In one respect the sepoy commander’s death was as serious to his cause as the loss of Nicholson to the English. The rebels, fighting fiercely enough in small detachments, but no longer controlled by a man who knew how to use their vastly superior numbers, allowed themselves to be dealt with in detail. Soon the British attack was properly organized, and a six days’ orgy of destruction began.
Although no Briton was seen to injure a woman or child in the streets or houses of Delhi, the avenging army spared no man. Unhappily thousands of harmless citizens were slaughtered side by side with the mutineers. The British had received a great provocation and they exacted a terrible payment. On the 20th the gates of the palace were battered in and the British flag was hoisted from its topmost turret. Then, and not till then, did Delhi fall. The last of the Moguls was driven from the halls which had witnessed the grandeur and pomp of his imperial predecessors, and the great city passed into the hands of the new race that had come to leaven the decaying East. It was a dearly-bought triumph. On September 14 the conquering army lost sixty-six officers and eleven hundred and four men. Between May 30 and September 20 the total British casualties were nearly four thousand.
Malcolm soon learnt that the Princess Roshinara had fled with her father and brothers. Probably the death of Akhab Khan had unnerved her, and she dared not trust to the mercy of the victors. Frank was among the first to enter the palace. After a few fanatical ghazees were made an end of, he hurried towards the zenana. It was empty. He searched its glittering apartments with feverish anxiety, but he met no human being until some men of the 75th entered and began to prise open boxes and cupboards in the search for loot.
After that his duties took him to the Ridge, and it was not until all was over that he heard how Hodson had captured the King and shot the royal princes with his own hand. This tragedy took place on the road from Humayun’s Tomb, whither the wretched monarch retreated when it was seen that Delhi must yield. Hodson claimed to be an executioner, not a murderer. He held that he acted under the pressure of a mob, intent on rescuing Mirza Moghul, the heir apparent, and his brother and son. That all three were cowardly ruffians and merciless in their treatment of the English captured in Delhi on May 11, cannot be denied, but Hodson’s action was condemned by many, and it was perhaps as well that he found a soldier’s grave during Colin Campbell’s advance on Lucknow.
It was there that the fortune of war next brought Malcolm. Delhi had scarce quieted down after the storm and fury of the week’s street fighting when Havelock, re-enforced by Outram, drove the relief force through the insurgent ring around the Residency like some stout ship forcing her way to port through a raging sea.
No sooner had he entered the entrenchment on the 25th of September than the rebel waves surged together again in his rear, and on the 27th the Residency was again invested almost as closely as ever. But the new column infused vigor and hope in the hearts of a garrison that had ceased even to despair. Apathy, a quiet waiting for death, was the prevalent attitude in Lucknow until the Highland bonnets were seen tossing above the last line of mutineers that tried to bar their passage through the streets. At once the besieged took up the offensive. The lines were greatly extended, the enemy’s advanced posts were carried with the bayonet, troublesome guns were seized and spiked and the rebel mining operations summarily stopped.
Two days before Havelock’s little army cut its way into Lucknow, Ungud, the pensioner, crept in to the retrenchment and announced the coming relief. He was not believed. Twice already had he brought that cheering message and events had falsified his news.
Winifred, a worn and pallid Winifred by this time, sought him and asked for tidings of Malcolm. He had none. There was a rumor that Delhi had fallen, and an officer had told him that there was a Major Malcolm on Nicholson’s staff. That was all. Not a letter, not a sign, came to reassure the heart-broken girl, so the joy of Havelock’s arrival was dimmed for her by the uncertainty that obtained in regard to her lover’s fate.
Then the dreadful waiting began again. After having endured a plague of heat in the hot weather, the remnant of the original garrison was subjected to the torment of cold in the months that followed. In Upper India the change of temperature is so remarkably sudden that it is incomprehensible to those who live in more favored climes. Early in October the thermometer falls by many degrees each day. The reason is, of course, that the diminishing power of the sun permits the earth to throw off by night the heat, always intense, stored during the day. Something in the nature of an atmospheric vacuum is thus created, and the resultant cold continues until the opposite effect brings about the lasting heat of the summer months, which begin about March 15 in that part of India.
But scientific explanations of unpleasant phenomena are poor substitutes for scanty clothing. In some respects the last position of the beleaguered garrison was worse than the first, and the days wore on in seemingly endless misery, until absolutely authentic intelligence arrived on November 9, that Sir Colin Campbell was at Bunnee and would march forthwith to relieve the Residency.