A BRUSH ON THE FRONTIER.
Tell me not, love, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
The reign of peace and pleasure was not destined to last through the
summer undisturbed. Conflicts, more serious than those which were
agitating poor Boldero's breast, broke in upon the tranquil season and
caused a hurried dispersion of many of the holiday-makers.
For weeks past the news from the frontier had not been reassuring. Blunt
had gone off on his mission to the Rumble Chunder District, dragging the
miserable Whisp, who could not ride and hated leaving head-quarters, in
his train. He had mastered the whole matter, as he considered, from
first to last and was resolved to bring his knowledge to bear with good
effect upon the entanglements which his predecessors' ignorance and
indistinctness had produced. He saw his way quite clearly and was
resolved to have it. Other people had faltered and hesitated; but Blunt
was resolved to strike, and to strike hard, and to finish the matter and
have done with it once for all. He arrived, accordingly, in no mood to
be trifled with, as Mahomed Khan, the first of the Zámindars who had an
interview with him, discovered in about two minutes. Now, Mahomed Khan,
a wily old gentleman, with a great turn for diplomacy, was deeply
interested in the Rumble Chunder question, and had, at different times,
interviewed a long succession of 'Sahibs' with reference to it. He had
invariably found them long-suffering, conciliatory, anxious to learn and
not difficult to puzzle. He had talked to them at ease in his own
language and was accustomed to the elaborate courtesy due to the leader
of a powerful and not over-loyal clan. His antecedents entitled him to
respect. When Sutton was getting his troop together in the Mutiny a word
from Mahomed Khan would have put the whole district in a blaze and
rendered it impossible to recruit a man. The liking, however, which one
good soldier feels for another had carried the day. The old fellow had
ridden with fifty followers into Sutton's camp, unstrapped his sword,
and, placing it in Sutton's hands, had sworn that he and his would
follow him wherever he pleased to lead them. Well had the oath been
kept; when some months later the fighting closed, Mahomed Khan's name
was recorded as amongst the most deserving of Her Majesty's lieges, and
his well-timed loyalty had resulted in a fine grant of fat acres, a
conspicuous seat in the Durbar, and, not least in the estimation of men
keenly sensitive to honour, a vast deal of complimentary writing and
talking on the part of every British official with whom he had to deal.
All this flattery had, perhaps, turned the old soldier's head, or, at
any rate, had given him no small idea of his importance to the British
'Ráj' and of his claims to the gratitude of British administrators. His
rights in the Salt matter had been left in convenient obscurity, and
might, not without reason, be considered as tacitly conceded by the
Power with whom he was on such affectionate terms.
This, however, was not at all the light in which Blunt saw the matter;
he was annoyed at the man's bluster, pomposity and pretence. He was not
in the least impressed by a well-worn packet of letters which his
visitor produced, in which successive Generals and Commissioners had
testified to his deserts; what he wanted was business, and this was
essentially unbusinesslike. If Sutton had written, 'You have proved
yourself a brave and loyal soldier, and I will ever be your friend,'
this was no reason why Mahomed Khan should not pay his salt-dues like
other folk, or should object to have his title-deeds rigidly overhauled.
'If it was just, why had Sir John Larrens Sahib never done it?' the old
man objected; but Blunt did not care what Sir John Lawrence had done or
had not done; what he wanted was his bond, and nothing else would
satisfy him.
This was Blunt's first nettle, and he was grasping it firmly, with no
doubts as to the propriety of the course. Then, at last, he got tired of
the interview, and--fatal blunder for an Eastern diplomat--became abrupt
and rude, and began to show his hand. Thereupon Mahomed Khan began to
show his teeth and went away in a surly mood with the news, which spread
like wildfire among the clansmen, that the Sirkar was going to rule them
with a heavy hand; that all old rights were to be cancelled; a grievous
land-tax to be imposed, and that a terrible 'Sahib,' of fierce aspect,
had arrived to see this objectionable policy carried out.
Then Blunt found the investigation by no means the simple matter he had
hoped. Statements, which looked so neat and clean when submitted to the
Board and neatly minuted on by Whisp, assumed an aspect of hopeless
inexplicability when Blunt had them face to face; and the more he
questioned the less he understood. He was armed with powers to examine
witnesses, but not a word of truth could be got out of any one. Fine
old countrymen, whose noble bearing, well-chiselled features and long
flowing beards would have made a fortune in a Roman studio, came before
him and told him the most unblushing lies with a volubility and
earnestness that fairly staggered Blunt's bewildered comprehension.
To say one thing to-day, the precise opposite to-morrow, and to explain
with easy grace that it was a mistake, or that the evidence had been
wrongly taken down, seemed to every man whom Blunt interrogated the
correct and natural procedure for a person who was being pressed for
information which it was inconvenient to produce. Some men remembered
everything; others professed the most absolute obliviousness; each
contradicted all the rest, except when Government interests were
concerned, and then all swore together like a band of conspirators. To
make confusion worse confounded, the accounts were kept on a system
which none of the Salt Board people understood and which no one else
could be induced to explain.
Then, by some fatality, the white ants had always eaten the precise
documents of which Blunt stood in need, and the trembling officials
produced a tattered mass of dirt and rags and assured him that this was
the record which he called for, or rather all that could be found of its
remains. Blunt became, day by day, more profoundly convinced that all
men--all the Rumble Chunder men, at any rate--were liars, and let his
conviction appear in short speeches and abrupt procedure. The old
Zámindars, outraged by discourtesy in the presence of their retainers,
came away from his presence quivering with rage and ripe for the first
chance of mischief which offered. Blunt found the nettle stinging him
sorely, and, like a rough, resolute man, grasped it with all the more
unflinching hand. When at last he succeeded in making out a case he
dealt out the sternest justice, not, perhaps, without a gratified
vindictiveness against the people who had so long baffled and annoyed
him. One Uzuf Ali, a large grantee, had been called upon to verify his
claims; and this he proceeded to do with the utmost alacrity. He and his
forefathers, he protested, had been in possession for centuries--look at
the Revenue records, the files of the Courts, the orders of Government.
Here, too, was a Sunnud from the Emperor Akbar confirming them in their
rights. Twenty witnesses, all disinterested, honourable, unimpeachable,
the entire village indeed, would attest the fact of continuous, open,
rightful enjoyment from a period as far as memory could go. So the
twenty witnesses did; but then appeared a gentleman, one Hosain Khan, on
the other side, and blew the pretty story into the air. Uzuf Ali was an
audacious impostor, everybody in the country knew that his father had
come from Delhi not thirty years ago; he had no more right to an ounce
of salt than the 'Commissioner Sahib' himself; the ground over which he
claimed his rights was notoriously in the possession of another man: as
for the Sunnud of Akbar, it was an obvious forgery, as the Commissioner
Sahib might see for himself by merely looking.
Hosain Khan having had his innings, Uzuf Ali returned to the wickets and
began to make great play. 'Ask Hosain Khan,' he said, 'if his uncle did
not carry off my sister and if some of our people did not kill him for
it?'
'Yes,' says Hosain Khan, 'you stabbed him yourself, like a coward as you
are, when he lay asleep by his bullocks.'
'And if I did,' cries his opponent, 'did not your father knock out my
cousin's brains with a lathee[2] and get sent over the Kala Panee[3] for
his pains?'
The controversy waxed ardent; the combatants' voices rose shrill and
high; they tossed their black locks and waved their arms, and poured out
long streams of passionate family history, long-cherished feuds--deep,
never-to-be-forgotten wrongs--interminable complications as to lands and
wells, women and bullocks; and Blunt, who understood nothing but that
they had travelled a long way from the Rumble Chunder Grant, sat by in
mute and wrathful despair, and began to perceive that the administration
of justice to folks so excitable and unveracious as these was no such
easy matter as he had once imagined.
Amid all the chaff, however, Blunt had, he thought, got hold of one
piece of solid fact: either the Sunnud was a forgery or it was not; and
if a forgery, then he resolved to make an example, prosecute Uzuf Ali
for his fraud, and turn him summarily out of his pretended rights. A
forgery no doubt it was, for the paper bore the British watermark, and
you could see the places where the gunpowder had been smeared in hopes
of giving it an antiquated look. And so the question was decided, and
the order made out, and poor Uzuf Ali, in vain protesting that it was a
device of the enemy, left the Commissioner's presence a ruined man.
Ruined men, however, are dangerous things at all times, and especially
with an excitable and easily frightened people, who see in their
neighbours' fall only an anticipation of their own. The Bazaar was
presently in a tumult: angry clusters of talkers gathered in circles
round the grain-shops or at the village well, or under the great
banyan-tree which spread a wide shade over one end of the street, and
discussed past grievances and future disaster. Meanwhile Blunt, not
with so light a heart or seeing his way as clearly as usual, had moved
his head-quarters a dozen miles away, and begun a new series of
investigations with a new set of Hosain Khans and Uzuf Alis, and with
precisely similar success.
Before the month was over Fotheringam's words had come true. The Eusuf
Khayls, a turbulent tribe of frontier freebooters, were up. A police
outpost had been attacked in force one night, and its occupants had made
a bad retreat, leaving two of their number on the field. The marauders
had ridden through twenty miles of British territory, burning villages,
destroying crops, driving away bullocks to their fastnesses in the
hills. Blunt, as he came, escorted by a strong detachment, into
Dustypore, met the Horse Artillery rattling out towards the disturbed
region; and a telegram despatched to Elysium informed Sutton that he was
to head a flying column into the enemies' country and that he must be
with his regiment without an instant's delay.