CONCLUSION.
Day by day Herbert made progress towards recovery, and with peace of mind returned strength and vigour. He had been ill for nearly a fortnight before the time we speak of, and had been tended with that constant and unremitting solicitude by his dear friends and brothers, which can easily be imagined, but not easily described. There was another too, the brave Kasim Ali, who had been quickly summoned to Philip’s tent after the arrival of the lost one, and who had rejoiced in his recovery with joy as genuine as the others.
‘How often I told you to hope, Sahib,’ he would exclaim, as he looked on the joy of the friends, and their love for each other. ‘How often I said he was not dead; that the Sultaun (may his sepulchre be honoured!) would not destroy him.’
And then they would shake their heads, and think that if the Sultaun had been alive, how little would have been the chance of their ever meeting again upon earth.
‘You appear to cling to his memory with fondness,’ said Dalton, in reply to a burst of praise which Kasim had uttered; ‘yet he used you ill, and would have killed you.’
‘I do,’ he replied; ‘he was a great man—such an one as Hind will never see again. He had great ambition, wonderful ability, perseverance, and the art of leading men’s hearts more than they were aware of, or cared to acknowledge; he had patient application, and nothing was done without his sanction, even to the meanest affairs, and the business of his dominions was vast. You will allow he was brave, and died like a soldier. He was kind and considerate to his servants, and a steady friend to those he loved. Mashalla! he was a great man.’
‘Yet he was treacherous to you, Meer Sahib,’ said Philip.
‘Ay, and had he not been so, ye might now have been far from hence. Ye see, sirs, the power of destiny, which, working even by such mean instruments as myself and Jaffar, has wrought great ends.’
‘What treachery?’ said Herbert. ‘I have wondered to see thee here in the English camp, but thought thou mightest have been admitted to protection like the rest of the Sultaun’s officers.’
‘It is a long tale,’ said Kasim, ‘but your brother, the colonel, knows much of it already, and he will tell it to you.’