'My father and my mother!' he said, 'it is no longer possible to hold the people back. It is cried abroad that this English hakkim[7] has given the people powder of pig's feet. Even now they have set upon his house. And to-day is the festival of Krishna. My heart is bursting with grief.'
[7] 'Doctor.'
'If Maun Rao strikes, I can do nothing,' said the Maharajah weakly. 'He thinks the Englishman killed his son. But look you, send Sunni to me. HE saved mine. And I tell you,' said the Maharajah, looking at Surji Rao fiercely with his sunken black eyes, 'not so much of his blood shall be shed as would stain a moth's wing.'
But Maun Rao struck, and the people being told that the missionary was dead, went home hoping that Krishna had nothing more against them; they had done what they could.
As to Sunni he told his grief to Tooni because it comforted him, and went into mourning for nine days in defiance of public opinion, because he owed it to the memory of a countryman. He began, too, to take long restless rambles beyond the gates, and once he asked Tooni if she knew the road to Calcutta.
'It is fifty thousand miles,' said Tooni, who had an imagination; 'and the woods are full of tigers.'
CHAPTER VIII
The gates of Lalpore were shut, and all about her walls the yellow sandy plains stretched silent and empty. There did not seem to be so much as a pariah dog outside. Some pipal-trees looked over the walls, and a couple of very antiquated cannon looked through them, but nothing stirred. It made a splendid picture at broad noon, the blue sky and the old red-stone city on her little hill, holding up her minarets and the white marble bubbles of her temples, and then the yellow sand drifting up; but one could not look at it long. Colonel Starr, from the door of his tent, half a mile away, had looked at it pretty steadily for two hours, so steadily that his eyes, red and smarting with the dust of a two hundred mile ride, watered copiously, and made him several degrees more uncomfortable than he had been before.
I doubt whether any idea of the beauty of Lalpore had a place in the Colonel's mind, it was so full of other considerations. He thought more, probably, of the thickness of its walls than of their colour, and speculated longer upon the position of the arsenal than upon the curves of the temples. Because, in the Colonel's opinion, it had come to look very like fighting. In the opinion of little Lieutenant Pink the fighting should have been over and done with yesterday, and the 17th Midlanders should be 'bagging' the Maharajah's artillery by now. Little Lieutenant Pink was spoiling for the fray. So were the men, most of them. They wanted a change of diet. Thomas Jones, sergeant, entirely expressed the sentiments of his company when he said that somebody ort to pay up for this blessed march, they 'adn't wore the skins off their 'eels fer two 'undred mile to admire the bloomin' scenery. Besides, for Thomas Jones's part, he was tired of living on this yere bloomin' tinned rock, he wanted a bit of fresh roast kid and a Lalpore curry.