“About eight miles.”
“I wonder why the Begum was so insistent that we should go back along the Grand Trunk Road?”
Mayne hesitated. He knew that Winifred was listening.
“It is hard to account for the vagaries of a woman’s mind, or, shall I say, of the mind of such a woman,” he answered lightly. “You will remember that when you came to our assistance outside Meerut she was determined to take us, willy-nilly, to Delhi.”
Malcolm, who had heard Roshinara’s impassioned speech and looked into her blazing eyes, thought that her motives were stronger than mere caprice. He never dreamed of the true reason, but he feared that she knew Cawnpore had fallen and her curiously friendly regard for himself might have inspired her advice. Here, again, Winifred’s presence tied his tongue.
“Well,” he said, with a cheerless laugh, “I, at any rate, must endeavor to reach Wheeler. I am supposed to be bearing despatches, but they were taken from me when I was knocked off my horse in the village—”
“Were you attacked?” asked Winifred, and the quiet solicitude in her voice was sweetest music in her lover’s ears.
His brief recital of the night’s adventures was followed by the story of the others’ journey and detention at Bithoor. It may be thought that Mr. Mayne, with his long experience of India, should have read more clearly the sinister lesson to be derived from the treatment meted out that night to a British Officer by the detachment of sowars, amplified, as it was, by their open references to the Nana as a Maharajah. But he was not yet disillusioned. And, if his judgment were at fault, he erred in good company, for Sir Henry Lawrence, Chief Commissioner at Lucknow, was even then resisting the appeals, the almost insubordinate urging, of the headstrong Martin Gubbins that the sepoys in the capital of Oudh should be disarmed.
Meanwhile the boat lurched onward. Soon a red glow in the sky proclaimed that they were nearing Cawnpore. Though well aware that the European houses were on fire, they were confident that the Magazine would be held. They helped Akhab Khan, Chumru, and the two troopers to rig a pair of long sweeps, and prepared to guide the budgerow to the landing-place.
Winifred was stationed at the rudder. As it chanced the three sowars took one oar and Chumru helped the sahibs with the other, and the two sets of rowers were partly screened from each other by the horses. Malcolm was saying something to Winifred when the native bent near him and whispered: