Friends now met friends from whom they had been so long and painfully separated; wives threw themselves exultingly and passionately into the arms of their husbands; daughters leaned upon their fathers' breasts and wept. Many there were whose widowed hearts had none to meet them there; and many an orphan child stretched forth its little hands to the ranks wherein its father marched no more, though some might give a kiss or a caress to "Tom Brown's little 'un—Tom that was killed at Ghuznee," or to the "little lass of Corporal Smith—poor Jack that was killed with his missus at Khoord Cabul;" but these sad episodes were soon forgotten amid the general joy.
Wheeled round on the mountain slope, the artillery thundered forth a royal salute; muskets and swords were brandished in the sunshine; caps tossed up, to be caught and tossed up again; reiterated English cheers woke the echoes of the hills of Jubeaiz, which seemed to repeat the sounds of joy to the winds again and again.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE DURBAR.
"Coincidence," saith Ouida, "is a god that greatly influences human affairs;" and the sequel to our story will prove the truth of this trite aphorism, when we now change the scene from Cabul to our cantonment, in the territory between the Sutledge and the Jumna—to the Court Sanatorium of Bengal—the country mansion of the Governor-General at Simla, a beautiful little town of some five hundred houses, built on the slope of the mighty Himalayas, where, amid a veritable forest of oak, evergreens, and rhododendron, and the loveliest flora a temperate zone can produce, surrounded by that wondrous assemblage of snow-covered peaks that rise in every imaginable shape (a portion of those bulwarks of the world, that slope from the left bank of the Indus away to the steppes of Tartary and the marshes of Siberia), the representative of the Queen retires periodically to refresh exhausted nature, and mature the plans of government in those cool and pleasant recesses, where the punkah is no longer requisite; where one may sleep without dread of mosquitos and green bugs, nor welcome cold tea at noon as preferable to iced champagne.
By the time that Audley Trevelyan had reached this occasional seat of government—the Balmoral of India—Lord Auckland, whose vacillation and mismanagement of the Cabul campaign gave great umbrage, had returned to Britain, and another Governor-General had arrived—one who boldly stigmatised the Afghan project of his predecessor (now created an earl) "as a folly, and that it yet remained to be seen whether it might not prove a crime;" and so Audley presented, of necessity, the reports and Jellalabad despatches of Sir Robert Sale to this new Viceroy, whose firmness of character and past promise as a statesman gave a guerdon that we should yet retrieve all that we had lost of prestige beyond the Indus; to which end he took the executive power from the weak hands of those secretaries to whom it had been previously committed, and resolved to wield it himself, though he found in India a treasury well-nigh empty, an army exasperated, and the hearts of men depressed by fears for the future.
But tidings of the storming of Ghuznee by General Nott, of the advance upon Cabul, the recapture of it after our victory at Tizeen, and the rescue of the hostages, followed so quickly upon each other to Simla, that soon after the arrival of Audley, he was informed that as there would be no necessity for his return to Jellalabad, he was to remain provisionally attached to the staff, either till he could rejoin his regiment, or our troops re-entered the Punjaub—a little slice of India, having a population equal to all that of England. So by this arrangement he found himself a mere idler, a dangler attached to the Viceregal court, where now the glorious war that Napier was to inaugurate against the treacherous Ameers of Scinde was schemed out, and where a series of reviews, dinners, balls, and a durbar, or assembly of the native princes, was proposed to welcome Pollock's troops when they came down country, and were once again, as the Viceroy expressed it, in "our native territories;" and the programme of all those gayeties was to be fully arranged when his lady and other ladies of the mimic court arrived, after the rainy season, which continues there from June till the middle of September, was nearly over.
On the first day of October, when her ladyship and the suite were to arrive, the durbar of native princes was to be held, and the final proclamation of the Governor-General concerning the affairs of Afghanistan was to be read aloud and issued. As this was but an instance of Anglo-Indian pageantry, though Audley Trevelyan rode amid the brilliant staff of his Excellency, and it all led to something of more interest, we shall only notice it briefly.
The durbar was, indeed, a magnificent spectacle! On a great plateau of brilliant green, smooth as English turf, that lies near the ridge which is crowned by the white plastered mansions of Simla, dotted here and there and finally bordered by dark clumps of heavily foliaged oaks, towering rhododendrons, and over all by mighty, spire-like Himalayan pines; it took place under a clear and lovely sky, and the locality was indeed picturesque and impressive; for in the distance, as a background, towered that wonderful sea of snow-clad peaks, covered with eternal whiteness—peaks between which lie the deep paths and passes that lead to Chinese Tartary, the wilderness of Lop, and the deserts of Gobi. Here and there amid the green clumps and gardens full of rare trees and lovely flowers, a white marble dome, or a tall and needle-like minaret, each stone thereof a miracle of carving, broke the line of the clear blue cloudless sky.
On this auspicious occasion all the Rajahs, Maharajahs, chiefs, Maliks, Sirdirs, and other men of rank, from the protected Sikh territory that lies between the Sutledge and the Jumna, and even from beyond it, were present with their trains of followers, in all the gorgeous richness of oriental costume, bright with plumage, silks, and satins, brilliant with arms and the jewels of a land where sapphires and diamonds, rubies and opals, seem to be plentiful as pebbles are by the wayside in Europe.