"And your breakfast?" she asked coldly, almost sarcastically; for he seemed to her so hard, so grudging, while her sympathies, her enthusiasms were red-hot for the newcomers.
He laughed bitterly. "I've learned to live on parched grain like a native, if need be, and I take opium too; so I shall manage." He was back again to the turret, however, before two o'clock, curtly apologetic, calmer, yet still eager. The people, to be sure, he said, had given up keeking round their doors at every clatter, and the gates had been closed on deserters by the Palace folk; but no one had thought of bricking them up, and after going round everywhere he doubted if there were more than seven or eight thousand real soldiers in Delhi. The 74th and the 11th regiments had been slipping away for days, and numbers of men who had remained did not really mean to fight. Tiddu, who seemed to know everything, said that the mutineers had been very strongly in-trenched at Budli-serai, so the resistance could not have been very dogged, or our troops could not have fought their way in before nine o'clock. Yes! since she pressed for an answer, the General might have been wise in waiting for the cool. Only he personally wished he had thought it possible, for then he would at any rate have tried to get a letter sent to the Ridge. Now it was too late.
And then suddenly, as he spoke, a fierce elation flashed to his face again at the sound of bugles, the roll of a gun from the Moree Bastion; and he was up the stairs of the turret in a second, casting a half-humorous, wholly deprecating glance back at her.
"A hare and a tortoise once--I learned that at school--put it into Latin!" he said lightly, as the walls round them quivered to the reverberating rolls, thundering from the city wall.
Kate walked up and down the roof restlessly, passing into the outer one so as to be further from that eager sentinel and his criticisms. Tara was spinning calmly, and Kate wondered if the woman could be alive. Did she not know that brave men on both sides were going to their deaths? And Tara, from under her heavy eyelashes, watched Kate, and wondered how any woman who had brought Life into the world could fear Death. Did not the Great Wheel spin unceasingly? Let brave men, then, die bravely--even Soma. For she knew by this time that her brother was in Delhi, and by the master's orders had dodged his detection more than once. So the two women waited, each after their nature; while like the pulse of time itself, the beat of artillery shook the walls. It came so regularly that Kate, crouching in a corner weary of restless pacing to and fro, grew almost drowsy and started at a step beside her.
"A false alarm," said Jim Douglas quietly; "a sortie, as far as I could judge, from the Moree; easily driven back."
His tone roused her antagonism instantly. "Perhaps they are waiting for night."
"There is a full moon--almost," he replied; "besides, there is fair cover up to within four hundred yards of the Cabul gate. They could rush that, and a bag or two of gunpowder would finish the business."
"They could do that as well to-morrow," she remarked hotly.
"I hope to God they won't be such fools as to try it!" he replied as hotly. "If they don't come in to-night they will have to batter down the walls, and then the city will go against them. What city wouldn't? It will rouse memories we can't afford to rouse. Who could? And every wounded man who creeps in to-day will be a center of resistance by to-morrow. The women will hound others on to protect him. It is their way. You have always to allow for humanity in war. Well! we must wait and see." He paused and rubbed his forehead vexedly. "If I had known, I might have got out with the sortie; but I suppose I couldn't really----" He paused, shrugged his shoulders, and went out.