A LETTER FROM ENGLAND
Leaving Grace to come to herself in the hands of her friends, we will follow the young rajah to his rooms, where several people were waiting to have audience of him. He despatched the business which they brought to him with his usual clear-sightedness and rapidity, received the congratulations of the Resident, who had come up to see him, and of the two young officers whom he had so happily rescued, appointed a session for the following day, in open court, to try the cases, and read the petitions which had been accumulating during his absence, promised to attend later a supper which the Resident had prepared in his honour, and then, being left at last to the ministrations of Hoosanee and Ganesh, he turned to the letters and papers heaped high upon his table. Before turning them over he stopped to think. Up to this he had been too busy to reflect. All day long, ever since he touched the boundaries of the State, a vague sense of wonder had been present in his mind. He was trying now to puzzle it out. When, two months ago, he left Gumilcund secretly, when he camped out in the forest waiting for news from Dost Ali Khan, he had felt like an escaped prisoner. Now, having fulfilled his mission, and returned to the bondage which he had remembered as so galling, he found, to his surprise, that it was bondage no longer. He had left Gumilcund as a prison; he returned to it as a home. And it was not that he had lost his love for England. On the contrary, he had never loved England more: he had never felt prouder of his connection with her. Some day, if his life was spared, he hoped to revisit his early home, and to see his mother and the friends of his youth. But he belonged to India, not to England. A few weeks ago, it would have given him keen pain to say this even to himself. It would have been a renunciation such as he could scarcely have had strength to face. Now he did not find that any effort was needed. The wonder to him was that he had not recognised it before.
Hoosanee and Ganesh were chattering busily, as they made preparations for his toilet and his tea. Their voices came to him like the distant buzzing of bees; but the sounds warned him that he must not give much more time to thought. He was turning over the papers mechanically. They were spread out on a beautiful table of marble inlaid with precious stones. Above it swung a gold lamp of delicate workmanship. He wondered a little at the familiarity of these things, at the sense of coming back to his own—he who had only enjoyed them for so short a time! The papers did not seem to be of the first importance. There were belated news-sheets—circulars—petitions; answers sent to inquiries of his own by Indian civil and military officers, some of which he put by for more careful perusal on the following day, and two or three letters from private friends. He was about to turn away from his hasty inspection, and to give himself over into the hands of Hoosanee, when at the very bottom of the pile, a bulky letter, different in appearance from any of the others, drew his notice. As he took it up his heart began to beat strangely. He held it up to the light. It was addressed in his mother's handwriting—the delicate, flowing penmanship he knew so well; what made it so peculiarly remarkable to him was not only its size and weight; but that, for the first time since he took up his position, his mother had addressed him by his Indian name and title.
He looked at the date, went through a brief calculation, and then sank down upon his seat, feeling, for the moment, sick and faint. The letter was an answer to that written at Lucknow, in which he had begged so earnestly to be told his true position. Trembling from head to foot, he put it within his vest. How he passed through that evening with all its formalities—how, carrying about with him the consciousness of this letter which he had not yet dared to open, he talked and laughed and jested, and told the tale of his adventures, and independently of it—it, that might change his whole life—entered into engagements and appointments, and made plans for the future—how, when the long evening of festivities was over, he found strength to go quietly to his room, and, dismissing Hoosanee, to sit down under the swinging lamp and open it, he never quite knew. But it was done at last, and that was his last moment of weakness. The four closely written sheets, in which his poor mother told the secret that had made the joy and the torment of her life, he read to the end without wavering. When he got up from their perusal, his face was perfectly pale, but his eyes glistened strangely.
For a few moments he paced the room. He went to the marble lattice, and, leaning his head against it, let the soft and fragrant air blow in upon his closed eyelids and burning forehead. He looked back upon his room—the room where Byrajee Pirtha Raj had breathed his last—the sculptured pillars, the inlaid pavement, and the fretted roof. He turned to the window again, and looked out upon the solemn Indian night—the still earth—the dark trees with their ink-black shadows—the piercing radiance of silver stars winning its way through the finely-wrought marble. His mind was strangely upset. It was as if a revolution, in the conduct of which his own will had neither place nor power, were being wrought within him. And for this moment, at least, emotion was as passive as will. If he had any feeling, it was a sense of satisfaction that the mystery of the past was solved. He knew now to whom he belonged—knew that it was through no caprice of an eccentric stranger, but by the will of the Divine, which, from the beginning, had shaped his course for this end, that he had been called to his present position. Whether he was sorry or glad, uplifted or humiliated, would be for to-morrow to determine. To-night he had no more force left, even to feel.
And so he threw off his festive garments, extinguished the lamps, stretched himself out on the couch which for the first time since he had occupied it seemed to belong to him; and Sleep, the nursing-mother of wearied human souls, received him presently into her keeping.
While the rajah sleeps, I must tell very briefly the story that his letter contained. To do so, it will be necessary to go far back into the past. Not only those early years which were so much of a puzzle to Mrs. Gregory's friends, but the years that preceded them, must be touched upon if we wish to understand how she and her son stood, and of what nature was the confession which his passionate entreaties had drawn from her. I have already said that she belonged to an honourable and distinguished family, well-known in early Anglo-Indian records. General Sir Anthony Bracebridge, her grandfather, who began as a subaltern in one of the Company's regiments and worked his way up to a high command and the honour of knighthood, went to India in the days when home-leave was an almost unknown privilege, and when English ladies had not yet begun to make India a field for the display of their talents and accomplishments. Yet upon him, as upon others, came the season when a 'young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.' He was more fortunate than most of his comrades, in that, through a romantic adventure, he won the favour of an Indian family of power, wealth, and high lineage. It happened that the daughter of a rajah, concerning whose beauty and magnificence the wildest rumours were afloat, was on her way to the sacred bathing-ghat, where she was accustomed to offer up her morning prayers, when her escort was attacked by a body of men belonging to a neighbouring rajah. This person had asked her hand in marriage, and been refused. Burning with fury at the insult offered to him, he had determined to seize her by force. So he might have done, for, after a fierce conflict, the escort of the maiden was nearly overpowered; but, as fate would have it, Captain Bracebridge and a few English troopers were passing through the town. These, as was natural, threw themselves into the mêlée, the maiden was rescued, and the Englishmen, being full of chivalrous ardour, refused to leave her until they had seen her safely within the gates of her father's palace.
That Captain Bracebridge should have won for himself the everlasting gratitude of the maiden's father for this gallant deed of arms was not wonderful. But what did seem strange to those who knew the manners of the times was that he was presently adopted by the whole household as a friend. After a decent interval, during which he gained an influence, so extraordinary as to be attributed by many of their own people to magic, over the minds of the rajah and his brothers, he married with her father's consent, and according to English rites, the beautiful girl whom he had so gallantly defended from peril and outrage.
The marriage, so the story goes, proved perfectly happy; but the bliss was of brief duration. After little more than two years of wedlock, Captain Bracebridge's Indian wife died, leaving a son behind her. On this son the father poured out the most devoted affection. He is said to have been a rarely beautiful creature; but all his affinities were with his mother's race. Notwithstanding this, it was his father's wish to bring him up as an English gentleman. I think one of his favourite schemes was through this boy, on whom a large fortune had been settled by his Indian relatives, to re-establish the fortunes of the Bracebridge family, and restore the ancient glories of their ancestral seat. But it was not to be. For although the boy was intellectually gifted, drinking in learning and science with an eagerness that surprised his teachers, he was not the stuff of which the ordinary English gentleman is made. He was too dreamy, too sensitive and far too strange a being to make any sort of a success in society. Recalled to India, where General Bracebridge had, by this time, made both money and renown, he found that in the proud little official world, of which he was expected to form a part, he was even more of an alien than in England, and at last, stung by slights, some of them fancied and some of them real, he announced his determination of giving up his English citizenship altogether, and knitting himself to his mother's race and family.
It may almost be said that Gumilcund owed its birth to this determination. The estate on which that flourishing little city now stands was, about this time, bequeathed to him by one of his grand-uncles, and he was in the enjoyment of the vast fortune settled upon him by his grandfather. Part of this money he spent in building Gumilcund, while the energy and political talent that had found no scope amongst his father's people, were devoted to the task of organising it.
General Bracebridge, in the meantime, indemnified himself for his disappointment by entering into a second marriage, which, the world said, was far more satisfactory than the first. In course of time a second son was born to him; but he never lost his deep love for the first, and as long as he lived, the Rajah of Gumilcund, who had, in course of time, married and, in his turn, become a father, was a frequent and welcome visitor at his house.
There Mrs. Gregory, his grandchild, then a lovely little girl six or seven years old, met her Indian cousin, who was just verging upon manhood. He was handsome, gracious, and noble, and she loved him as little children love their first hero. She was sent to England to school, and returned, after ten long years of absence, with her cousin's image fresh in her mind. Her grandfather was dead then, and the intimacy between the English and Indian branches of the house of Bracebridge was not so close as it had been. Nevertheless the cousins, who had thought of one another kindly all these years, met and loved.
Colonel Bracebridge was absent on a frontier war. His wife was dead. The simple, inexperienced English girl was left very much to her own devices. After a ball, at which the Indian rajah had been the stateliest figure, she was persuaded to enter into a clandestine marriage. But, though feeling had carried her away for a time, her instincts of prudence and propriety were too strong to be altogether fought down, even by love. She left her husband, who would fain have persuaded her to give up all for him, and travelled under the escort of faithful servants to the station where her father was in command. To him she confessed what she had done, entreating his consent to celebrate publicly the marriage into which she had entered in secret. A terrible scene followed, for Colonel Bracebridge was of those who considered the admixture of alien blood in a family a disgrace and a sin. He told his daughter harshly that her marriage was no marriage, and threatened her with the loss not only of his protection, but of the good word of every friend she possessed, if she would not promise him never to see her so-called husband again.
For many days she held out; but the strong will and passionate, overbearing temper of her father, reinforced by depressing tales from him and others of how, if she persisted in her folly, she would be shut up in a zenana, and as much cut off from the world as a nun in a convent, prevailed at last. She was only sixteen, too young to take a line of her own, or to do battle with those she was trained to obey; and, doubtless, she was not capable then, nor ever would have been, of that strong and perfect love which holds firm and faithful through all the storms of destiny and shocks of change. Moved by her father, she wrote a letter to the rajah, reproaching him for the advantage he had taken of her inexperience, and a few weeks later she was prevailed upon to marry Captain Gregory, having first told him the whole story and assured him that she could never love him. As a fact she came to love him dearly, both on account of the sacrifices he had made for her, and for his own sake. As for her little son, whom in the vain hope that he would be a Bracebridge and nothing else, she called 'Tom,' he was born in wedlock, and only a very few knew that he was not the true son of Captain Gregory.