He gave a shrug of his shoulders as he turned away to get ready for his start. So that was it; and even Kate Erlton had not benefited by his sacrifice. No one had benefited. There had been no chance for any of them. "Come!" That ended Kate Erlton's hope of concealment, the Major's career. "No!" That ended his own vague ambitions. Still, it was a strange chance in itself that those two laconic renunciations should go the same day by the same hand. No stranger telegrams, he thought, could have left Meerut, or were likely to leave it that night.
He was wrong, however. An hour or two later, the strangest telegram that ever came as sole warning to an Empire that its very foundation was attacked, left Meerut for Agra; sent by the postmaster's niece.
"The Cavalry," it ran, "have risen, setting fire to their own houses besides having killed and wounded all European officers and soldiers they could find near the lines. If Aunt intends starting to-morrow, please detain her, as the van has been prevented from leaving the station."
For, as Jim Douglas paced slowly down the Mall toward Delhi, and Soma, his buckles gleaming, his belts pipe-clayed to dazzling whiteness, was swaggering through the bazaar on his way to the rest-house with his word of warning--the word which would have given Jim Douglas the power for which he had longed--another word was being spoken in that lane of lust, where the time had come for which Nargeeza had waited all day. But she did not say it. It was only a big trollop of a girl hung with jasmine garlands, painted, giggling.
"We of the bazaar kiss no cowards," she said derisively. "Where are your comrades?"
The man to whom she said it, a young dissolute-faced trooper, dressed in the loose rakish muslins beloved of his class--the very man, perchance, who had gone cityward that morning, and dropped an alms into the yellow fakir's bowl--stood for a second in the stifling, maddening atmosphere of musk and rose and orange-blossom; stood before all those insolent allurements, balked in his passion, checked in his desires. Then, with an oath, he dashed from her insulting charms; dashed into the street with a cry:
"To horse! To horse, brothers! To the jail! to our comrades!"
The word had been spoken. The speech which brings more than speech, had come from the painted lips of a harlot.
The first clang of the church bell--which the chaplain had forgotten to postpone--came faintly audible across the dusty plain, making other men pause and look at each other. Why not? It was the hour of prayer--the appointed time. Their comrades could be easily rescued--there was but a native guard at the jail. And hark! from another pair of painted derisive lips came the same retort, flung from a balcony.
"Trra! We of the bazaar kiss no cowards!"