"But the crimes we charge against him are not lapses, defects, errors of common human frailty which, as we know and feel, we can allow for. There are no crimes that have not arisen from passions which it is criminal to harbour, no offences that have not their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper; in short, in nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart dyed ingrain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core."
"Confound his Billingsgate!" murmured Tom Gordon softly. "What good does it do--anybody?"
"H'sh!" came the warning feminine whisper; "his accent is really very good."
Tom shifted uneasily, and once again the strenuous, eager voice, struggling bravely against the harshness of the English language, was the only sound held in the white walls of the Mission School at Ilmpur, a little Punjab town set in a waste of sand. The hot sunshine slanted across it in broad, golden rays from the upper windows, to lay broad, yellow squares on the cool whitewash. Through the doors, set open to the air on all sides, the same hot, yellow sunshine slanted in on the upturned faces of the students, all bent--with elation in their looks--on the prize English speaker, who was declaiming his set speech out of Burke's famous impeachment of Warren Hastings. Declaiming it before, as the local paper put it, "Mr. Commissioner Gordon and his good lady, Mr. Tom Gordon, a fine young man worthy of his great father who has lately entered India from Eton in quest of police post, the beautiful Miss Gordon, and many others of European renown, including natives of high official positions, who have honoured the Reverends Freemantle and Smith with attendance at their mission-school prizegiving."
They sat in a semicircle on the dais. A quaint company. Mr. Commissioner Gordon, with a painstakingly pious expression on his grizzly red-bearded face, inwardly rehearsing the speech he would have to make in his turn; his good lady nervously eyeing the gilt books which she would have to give away, spread out on the table before her. It was covered with a royal red cloth, and on it stood a packed posy of jasmine blossoms and marigolds. The odour of the crushed blossoms mingled with the confused scent of cocoanut oil, roses, and curry powder which is inseparable from every Indian assembly. On one side of the Commissioner sat the Reverend Freemantle, a gentleman with a beard grown white in the service of education. Mild, placid, benevolent, his face beamed out over his students. They were all doing well, and Gunpat-Rai was simply excelling himself by showing complete mastery over both vowels and consonants. Indeed, in the whole semicircle of eager teachers and approvers upon the platform there was not to be seen a dissentient expression; and one zenana-worker positively wept tears of joy, because it was through her dreary daily drudgery amongst fetid alleys and sunless back courts that the prize pupil had originally come to the mission-school.
Otherwise he might have remained as his father had remained all his life, proprietor of an odd little shop right away from all other shops, where they sold matches and oil, flour and earthenware dishes, string and pipe-bowls--everything, in fact, which might suddenly be wanted in the big, high, tenement houses that elbowed and shouldered the little dark lane.
"The law is the security of the people of England! It is the security of the people of India!"
Gunpat-Rai's voice, overtaxed, almost broke over the climax of Burke's rhodomontade, but the tumultuous, undisciplined applause which followed, covered the fact, and he sat down feeling dazed, confused. It was the first time he had ever spoken in public, and he had found that he had not been afraid. That, in itself, was disturbing--he had not felt afraid!
Meanwhile, Mr. Commissioner Gordon's loud voice was bombarding the wall with fitful explosions of words which reverberated amidst an echo of hesitating stutters.
"Gives me great pleasure, unalloyed pleasure to--er--er--er--to--to see Indian youth--er--er--er--taking their place with--with--er--er--er----" Here a glance at his son--who, after the manner of sons when their fathers are speaking, was burying his face in his hands--seemed to supply the lacking phrase--"with the youth of England."