HOW THE VOW WAS MADE
"I f they're a-goin' to kill me, why don't they look sharp and git it over? If I 'ad the killin' o' them, I'd be quick enough about it, I knows that!"
So growled a solitary prisoner in the "black-hole" of a British outpost in Upper Bengal one hot May morning in 1803.
Though dark compared with the blistering glare outside, the cell was light enough to show its tenant in all his squalid and savage disorder. With his clothes almost torn from his back, his face smeared with dust and blood, and a scowl of sullen desperation on his hard, low-browed, ruffianly features, he looked like what too many of the Company's soldiers were, in days when it drew its recruits chiefly from the prison and the hulks, and often enough from the gallows itself.
His mouth was parched with thirst (for no one had thought of bringing him water), his bruised limbs were all one pain, his bound hands kept him from defending himself against the flies that swarmed around his wounded face, hardly to be scared away by incessant jerkings of his aching head. Well, what did it all matter? He would soon be past pain and thirst, and feeling of any kind; or, if there really was anything after that—well, God couldn't be harder on him than the colonel had been, anyhow.
They would shoot him, of course; for he knew what a charge of "attempting to stir up mutiny" meant at a time when England's half-formed power in the East stood like a rock amid a thousand roaring waves, with all India raging around it. Well, let them! he would at least die game, and spite "Old Blue-Beard," who would want to see him flinch.
Just then a clear, childish voice was heard outside—the voice of the colonel's only child, a bright little lad of seven, who was the pet of the whole barrack, and even more loved (if such a thing could be) than his father was hated.
"Oh, please let me in; I do want to see poor Bob!"
"Can't, lovey, can't indeed," replied the sentry's deep tones; "it's yer par's orders as no one's to pass in. I'd let yer in if I could, I would indeed; but orders is orders, you know."
And the voices died away.
The doomed man's face softened for a moment into such a look as he might have worn long ago, when he was a child himself.
"He thought o' me, then, the little 'un did!" he muttered. "Bless his 'art for a kind little chap!"
Meanwhile his comrades outside, with a fellow-soldier's life swaying in the balance, were laughing loudly at the tricks of a native juggler, who had begged and obtained leave to enter the barrack-yard.
And why not? The same sudden and violent death might be their own lot any day. Ignorant, debauched, reckless, they, like too many of those who had cemented with their blood the foundations of Britain's Eastern empire, found their chief enjoyment in the mad whirl of battle, and their chief ambition to be able to "git drunk and forget it all!"
The juggler, who was the centre of attraction, was a very remarkable-looking man, not at all like the average of his class. His tall, sinewy frame had a tiger-like elasticity in every movement, and through the fawning servility of his manner broke ever and anon a flash of something bolder and fiercer, which would have betrayed to any keen observer that he was not what he seemed.
But no such observer was to be found among the reckless soldiers, who were firmly convinced (like most "true Britons" of that age) that no one who had not had the luck to be born an Englishman could possess either courage or any other virtue—a theory to which the great Mahratta war of 1803 was just about to give the lie in a very startling way.
The juggler began by exhibiting some of the familiar feats that have amused India in all ages, including the swallowing of a sword and the famous "mango trick," which consisted in planting a mango-seed in a tiny basket of earth and then covering it with a cloth, the withdrawal of which a moment later showed the first green shoot already springing up. At the second lifting of the cloth, this shoot was seen to have grown into a miniature tree, on which, when uncovered once more, hung a tiny fruit, which the conjurer plucked and gave to one of the spectators to eat, as a proof that it was genuine.
Then the juggler turned to the nearest of the lookers-on, and said—
"Hey, Inglis sojeer! s'pose me give you one rupee, what you do?"
"Why, I'd take it, o' course," cried the soldier, with a loud laugh at the absurdity of such a question, hoarsely echoed by all the rest.
The other held out a silver coin, upon which the soldier's strong hand closed eagerly; but he opened it again instantly with a start and an exclamation of disgust, and out fell a large, fat, wriggling worm, amid a fresh roar of laughter from his comrades.
Then the conjurer stepped forth into the midst, and called out—
"Look, see! you sojeer say you all plenty brave men."
"Say we are?" echoed a soldier angrily; "why, do you mean for to say as we ain't, you lyin', coffee-coloured thief?"
"No, no, not speak one such word!" said the Hindu humbly. "Inglis man no fear nothing, me sabbee (know) plenty well. S'pose Inglis sojeer hold out hand, me put lemon on sojeer hand; cut lemon in half wid sword. Who come first?"
But no one seemed in any haste to do so; for, bold as they were, such a challenge made even these reckless men look grave.
Though they had all heard of this feat, none of them had ever seen it done; and to lay one's bare hand beneath a sword-stroke that would certainly hew it off if the juggler happened to miss the lemon (and very possibly whether he did or not), was a matter about which the boldest man might well think twice.
"What? are ye all afeared?" cried a tall, sturdy, rather good-looking young fellow, with a markedly reckless and defiant air, as he shouldered his way to the front. "Well, no man shan't ever say as Tom Tuffen showed the white feather afore a blackamoor! Go ahead, old 'un, 'ere's my 'and to work on; but mind, if yer cuts it off, I'll kill yer with t'other 'and afore ye can sing out 'Help!'"
The gleam of stern joy that shone for a moment in the seeming juggler's keen, black eyes, was strangely out of keeping with his cringing manner; and there was a perceptible change in his tone as he said, while putting back the soldier's extended right hand—
"That hand no good—cut thumb off, try wid him—give other."
"That hand no good—cut thumb off."
The soldiers laughed again, thinking that the Hindu was going to "back out"; but Tom offered his left hand without a word, and the juggler, laying the lemon on the open palm, drew his short tulwar (sword).
The ring of spectators gave a sudden heave, and the boldest man among them held his breath as the Hindu stepped forward with uplifted weapon; but the young Englishman looked him full in the eyes, and held the extended hand as firm as a rock.
A flash—a whiz—a sudden chill across Tom's open hand, like the fall of a drop of cold water, and the lemon rolled on the ground in two clear halves, leaving the young soldier unharmed.[2]
A shout of applause from the lookers-on made the air ring, and under cover of it the pretended juggler, bending forward as if to satisfy himself that Tom's hand was indeed unhurt, said a few emphatic words to him, so low that no one else could hear them.
Whatever those words were, they seemed greatly to startle the hearer, who was about to reply, when the Hindu signed to him to be silent, and, letting drop, in passing, a second emphatic whisper (destined to bear, later on, strange and terrible fruit), glided by him and was gone.
All the rest of that day "Wild Tom" was unwontedly silent and thoughtful; and his gravity appeared to have infected his special crony, Sam Black (the man on whom the rupee trick had been played), with whom Tom had some talk apart as soon as the juggler had gone.
Meanwhile the prisoner in the "black hole" was fast sinking into a heavy torpor, which seemed proof against even the ceaseless torment of the swarming flies, when the sound of a well-known and hated voice outside his prison roused him like the sudden shock of a blow.
"We shall be well rid of the rascal; such a fellow is a disgrace to the name of Englishman!"
"Am I?" growled Bob Burton through his set teeth. "And what are you?"
But just then his attention was diverted to a strange, rustling, scraping noise overhead, as if something were dragging itself along the roof of his prison. What could it be? A rat? a snake? and his hands were tied!
But the next moment appeared at the air-hole, high above him, a fresh, child-like face, framed in golden hair—the face of little Freddy Hardman, the colonel's son. An instant more, and the boy's slim figure had wormed itself through the opening (which was only just wide enough to let it pass), and had dropped lightly down on to the floor at Bob Burton's side.
"They wouldn't let me in to see you," said the little hero, with a gleeful laugh; "but I'd made up my mind that I would come, so I just went up into the store-house, and climbed through the window down on to this roof, and then squeezed through the air-hole, and here I am. Poor old Bob! why, your face is all bleeding, I declare; and how those horrid flies must have been plaguing you! Let me tie it up for you with my handkerchief."
And the kind little fingers tenderly wiped the dust and blood from the hurt, and bound it up dexterously enough.
"Ah! if only they was all like you!" said Burton brokenly; "you doesn't preach and jaw at a chap—you jist loves him!"
No words could have better summed up the secret of that power by which One whose very name poor Bob had never heard, save in the form of an oath, had conquered the whole world.
"And here's a banana that I've brought you, for I knew how thirsty you must be, shut up in this hot place," went on Freddy, as he tugged from his pocket a huge ripe plantain.
As Burton awkwardly held out his bound hands to take it, the boy saw for the first time that they were knotted together at the wrists, and flushed up indignantly.
"What? have they really tied your hands? What a shame! Well, eat this banana first, and then I'll untie them for you."
The thirsty man's parched lips sucked in the juicy pulp with a wolfish eagerness that told its own story; and then Freddy, eager to help him, went to work manfully upon the cruel cord, which at first resisted all his efforts.
"Best let it be," said Bob Burton gruffly. "Thank'ee all the same, little 'un; but ye'll only 'urt them little fingers o' your'n."
But the brave little champion was not to be so easily balked of his kind purpose; and, bruise his fingers as he might, he persevered gallantly, till at length the hastily and clumsily tied knot gave way, and Burton's stiffened, aching hands were free.
Free once more! And then, with that sense of recovered strength, the wild beast in that perverted nature started into life again, and there came to him a thought from hell.
His worst enemy's only son was alone with him, and wholly in his power; and one strangling clutch of his strong hands on that slender throat would acquit at once and for ever the heavy debt of revenge that he had so long hungered to repay. Ah! to see that hard, pitiless man's face as he bent over the corpse of his only child! and to watch him writhe, and mock his agony!
It was but for a moment, and then the hideous temptation was past and gone like the phantom of a nightmare; but its tremendous reaction turned the overwrought man sick and faint, and he sank dizzily back against the wall.
The boy eyed him anxiously for an instant, and then, climbing on to his knee, began to wipe off, with the end of the sash that served him as a waist-belt, the big drops of moisture that beaded the tortured face.
"Do you know what this reminds me of, Bob?" said he; "of a picture I saw once of Christ nailed to the Cross, and a little tiny bird that was sorry for Him, trying hard with its poor wee beak to pull the nails out of His hands, and set Him free. I used to think I should like to be that bird; and now I have been like it in a sort of a way, for I've set your hands free, haven't I?"
A long shiver ran through the soldier's hardy frame, and he was about to speak, when a measured tramp was heard outside, a short, sharp order was given, and then the door swung back, revealing the uniforms of a corporal's guard.
But when the soldiers saw Freddy (whose absence had already been noticed and wondered at) in the cell with the prisoner, they exchanged looks of blank amazement, not wholly untinged with superstitious awe.
Was he indeed, then, what they had often called him—an angel sent down to undo the evil wrought by the merciless harshness of his iron-hearted father? How else could he have come into this lockfast place, with a sentry at its door, and (as they thought) no other available access?
One of the men entered the cell to bring out the prisoner, and Burton recognised his chum Tom Tuffen.
"What'll they do with me, Tom?" asked he in a whisper; "dose o' lead pills, eh?"
"No such luck, Bob," replied the other gloomily, in the same low tone; "down to the depot at Kalipur!"
"Then I knows wot I've got to expect," said the doomed man with a sickly smile. "That's wot they calls 'commutin' the death-penalty,' I s'pose; if they'd commuted the penalty to death, there 'ud ha' been more sense in it!—Jist tie my 'ands agin, will yer, Tom? I don't want the little chap to git into trouble for undoin' 'em!"
"Jist tie my 'ands agin, will yer, Tom?"
"There's my father, and I must go to him," called out Freddy at that moment. "Good-bye, dear Bob—good-bye!"
"Good-bye, little 'un—I won't forget yer; and" (with a terrific scowl at the tall, upright, soldierly figure toward which the boy flew with outstretched hands) "I won't forget 'im, neither!"[3]
CHAPTER II