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

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

George Willoughby; the Head-of-the-nine, looked at the sullen group of dark faces lounging distrustfully within those barred doors, and his own face grew stern. Well, if they would not work, they should at least stay and look on--stay till the end. Then he took out his watch.

"Twelve! The Meerut troops will be in soon--if they started at dawn." There was the finest inflection of scorn in his voice.

"They must have started," began his companion. But the tall figure with the grave young face was straining its eyes from the bastion they were passing; it gave upon the bridge of boats and the lessening white streak of road. He was looking for a cloud of dust upon it; but there was none.

"I hope so," he remarked as he went on. He gave a half-involuntary glance back, however, to the stunted lemon-bush. There was a black streak by it, which might be relied upon to give aid at dawn, or dusk, or noon; high noon as it was now.

The chime of it echoed methodically as ever from the main-guard, making a cheerful young voice in the officer's room say, "Well! the enemy is passing, anyhow. The reliefs can't be long--if they started at dawn."

"If they had started when they ought to have started, they would have been here hours ago," said an older man, almost petulantly, as he rose and wandered to the door, to stand looking out on the baking court where his men--the two companies of the 54th, who had come down under his charge after those under Colonel Riply had shot down their officers by the church--were lounging about sullenly. These men might have shot him also but for the timely arrival of the two guns; might have shot at him, even now, but for those loyal 74th over-awing them. He turned and looked at some of the latter with a sort of envy. These men had come forward in a body when the regiment was called upon by its commandant to give honest volunteers to keep order in the city. What had they had, which his men had lacked? Nothing that he knew of. And then, inevitably, he thought of his six murdered friends and comrades, officers apparently as popular as he, whose bodies were lying in the next room waiting for a cart to remove them to the Ridge. For even Major Paterson, saddened, depressed, looked forward to decent sepulture for his comrades by and by--by and by when the Meerut troops should arrive. And the half dozen or more of women upstairs were comforting each other with the same hope, and crushing down the cry that it seemed an eternity, already, since they had waited for that little cloud of dust upon the Meerut road. But for that hope they might have gone Meerutward themselves; for the country was peaceful.

Even in Duryagunj, though by noon it was a charnel-house, the score or so of men who kept cowards at bay in a miserable storehouse comforted themselves with the same hope; and women with the long languid eyes of one race, looked out of them with the temper and fire of the other, saying in soft staccato voices--"It will not be long now. They will be here soon, for they would start at dawn."

"They will come soon," said a young telegraph clerk coolly, as he stood by his instrument hoping for a welcome kling; sending, finally, that bulletin northward which ended with the reluctant admission, "we must shut up." Must indeed; seeing that some ruffians rushed in and sabered him with his hands still on the levers.

"They will be here soon," agreed the compositors of the Delhi Gazette as they worked at the strangest piece of printing the world is ever likely to see. That famous extra, wedged in between English election news, which told in bald journalese of a crisis, which became the crisis of their own lives before the whole edition was sent out.

But down in the Palace Zeenut Maihl had been watching that white streak of road also, and as the hours passed, her wild impatience would let her watch it no longer. She paced up and down the Queen's bastion like a caged tigress, leaving Hâfzan to take her place at the lattice. No sign of an avenging army yet! Then the troopers' tale must be true! The hour of decisive action had come, it was slipping past, the King was in the hands of Ahsan-Oolah, and Elahi Buksh, whose face was set both ways, like the physician's. And she, helpless, half in disgrace, caged, veiled, screened, unable to lay hands on anyone! Oh! why was she not a man! Why had she not a man to deal with! Her henna-stained nails bit into her palms as she clenched her hands, then in sheer childish passion tore off her hampering veil and, rolling it into a ball, flung it at the head of a drowsy eunuch in the outside arcade--the nearest thing to a man within her reach.