“Surajah Dowlah, your words are the words of a boaster, who is bold only when he sees his enemy before him disarmed. Beware of what you do; you are walking in the dark! Do you believe the paltry handful of English whom you drove out of Calcutta count for anything in the strength of our nation? If so, let me tell you there are men about you, men who have your trust, who could teach you otherwise. You are being deceived if your spies have not already told you of the armament which he whom you call Sabat Jung is already preparing to invade your dominions, when every hair of an Englishman’s head that you have injured will have to be reckoned for. And it will be well for you if, among all those who crouch before you, you find any to fight for you in that day.”
The servile crew that stood round the tyrant here began to cry out at me, and drown my voice. But I was satisfied with the impression I had made on the mind of their master. He listened, hanging his head, and casting meaning glances at me, as if doubtful how far I had authority for what I said. Finally he ordered me to be kept under a strong guard, and I was conveyed back to the same prison I had escaped from overnight.
CHAPTER XIV
IN A STRANGE LAND
I have now come to a period which was in many respects the strangest of my whole life, so that I often look back on it with wonder; and sitting here at the open window, framed in honeysuckle and sweetbriar, with the sounds of the farm in my ears and the prospect of the peaceful broad in front of me, I ask myself if I be truly that adventurous youth who once dwelt in captivity for many months in the court of an Indian prince, half victim and half plaything, one day caressed and loaded with rich gifts, the next threatened with death and torture.
Yet so it was. After the attempt whose miscarriage I have just related, the demeanour of the Nabob underwent a singular change. He relented from his severity towards us, and in fact a few days after, riding past our place of imprisonment one morning, he stopped at the door and calling Mr. Holwell out to him, bade him and his two companions betake themselves where they would, since he desired never to hear of them again.
However, in this dismissal he did not include me, choosing to put me on a different footing from the other prisoners he had taken at Fort William, and to hold me as a hostage—for so I am sure he considered me—for the friendship of Colonel Clive. He offered me the choice between being kept in chains or giving him my parole not to leave Moorshedabad without his consent. The Moors do not accept each other’s parole, but they trust that of a European, than which there can be no stronger proof of the dishonesty of their whole nation. I chose to comply with the Nabob’s condition, as I considered that I ought not to quit the place without having effected something for Marian. And by giving my parole I trusted to obtain opportunities for communicating with her, as well as with my luckless cousin Gurney, whom I had not seen since the morning after our adventure.
Whether Surajah Dowlah suspected my designs, and took particular measures for baffling them, I cannot say. But during the time that now followed, try as I would, I never succeeded in so much as hearing the smallest news of either of the two persons whom I knew to be in Moorshedabad. So close is the secrecy maintained by Orientals that they might have both been carried off into the recesses of Tartary, and yet not been more utterly out of my reach than they were, abiding in the same city.