Produced by Don Lainson and Charles Aldarondo. HTML version
by Al Haines.
THE STORY OF SONNY SAHIB
By
MRS. EVERARD COTES
(SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN)
1894
CHAPTER I
'Ayah,' the doctor-sahib said in the vernacular, standing beside
the bed, 'the fever of the mistress is like fire. Without doubt
it cannot go on thus, but all that is in your hand to do you have
done. It is necessary now only to be very watchful. And it will
be to dress the mistress, and to make everything ready for a
journey. Two hours later all the sahib-folk go from this place in
boats, by the river, to Allahabad. I will send an ox-cart to take
the mistress and the baby and you to the bathing ghat.'
'Jeldi karo!' he added, which meant 'Quickly do!'--a thing people
say a great many times a day in India.
The ayah looked at him stupidly. She was terribly frightened; she
had never been so frightened before. Her eyes wandered from the
doctor's face to the ruined south wall of the hut, where the sun of
July, when it happens to shine on the plains of India, was beating
fiercely upon the mud floor. That ruin had happened only an hour
ago, with a terrible noise just outside, such a near and terrible
noise that she, Tooni, had scrambled under the bed the mistress was
lying on, and had hidden there until the doctor-sahib came and
pulled her forth by the foot, and called her a poor sort of person.
Then Tooni had lain down at the doctor-sahib's feet, and tried to
place one of them upon her head, and said that indeed she was not a
worthless one, but that she was very old and she feared the guns;
so many of the sahibs had died from the guns! She, Tooni, did not
wish to die from a gun, and would the Presence, in the great mercy
of his heart, tell her whether there would be any more shooting?
There would be no more shooting, the Presence had said; and then he
had given her a bottle and directions, and the news about going
down the river in a boat. Tooni's mind did not even record the
directions, but it managed to retain the words about going away in
a boat, and as she stood twisting the bottle round and round in the
folds of her ragged red petticoat it made a desperate effort to
extract their meaning.
'There will be no more shooting,' said the doctor again, 'and there
is a man outside with a goat. He will give you two pounds of milk
for the baby for five rupees.'
'Rupia! I have not even one!' said the ayah, looking toward the
bed; 'the captain-sahib has not come these thirty days as he
promised. The colonel-sahib has sent the food. The memsahib is
for three days without a pice.'
'I'll pay,' said the doctor shortly, and turned hurriedly to go.
Other huts were crying out for him; he could hear the voice of some
of them through their mud partitions. As he passed out he caught a
glimpse of himself in a little square looking-glass that hung on a
nail on the wall, and it made him start nervously and then smile
grimly. He saw the face of a man who had not slept three hours in
as many days and nights--a haggard, unshaven face, drawn as much
with the pain of others as with its own weariness. His hair stood
up in long tufts, his eyes had black circles under them. He wore
neither coat nor waistcoat, and his regimental trousers were tied
round the waist by a bit of rope. On the sleeve of his collarless
shirt were three dark dry splashes; he noticed them as he raised
his arm to put on his pith helmet. The words did not reach his
lips, but his heart cried out within him for a boy of the 32nd.
The ayah caught up her brass cooking-pot and followed him. Since
the doctor-sahib was to pay, the doctor-sahib would arrange that
good measure should be given in the matter of the milk. And upon
second thought the doctor-sahib decided that precautions were
necessary. He told the man with the goat, therefore, that when the
ayah received two pounds of milk she would pay him the five rupees.
As he put the money into Tooni's hand she stayed him gently.
'We are to go without, beyond the walls, to the ghat?' she asked in
her own tongue.
'Yes,' said the doctor, 'in two hours. I have spoken.'
'Hazur![1] the Nana Sahib--'
[1] 'Honoured one.'
'The Nana Sahib has written it. Bus!'[2] the doctor replied
impatiently. Put the memsahib into her clothes. Pack everything
there is, and hasten. Do you understand, foolish one?'
[2] 'Enough.'
'Very good said the ayah submissively, and watched the doctor out
of sight. Then she insisted--holding the rupees, she could
insist--that the goat-keeper should bring his goat into the hut to milk
it; there was more safety, Tooni thought, in the hut. While he
milked it Tooni sat upon the ground, hugging her knees, and
thought.
The memsahib had said nothing all this time, had known nothing.
For two days the memsahib had been, as Tooni would have said,
without sense--had lain on the bed in the corner quietly staring at
the wall, where the looking-glass hung, making no sign except when
she heard the Nana Sahib's guns. Then she sat up straight, and
laughed very prettily and sweetly. It was the salute, she thought
in her fever; the Viceroy was coming; there would be all sorts of
gay doings in the station. When the shell exploded that tore up
the wall of the hut, she asked Tooni for her new blue silk with the
flounces, the one that had been just sent out from England, and her
kid slippers with the rosettes. Tooni, wiping away her helpless
tears with the edge of her head covering, had said, 'Na, memsahib,
na!' and stroked the hot hand that pointed, and then the mistress
had forgotten again. As to the little pink baby, three days old,
it blinked and throve and slept as if it had been born in its
father's house to luxury and rejoicing.
Tooni questioned the goat-keeper; but he had seen three sahibs
killed that morning, and was stupid with fear. He did not even
know of the Nana Sahib's order that the English were to be allowed
to go away in boats; and this was remarkable, because he lived in
the bazar outside, and in the bazar people generally know what is
going to happen long before the sahibs who live in the tall white
houses do. Tooni had only her own reflections.
There would be no more shooting, and the Nana Sahib would let them
all go away in boats; that was good khaber--good news. Tooni
wondered, as she put the baby's clothes together in one bundle, and
her own few possessions together in another, whether it was to be
believed. The Nana Sahib so hated the English; had not the guns
spoken of his hate these twenty-one days? Inside the walls many
had died, but outside the walls might not all die? The doctor had
said that the Nana Sahib had written it; but why should the Nana
Sahib write the truth? The Great Lord Sahib, the Viceroy, had sent
no soldiers to compel him. Nevertheless, Tooni packed what there
was to pack, and soothed the baby with a little goat's milk and
water, and dressed her mistress as well as she was able, according
to the doctor's directions. Then she went out to where old Abdul,
the table-waiter, her husband, crouched under a wall, and told him
all that she knew and feared. But Abdul, having heard no guns for
nearly an hour and a half, was inclined to be very brave, and said
that without doubt they should all get safely to Allahabad; and
there, when the memsahib was better, they would find the captain-sahib
again, and he would give them many rupees backsheesh for
being faithful to her.
'The memsahib will never be better,' said Tooni, sorrowfully; 'her
rice is finished in the earth. The memsahib will die.'
She agreed to go to the ghat, though, and went back into the hut to
wait for the ox-cart while Abdul cooked a meal on the powder-blackened
ground with the last of the millet, and gave thanks to Allah.
There was no room for Tooni to ride when they started. She walked
alongside carrying the baby and its little bundle of clothes.
There was nothing else to carry, and that was fortunate, for the
cart in which the memsahib lay was too full of sick and wounded to
hold anything more. In Tooni's pocket a little black book swung to
and fro; it was the memsahib's book; and in the beginning of the
firing, before the fever came, Tooni had seen the memsahib reading
it long and often. They had not been killed in consequence, Tooni
thought; there must be a protecting charm in the little black book;
so she slipped it into her pocket. They left the looking-glass
behind.
The ox-cart passed out creaking, in its turn, beyond the earthworks
of the English encampment into the city, where the mutinous natives
stood in sullen curious groups to watch the train go by. A hundred
yards through the narrow streets, choked with the smell of
gunpowder and populous with vultures, and Abdul heard a quick voice
in his ear. When he turned, none were speaking, but he recognised
in the crowd the lowering indifferent face of a sepoy he knew--one
of the Nana Sahib's servants. Saying nothing, he fell back for
Tooni and laid his hand upon her arm. And when the cart creaked
out of the town into the crowded, dusty road that led down to the
ghat, neither Abdul nor Tooni were in the riotous crowd that
pressed along with it. They had taken refuge in the outer bazar,
and Sonny Sahib, sound asleep and well hidden, had taken refuge
with them.
As to Sonny Sahib's mother, she was neither shot in the boats with
the soldiers that believed the written word of the Nana Sahib, nor
stabbed with the women and children who went back to the palace
afterwards. She died quietly in the oxcart before it reached the
ghat, and the pity of it was that Sonny Sahib's father, the
captain, himself in hospital four hundred miles from Cawnpore,
never knew.
There is a marble angel in Cawnpore now, standing in a very quiet
garden, and shut off even from the trees and the flowers by an
enclosing wall. The angel looks always down, down, and such an
awful, pitiful sorrow stands there with her that nobody cares to
try to touch it with words. People only come and look and go
silently away, wondering what time can have for the healing of such
a wound as this. There is an inscription--
SACRED TO THE PERPETUAL MEMORY OF A LARGE COMPANY OF CHRISTIAN
PEOPLE, CHIEFLY WOMEN AND CHILDREN, WHO NEAR THIS SPOT WERE CRUELLY
MURDERED BY THE FOLLOWERS OF THE REBEL NANA DHUNDU PANT OF BITHUR,
AND CAST, THE DYING WITH THE DEAD, INTO THE WELL BELOW, ON THE XVTH
DAY OF JULY MDCCCLVII.'
And afterward Sonny Sahib's father believed that all he could learn
while he lived about the fate of his wife and his little son was
written there. But he never knew.