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

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

Abool-Bukr, drunk as a lord, lurched about asserting his intention of being Inspector-General of the King's cavalry, and not leaving man, woman, or child of the hell-doomed alive in India. For he had been right when he had warned Newâsi to leave him to his own life, his own death; when he had shrunk from the inherited bloodstains on his hands, the inherited tinder in his breast. It had caught fire with the first spark, and there was fresh blood on his hands: the blood of a Eurasian boy who had tried to defend his sister from drunken kisses. Someone in the melée had killed the girl and finished the boy: the Prince himself being saved from greater crime by tumbling into the gutter and setting his nose a-bleeding, a catastrophe which had sent him back to the Palace partially sobered.

But Princess Farkhoonda Zamâni, safe housed in the rooms kept for honored visitors, knew nothing of this, knew little even of the disturbances; for she had been a close prisoner since noon--a prisoner with servants who would answer no questions, with trays of jewels and dresses as if she had been a bride. She sat in a flutter, trying to piece out the reason for this kidnaping. Was she to be married by force to some royal nominee? But why to-day? Why in all this turmoil, unless she was required as a bribe. The arch-plotter was capable of that. But who? One thing was certain, Abool-Bukr could know nothing of this--he would not dare--and suddenly the hot blood tingled through every vein as she lay all unconsciously enjoying the return to the easeful idleness and luxury she had renounced. But if he did dare? if it was not mere anger which brought bewilderment to heart and brain, as she hid her face from the dim light which filtered in through the lattice--the dim, scented, voluptuous light from which she had fled once to purer air?

And not a hundred yards away from where she was trying to steady her bounding pulse, Abool-Bukr himself was bawling away at his favorite love-song to a circle of intimates, all of whom he had already provided with places on the civil list. His head was full of promises, his skin as full of wine as it could be, and he not be a mere wastrel unable to enjoy life. For Abool-Bukr gave care to this; since to be dead drunk was sheer loss of time.

"Ah mistress rare, divine,
Thy lover like a vine
With tendril arms entwine."

Here his effort to combine gesture with song nearly caused him to fall off the steps, and roused a roar of laughter from some sepoys bivouacking under the trees hard by. But Mirza Moghul, passing hastily to an audience with the King, frowned. To-day, when none knew what might come, the Queen might have her way so far; but this idle drunkard must be got rid of soon. He would offend the pious to begin with, and then he could not be trusted. Who could trust a man who had been known to lure back his hawk because a bird's gay feathers shone in the sunshine?

But Ahsan-Oolah, dismissed from feeling the royal pulse once more, by the Mirza's audience, paused as he passed to recommend a cooling draught if the Inspector-General of Cavalry wanted to keep his head clear. It was the physician's panacea for excitement of all kinds. But an exhibition of steel would have done better on the 11th of May.

There was no one, however, to administer it to Delhi, and even the refugees in the Flagstaff Tower were beginning to give up hope of its arriving from Meerut. Those in the storehouse at Duryagunj still clung to the belief that succor must come somehow; but Kate Erlton, behind the wood-pile, knew that her hope lay only in herself.

For how could Jim Douglas, as he more than once passed through the now open and almost deserted Cashmere gate, in the hope, or rather the fear, of finding some trace of her, know that she was hidden within a few yards of him? or, how could she distinguish the sound of his horse's hoofs from the hundreds which passed?

She must have escaped with the others, he concluded, as he galloped toward the cantonments to see if she were there. But she was not. He had failed again, he told himself; failed through no fault of his own; for who could have foretold that madness of retreat from the gate?

So now, there was nothing to be done in Delhi save gather what information he could, give decent burial--if he could--to Alice Gissing's body, and, if no troops arrived before dawn, leave the city.