winifred, with no small pride, addressed to "Major Frank Malcolm, Headquarters Staff, British Field Force, Cawnpore," and she said inside, among other things, that she hoped this would prove to be the first letter he received with the inscription of his new rank.

Ungud also took confidential details from the Brigadier for Havelock's information, and in three days, being as supple as an eel and cautious as a leopard, he was back again with a reply from the general to the effect that the relieving force would arrive in less than a week.

He brought another missive from Frank, cheery and optimistic in tone and still blithely oblivious of the existence of such baubles as hundred-thousand-dollar necklaces.

And that was all the news that either the garrison or Winifred received for more than a month, when the intrepid Ungud again entered the lines to bring Havelock's ominous advice: "Do not negotiate, but rather perish sword in hand."

This time there was no letter from Frank, and the alarmed, half-despairing girl could only learn that the major-sahib was not with the column, which had been compelled to fall back on Cawnpore after some heavy fighting in Oudh. Ungud did not think he was dead; but who could tell? There were so many sahibs who fell, for out of his twelve hundred Havelock had lost nearly half, and was now eating his heart out in a weary wait for re-enforcements that were toiling up the thousand miles of road and river from Calcutta.

So the blackness of disappointed hope fell on the Residency and its inmates. Those few natives who had hitherto proved faithful began to desert in scores. About a third of the European soldiers were dead.

Smallpox and cholera added their ravages to the enemy's unceasing fire and occasional fierce a.s.saults. Famine and tainted water, and lack of hospital stores, and every evil device of malign fate that persecutes people in such straits, were there to hara.s.s the unhappy defenders.

Officers and men swore that they would shoot their women-folk with their own hands rather than permit them to fall into the rebels' clutches, and, at times, when the siege slackened a little in its continuous cannonade, the devoted community gave way to lethargy and despondency.

But let the enemy muster for an attack, these veteran soldiers faced them with the dogged steadfastness that made them G.o.ds among the Asiatic sc.u.m. The Brigadier, too, never allowed his splendid spirit to flag.

Though for three months he had not slept without being fully dressed, though he worked harder than any other man in the garrison, he was the life and soul of every outpost that he visited during the day or night.

Captain Fulton was another human dynamo in their midst. Finding plenty of miners among the Cornishmen of the 32d, he sunk a countermine for each mine burrowed by the enemy. His favorite amus.e.m.e.nt was to sit alone for hours in a shaft, wait patiently until the rebels bored a way up to him, and then shoot the foremost workers.

And in such fas.h.i.+on the siege went on, with houses collapsing, because they were so riddled with cannon-b.a.l.l.s that the walls gave way, and ever-nearing sapping of the fortifications, and intolerable breaks in the monsoon, when the heat became so overpowering that even the natives yielded to the strain--and the days pa.s.sed, and the weeks, and the months, until, on September 16, Ungud, tempted by a bribe of five thousand rupees, crept away for the last time with despatches for Havelock.