For new-made lovers, their tone and bearing was oddly detached, almost brusque. They had gone some distance before they heard shots behind them.
"Thank goodness! At last! I hope it hurt some of them badly," Rose broke out with unusual warmth. She was rather unusual altogether this evening. "Really, it would serve them right—as Mr Hayes says—if we did clear out, lock, stock, and barrel, and leave their precious country to be scrambled for by others of a very different ját[33] from the stupid, splendid British. I'm glad I'm going, anyway. I've never felt in sympathy. And now, after all this ... and Amritsar ... I simply couldn't...."
She broke off in mid-career, flicked her pony's flanks, and set off at a brisk canter.
Pause and action could have but one meaning. "She's realising," thought Roy, cantering after, pain and anger mingled in his heart. At such a moment, he admitted, her outburst was not unnatural. But to him it was, none the less, intolerable. The trouble was, he could say nothing, lest he say too much.
At the Lawrence Hall they found half a company of British soldiers on guard,—producing, by their mere presence, that sense of security which radiates from the policeman and the soldier when the solid ground fails underfoot.
Within doors, the atmosphere was electrical with excitement and uncertainty. Orders had been received that, in case of matters taking a serious turn, the hundred or so of English women and children gathered at the Club would be removed under escort to Government House. No one was dancing. Every one was talking. The wildest rumours were current.
At a crisis the curtains of convention are rent and the inner self peers through, sometimes revealing the face of a stranger. While the imposing Mrs Elton quivered inwardly, Mrs Ranyard—for all her 'creeps' and her fluffiness—knew no flicker of fear. In any case, there were few who would confess to it, though it gnawed at their vitals; and Roy's quick eye noted that, among the women, as a whole, the light-hearted courage of Anglo-India prevailed. It gave him a sharp inner tweak to look at them all and remember that nightmare of seething, yelling rebels at Anarkalli. He wished to God Rose had not seen it too. It was the kind of thing that would stick in the memory.
On their appearance in the Hall, Mrs Elton deserted a voluble group and bore down upon them, flustered and perspiring.
"My darling girl—thank God! I've been in a fever!" she cried, and would have engulfed her stately daughter before them all, but that Rose put out a deterring hand.
"I was afraid you'd be upset—so we hurried," she said serenely; not the Rose of Anarkalli, by any means. "But we were all right along the Mozung road."