“Well, my dear, I think if Carthew could make up his mind to face a trial——”
“But he can’t—you know he can’t. It ain’t his fault if he was born a coward, and if it is, we have reason to be tender to his faults if any one has. If you won’t help him escape, I will.”
“I will,” said Brian; “but I won’t be melodramatic about it. I’ll just get hold of the General.”
And get hold of the General he did—when the expedition retraced its steps to the riverside camp,—riding ahead to bear the news of all that had happened. Officers and men streamed out joyously to welcome Eveleen and her husband—Colonel Bleackley thought it was to welcome him, and smiled on them graciously,—and Sir Harry himself rode out on Black Prince, looking old and shaky, with his worn blue coat hanging loose upon him, but his face wreathed with smiles.
“I was never so delighted in my life!” he cried, as he shook hands vigorously with the rescued ones. “It has been touch and go with me, but I began to mend when I heard Haigh’s guns in the distance—showing, as I hoped, that Kamal-ud-din had been brought to action, and now the sight of Mrs Ambrose has wrought a complete cure! No time to waste if we are to leave that plague-spot in time to get across the river, but at least we can frizzle through the rest of the hot weather in the shade at Qadirabad, instead of out in the desert.”
“Y’ought take a little rest at Bab-us-Sahel yourself, Sir Harry,” said Eveleen. “’Twould do you great good.”
“Well, well, all in good time. Lord Maryport has been kind enough to bid me build a house there and do my work in a better climate than Qadirabad. You and Ambrose may go down by road now in safety if you choose, for the King of the Codgers has thrown up his hand. Vowed to Doveton at Bab-us-Sahel that he would never come in to make his submission with less than seven hundred retainers at his back, the old rascal! but I sent him word he was to present himself in Qadirabad without a follower of any sort, and he’s coming! So you may go when you like—but with an escort this time, if you please, ma’am——” Eveleen had the grace to look ashamed. “Keeping us all on the rack with anxiety on your behalf—as if the hot weather wasn’t trying enough by itself,—and taking up the services of my whole espionage to find you, without even letting ’em have the satisfaction of doing it! It’s to that brother of yours you owe it that you’re here, do you know that?”
“I do, Sir Harry, I do. Knowing him yourself, would you say he was one to hide his trumpet under a bushel?”
Sir Harry considered the metaphor gravely. “Perhaps not, ma’am—perhaps not. But I owe him not a little gratitude for schooling that fighting brute Dick Turpin for me. The beast is a reformed character nowadays, by the look of him. I shall hear of it from the Bombay papers, no doubt—a regular shout of execration of the wicked officer who all but killed his horse. Or they’ll go a step farther, and say he did kill him. Why not? paper and ink are cheap, and truth is precious dear. Some day I shall see it set forth solemnly in print that I eat an Arabit baby for my breakfast every morning, and insist upon having ’em fat—ever since the mild and restraining influence of the accomplished Colonel Bayard was so unfortunately withdrawn!”
He spoke in jest, but as though with prevision of the paper warfare that was to embitter the remainder of his life. The Flag might fly from the round tower of Qadirabad, and in the cool chambers where the Khans had passed their time drowsily in drugged slumber their supplanter might work ten, twelve, eighteen hours a day upon plans for the sanitary, economic, moral betterment of Khemistan. But the flow of poisoned comment from Bombay was to know no rest, and the famous Bayard-Lennox controversy, which raged unabated throughout both men’s lives, and still divides historians, was to leave the home authorities doubtful whether the annexation of Khemistan had not after all been a piece of high-handed rascality perpetrated by the General on his own authority, and to rob him and his force of their well-deserved honours. Sir Harry could not see as far as this, however.