‘Go!’ said he to the man, recollecting himself, ‘thou are but the instrument of others; go—may Alla give thee a better heart! Tell thy master I recognise his work; and bid him say to the Sultaun, or say it thyself—the love that was between us is broken for ever. Go!’
‘Let us press on, my friends,’ said Kasim, ‘not by the road, but by bye-paths. Though I know not what vengeance I have provoked, ye see I am not safe.’
They did so, and it was well that they travelled fast, for the baffled tiger raved at the loss of his prey, and many men pursued Kasim and his companions, but in vain.
CHAPTER XLVII.
The morning of the twenty-sixth of April 1798 was a scene of universal excitement in the fort of Seringapatam. As the day advanced, crowds of men collected in the great square before the palace; soldiers in their gayest costumes, horsemen, and caparisoned elephants, which always waited upon the Sultaun and his officers. The roofs of the houses around, those of the palace particularly, the old temples, and the flat terraces of its courts and dhurrumsalas, even the trees were crowded with human beings, on the gay colours of whose dresses a brighter sun had never shone. There arose from the mighty mass of garrulous beings a vast hubbub of sounds, increased by the Sultaun’s loud kettle-drums, the martial music of the band of a French regiment, the shrill blasts of the collery horns, neighings of horses and trumpetings of elephants, as they were urged hither and thither.
No one in this soberly-dressed land can have an idea of the gorgeous appearance of these spectacles; for an eastern crowd, from the endless variety of its bright colours, and the picturesqueness and grace of its costumes,—its gaily caparisoned horses, elephants, and camels,—is of all others in the world the most beautiful and impressive.
In the centre of the square was an open space, kept by French soldiers; in the middle of this stood a small tree, which had been uprooted and planted there; but already its leaves had faded and drooped. It was covered with gay ribbons of all colours and of gold and silver tissue, which fluttered in the fresh breeze and glittered in the sun: this was surmounted by a spear, on which was the red cap of liberty, the fearful emblem of the French revolution.
Around it were many French officers, some dressed fantastically and crowned with wreaths of green leaves, others in brilliant uniforms, their plumes and feathers waving. Many of them spoke with excited gestures from time to time, and swore round oaths at the Sultaun’s delay; for the sun had climbed high into the heaven, and no shade was there to save them from its now scorching beams.
The amicable issue of the embassy to Paris, sent by Tippoo in 1788, had been exaggerated by the envoys to enhance their consequence; and the French officers in his service had by every possible means in their power kept this feeling alive. When the revolution broke out, the roar of which faintly reached the Sultaun of Mysore, it was represented to him by those of the French nation who were there, in such terms of extravagant eulogium, while its bloody cruelties were concealed, or, if mentioned, declared to be acts of retributive justice, that the Sultaun’s mind, itself a restless chaos of crude ideas of perpetual changes and progression, eagerly caught at the frenzied notions of liberty which the Frenchmen preached. At the same time it is almost impossible to conceive how an Asiatic monarch born to despotism could have endured such an anomaly as his position presents—one who with the most petty jealousy and suspicion resisted any restriction of, or interference with, his absolute will and direction of all affairs, even to the most minute and unimportant of his government, whether civil or military.