There was a flood of it now outside the ruth as it lumbered along by the jail, not a quarter of a mile yet from the city gate. Half-shivering she peeped through the gay patchwork curtains to assure herself it held no horror.
God and his Holy Prophet! What was that crowd on the road ahead? No, not ahead, she was in it, now, so that the oxen paused, unable to go on. A crowd, a cluster of spear-points, and then, against the jail wall, an open space round another ruth, an Englishman on foot, three figures stripped. No; not three! only two, for one had fallen as the crack of a carbine rang through the startled air. Two? But one, now, and that, oh! saints have mercy! the vision! the vision! It was Abool, dodging like a hare, begging for bare life; seeking it, at last, out of the sunshine, under the shadow of the ruth wheels.
"Abool! Abool!" she screamed. "I am here. Come! I am here."
Did he hear the kind voice? He may have, for it echoed clear before the third and final crack of the carbine. So clear that the driver, terrified lest it should bring like punishment on him, drove his goad into the oxen; and the next instant they were careering madly down a side road, bumping over watercourses and ditches. But Newâsi felt no more buffetings. She lay huddled up inside, as unconscious as that other figure which, by Major Hodson's orders, was being dragged out from under the wheels and placed upon it beside the two other corpses for conveyance to the city. And none of all the crowd, ready--so the tale runs--to rescue the Princes lest death should be their portion in the future, raised voice or hand to avenge them now that it had come so ruthlessly, so wantonly. Perhaps the English guard at the Delhi gate cowed them, as it had cowed those who the day before had followed the King so far, then slunk away.
So the little cortège moved on peacefully; far more peacefully than the other ruth, which, with its unconscious burden, was racing Kutb-ward as if it was afraid of the very sunshine. But the Princess Farkhoonda, huddled up in all her jewels and fineries, had forgotten even that; forgotten even that vision seen in it.
But Hodson as he rode at ease behind the dead Princes seemed to court the light. He gloried in the deed, telling himself that "in less than twenty-four hours he had disposed of the principal members of the House of Timoor"; so fulfilling his own words written weeks before, "If I get into the Palace, the House of Timoor will not be worth five minutes' purchase, I ween." Telling himself also, that in shooting down with his own hand men who had surrendered without stipulations to his generosity and clemency, surrendered to a hundred troopers when they had five thousand men behind them, he "had rid the earth of ruffians." Telling himself that he was "glad to have had the opportunity, and was game to face the moral risk of praise or blame."
He got the former unstintingly from most of his fellows as, in triumphant procession, the bodies were taken to the chief police station, there to be exposed, so say eye-witnesses, "In the very spot where, four months before, Englishwomen had been outraged and murdered, in the very place where their helpless victims had lain."
A strange perversion of the truth, responsible, perhaps, not only for the praise, but for the very deed itself; so Mohammed Ismail's barter of his truth and soul for the lives of the forty prisoners at the Kolwâb counted for nothing in the judgment of this world.
But Hodson lacked either praise or blame from one man. John Nicholson lay too near the judgment of another world to be disturbed by vexed questions in this; and when the next morning came, men, meeting each other, said sadly, "He is dead."
The news, brought to Kate Erlton by Captain Morecombe when he came over to report another failure, took the heart out of even her hope.