There were found two slips of paper: one bearing in an unknown hand a brief but correct outline of our disasters. On the other a Miss Lindsay had kept an account of the killed and wounded in a single family. It runs thus, telling its own tale:
"Entered the barracks May 21st.
Cavalry left June 5th.
First shot fired June 6th.
Aunt Lilly died June 17th.
Uncle Willy died June 18th.
Left barracks June 27th.
George died June 27th.
Alice died July 9th.
Mamma died July 12th."
The writer, with her two surviving sisters, perished in the final massacre.
The library of the captives was small indeed: but such books as they had were to the purpose. The earliest comers discovered among the vestiges of slaughter a treatise, entitled "Preparation for Death:" and a bible, which must have travelled in Major Vibart's barge down to Nuzzufgur and back to Cawnpore, as may be gathered from the following record:
"27th June. Went to the boats.
29th. Taken out of boats.
30th. Taken to Sevadah Kothi. Fatal day."
Fatal indeed: for that was the day when "the wives sat down, each by her husband;" when "the sepoys, going in, pulled them away forcibly; but could not pull away the doctor's wife, who there remained;" when "one Sahib rolled one way, and one another, as they sat." That bible was a present from the dead to the dead: for on the fly-leaf appeared this address: "For darling Mamma, from her affectionate daughter, Isabella Blair:" the "Bella Blair," whose fate is mentioned in the letter from young Masters to his father. The list was closed by a church service, from which the cover had been stripped, and many pages at the end torn off. Unbound and incomplete, it had fulfilled its mission: for it opened of itself where, within a crumpled and crimson-sprinkled margin, might be read the concise and beautiful supplications of our Litany. It concluded, that mutilated copy, with the forty-seventh Psalm, wherein David thanks the Almighty for a victory and a saving mercy:
"O, clap your hands together, all ye people: O, sing unto God with the voice of melody. He shall subdue the people under us: and the nations under our feet. God is gone up with a merry noise, and the Lord with the sound of a trump. God rejoiceth over the heathen: God sitteth on his holy seat. God, which is very high exalted, doth defend the earth, as it were with a shield."
Such were the printed lines which, from amidst the rent tresses, and shivered toys, and the scraps of muslin dyed with the most costly of all pigments, lay staring up to high heaven in tacit but impressive irony.
It is good that the house and the well of horror have been replaced by a fair garden and a graceful shrine. But there let piety stay her hand. A truce thenceforward to that mistaken reverence which loves to express sorrow and admiration in guineas, and rupees, and the net product of fancy bazaars! Too often already have architect and sculptor disguised the place where a notable thing was done. India still contains some sacred plots untouched by the art of the decorator,—some shapeless ruins more venerable than dedicated aisle or stately mausoleum. Still, amidst the fantastic edifices of Lucknow, hard by a shattered gateway, rise or lie prostrate the pillars of a grass-grown portico. Beneath that verandah, in the July evening, preferring the risk of the hostile missiles to the confinement of a stifling cellar, was dying Henry Lawrence, the man who tried to do his duty. It was not time and the weather that made bare of plaster the brickwork of the old gate. There from summer into winter,—until of his two hundred musketeers he had buried four-score and five, and sent to hospital three-score and sixteen,—earning his Cross in ragged flannel trousers and a jersey of dubious hue, burly Jack Aitken bore up the unequal fray. An Englishman does not require any extraneous incentives to emotion when, leaning against the beams of that archway, he recalls who have thereby gone in and out, bent on what errands, and thinking what thoughts. Between those door-posts have walked Peel, and Havelock, and gentle Outram, and stout Sir Colin, heroes who no longer tread the earth. Through the same entrance passed, but not erect, the form of a tall grey soldier, stern even in death, with a bullet-wound in the centre of his forehead, whom the orderlies announced in whispers to be Neill of the Madras army. At Delhi still, before the police-court in the Street of Silver, may be seen the platform whereon, naked to the waist and besmeared with dirt and blood, were exposed to three autumn suns the corpses of the last descendants of Timour, slain and spoiled by one who knew neither pity nor scruple. Still, after an evening stroll along the ridge outside the battlements, as on his return he descends the slope rough with crag and brushwood, the visitor may come upon a mound of rubbish so beaten with shot that it is not easy to discern what of it is artificial rampart, and what is broken ground. The rocks coated with frequent films of lead, and the wreck of a small temple, testify that this is the famous post, known in military history as the "Sammy-house picket," which Briton, and Sikh, and Ghoorka, fighting shoulder to shoulder, hardly made good throughout the hundred days of the terrible siege. On the summit of the tottering dome, at a height of some twelve feet from the soil, presides a Hindoo idol with an elephant's head. There he sits, a stupid little god, with arms reposing on his knees, gazing across the valley at the minarets of the ancient capital, as though he had never seen any stranger sight than the tourist in his white dress and dust-coloured helmet, or heard any sounds more wild and maddening than the chirping of the grasshoppers, and the lowing of the belated cattle as they stray homeward to their stalls. Not urn, nor monolith, nor broken column is so fit a monument for brave men as the crumbling breastwork and the battered wall. And in like manner the dire agony of Cawnpore needs not to be figured in marble, or cut into granite, or cast of bronze. There is no fear lest we should forget the story of our people. The whole place is their tomb, and the name thereof is their epitaph. When the traveller from Allahabad, rousing himself to learn at what stage of his journey he may have arrived, is aware of a voice proclaiming through the darkness the city of melancholy fame,—then those accents, heard for the first time on the very spot itself which they designate, recall, more vividly than written or engraven eloquence, the memory of fruitless valour and unutterable woe.