On the Face of the Waters: A Tale of the Mutiny

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

An hour! And not a cloud of dust upon the Meerut road.

"They can't be long, though, now," said the eldest there hopefully. "And Ripley will bring his men down at the double. If we go into the guard-house we can hold our own till then, surely."

"I can hold mine," replied a young fellow with a rough-hewn homely face. He gave a curt nod as he spoke to a companion, and together they turned back, skirting the wall, followed by an older, burlier man. They belonged to the magazine, and they were off to see the best way of holding their own. And they found it--found it for all time.

But fate had denied to those other brave men the nameless something which makes men succeed together, or die together. Within half an hour they were scattered helplessly. The Resident, after seeking support from the city police for one whose name had been a terror to Delhi for fifty years, and finding insult instead, was flying for dear life through the Ajmere gate to the open county; The Commissioner, who, after seizing a musket from a wavering guard beside him and--with the first shot fired in Delhi--shooting the foremost trooper dead, seems to have lost hope, with mutiny around and treason beside him, jumped into his buggy alone and drove off to those cool quarters above the Palace gate, as his nearest refuge. Their owner, the Captain sought like refuge by flinging himself into the cover of the dry moat, and creeping--despite injuries from the fall--along it till some of his men, faithful so far, seeing him unable for more, carried him to his own room.

The Collector! Strangely enough there is no record of what the Magistrate of the city did, thus left alone. He had been wounded by the crowd at first, and was no doubt weary after his wild gallopings. Still he, holding his own so far, managed to gain the same refuge, somehow. What else could he do alone? One thing we know he could not do. That is, mount the broad, curving flight of shallow stone stairs leading to the cool upper rooms. So the chaplain helped him; the chaplain who had "from an early hour been watching the advance of the Meerut mutineers through a telescope and feeling there was mischief in the wind."

Mischief indeed! and danger; most of all in those rose-red walls within which refuge had been sought. For the King was back in the women's apartments listening to the Queen's cozenings and Hussan Askuri's visions, when that urgent appeal to send dhoolies to convey the English ladies at the gate to the security of the harem reached him; reached him in Ahsan-Oolah's warning voice of wisdom. And he listened to both the wheedling ambition and the crafty policy with a half-hearing for something beyond it of pity, honor, good faith; while Hâfzan, pen in hand, sat with her large profoundly sad eyes fixed on the old man's face, waiting--waiting.

"If they come here--outcaste! infidel! I go," said Zeenut Maihl.

"Thou shalt go with a bowstring about thy neck, woman, if I choose," said the old King fiercely. "Write! girl--the Queen's dhoolies to the Lahore gate at once."

So, through the swarms of pensioners quarreling already over new titles and perquisites, through the groups of excited fanatics preparing for martyrdom about the Mosque, past Abool-Bukr, three parts drunk, boasting to ruffling blades of the European mistresses he meant to keep, the Queen's dhoolies went swaying out of the precincts; all yielding place to them. And beyond, in the denser, more dangerous crowd without, they passed easily; for those tinsel-decked, tawdry canopies, screened with sodden musk and dirt-scented curtains, were sacred.

Sacred even to the refuse and rabble of the city, the dissolute eunuchs, the mob of retainers, palace guards, and blood-drunk soldierly surging through that long arched tunnel by the Lahore gate, and hustling to get round that wide arch, and so, a few steps further, see the Commissioner standing at bay upon that wide curving red-stone stair that led upward. Standing and thinking of the women above; of one woman mostly. Standing, facing the wild sea of faces, waiting to see if that last appeal for help had been heard.