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

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

She wished it often. Thinking over it all in the long days that followed, it came to be almost her only regret. If he had told her, if he had heard her say how glad she was, she felt that she would have asked no more. And so, as she went down every evening to lay the white rosebuds the gardener brought her on his grave she used to repeat, as if he could hear them, his own words: "It is the finish that is the win or the lose of a race."

That was what many a man was saying to himself upon the Ridge in the first week of September. For the siege train had come at last. The winning post lay close ahead, they must ride all they knew. But those in command said it anxiously; for day by day the hospitals became more crowded, and cholera, reappearing, helped to swell the rear-guard of graves, when the time had come for vanguards only.

But some men--among them Baird Smith and John Nicholson--took no heed of sickness or death. And these two, especially, looked into each other's eyes and said, "When you are ready I'm ready." Their seniors might say that an assault would be thrown on the hazard of a die. What of that; if men are prepared to throw sixes, as these two were? They had to be thrown, if India was to be kept, if this bubble of sovereignty was to be pricked, the gas let out.

In the city and the Palace also, men, feeling the struggle close, put hand and foot to whip and spur. But there was no one within the walls who had the seeing single eye, quick to seize the salient point of a position. Baird Smith saw it fast enough. Saw the thickets and walls of the Koodsia Gardens in front of him, the river guarding his left, a sinuous ravine--cleaving the hillside into cover creeping down from the Ridge on his right to within two hundred yards of the city wall. And that bit of the wall, between the Moree gate and the Water Bastion, was its weakest portion. The curtain walls long, mere parapets, only wide enough for defense by muskets. So said the spies, though it seemed almost incredible to English engineers that the defense had not been strengthened by pulling down the adjacent houses and building a rampart for guns.

In truth there was no one to suggest it, and if it had been suggested there was no one to carry it out, for even now, at the last, the Palace seethed with dissension and intrigue. Yet still the sham went on inconceivably. Jim Douglas, indeed, walking through the bazaars in his Afghan dress, very nearly met his fate through it. For he was seized incontinently and made to figure as one of the retinue of the Amir of Cabul's ambassador, who, about the beginning of September, was introduced to the private Hall of Audience as a sedative to doubtful dreamers, and a tonic to brocaded bags. Luckily for him, however, the men called upon to play the other part in the farce--chiefly cloth-merchants from Peshawur and elsewhere, whom Jim Douglas had dodged successfully so far--had been in such abject fear of being discovered themselves that they had no thought of discovering others. For Bahâdur Shâh had the dust and ashes of a Moghul in him still. Jim Douglas recognized the fact in the very obstinacy of delusion in the wax-like, haggard old face looking with glazed, tremulous-lidded eyes at the mock mission; and in the faded voice, accepting his vassal of Cabul's promise of help. It was an almost incredible scene, Jim Douglas thought. Given it, there was no limit to possibilities in this phantasmagoria of kingship. The white shadows of the marble arches with their tale of boundless power and wealth in the past, the wide plains beyond, the embroidered curtain of the sunlit garden, the curves of courtiers, most of them in the secret, no doubt; and below the throne these tag-rag and bob-tail of the bazaars, one of them at least a hell-doomed infidel, figuring away in borrowed finery! All this was as unreal as a magic lantern picture, and like it was followed hap-hazard, without rhyme or reason, by the next on the slide; for, as he passed out of the Presence he heard the question of appointing a Governor to Bombay brought up and discussed gravely; that province being reported to have sent in its allegiance en bloc to the Great Moghul. The slides, however, were not always so dignified, so decorous. One came, a day or two afterward, showing a miserable old pantaloon driven to despair because six hundred hungry sepoys would not behave according to strict etiquette, but, invading his privacy with threats, reduced him to taking his beautiful new cushion from the Peacock Throne and casting it among them.

"Take it," he cried passionately, "it is all I have left. Take it, and let me go in peace!"

But the lesson was not learned by him as yet; so he had to remain; for once more the sepoys sent out word that there was to be no skulking. To do the Royal family justice, however, they seem by this time to have given up the idea of flight. To be sure they had no place to which they could fly, since the dream required that background of rose-red wall and marble arches. So even Abool-Bukr, forsaking drunkenness as well as that kind, detaining hand, clung to his kinsfolk bravely, behaving in all ways as a newly married young prince should who looked toward filling the throne itself at some future time.[^[8]]

The sepoys themselves had given up blustering, and many, like Soma, had taken to bhang instead; drugging themselves deliberately into indifference. The latter had recovered from the blow on the back of his head, which, however, as is so often the case, had for the time at any rate deprived him of all recollection of the events immediately preceding it. So, as Tara had restored his uniform before he was able to miss it, he treated her as if nothing had occurred; greatly to her relief. The fact had its disadvantages, however, by depriving her of all corroborative evidence of the mem having really left the city. Thus Jim Douglas, warned by past experience, and made doubtful by Tara's strange reticences, refused to believe it. Her whole story, indeed, marred, as it was, by the endless reserves and exaggerations, seemed incredible; the more so because Tiddu--who lied wildly as to his constant sojourn in Delhi--professed utter disbelief in it. So, after a few days' unavailing attempt to get at the truth, Jim Douglas sent the old man off with a letter of inquiry to the Ridge, and waited for the answer.

Waited, like all Delhi, under the shadow of the lifted sword which hung above the city. A sword, held behind a simulacrum of many, by one arm, sent for that purpose; for John Lawrence, being wise, knew that the shadow of that arm meant more even than the sword it held to the wildest half of the province under his control, a province trembling in the balance between allegiance and revolt; a province ready to catch fire if the extinguisher were not put upon the beacon light. And all India waited too. Waited to see that sword fall.

But a hatchet fell first. Fell in the lemon thickets and pomegranates of the walled old gardens, so that men who worked at the batteries still remember the sweet smell that went up from the crushed leaves. A welcome change; for the Ridge, crowded now with eleven thousand troops, was not a pleasant abode. It was on Sunday, the 6th of September, that the final reinforcements came in, and on the 7th the men, reading General Wilson's order for the appointing of prize agents in each corps, and his assurance that all plunder would be divided fairly, felt as if they were already within the walls. The hospitals, too, were giving up their sick; those who could not be of use going to the rear, Meerut-ward, those fit for work to the front. And that night the first siege battery was traced and almost finished below the Sammy-House, while, under cover of this distraction on the right, the Koodsia Gardens and Ludlow Castle on the left were occupied by strong pickets.