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THE RED YEAR
A STORY
OF THE INDIAN MUTINY
BY
LOUIS TRACY
AUTHOR OF
"THE WINGS OF THE MORNING," "THE PILLAR OF
LIGHT," "THE CAPTAIN OF THE KANSAS,"
ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1907
BY EDWARD J. CLODE
_Entered at Stationers' Hall_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
THE MESHES OF THE NET 1
CHAPTER II
A NIGHT IN MAY 19
CHAPTER III
HOW BAHADUR SHAH PROCLAIMED HIS EMPIRE 39
CHAPTER IV
ON THE WAY TO CAWNPORE 54
CHAPTER V
A WOMAN INTERVENES 72
CHAPTER VI
THE WELL 91
CHAPTER VII
TO LUCKNOW 110
CHAPTER VIII
WHEREIN A MOHAMMEDAN FRATERNIZES WITH A BRAHMIN 131
CHAPTER IX
A LONG CHASE 151
CHAPTER X
WHEREIN FATE PLAYS TRICKS WITH MALCOLM 169
CHAPTER XI
A DAY'S ADVENTURES 190
CHAPTER XII
THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM 210
CHAPTER XIII
THE MEN WHO WORE SKIRTS 227
CHAPTER XIV
WHY MALCOLM DID NOT WRITE 247
CHAPTER XV
AT THE KING'S COURT 268
CHAPTER XVI
IN THE VORTEX 290
CHAPTER XVII
THE EXPIATION 309
_The Red Year_
CHAPTER I
THE MESHES OF THE NET
On a day in January, 1857, a sepoy was sitting by a well in the
cantonment of Dum-Dum, near Calcutta. Though he wore the uniform of John
Company, and his rank was the lowest in the native army, he carried on
his forehead the caste-marks of the Brahmin. In a word, he was more than
noble, being of sacred birth, and the Hindu officers of his regiment, if
they were not heaven-born Brahmins, would grovel before him in secret,
though he must obey their slightest order on parade or in the field.
To him approached a Lascar.
"Brother," said the newcomer, "lend me your brass pot, so that I may
drink, for I have walked far in the sun."
The sepoy started as though a snake had stung him. Lascars, the
sailor-men of India, were notoriously free-and-easy in their manners.
Yet how came it that even a low-caste mongrel of a Lascar should offer
such an overt insult to a Brahmin!
"Do you not know, swine-begotten, that your hog's lips would contaminate
my lotah?" asked he, putting the scorn of centuries into the words.
"Contaminate!" grinned the Lascar, neither frightened nor angered. "By
holy Ganga, it is your lips that are contaminated, not mine. Are not the
Government greasing your cartridges with cow's fat? And can you load
your rifle without biting the forbidden thing? Learn more about your own
caste, brother, before you talk so proudly to others."
Not a great matter, this squabble between a sepoy and a Lascar, yet it
lit such a flame in India that rivers of blood must be shed ere it was
quenched. The Brahmin's mind reeled under the shock of the retort. It
was true, then, what the agents of the dethroned King of Oudh were
saying in the bazaar. The Government were bent on the destruction of
Brahminical supremacy. He and his caste-fellows would lose all that made
life worth living. But they would exact a bitter price for their fall
from high estate.
"Kill!" he murmured in his frenzy, as he rushed away to tell his
comrades the lie that made the Indian Mutiny possible. "Slay and spare
not! Let us avenge our wrongs so fully that no accursed Feringhi shall
dare again to come hither across the Black Water!"
The lie and the message flew through India with the inconceivable speed
with which such ill tidings always travels in that country. Ever north
went the news that the British Raj was doomed. Hindu fakirs, aglow with
religious zeal, Mussalman zealots, as eager for dominance in this world
as for a houri-tenanted Paradise in the next, carried the fiery torch of
rebellion far and wide. And so the flame spread, and was fanned to red
fury, though the eyes of few Englishmen could see it, while native
intelligence was aghast at the supineness of their over-lords.
* * * * *
One evening in the month of April, a slim, straight-backed girl stood in
the veranda of a bungalow at Meerut. Her slender figure, garbed in white
muslin, was framed in a creeper-covered arch. The fierce ardor of an
Indian spring had already kissed into life a profusion of red flowers
amid the mass of greenery, and, if Winifred Mayne had sought an
effective setting for her own fair picture, she could not have found one
better fitted to its purpose.
But she was young enough and pretty enough to pay little heed to pose or
background. In fact, so much of her smooth brow as could be seen under a
broad-brimmed straw hat was wrinkled in a decided frown. Happily, her
bright brown eyes had a glint of humor in them, for Winifred's wrath was
an evanescent thing, a pallid sprite, rarely seen, and ever ready to be
banished by a smile.
"There!" she said, tugging at a refractory glove. "Did you hear it? It
actually shrieked as it split. And this is the second pair. I shall
never again believe a word Behari Lal says. Wait till I see him. I'll
give him such a talking to."
"Then I have it in my heart to envy Behari Lal," said her companion,
glancing up at her from the carriage-way that ran by the side of the few
steps leading down from the veranda.
"Indeed! May I ask why?" she demanded.
"Because you yield him a privilege you deny to me."
"I was not aware you meant to call to-day. As it is, I am paying a
strictly ceremonial visit. I wish I could speak Hindustani. Now, what
would you say to Behari Lal in such a case?"
"I hardly know. When I buy gloves, I buy them of sufficient size. Of
course, you have small hands--"
"Thank you. Please don't trouble to explain. And now, as you have been
rude to me, I shall not take you to see Mrs. Meredith."
"But that is a kindness."
"Then you shall come, and be miserable."
"For your sake, Miss Mayne, I would face Medusa, let alone the excellent
wife of our Commissary-General, but fate, in the shape of an uncommonly
headstrong Arab, forbids. I have just secured a new charger, and he and
I have to decide this evening whether I go where he wants to go, or he
goes where I want to go. I wheedled him into your compound by sheer
trickery. The really definite issue will be settled forthwith on the
Grand Trunk Road."
"I hope you are not running any undue risk," said the girl, with a
sudden note of anxiety in her voice that was sweetest music to Frank
Malcolm's ears. For an instant he had a mad impulse to ask if she cared,
but he crushed it ruthlessly, and his bantering reply gave no hint of
the tumult in his breast. Yet he feared to meet her eyes, and was glad
of a saluting sepoy who swaggered jauntily past the open gate.
"I don't expect to be deposited in the dust, if that is what you mean,"
he said. "But there is a fair chance that instead of carrying me back to
Meerut my friend Nejdi will take me to Aligarh. You see, he is an Arab
of mettle. If I am too rough with him, it will break his spirit; if too
gentle, he will break my neck. He needs the _main de fer sous le gant de
velours_. Please forgive me! I really didn't intend to mention gloves
again."
"Oh, go away, you and your Arab. You are both horrid. You dine here
to-morrow night, my uncle said?"
"Yes, if I don't send you a telegram from Aligarh. I may be brought
there, you know, against my will."
Lifting his hat, he walked towards a huge pipal tree in the compound.
Beneath its far-flung branches a syce was sitting in front of a
finely-proportioned and unusually big Arab horse. Both animal and man
seemed to be dozing, but they woke into activity when the sahib
approached. The Arab pricked his ears, swished his long and arched tail
viciously, and showed the whites of his eyes. A Bedouin of the desert, a
true scion of the incomparable breed of Nejd, he was suspicious of
civilization, and his new owner was a stranger, as yet.
"Ready for the fray, I see," murmured Malcolm with a smile. He wasted no
time over preliminaries. Bidding the syce place his thumbs in the steel
rings of the bridle, the young Englishman gathered the reins and a wisp
of gray mane in his left hand. Seizing a favorable moment, when the
struggling animal flinched from the touch of a low-lying branch on the
off side, he vaulted into the saddle. Chunga, the syce, held on until
his master's feet had found the stirrups. Then he was told to let go,
and Miss Winifred Mayne, niece of a Commissioner of Oudh, quite the most
eligible young lady the Meerut district could produce that year,
witnessed a display of cool, resourceful horsemanship as the enraged
Arab plunged and curvetted through the main gate.
It left her rather flushed and breathless.
"I like Mr. Malcolm," she confided to herself with a little laugh, "but
his manner with women is distinctly brusque! I wonder why!"
The Grand Trunk Road ran to left and right. To the left it led to the
bazaar, the cantonment, and the civil lines; to the right, after passing
a few houses tenanted by Europeans, it entered the open country on a
long stretch of over a thousand miles to Calcutta and the south. In 1857
no thoroughfare in the world equaled the Grand Trunk Road. Beginning at
Peshawur, in the extreme north of India, it traversed the Punjab for six
hundred miles as far as Aligarh. Here it broke into the Calcutta and
Bombay branches, each nearly a thousand miles in length. Wide and
straight, well made and tree-lined throughout, it supplied the two great
arteries of Indian life. Malcolm had selected it as a training-ground
that evening, because he meant to weary and subdue his too highly
spirited charger. Whether the pace was fast or slow, Nejdi would be
compelled to meet many varieties of traffic, from artillery elephants
and snarling camels down to the humble bullock-cart of the ryot.
Possibly, he would not shy at such monstrosities after twenty miles of a
lathering ride.
The mad pace set by the Arab when he heard the clatter of his feet on
the hard road chimed in with the turbulent mood of his rider. Frank
Malcolm was a soldier by choice and instinct. When he joined the Indian
army, and became a subaltern in a native cavalry regiment, he determined
to devote himself to his profession. He gave his whole thought to it and
to nothing else. His interests lay in his work. He regarded every
undertaking from the point of view of its influence on his military
education, so it may be conceded instantly that the arrival in Meerut of
an Oudh Commissioner's pretty niece should not have affected the peace
of mind of this budding Napoleon.
But a nice young woman can find joints in the armor of the
sternest-souled young man. Her attack is all the more deadly if
it be unpremeditated, and Frank Malcolm had already reached the
self-depreciatory stage wherein a comparatively impecunious subaltern
asks himself the sad question whether it be possible for such a one to
woo and wed a maid of high degree, or her Anglo-Indian equivalent, an
heiress of much prospective wealth and present social importance.
But money and rank are artificial, the mere varnish of life, and the hot
breath of reality can soon scorch them out of existence. Events were
then shaping themselves in India that were destined to sweep aside
convention for many a day. Had the young Englishman but known it, five
miles from Meerut his Arab's hoofs threw pebbles over a swarthy moullah,
lank and travel-stained, who was hastening towards the Punjab on a
dreadful errand. The man turned and cursed him as he passed, and vowed
with bitter venom that when the time of reckoning came there would not
be a Feringhi left in all the land. Malcolm, however, would have laughed
had he heard. Affairs of state did not concern him. His only trouble was
that Winifred Mayne stood on a pinnacle far removed from the beaten path
of a cavalry subaltern. So, being in a rare fret and fume, he let the
gray Arab gallop himself white, and, when the high-mettled Nejdi thought
of easing the pace somewhat, he was urged onward with the slight but
utterly unprecedented prick of a spur.
That was a degradation not to be borne. The Calcutta Brahmin did not
resent the Lascar's taunt more keenly. With a swerve that almost
unseated Malcolm, the Arab dashed in front of a bullock-cart, swept
between the trees on the west side of the road, leaped a broad ditch,
and crashed into a field of millet. Another ditch, another field, breast
high with tall castor-oil plants, a frantic race through a grove of
mangoes--when Malcolm had to lie flat on Nejdi's neck to avoid being
swept off by the low branches--and horse and man dived headlong into
deep water.
The splash, far more than the ducking, frightened the horse. Malcolm,
in that instant of prior warning which the possessor of steady nerves
learns to use so well, disengaged his feet from the stirrups. He was
thrown clear, and, when he came to the surface, he saw that the Arab
and himself were floundering in a moat. Not the pleasantest of
bathing-places anywhere, in India such a sheet of almost stagnant water
has excessive peculiarities. Among other items, it breeds fever and
harbors snakes, so Malcolm floundered rather than swam to the bank,
where he had the negative satisfaction of catching Nejdi's bridle when
that disconcerted steed scrambled out after him.
The two were coated with green slime. Being obviously unhurt, they
probably had a forlornly comic aspect. At any rate, a woman's musical
laugh came from the lofty wall which bounded the moat on the further
side, and a woman's clear voice said:
"A bold leap, sahib! Did you mean to scale the fort on horseback? And
why not have chosen a spot where the water was cleaner?"
Before he could see the speaker, so smothered was he in dripping
moss and weeds, Malcolm knew that some lady of rank had watched his
adventure. She used the pure Persian of the court, and her diction
was refined. Luckily, he had studied Persian as well as its Indian
off-shoot, Hindustani, and he understood the words. He pressed back his
dank hair, squeezed the water and slime off his face, and looked up.
To his exceeding wonder, his eyes met those of a young Mohammedan woman,
a woman richly garbed, and of remarkable appearance. She was unveiled,
an amazing fact in itself, and her creamy skin, arched eyebrows, regular
features, and raven-black hair proclaimed her aristocratic lineage. She
was leaning forward in an embrasure of the battlemented wall. Behind
her, two attendants, oval-faced, brown-skinned women of the people,
peered shyly at the Englishman. When he glanced their way, they
hurriedly adjusted their silk saris, or shawls, so as to hide their
faces. Their mistress used no such bashful subterfuge. She leaned
somewhat farther through the narrow embrasure, revealing by the action
her bejeweled and exquisitely molded arms.
"Perhaps you do not speak my language," she said in Urdu, the tongue
most frequently heard in Upper India. "If you will go round to the
gate--that way--" and she waved a graceful hand to the left left--"my
servants will render you some assistance."
By that time, Malcolm had regained his wits. A verse of a poem by Hafiz
occurred to him.
"Princess," he said, "the radiance of your presence is as the full moon
suddenly illumining the path of a weary traveler, who finds himself on
the edge of a morass."
A flash of surprise and pleasure lit the fine eyes of the haughty beauty
perched up there on the palace wall.
"'Tis well said," she vowed, smiling with all the rare effect of full
red lips and white even teeth. "Nevertheless, this is no time for
compliments. You need our help, and it shall be given willingly. Make
for the gate, I pray you."
She turned, and gave an order to one of the attendants. With another
encouraging smile to Malcolm, she disappeared.
Leading the Arab, who, with the fatalism of his race, was quiet as
a sheep now that he had found a master, the young officer took the
direction pointed out by the lady. Rounding an angle of the wall, he
came to a causeway spanned by a small bridge, which was guarded by the
machicolated towers of a strong gate. A ponderous door, studded with
great bosses of iron fashioned to represent elephants' heads, swung
open--half reluctantly it seemed--and he was admitted to a spacious
inner courtyard.
The number of armed retainers gathered there was unexpectedly large. He
was well acquainted with the Meerut district, yet he had no notion that
such a fortress existed within an hour's fast ride of the station. The
King of Delhi had a hunting-lodge somewhere in the locality, but he had
never seen the place. If this were it, why should it be crammed with
soldiers? Above all, why should they eye him with such ill-concealed
displeasure? Duty had brought him once to Delhi--it was barely forty
miles from Meerut--and the relations between the feeble old King,
Bahadur Shah, and the British authorities were then most friendly, while
the hangers-on at the Court mixed freely with the Europeans. His quick
intelligence caught at the belief that these men resented his presence
because he was brought among them by the command of the lady. He knew
now that he must have seen and spoken to one of the royal princesses.
None other would dare to show herself unveiled to a stranger, and a
white man at that. The manifest annoyance of her household was thus
easily accounted for, but he marveled at the strength of her bodyguard.
He was given little time for observation. A distinguished-looking man,
evidently vested with authority, bustled forward and addressed him,
civilly enough. Servants came with water and towels, and cleaned his
garments sufficiently to make him presentable, while other men groomed
his horse. He was wet through, of course, but that was not a serious
matter with the thermometer at seventy degrees in the shade, and,
despite the ordinance of the Prophet, a glass of excellent red wine
was handed to him.
But he saw no more of the Princess. He thought she would hardly dare to
receive him openly, and her deputy gave no sign of admitting him to the
interior of the palace, which loomed around the square of the courtyard
like some great prison.
A chaprassi recovered his hat, which he had left floating in the moat.
Nejdi allowed him to mount quietly; the stout door had closed on him,
and he was picking his way across the fields towards the Meerut road,
before he quite realized how curious were the circumstances which had
befallen him since he parted from Winifred Mayne in the porch of her
uncle's bungalow.
Then he bent forward in the saddle to stroke Nejdi's curved neck, and
laughed cheerfully.
"You are wiser than I, good horse," said he. "When the game is up, you
take things placidly. Here am I, your supposed superior in intellect, in
danger of being bewitched by a woman's eyes. Whether brown or black,
they play the deuce with a man if they shine in a woman's head. So ho,
then, boy, let us home and eat, and forget these fairies in muslin and
clinging silk."
Yet a month passed, and Frank Malcolm did not succeed in forgetting.
Like any moth hovering round a lamp, the more he was singed the closer
he fluttered, though the memory of the Indian princess's brilliant black
eyes was soon lost in the sparkle of Winifred's brown ones.
As it happened, the young soldier was a prime favorite with the
Commissioner, and it is possible that the course of true love might have
run most smoothly if the red torch of war had not flashed over the land
like the glare of some mighty volcano.
On Sunday evening, May 10th, Malcolm rode away from his own small
bungalow, and took the Aligarh road. As in all up-country stations, the
European residences in Meerut were scattered over an immense area. The
cantonment was split into two sections by an irregular ravine, or
nullah, running east and west. North of this ditch were many officers'
bungalows, and the barracks of the European troops, tenanted by a
regiment of dragoons, the 60th Rifles, and a strong force of artillery,
both horse and foot. Between the infantry and cavalry barracks stood
the soldiers' church. Fully two miles away, on the south side of the
ravine, were the sepoy lines, and another group of isolated bungalows.
The native town was in this quarter, while the space intervening between
the British and Indian troops was partly covered with rambling bazaars.
Malcolm had been detained nearly half an hour by some difficulty which a
subadar had experienced in arranging the details of the night's guard.
Several men were absent without leave, and he attributed this unusual
occurrence to the severe measures the colonel had taken when certain
troopers refused to use the cartridges supplied for the new Enfield
rifle. But, like every other officer in Meerut, he was confident that
the nearness of the strongest European force in the North-West Provinces
would certainly keep the malcontents quiet. Above all else, he was ready
to stake his life on the loyalty of the great majority of the men of his
own regiment, the 3d Native Cavalry.
In pushing Nejdi along at a fast canter, therefore, he had no weightier
matter on his mind than the fear that he might have kept Winifred
waiting. When he dashed into the compound, and saw that there was no
dog-cart standing in the porch, he imagined that the girl had gone
without him, or, horrible suspicion, with some other cavalier.
It was not so. Winifred herself appeared on the veranda as he
dismounted.
"You are a laggard," she said severely.
"I could not help it. I was busy in the orderly-room. But why lose more
time? If that fat pony of yours is rattled along we shall not be very
much behindhand."
"You must not speak disrespectfully of my pony. If he is fat, it is due
to content, not laziness. And you are evidently not aware that Evensong
is half an hour later to-day, owing to the heat. Of course, I expected
you earlier, and, if necessary, I would have gone alone, but--"
She hesitated, and looked over her shoulder into the immense
drawing-room that occupied the center of the bungalow from front to
rear.
"I don't mind admitting," she went on, laughing nervously, "that I am a
wee bit afraid these days--there is so much talk of a native rising.
Uncle gets so cross with me when I say anything of that kind that I keep
my opinions to myself."
"The country is unsettled," said Frank, "and it would be folly to deny
the fact. But, at any rate, you are safe enough in Meerut."
"Are you sure? Only yesterday morning eighty-five men of your own
regiment were sent to prison, were they not?"
"Yes, but they alone were disaffected. Every soldier knows he must obey,
and these fellows refused point-blank to use their cartridges, though
the Colonel said they might tear them instead of biting them. He could
go no further--I wonder he met their stupid whims even thus far."
"Well, perhaps you are right. Come in, for a minute or two. My uncle is
in a rare temper. You must help to talk him out of it. By the way, where
are all the servants? The dog-cart ought to be here. _Koi hai!_"[1]
[Footnote 1: The Anglo-Indian phrase for summoning a servant, meaning:
"Is there any one there?"]
No one came in response to her call. Thinking that a syce or chaprassi
would appear in a moment, Frank hung Nejdi's bridle on a lamp-hook in
the porch, and entered the bungalow.
He soon discovered that Mr. Mayne's wrath was due to a statement in a
Calcutta newspaper that a certain Colonel Wheler had been preaching to
his sepoys.
"What between a psalm-singing Viceroy and commanding officers who
hold conventicles, we are in for a nice hot weather," growled the
Commissioner, shoving a box of cheroots towards Malcolm when the latter
found him stretched in a long cane chair on the back veranda. "Here
is Lady Canning trying to convert native women, and a number of
missionaries publishing manifestoes about the influence of railways and
steamships in bringing about the spiritual union of the world! I tell
you, Malcolm, India won't stand it. We can do as we like with Hindu and
Mussalman so long as we leave their respective religions untouched. The
moment those are threatened we enter the danger zone. Confound it, why
can't we let the people worship God in their own way? If anything, they
are far more religiously inclined than we ourselves. Where is the
Englishman who will flop down in the middle of the road to say his
prayers at sunset, or measure his length along two thousand miles of a
river bank merely as a penance? Give me authority to pack a shipload of
busy-bodies home to England, and I'll soon have the country quiet
enough--"
An ominous sound interrupted the Commissioner's outburst. Both men heard
the crackle of distant musketry. At first, neither was willing to admit
its significance.
"Where is Winifred?" demanded Mr. Mayne, suddenly.
"She is looking for a servant, I fancy. There was none in the front of
the house, and I wanted a man to hold my horse."
A far-off volley rumbled over the plain, and a few birds stirred
uneasily among the trees.
"No servants to be seen--at this hour!"
They looked at each other in silence.
"We must find Winifred," said the older man, rising from his chair.
"And I must hurry back to my regiment," said Frank.
"You think, then, that there is trouble with the native troops?"
"With the sepoys, yes. I have been told that the 11th and 20th are not
wholly to be trusted. And those volleys are fired by infantry."
A rapid step and the rustle of a dress warned them that the girl was
approaching. She came, like a startled fawn.
"The servants' quarters are deserted," she cried. "Great columns of
smoke are rising over the trees, and you hear the shooting! Oh, what
does it mean?"
"It means, my dear, that the Dragoons and the 60th will have to teach
these impudent rebels a much-needed lesson," said her uncle. "There is
no cause for alarm. Must you really go, Malcolm?"
"Go!" broke in Winifred with the shrill accents of terror. "Where are
you going?"
"To my regiment, of course," said Frank, smiling at her fears. "Probably
we shall be able to put down this outbreak before the white troops
arrive. Good-by. I shall either return, or send a trustworthy messenger,
within an hour."
And so, confident and eager, he was gone, and the first moments of the
hour sped when, perhaps, a strong man in control at Meerut might have
saved India.