The Durbar had been announced only a few hours previous to Terrington's
return, but Rose Chantry had had the news of it from her husband on the
previous evening.
Consequently, when Nevile, so long before he was expected, entered the
ante-room, she was quite at home with her triumph and only surprised by
the chance of thrusting it into his face.
When, half ashamed of having harried such a hungry man, she had flown
into the mess-room to find food for him, Terrington sat staring at the
white chunam walls, softly aglow with the sunlight that blazed outside.
A window in one of them framed a space of blue sky, the greenness of a
chenar, and, squatted on the ground beneath it, Rose Chantry's ayah,
swinging a glass bead tied to the lowest bough. He was too tired to
think of the news he had heard, or to keep his thoughts from following
the woman who had told it. He realized with a numb surprise how many
memories of her remained in the queer glimmer of that empty room. How
much he remembered which he thought to have forgotten, and which, he
was not too tired to tell himself, he ought to have forgotten.
Whichever way he looked he could see her figure in one of its airy
poses, coquettishly sweet or coquettishly defiant; smiling, pouting,
mocking, or fancifully grave. The other figures in those groups, men
all of them, had faded; hers remained. A white spirit that filled the
place for him.
He shut his eyes to shut it out; but found the likeness was on the
other side of his lids.
He lifted them quickly at a laugh from the mess-room doorway through
which Rose Chantry was leaning, with a tatty in either hand pressed
against her shoulders and her golden head in the gap.
"Didn't mean to wake you," she said, smiling, "but there's some cold
chikor. Will that do?"
"Nothing better," he replied.
"Well, you'd better have it where you are," she announced with a glance
across her shoulder; "they're hanging a new ceiling cloth in here, and
there's no end of a litter."
As her head withdrew with a shrill call to the kitmatgah, Sir Colvin
and Chantry entered from the verandah.
The Commissioner, with the sense of nakedness which men have felt so
often since the days of Eve from following a woman's counsel, wished,
on learning of Terrington's arrival, to confront him personally with
the news of the Durbar. So after he had seated himself and listened to
what could be told him on the prospects of supply, he put the question
with an exaggerated imitation of his own bluffness.
"Well! I suppose you've heard of the Durbar?"
"I'm afraid, sir," said the other, "I've been too hungry to hear of
anything but breakfast. It's to be cold chikor," he added, smiling, as
Rose Chantry, followed by the kitmatgah, made a muslin whiteness in the
mess room-door.
She heard the cheerful lie with a flash of admiration for the man who
spoke it.
So many beaten men, she knew, would have jumped at the peevish chance
to hit back, especially when the hard truth to hit with was in their
hands.
"Well," continued Sir Colvin, saluting Mrs. Chantry and reseating
himself, as the tray was laid before Terrington, "I decided, as no
reply came to my last demand, some sort of move must be made at once,
if we weren't to be boxed here all the winter. So, as there was no
chance of ferreting the Khan out of that hole of his, we're going to
talk him into reason over there."
Terrington, with his knife in the partridge, looked up and nodded.
"I suppose the plan's no more to your mind than ever?" queried the
Commissioner.
"No, sir," said his military adviser. "I think it's even less."
"How! from what you've heard?" exclaimed Sir Colvin.
"No," said the soldier slowly; "from what I haven't heard. There's no
talk in the hills; and when a Sari man's dumb, he's either got
something to say, or something not to say it."
"Hang it all!" cried Chantry. "I wonder if there's anything that you
wouldn't think a bad sign?"
Aire shrugged his shoulders.
"Well! the die's cast," he said; "and we've got to see the thing
through. The only question left is one of escort. We want to look
imposing but not belligerent. What do you think?"
"The smaller the better," said Terrington drily.
"Why?"
"You can't take enough to make it safe for you," explained the other;
"but you can take enough to make it unsafe for us."
"For _you_?" Sir Colvin asked.
"Suppose you don't come back?" was Terrington's reply.
"Gad! but you're a cheerful counsellor," cried Chantry hotly.
"If they murder us, eh," said Aire.
"And you think they mean to, Captain Terrington?" asked Rose Chantry.
Terrington shook his head.
"Not to-morrow!" he said. "Mir Khan wouldn't expect to get the chance."
"You mean he doesn't believe we're such unqualified fools as to go
there?" Sir Colvin suggested.
"That's probably how he puts it," said Terrington blandly.
"Well that gives us a chance the more," Chantry threw in.
"A chance the less, I think," said Terrington. "Blood is always a Sari
man's first thought, and he'll leave no time for a second."
The agent's dark eyes glowered with a whole-souled malediction, but Sir
Colvin, tapping on the table, watched in silence for some seconds while
Terrington finished his meal.
"Do you still try to dissuade me?" he asked at length.
"Not at all, sir," replied the other. "I was only thinking of the
escort. If they mean murder over there they'll mean it the more the
more of you there are."
"Why?"
"Supposing they intend to go for us, they'll wait till all the passes
are closed, and we're cut off. In that case they'll hardly give away
their game now, unless they get a chance to cripple us."
"Twenty men would be enough?"
"Ample," said Terrington. "And I'd keep as many of them outside as
possible."
"Yes; and you might pick some of your own men for the job."
Terrington's face hardened. His men were his children, and he hated to
let them run a risk which he could not share.
"In that case I'd ask the honour of going with you, sir," he said.
Sir Colvin shook his head.
"No, no!" he answered. "The Fort is your business, and it may prove a
big one. Chantry is going in with me, and Langford, who's an old
cavalryman, will take the escort. I've sent down word of what I'm
doing, but I'll leave a fuller account with you, in case anything goes
wrong." He turned with Chantry to leave the room, calling back from
the doorway: "By the way, the polo's to come off to-morrow afternoon as
we arranged. You're playing, aren't you?"
"Yes, sir," replied the other, watching the two figures pass out of the
verandah, and seem to shrink as they were immersed in the fierce yellow
of the sun.
Then he turned, and met Rose Chantry's eyes.
She had flung herself into a long chair: her knees were crossed; her
head thrown back; her hands clasped behind it. To Terrington's vision
the tip of her toe, her knee and her chin were in a line; and the
absurd little sole of her shoe, with its elfin instep and the arch curl
of its heel, made a print on his memory in which it was afterwards to
tread.
"Well!" she said, with her tantalizing smile, "was the chikor good?"
"Excellent," he answered.
Her lips fluttered like the wings of a bird.
"Didn't it taste of defeat?" she suggested, the dark lids drooping over
her eyes.
"No," he said gravely, "it tasted extremely game."
She swept him with her covert glances, but his had fallen to her foot.
"Why did you tell that lie?" she asked presently.
He looked up into her face for an instant.
"I've forgotten," he said.
"Sir Colvin wouldn't have suspected me," she added. "He knows no more
about a woman than ... than you do.
"I suppose that leaves him without much knowledge to boast of?" he
reflected.
"Yes," she said; "it does."
She tilted her head sideways to see, beyond her knee, on what his eyes
were fixed. She tossed her foot clear of the muslin flounces, and then
with a curious twist of the ankle brought it round into her view.
"What's wrong with it?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"How should I know?" he said thoughtfully. "It wasn't made for me."
She laughed, slowly twirling her foot, as though fascinated by its
suppleness, or by the gleaming creases of the silk that covered it.
Then, with a little jerk of her knee, she let it settle again into the
froth of flounces.
"Really," she said, "for a man who says so little, you do say the
strangest things."
His eyes had wandered again to the square of open air, the picture in
azure and ochre and emerald which the window made in the wall. The
brown woman still sat swinging her bead in the shade of the chenar.
Terrington could see its glassy blueness as it dipped to and fro across
a splinter of sunlight.
Rose Chantry, with her eyes on his profile, asked him at what he was
looking.
He told her.
"I know!" she exclaimed. "Why is she always doing that?"
"She wants a child," he said.
"But she has one."
"Another then."
She gave a shudder.
"What strange things women are!" she cried.
His eyes came round to her, and she felt a coldness in them like the
green gleam of ice.
"Out here, you see," he said quietly, "women are still as fond of
making men as of making fools of them."
"Why do you say that?" she asked sharply.
"I could think of nothing better," he replied.
"Why did you say it to _me_?" she persisted.
"To whom else could I have said it?" he enquired blandly.
The blaze of anger seemed to fill her eyes with a floating sparkle of
fresh colours, and her lips closed tightly, as though to repress a
desire to bite him. Then she met his glance and laughed.
"I wonder why you dislike me so," she said.
"I don't dislike you," he replied.
"Oh, well!" she sighed, "why don't you dislike me, then; since you seem
too? You wish I wasn't here!"
"Very much," he admitted.
"Why? What harm do I do?"
"Haven't you told me that this morning?"
"No!" she cried. "You weren't thinking of that; you know you weren't.
You believe that would have happened anyhow. It was what you meant
about making fools of men."
"Well," he said, "don't you make fools of them?"
She shook her head softly.
"My mistake then," he said.
"Ah!" she sighed, "but you don't think so. I daresay you think
something much more horrid of me than you care to say. And it ought to
have been rather nice for you all, having me up here."
"Yes," he said, "I think it ought."
She looked at him doubtfully, crumpling her lips together in her
fingers.
"But you _do_ make mistakes," she went on retrospectively.
"Yes," he said, "one makes everything of them."
She regarded him for a moment in the light of the remark, before adding:
"You told me, the first time you saw me, I must give up riding."
"Yes," he admitted, smiling; "that was one of them. But I found that
your riding could be of use to us."
"Of use to _you_?" she exclaimed.
"Yes, in creating a false impression."
"An impression of what?"
"Of security: that we did not think you were in any danger."
"Though you thought I was?"
"I was sure of it," he said.
She was sitting upright now; her hands set upon the chair-arms; her
face changing stormily between anger and astonishment.
"You were sure I was in danger, yet you did nothing to prevent it!" she
cried. "Do you mean that?"
"What should I have done?" he enquired.
"Warned me!" she said
"But didn't I?"
"Oh, that!" she exclaimed impatiently.
"And would you have been warned?"
"I don't know. I can't say. That's got nothing to do with it. Or you
could have given me an escort."
He shook his head.
"That would have made you no safer, and would have spoilt you as an
advertisement."
"As an advertisement!" she protested hotly. "Do soldiers let a woman
run the risk of being murdered to make things safe far them? I think
it's contemptible!"
"Yes," he said quietly; "so I see: but you don't think enough."
He sat looking at her in a way she detested; as no other man seemed
able to look at her; as though she were a piece in a game he played.
"Did any one else know it wasn't safe for me?" she demanded.
He shook his head.
"Wouldn't you have been warned in that case?" he suggested.
"Yes," she returned warmly, "I'm quite certain I should."
"I think so too," he said. "Nothing in Sar would have been weighed
beside it."
"Except by you," she retorted.
"Except by me," he said. "You see I'm here to weigh things. I'm here
to look after you all. You think I should have told you of your
danger, and shut you up in the safety of Sar. But there is no safety
in Sar. That's the mistake. Your riding was a risk, but it helped our
chance to make Sar safer; safer for every one, safer for _you_."
"And suppose I had been killed?"
"Well," he said, "you can fancy what I should have paid for it. But
the safety would have been there, though it was only there for others.
And it was to make that that I am here."
She met his musing observation of her with hard clear eyes.
"Haven't you wasted an unusual lot of time talking to me this morning,
Captain Terrington?" she said.
He took the deep breath of a man whose heart is sick for sleep, and
threw back his shoulders.
"Yes," he smiled, rising; "I was quite exceptionally tired."
V
Terrington gave a practical shape to his forebodings as soon as the
Commissioner and his escort started for the Durbar.
The entire force was under arms; the Residency guard was trebled;
sappers were stationed in every room to break open the loopholes;
others waited with discs of guncotton to blow away the trees which
masked the polo ground; and the final connexions were made with the
mine which was to overthrow the courtyard wall.
Appearances were kept up by an attenuated fatigue party, which was as
markedly visible about the place as the rest of the garrison was not.
Terrington, who had changed for polo, also made a peacefully
indifferent figure as he strolled across to the mess-room and round the
Residency garden, with a loose coat drawn over his riding-shirt, whose
blue and silver showed in the scarf about his throat.
He had returned to his orderly-room in the Fort, when news of the
tragedy which was to wring from England a growl of vengeance was
brought to the sentries at the Residency gate by the handful of
blood-smeared horsemen who swept through it with broken and clotted
lances and a crimson lather on their horses' flanks.
Hussain Shah was holding Langford, mortally hurt, in the saddle, his
huge figure swinging limply to and fro, and more than half that remnant
of the escort reeled as they drew rein before the Residency door.
Terrington was not the first to hear of the disaster, but he heard it
in the most dramatic fashion; from Mrs. Chantry's lips.
She had torn across the compound as the Lancers came to a blundering
halt before the mess-room entrance, and dashed breathless into the
orderly room, waiting no confirmation of the story that was told by
their plight.
She caught at her side, clutching with the other hand at the table, and
for an instant panted, speechless, her face white as jasmine, above a
big bow of creamy lace.
Then, with a hard gasp of breath:
"They're killed!" she cried.
Terrington had sprung to his feet as she burst in upon him.
"Who are?" he demanded.
"Lewis and Sir Colvin," she panted, "and ... and most of the others.
All but six or seven of them. Mr. Langford's there, but he's simply
hacked; and all the men are streaming."
A long thin wail broke from her with the horror of what she had seen,
and she covered her eyes with both her hands.
Terrington had stepped towards the doorway as he realized the
significance of what she had seen. She put herself sharply in front of
him, her head flung fiercely back.
"What are you going to do?" she demanded. "You let them go like that,
you _made_ them go like that! That's what's done it all! You wouldn't
let them take the men! Aren't you going to try to save them? They
mayn't be dead! Don't you think they mayn't be dead? If only you'll
go at once; this moment! Take every one and smash them. Don't you
think it's possible; just possible? And it wasn't I who did it, was
it? was it really?"
He laid a hand upon her shoulder to put her aside.
"No, child," he said gently; "you had nothing to do with it."
As he would have passed out, leaping footsteps sounded on the stairs,
and Captain Walcot almost dashed into his arms.
"Have you heard?" he cried.
"What?" asked Terrington
Walcot glanced with deprecation at Mrs. Chantry's figure.
"Say what you know!" said Terrington.
"Sir Colvin and Chantry have been murdered at the Durbar, and all the
men they took in with them."
"Who told you?" said Terrington.
"Hussain Shah," replied the other excitedly. "Langford was in the
courtyard with half the escort, when a yelling began inside the hall,
and a swarm of those brown swine poured out shouting that Sir Colvin
was killed, and attacked him. Langford charged, and tried to jam them
in the doorway; but the crowd joined in behind, and when Langford was
shot through the body Hussain retired 'em, and they had to cut their
way through till they were clear of the Bazaar. Every man of them was
wounded, and they've lost five and Langford's dying."
"Is Clones with him?"
Walcot nodded.
Terrington remained a moment without speaking, gazing almost absently
through the window in the thick mud wall at the green grove of chenar.
In his loose racing-coat above polo boots and breeches, and with the
gay silk scarf at his throat, he suggested anything but a man suddenly
met by a great emergency.
"Tell Subadar Afzul Singh," he said slowly, "to post the Fort guard,
break out the loopholes and put the place at once in a state of
defence. You will parade every other available man in the courtyard
within half an hour, in marching order a hundred and fifty rounds a
man. Dore will take over Langford's Sikhs and Dogras; the Bakót levies
will reinforce the Fort guard. Send Risaldar Hussain Shah to me here."
Rose Chantry held her sobbing breath in astonishment at the note of
control which had come into the man's voice. It was lower and softer
than she had ever heard it, but it spoke with a quiet and assured
authority which seemed to master her even while it addressed another.
Walcot felt it too. He was the elder of the two men, and but a few
months junior in the service; they had lived together for some time on
terms of perfect equality, yet now, though Terrington had made no
reference to a change in their relations, Walcot's heels came together
while the other was speaking, and his hand went to his cap with a "Very
good, sir" as Nevile ended.
The phrase, the sudden change of relation, Walcot's retreating figure,
disciplined and subordinate, produced on Rose Chantry a very curious
effect.
"Are you going to take over the command?" she said to Terrington, who
had seated himself at his desk and was writing rapidly.
He turned his head and looked at her, his mind evidently occupied with
an interrupted thought.
"I have taken it over," he said quietly, turning again to his pen.
She watched him for a moment. His silence, his unconcern, his power,
were all alike beyond her.
"Are you going to the Palace?" she asked at length.
He looked round at her again, as clearly preoccupied as before, but
without irritation.
"You will save them, won't you, if you can?" she went on imploringly,
to force the subject into his mind.
"Yes," he said slowly, "I'm going to the Palace." Then after a pause,
but with his eyes still upon her, "Mr. Clones would probably be very
glad of some help with the wounded."
"The wounded!" she repeated with a little shudder.
"Yes," he said; "you'll see a good deal of them during the next few
days, and it's as well to be of use. If you'll take this to him," he
went on, folding up a note, "he'll show you what to do. It's only the
making up of bandages," he continued, as she held back; "the time left
us is very short."
Something scornful had come into his voice, though ever so faintly, and
something compelling as well. She took the note when he held it out to
her, unable, despite her will, to do anything else. As she passed the
doorway Hussain Shah appeared on the landing beyond it, the folds of
the turban above his temple stiff with blood. She paused an instant to
hear Terrington's greeting, but the greeting was in Pukhtu, which she
did not understand. Had she understood, her opinion of Terrington's
hardness would have been confirmed, for no reference was made to the
wounded man's condition until he had received his orders.
"Are you fit for duty?" said Terrington simply.
"I am unhurt, sir," replied the other as he saluted.
Half an hour later every available man in the force was paraded in the
courtyard of the Fort. Walcot with his Lancers in front; then, behind
Terrington, the Sikhs and Dogras that could be spared from the Fort,
the Guides bringing up the rear. The Maxim had been hoisted on to the
roof of the Eastern Tower, whence it covered for a certain distance an
advance on the Palace. In the silence the blow of a pick could be
heard, and the falling stones from the last loopholes in the walls.
Terrington sat his horse immovably, waiting for the signal from Afzul
Singh which should open the gates. He was burning with a dull anger
against the circumstance in which he had been placed, and against the
folly of the men who had created it. He knew that in marching on the
Palace to demand the men who had entered it that morning he was
imperilling the safety of his entire force; yet he knew, too, that
sentimental England would never forgive his sanity in declining the
risk should any of Sir Colvin's party happen to be still alive. He had
no hope of their safety. He was too well acquainted with the temper in
which they had been attacked. That he viewed with no resentment
whatever. It had been a piece of the foulest treachery, but treachery
was a virtue in Sar, and he was quite able to accept, and even to
respect, alien standards of conduct.
What did anger him was the stolid British arrogance which declined to
make allowance for any prejudices but its own, and thought beneath its
dignity all considerations which were not in the terms of its own
intelligence. Rose Chantry watched him from the orderly-room window
which overlooked the courtyard. She had been in the surgery helping
Clones to make up first-aid bandages, but the tramp of laden men down
the long passages, and the roll, like a soft volley, of grounded butts
in the dust as the men fell in, so wrought on her excitement that she
left her work and ran up the narrow twisted stairs to the room from
which half an hour earlier Terrington had sent her.
She watched him now, with her shoulder pressed against the yellow
chunam wall and her head drawn back in order not to be seen, wondering
how a man of his dominant authority could wait impassively at such a
moment the arrangements of a subordinate.
Her eyes, dry and hot, seemed almost to repudiate resentfully the tears
which she had shed; a pulse throbbed like the flutter of a moth at her
throat; her uneasy fingers seemed to crave to be closed, and yet when
she clenched her fist they ached to be opened. She longed to tear
about, to give orders, to rouse enthusiasm. She would have liked to
ride beside Terrington to the Palace and carry a flag: and the thought
of how he would regard such a proposal moved her not to a sense of its
humour but to renewed irritation with the man who could ride as
indifferently to death as he would to a dinner.
Her whole being was in disorder owing to the uncertainty of her
husband's fate. At the first shock and accepted inference of his death
tears had burst from her in the weak wretchedness of bereavement, the
sense of widowhood, and grief at the dying of one so near to her in the
pride of his youth. It was perhaps the very nearness of death's-knife,
the cutting off of the one who was one with her, who had scarcely gone
from her arms, which gave her the keenest shudder. The sword which had
been thrust through him seemed almost to have pricked her breast. Not
that she feared for her own safety; she never imagined that it was
compromised. She had the supreme British scorn for her country's foes,
and thought it was only a question of policy whether Terrington with
his handful of men would not at once burn the Palace to the ground,
carry off the Khan in chains, and ravage the whole country with sword
and fire.
It was death in the shadow which had stabbed and was gone which made
her shiver. A thing so swift, so sudden, so unforeseen mocked the
comfortable security of life.
But with the fitting out of the expedition and speculation on the
possible safety of those in the Palace, her emotions became dreadfully
perplexed. She had perforce to cease mourning a husband who might be
still alive, and with the disappearance of a reason for her sorrow she
began to wonder what had caused it.
Had she cried because she loved him or because he was killed? She had
not a doubt while she thought him dead, but the chance of his being
alive seemed to have altered everything. Last night she would have
disowned indignantly the idea that she did not love him. She had
accepted him as naturally in the order of needful things as food and
clothing. He was her husband and so had everything that husbands have,
did everything that husbands do. She had never thought about it as a
personal matter. One had a husband as one had a cold in the head; one
didn't always quite know why; but having him one accepted him for the
sort of thing he was.
Lewis had taken her from a life already wearily dull, and with every
prospect of becoming duller. He had come suddenly into her
existence--a quite unlooked-for excitement; and had transplanted her
into surroundings more exciting still; full of men, and dangers, and
pageants and great affairs. It was so full indeed, that in the press
of things to do he was a good deal crowded out. His work, his fresh
appointments--for he had been tremendously in demand--gave him rather
the air of continually arranging new scenes and effects in which she
played the leading lady.
She didn't in the least so consciously regard him; she had not even
noticed how much his work kept him out of the occasions which she most
enjoyed; he seemed just a part of the delightful movement, a sort of
dashing high-spirited hot-tempered ambitious concentration of it all.
He was the man who had made it all possible for her, being her husband.
That was how, gratefully, she most often thought of him.
His death wrenched her by its treacherous horror; but it had put no
awkward questions. The questions came with the doubt if he were dead.
How much did she care for him? Did she care for him at all? Had she
ever cared for him as a husband? Right on the heels of that, answering
it to her astounded perception, came a shrinking of disgust that she
had lived three years with a man as his wife without loving him;
without even discovering that she did not love him. It was that which
seared the tears in her eyes, and left her with a sense of shame and
self-disdain and loneliness indescribable.
It was that too in a curious reflected fashion which increased her
anger at Terrington's quiet indifference to the ways of Fate. She
could picture Lewis Chantry's raging vehemence under a like provocation.
As she watched the silent mass of men in the courtyard--the dull yellow
of the field-service kit lightened by the gay alkalaks of the Lancers,
the orange and white of their pennons, the glistening of the sun upon
lance-head and bayonet, the silence broken only by the clink of a
bridoon as some impatient horse flung up its head--there was a burst of
blue and red above the eastern tower and the Union Jack flew out above
the Fort.
It was the signal that Afzul Singh had completed his defences. Walcot
rode back to Terrington and saluted. Terrington nodded. With a
sparkle of light on their lances, the horsemen were in the saddle, the
rifles leapt to the 'carry,' and were swung on to the shoulder,
cresting the infantry with the shimmer of steel; the gates were thrown
open, the Lancers passed through and extended, the Sikhs and Dogras
wheeled outwards after them in column of fours, followed by the Guides.
As the gates closed behind the last section a sharp explosion rang out,
followed by others in quick succession.
Rose Chantry started and stood quivering in tense excitement; then
darted across the room to the further window, which looked towards the
polo ground through a green fringe of chenar.
As she reached it there was another rending uproar almost under her
feet, and a tree leapt into the air from beneath the window and fell
with a crashing ruin of its branches towards the river.
Afzul Singh was converting the screen of chenar into an abattis with
discs of gun cotton, but to Rose the trees seemed to be falling before
the enemy's shells, and she ran hurriedly to the eastern tower to get a
view of the besiegers, and found there Afzul Singh himself, who
explained her mistake.
A sand-bag revetment crowned the top of the tower, and the loopholes on
either side of the Maxim were manned by picked shots. All were
intently watching the occasional glimpse of colour or gleam of steel
which marked the progress of Terrington's force through the Bazaar.
Now that the din of the detonations had ceased not a sound broke the
silence; the city lay listless and without a sign of life in the haze
of its noontide heat. The dust rose on the heels of the column as it
emerged from the Bazaar and filtered through the collection of low mud
buildings beyond it. Clear of these, Terrington swung his right at
once on to the river, and the whole of his little force could be seen
for the first time as it extended and moved forward across the space of
open ground to the east of the Palace. It looked painfully small for
its job, like an ant attacking a mouse, even though Terrington made it
as imposing as he could without sacrificing its compactness. The
ground, flat as a floor from the river to the foot-hills, gave no
command for rifle fire over the centre of the town, and Terrington had
no choice but to march straight at the wall which surrounded the Khan's
buildings, and chance their being defended. It was a dangerous piece
of work, and Afzul Singh never lowered his glasses till the doubtful
part of it was done.
But Terrington showed at once the temper in which he had undertaken it.
His cavalry wheeled to the left, leaving the front open, and,
advancing, formed a screen which covered the skirts of the town. The
river protected the other flank, and, with the Guides in the centre as
reserve, the Sikhs went straight for the eastern gate, while the Dogra
detachment advanced half right upon the Palace stables where the wall
ran down to the river. The guards on the gate allowed themselves to be
taken, the stables were occupied without resistance, and a command was
thus obtained of the Palace compound which was seen to be invitingly
empty. But Terrington was the last man to be tempted by such an
invitation. He had obtained a foothold from which to enforce his
demands, and did not intend to go a step further.
He could not hope to carry the Palace, filled as it doubtless was with
the Khan's guards; he had no guns to batter it; but he could now, if
his hand was forced, make life very uncomfortable for those within its
walls. So he began to parley.
What passed was hidden by the Palace wall from the watchers on the
tower, but after three hours of apprehension they could see that the
force was preparing to retire, and presently some of the Khan's bearers
appeared through the gateway carrying charpoys. Afzul Singh guessed
what was on them, and his grave consideration made no disguise with
Mrs. Chantry. He had no hope that any of those who had been trapped in
the Palace would return alive, and he held out none to her.
"None come," he said, lowering his glasses; "they are all carried."
Terrington had requested the return of Sir Colvin and his escort, and,
on the reply that they were killed, had demanded their bodies.
Mir Khan, informed by his spies that the Fort had been loop-holed,
provisions stored, the trees levelled and every preparation made for a
prolonged siege, foresaw with a chuckle the very imminent destruction
of the British force in Sar, and was far too astute to hurry a game
which was going his own way.
So he tendered the bodies with every mark of respect and the most
profound apologies for the passions of his subjects which he had been
unable to keep under control.
Terrington had replied acknowledging the arrival of the charpoys and
announcing that he was for the present the British representative in
Sar, and would, on receiving instructions from his Government, acquaint
the Khan what reparation was demanded for the murder at a friendly
Durbar of Her Majesty's Commissioner.
The old man, when the message was read to him, rubbed his foot and
smiled with child-like craftiness. He admired the daring which had
flung that handful of the Sirkar's men without an hour's hesitation
against his Palace; admired it the more since it seemed to prove that
Terrington was after all but a swine-headed fighter like the rest of
his kind.