How alert it sounded! How reminiscent of the old days! How full of promise of the days that were to come!
He leaned out and smiled as he told a stolid private of the 64th that he was “a friend.” His uniform acted as a passport, the dâk-gharry crossed the drawbridge and crept through a narrow tunnel, and he found himself standing in the great inner parade-ground of the fort. A young officer approached.
“Do you wish to see the General? Whom shall I report?” he asked, eyeing the worn appearance and torn and blood-stained uniforms of Englishman and native.
“I am from Lucknow,” said Frank. “Will you kindly tell General Havelock that Captain Malcolm of the 3d Cavalry has brought him a message from Sir Henry Lawrence?”
It was the first time he had described himself by his new rank. It sent a pleasant tingle through his veins and made that injured arm of his ache again. Lawrence had given him to the 4th, and here he was in Allahabad on the very date of his Chief’s reckoning, after having gone through adventures that would have satiated Ulysses.
But the pardonable pride of a young and gallant soldier soon yielded an inexplicable sensation of humility when he was brought before a small, slender, erect man, gray-haired, eagle-nosed, with strangely bright and piercing eyes, and a mouth habitually set in a thin, straight line. This was Sir Henry Havelock, and Frank felt instantly that he was in the presence of one who lived in a world apart from his fellows. And, in truth, Havelock would have been better understood by Cromwell’s Ironsides than by his own generation. He was outside the ordinary run of mankind. Though aware of a natural timidity, he fought with and conquered it until his soldiers refused to believe that Havelock knew what fear was. Conscious of his own military genius he had borne without comment or complaint a constant supersession by inferiors, and in an age when levity of thought and manners among officers was often looked upon as the hall-mark of distinguished social position, he lost no opportunity of giving his men religious instruction, while every act of his life was governed by a stern sense of duty.
Such was the man who listened to Malcolm’s account of the proceedings which led up to the disastrous battle of Chinhut.
“You say you rode straight from the field on the evening of the 30th,” said he, when Frank had delivered his message of Lucknow’s plight. “How did you travel, and in what state did you find the country you traversed?”
Then Frank told him all that had taken place. More than once the young officer would have cut short the recital, but this Havelock would not permit. His son was present, that younger Havelock who lived for forty years to keep ever in the public memory a glorious name, and often the father would turn towards him and punctuate Malcolm’s tale with a nod, or a brief, “Do you hear that, Harry?”