CHAPTER XVIII
MEER JAFFIER’S OATH
I arrived in Moorshedabad without accident, and at once repaired to the house of the Company’s agent, Mr. Watts.
I found this gentleman in a state of the utmost apprehension. The air was full of suspicion. Moorshedabad swarmed with the Nabob’s spies, who watched the going in and coming out of every person whom their master had reason to distrust, and carried their reports to his infamous minion, Lal Moon. Mr. Watts assured me that he did not consider his own life to be worth a day’s purchase, and the Nabob had uttered such threats against him on the last occasion of his going to the palace that he dared not present himself there again.
Fortunately for me Colonel Clive had provided me with an excuse for my journey in the shape of a letter to Surajah Dowlah, in which the Colonel renewed his expressions of friendship, but demanded the withdrawal of the Nabob’s army from Plassy. This was a step which the conspirators considered indispensable to their design, as they had no expectation that Colonel Clive could overcome this force of forty thousand men as long as it kept the field.
Armed with the Colonel’s letter I went to wait upon the Nabob, leaving Mr. Watts to exert his utmost diligence in procuring the necessary signatures to the treaties, which I delivered to him for the purpose.
Nothing could exceed the astonishment of the Nabob’s officers when I, who had fled secretly from the city six months before, presented myself before them in the character of an ambassador from Sabat Jung and boldly demanded an audience. They hastened to carry the news to the Nabob, and after a short time they returned and conducted me into his presence.
Although scarcely three months had elapsed since I had last seen Surajah Dowlah, I observed a change for the worse in his appearance. He sat on the royal musnud with the same state as formerly, clad in his gold-embroidered robes and turban sparkling with the light of many gems, surrounded by the same obsequious throng of courtiers and attended by his ferocious guards ready to take the life of any man present, at a nod from their despotic lord. Yet I discovered something in his countenance which I had not seen there before. His head hung down with an air of weariness, and his gaze, instead of darting fiercely to and fro, seemed to shift and hesitate as if with a lurking distrust of those about him. He appeared to be in ill-health, and shifted fretfully about in his seat as he talked. On my part, I regarded him with different eyes from the time when I had come before him as a captive in his hands, when I had viewed him as a powerful tyrant, invested with all the horror of his recent crimes, and especially of that never-to-be-forgotten atrocity of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Now, on the last occasion on which I was ever to confront him, I did so as the emissary of one whose power was yet greater than his own, as the agent of an intrigue that menaced his throne and perhaps his life. And beneath the surface of pomp and power and the outward show of sovereignty, I looked deeper, and beheld merely a young man, scarce older than myself—in his nineteenth year—the victim of an evil education, corrupted by the possession of despotic power, rent and exhausted by his own evil passions, and surrounded by traitors secretly scheming for his downfall. Some of the dread and hatred which I had formerly felt for him was replaced by milder sentiments, and I could have found it in my heart to pity Surajah Dowlah.
As if to strengthen these impressions in my mind, the young Nabob was in a singularly amiable mood, and appeared glad to see me.
“So it is you again!” he was pleased to say when I was introduced. “I see that you have told me the truth, and that you are a friend of Sabat Jung’s. But why did you flee from me before? I regarded you with favour, and would not have put you to death.”