FOOTNOTES:
[3] Nana Sahib was first referred to as “The Tiger of Cawnpore” by the Times.
[4] This is no exaggerated description. The room was exactly as described.
CHAPTER XV. AS ARMOUR IMPENETRABLE.
At the end of a block of buildings attached to the Rajah of Bhitoor’s Palace was a lofty, square tower, rising to the height of sixty feet, and crowned with a gilded cupola. It was a massive stone structure, and contained many apartments, used as the lodgings of the Nana’s retainers. From the basement to the roof there straggled, in wild profusion, a tough rope-like Indian parasite, a species of ivy, with reddish leaves. The beauty of the whole building was materially enhanced by this plat, that insinuated itself into every crevice, and twined gracefully round every angle. It was a conspicuous mark in the landscape, was this ivy-covered tower. It asserted its presence over all other erections; it rose up with a sort of braggadocio air, like unto a tall bully, and as if it said, “I am here. Who is as great as I?”
It had been witness to many a strange scene. If its time-stained stones could have spoken, many and curious would have been the tales they would have had to tell.
Quarrels deadly and bloody had taken place beneath its roof. There, too, had the Indian maid listened to the voice of the charmer. English officers had made it their quarters in the balmy days of the H.E.I.C., and its walls had given back the echo of the shouts of many a Bacchanalian revel. Life and death, laughter and tears, storm and calm, had it seen. But it was doomed to witness one scene yet such as it had never witnessed before.
In the topmost room of all, up next to the stars, and from the windows of which one looked from a dizzy height on to the roofs of many buildings that rose on all sides, and away over the city to the plains and the broken jungles, and followed the course of the “sacred Gunga,” that, like a silver thread, ran tortuously through the landscape, sat a maid, an English lady. It was Flora Meredith. It was the night of the day upon which Sir Hugh Wheeler had had an interview with Nana Sahib, and she was watching the fireworks that were being let off in the Palace grounds. That is, if one might be said to be watching who looked but saw not; whose eyes, while fixed there, were looking beyond, from the past—the happy, bright, and sunny past—to the future, the unknown, the dark, the awful future.