In a second twelve men were on the assassin; an English officer was pulling them off, and with his sword-hilt keeping back the Native guards, who would have killed the assailant on the spot. The torches had gone out; but the Viceroy, who had staggered over the pier side, was dimly seen rising up in the knee-deep water, and clearing the hair off his brow with his hand as if recovering himself. His Private Secretary was instantly at his side in the surf, helping him up the bank. 'Burne,' he said quietly, 'they've hit me.' Then, in a louder voice, which was heard on the pier, 'It's all right, I don't think I'm much hurt,' or words to that effect. In another minute he was sitting under the smoky glare of the re-lit torches, on a rude native cart at the side of the jetty, his legs hanging loosely down. Then they lifted him bodily on to the cart, and saw a great dark patch on the back of his light coat. The blood came streaming out, and men tried to stanch it with their handkerchiefs. For a moment or two he sat up on the cart, then he fell heavily backwards. 'Lift up my head,' he said faintly: and said no more.
They carried him down into the steam launch, some silently believing him dead. Others, angry with themselves for the bare surmise, cut open his coat and vest, and stopped the wound with hastily torn strips of cloth and the palms of their hands. Others kept rubbing his feet and legs. Three supported his head. The assassin lay tied and stunned a few yards from him. As the launch shot on in the darkness, eight bells rang across the water from the ships. When it came near the frigate, where the guests were waiting for dinner, and jesting about some fish which they had caught for the meal, the lights in the launch were suddenly put out, to hide what was going on in it. They lifted Lord Mayo gently to his cabin: when they laid him down in his cot, every one saw that he was dead.
To all on board, that night stands out from among all other nights in their lives. A silence, which seemed as if it would never again be broken, suddenly fell on the holiday ship with its 600 souls. The doctors held their interview with the dead—two stabs from the same knife on the shoulder had penetrated the cavity of the chest, either of them sufficient to cause death. On the guest steamer there were hysterics and weeping; but in the ship where the Viceroy lay, the grief was too deep for outward expression. Men moved about solitarily through the night, each saying bitterly to his own heart, 'Would that it had been one of us.' The anguish of her who received back her dead was not, and is not, for words.
At dawn the sight of the frigate in mourning, the flag at half-mast, the broad white stripe darkened to a leaden grey, all the ropes slackened, and the yards hanging topped in dismal disorder, announced the reality to those on the guest steamer who had persisted through the night in a hysterical disbelief. On the frigate a hushed and solemn industry was going on. The chief officers of the Government of India on board assembled2 to adopt steps for the devolution of the Viceroyalty. In a few hours, while the doctors were still engaged on the embalming, one steamer had hurried north with the Member of Council to Bengal, another was ploughing its way with the Foreign Secretary to Madras, to bring up Lord Napier of Ettrick, to Calcutta, as acting Governor-General. UNO AVULSO, NON DEFICIT ALTER. The frigate lay silent and alone. At half-past nine that night, the partially embalmed body was placed in its temporary coffin on the quarter-deck, and covered with the Union Jack.
2 Sir Barrow H. Ellis (Member of Council) presiding, with Mr. C. U. Aitchison, C.S.I., Foreign Secretary, and others.
The assassin received the usual trial and the usual punishment for his crime. Shortly after he had been brought on board, in the launch which carried his victim, the Foreign Secretary asked him why he had done this thing. He only replied, 'By the order of God.'3 To the question whether he had any associates in his act, he answered, 'Among men I have no accomplice; God is my partner.'4 Next morning, at the usual preliminary inquiry before the local magistrate, when called to plead, he said, 'Yes, I did it.'5 The evidence of the eye-witnesses was recorded, and the prisoner committed for murder to the Sessions-Court. The Superintendent, sitting as chief judge in the Settlement, conducted the trial in the afternoon. The accused simply pleaded 'Not guilty.' Each fact was established by those present when the deed was done; the prisoner had been dragged off the back of the bleeding Viceroy with the reddened knife in his hand. The sentence was to suffer death by hanging. The proceedings were forwarded in the regular way to the High Court at Calcutta for review. On the 20th February this tribunal confirmed the sentence; and on the 11th March the assassin was taken to the usual place of execution on Viper Island, and hanged.
3 Khudá ne húkm diyá.
4 Merá sharík koí ádmí nahín; merá sharík khudá hai.
5 Hán, main ne kiyá.
The man was a highlander from beyond our North-Western Frontier, who had taken service in the Punjab Mounted Police, and had been condemned at Pesháwar for slaying his blood-feud enemy on British soil. The Court took a merciful view of the case and sentenced him to transportation for life at the Andamans. In his dying confession, years afterwards, he stated that although he had not struck the blow, he had conspired to do the murder. But the slaying of a hereditary foe in cold blood was no crime in his eyes, and ever since his conviction in 1869, he said he had made up his mind to revenge himself by killing 'some European of high rank.' He therefore established his character as a silent, doggedly well-behaved man; and in due time was set at large as a barber among the ticket-of-leave convicts at Hopetown.