Now if Sergeant Brown possessed a sweetheart, and the sweetheart lived
in England, and if Brown still loved her--as has already been more
than hinted at--it is not at all unreasonable to wonder why he had no
likeness of her, no news of her, nothing but her memory around which
to weave the woof of sentiment--at least, it's not unreasonable so to
wonder in this late year of grace.
Then, though, in 1857, when a newspaper cost threepence or thereabouts,
and schools were so far from being free that only the sons of gentlemen
(and seldom the daughters of even gentlemen, remember) attended them,
the art of reading was not so common as it now is. Writing was still
more uncommon. And it has not been pretended that Brown was other than a
commoner. He was a stiff-backed man, and honest. And the pride that had
raised him to the rank of sergeant was even stiffer than his stock. But
he came from the ranks that owned no vote, nor little else, in those
days, and he owned a sweetheart of the same rank as himself, who could
neither read nor write. And when people whose somewhat primitive ideas
on right and wrong lead them to look on daguerreotypes as works of the
devil happen too to be living more than five thousand miles apart, when
one of the two can not write, nor readily afford the cost of postage,
and when the other is nearly always on the move from post to post, it is
not exactly to be wondered at that memory of each other was all they had
to dwell upon.
A journey to India in '57 meant, to the rank and file, oblivion and
worse. There were men then, of course, just as there are now, who would
leave a girl behind them tied fast by a promise of futile and endless
devotion; men who knew what the girls did not know--that India was all
but inaccessible to any one outside of government employ, and that a
common soldier's chance of sending for his girl, or of coming home
again to claim her, was something in the neighborhood of one in thirty
thousand.
But there were other men, like William Brown, who were a shade too
honest and too stiff-chinned to buckle under to the social conditions
of England in those days, and who were consequently not exactly pestered
with offers of employment. And a man who could see the difference
between doffing his ragged cap to a dissolute squire or parson, and
saluting his better on parade, could also see the selfishness of leaving
an honest girl to languish for him. Brown could not get a living in
England. So he told his girl to get a better man, swung his canvas bag
across his shoulder and marched away.
“What kind of a man is a better man than Bill?” she had wondered. Men
like Bill seem to have a knack of judging character, and of picking
girls who are as steadfast as themselves. So it is not to be wondered at
that almost before her tears were dry she had set about attempting what
few women of her type and time would have dreamed of. If Bill had set
her free, she reasoned, Bill had no more authority over her, and she
might do exactly what she chose. Bill could release, but he could not
make her take another man. So, for all that the local yeomen, and local
tradesmen even, haunted the little cottage on the Downs, and pestered
her with their attentions, no one supplanted Bill.
Bill could tell her--and had told her--that India was no country for a
white woman; that there were snakes there, and black men and tigers and
even worse. But, since he had set her free, if she could manage it
she was quite at liberty to brave the tigers and the snakes. And, once
there, she would see whether she was free or not, and whether Bill was,
either!
It took Bill Brown six years of constant honest effort to become a
sergeant. It took Jane Emmett six weeks of pride-consuming and vexatious
vigilance to procure for herself a job as nurse in a soldier-family. And
it took her six more years of unremitting diligence, sweetened by all
the attributes that seem desirable when nursing other people's children
and embittered by the shame of grudging patronage, before she was
considered dependable enough to be recommended for the service of a
family just leaving for Bengal. Then, however, her world was a real
world again!
Five months on a sailing-ship around the Cape--deep-laden, gunwales
awash in a beam--on Bay-of-Biscay “snorer,” hove-to for a week off Cape
Agul--has, while the clumsy brigantine rolled the masts loose in her,
all but dismasted in a typhoon come astray from the China Sea, fed on
moldy bread, and even moldier pork, with a fretful child to nurse, and
an exacting mother to be pleased! Jane Emmett laughed at it. Bill had
been there before her, and had done more on his way, and worse Bengal
did not frighten her. Nor did the knowledge, when she reached it, that
Bill was very likely still some hundreds of miles away. She, who had
come five thousand miles as the crows are said to fly and nine thousand
by the map, could manage the odd hundreds. And she could wait. She had
waited six long years. What was another month or two?
She had not even a notion where Bill was, beyond a vague one that he
belonged to another province. For when the Honorable East India Company
was muddling the affairs of India, the honors and emoluments and
privileges--such as they were!--were reserved for the benefit of the
commissioned ranks.
So a transfer to Jailpore did not mean to Jane Emmett ten extra degrees
of heat, the neighborhood of jungle-fever and a brand-new breed of
smells. Those disadvantages, which weighted down the souls of her
employers, were completely overshadowed, so far as she was concerned, by
the knowledge that she was traveling nearer by a hundred leagues or so
to where her Bill was stationed. She was going west; and somewhere
to the west was Bill. Anything was good--fever, and prickly heat, and
smells included--that brought her any nearer him.
There would be no sense in endeavoring to analyze her sensations when
the sudden outburst overwhelmed the inner-guard at Jailpore. The sight
of white women being butchered, and of white men with the blood of their
own women on their hands, selling their lives as dearly as the God
of War would let them in a holocaust of flames, blinded her. It was
probably just a splurge of fire and noise and smoke and blood in her
memory, with one or two details standing out. The only real sensation
that she felt--even when a tall, lean Rajput flung her across his
shoulder, ran with her and dropped her down through a square hole into
stifling darkness--was a longing for Bill Brown, her Bill, the one man
in the world who could surely stop the butchery.
The others prayed. But she refused to pray. She felt angry--not
prayerful! Had she come nine thousand miles, and sacrificed six good
years of youth and youth's heritage, to be cast into a reeking dungeon
and left to die there in the dark? Not if Bill should know of it! And
so she changed her argument, and prayed for Bill. If only Bill
knew--straight-backed, honest, stiff-chinned, uncompromising, plain Bill
Brown. He would change things!
“Oh, Bill! Bill! Bill!” she sobbed. “Dear God, bring Bill to me!”