The Advanced-Guard

by Sydney C. Grier

Shir Hussein was a man who knew when he was beaten. His first overwhelming success was entirely unexpected, for, once run to earth, he had only hoped to make his fortress a hard nut to crack, and keep the Shah Nawaz detachment occupied with it for some time, while he stood out for better terms. When he found all his approaches commanded by marksmen posted among the rocks, and learned that it was the height of folly for a man to show so much as his head above the parapet, he congratulated himself on having made such an impression upon the foe that they had decided upon a blockade rather than an assault, and made up his mind that he could hold out for weeks. But when a small group of men and two disagreeable-looking objects made their appearance at the top of a precipitous cliff, the steepness of which seemed to suggest that wings would be needed to get guns up there, and a far from charming variety of round-shot, shell, and grape began to fall inside his enclosure, Shir Hussein followed the example of the historic coon, and intimated that he would surrender without further persuasion. The resistance had been much too brief to satisfy the outraged feelings of the regiment and its Commandant, but it afforded these some relief to blow up the fort, and tumble the shattered fragments down into the valley. Major Keeling ordered a halt at Shah Nawaz on the way back, that he might install Lieutenant Jones there a second time in place of Ferrers, whom he had already suspended; but found to his disgust that there was no punishment involved in this, since Ferrers had just received his appointment as envoy to Gamara. The only thing to be done was to cold-shoulder him out of the province as quickly as possible.

“Envoy or no envoy,” said Major Keeling savagely to Lady Haigh in a rare moment of confidence, “I’d have court-martialled him if it hadn’t been for the private grudge between us. You can’t go persecuting the man who’s cut you out.”

Ferrers’ departure from Alibad, hurried and almost ignominious as it was, was not wholly without its compensations, for Penelope and he were drawn nearer together than ever before by their common anxiety about Colin. Ferrers was so genuinely anxious and distressed for his friend that he could think of nothing else, and his farewells to Penelope consisted almost entirely of charges to take care of Colin, and to let him know exactly how he was getting on. Penelope was not likely to resent this preoccupation—indeed, she caught herself reflecting what a sympathising friend she might have been to Ferrers if he had not insisted upon being regarded as a lover,—and she parted from him with kinder feelings than she would have thought possible before. Thus he started on his journey to the river, whence he was to cross the desert to the eastward and to travel to Calcutta, so as to receive his orders and credentials from the Government before he betook himself beyond the bounds of civilisation. Major Keeling saw him depart with unconcealed pleasure, and promptly ordered up from the river to replace him a young officer on whom he had had his eye for some time, sowing the seeds of future trouble by seconding him from his regiment and appointing him to the Khemistan Horse on his own authority.

As for Ferrers, he discovered very soon that his mission was not likely to be either an easy or a particularly glorious one. When the unfortunate Lieutenant Whybrow had disappeared, the Government expressed its official regret at his probable fate, and seemed to think it had done all that could be expected of it. But Whybrow had possessed relations and many friends, and these were so unreasonable as to hold the opinion that the Government was responsible for the lives of its accredited agents. They induced a section of the home press to take up the subject, and there was something like an agitation about it in London. Finding that it was not to be left alone, the Government decided on a compromise. Nothing but overwhelming physical force could bring the fanatics of Gamara to their knees, and this could only have been applied by an army, under the command of Sir Henry Lennox or an officer of his calibre, whose calculated rashness might, like Faith, “laugh at impossibilities, and say, It shall be done.” But no one would have ventured to propose such an expedition at this time, and it was therefore determined to try moral suasion once more. Ferrers was supplied with the means of obtaining abundance of money (which was to be rigorously accounted for), but denied an escort; instructed to obtain the release of Whybrow, if he was still alive, by all possible means, but strictly forbidden to indulge in threats which might seem to pledge the Government to take action. To most people the affair seemed hopeless from the first; but Ferrers’ failing was not a lack of self-confidence, and he felt that he had it in him to secure success where other men would only suffer signal defeat.

His journey to Gamara seemed to justify him in this opinion, for it was a triumph of what a later age has learnt to call bluff. Taking with him only his personal servants, he attached himself, for the greater part of the way, to a trading caravan, and speedily made himself the chief person in it. It could only be some very important man, with unlimited power behind him, who would dare to adopt such an insolent demeanour, and bully his travelling companions so unconcernedly, thought the merchants. Somewhat sulkily they accepted him at his own valuation, and the marches and halting-places came to be settled by reference to him. He it was also who rebuked the guides when it was necessary, bringing those haughty mountaineers to reason by displaying a proficiency in many-tongued abuse which astonished them, and who forced the headmen of inhospitable villages to turn out of their own houses for his accommodation. True, the merchants sometimes looked forward with misgiving to the next time they would traverse these regions, when there would be no champion to help them; but such a splendid opportunity of paying off old grudges was not to be let slip, and the caravan led by the overbearing Farangi was long a proverb on the route.

When the mountains had been crossed, and the irrigated plains of Gamara were in view, the caravan broke up into several portions, and Ferrers pursued his way to the city in company with one of these. His heart was high, for his reputation had preceded him, and the villagers received him with marked respect. It was clear, he thought, that the men who went before him had failed by going to work too gently, and truckling to the prejudices of the people. The right thing was to go on one’s way regardless of opposition, to browbeat the haughty and meet the insolent with an insolence greater than their own, and in general to act as no sane man, alone and without support in a hostile country, could be expected to act. The natives, like his fellow-travellers, would conclude that he had some mysterious reserve of strength, or he could never be so bold. Thus he saw without misgiving the distant masses of green which marked the neighbourhood of the city, and rode calmly along the narrow dikes, which were the only roads between the sunken fields, without a thought of turning back while there was time. Dimly seen through their screen of trees, the brick towers and earthen ramparts of Gamara had nothing very terrible about them, and was not Ferrers entering the place as an accredited envoy, with permission from the Khan to reside there until the business on which he came was done? Even the contemptible little dispute into which he was forced by the action of the officials at the gate, who wished to make him dismount from his horse, did not trouble him. What did it signify that the law of Gamara forbade a Christian to ride in her streets? He, at least, was going to ride where he liked, and ride he did. It was when he had passed triumphantly through the gate that he was first conscious of a sense of uneasiness, of a feeling that a net was closing round him. The city boasted flourishing bazaars, and streets bordered by canals of clear water and shaded by trees, but his way did not lie through them. Possibly by reason of his self-assertion at the gate, or merely in order to avoid the crowds which thronged the business part of the town, he was led through the dullest bylanes of the residential quarter. The narrow alleys through which he passed looked absolutely blank, the houses on either side presenting nothing but high bare walls to the public eye. Their roofs were flat, and such windows as there were looked into the inner courtyards. It was like passing a never-ending succession of prison-walls with occasional doors. Where the line was broken by a mosque, which generally served also as a college, there was some little relief in the shape of stately dome and lofty minaret, and occasional dashes of colour produced by the use of enamelled tiles; but it gave forth a throng of young fanatics clad in black, who made outrageous remarks about the Kafir, which were as audible to their object as they were intended to be. For convenience’ sake, and to avoid attracting a crowd round him by his mere presence, Ferrers had made the journey in native dress; but he had not attempted to alter his appearance in any other respect, and his fair colouring rendered him distinguishable at once.

Having presented his credentials to the favourite who occupied the position of the Khan’s foreign minister for the nonce, he was received with suitable compliments, and assured that his arrival had been expected, and a house and servants prepared for him. He was half afraid that this house might prove to be within the circuit of the inner wall enclosing the hill on which the Khan’s palace and the public offices stood, in which case he would have anticipated the possibility of foul play, but it turned out to be one of the ordinary houses of the town. It was furnished sufficiently, according to oriental ideas, with carpets and cushions; the servants in it accepted with remarkably little friction the direction of those he had brought with him; and when he had seen to the securing of the door opening into the street, he felt that what looked like a prison from without might be a fortress from within.

CHAPTER XV.
A LAND OF DARKNESS AND THE SHADOW OF DEATH.

After a night’s rest Ferrers prepared to pursue the inquiry on which he had come, but he found that the blank walls of the city were only a type of the passive opposition to be offered to his efforts. The mob of the place was so fanatical and so threatening that, as he persisted in maintaining his right to ride, he found it advisable to comply with the request of the Khan’s advisers, and only show himself when he was to be granted an audience at the palace or the house of one of the ministers. Visitors he had none—none at least of the type that in most oriental cities delights in calling upon a new-comer and spending long hours in eliciting all manner of useless information. Gamara was the scene of a perpetual reign of terror, exercised from above by the Khan, and from below by the mob, reinforced by the hordes of theological students, and between these two forces the mere moderate man was crushed out of existence or frightened into silence. A whisper against the orthodoxy of even a high official would send a raging crowd to attack his house or to tear him limb from limb in the public street, and the truth of the rumour would only be inquired into afterwards, if at all. The Khan maintained his unquestioned ascendancy by outdoing all his subjects in their zeal for orthodoxy, which had no connection with morals, and by repressing that zeal with atrocious severity when it clashed with his own wishes. Mob-law offered a very useful means of getting rid of undesirable persons; but one or two stern examples had been needed to teach the mob not to proceed to extremities unless they were smiled upon by the palace. The presence of a Christian in the sacred city was a standing defiance of its inhabitants, and it was only the drawn scimitars of the Khan’s bodyguard that protected Ferrers from certain death as he rode to and from the palace in full uniform.

There was a community of Jews in the place, and it was from this that his unofficial visitors were drawn—scared, furtive men, distinguished from the true believers by their dress, who skulked along back-lanes, and entered the house by a private door in terror of their lives, but emboldened to the enterprise by the hope of turning a more or less honest penny. They were anxious to be Ferrers’ agents in communicating secretly with personages whom he could not directly approach, and, in general, to do any dirty work that might be requisite. One of them, more courageous than the rest, actually offered to disguise Ferrers and take him about the city, but he felt compelled to refuse the offer, much against his will. The man was only too probably a spy, and what could be easier than to lead the stranger, ignorant of his whereabouts, into the precincts of one of the mosques, and raise the cry of “Kafir!” after which the Indian Government would have to lament the loss of another envoy who had mysteriously disappeared. It was very likely that the missing Whybrow had been trapped in some such way, but Ferrers was beginning to doubt whether exact information as to his fate would ever be obtained. The one indisputable fact was that he had disappeared, and not he alone, but his servants, horses, arms, and equipment, as completely as if they had never existed. The last of his written reports which had reached Calcutta was dated half a day’s march from the city, and in it he said that in view of his projected entry thither he thought it well to send off beforehand the results of his explorations up to this point. From inquiries made on the spot, Ferrers was certain that he had left this camping-ground and gone towards the city, but there his information stopped. No one could or would testify to the lost man’s having passed the gates, though rumour was rife on the subject of his doings and his fate. Ferrers’ emissaries brought him a different report every day. Whybrow had been turned back at the gates and had returned to India; he had been arrested on entering; he had been honourably received by the Khan and provided with a house and escort; he had performed his business and gone away in peace; he had been arrested during an audience at the palace and straightway beheaded; he had been torn to pieces in the streets; he had turned Mohammedan and been admitted to the Khan’s bodyguard; a mutilated body alleged to be his had been subjected to disgusting indignities at the place of execution,—all these mutually contradictory reports were submitted, apparently in perfect good faith, by the very same men, but they shed no certain light on the fact of Whybrow’s disappearance.