More than a hundred fakirs and wandering priests and mendicants had
sent in word that the province from end to end was ready, and that the
British slept. But there were those in Jailpore who distrusted fakirs
and religious votaries of every kind. They believed them fully capable
of rousing the countryside, of working on the religious feelings of the
unsophisticated rustics and setting them to murdering and plundering
right and left. But they doubted their ability to judge of the army's
sleepiness. These doubters were the older men, who had had experience
of England's craft in war. They knew of the ability of some at least of
England's generals to match guile against guile, and back up guile with
swift, unexpected hammer-strokes.
There were men who claimed that what had happened in Jailpore would be
repeated in Bholat and elsewhere. There was no need, these maintained,
to march and join hands with other rebels. Each unit was sufficient to
itself. Each city would be a British funeral pyre. Why march?
Some said, “The general at Bholat will learn of the massacre, and will
learn too, that not quite all were killed. He will come hotfoot to find
the four we could not find. For these British are as cobras; slay the
he cobra and the she one comes to seek revenge. Slay the she one and
beware! Her husband will track thee down, and strike thee. They are not
ordinary folk!”
There were other factions that maintained that General Baines was strong
enough, with his three thousand, to hold Bholat, unless the men of
Jailpore marched, to join hands with the Bholatis--who were surely in
revolt by this time. There were others who declared that he would leave
Bholat and Jailpore to their fates without any doubt at all, and would
march to join hands with the nearest contingent, at Harumpore.
The bolder spirits of this latter faction were for setting off at once
to prevent this combination. For a little while their arguments almost
prevailed.
But another faction yet, and an even more numerous one, insisted it were
best to wait for news from other centers.
Why march, they argued, why strike, why run unnecessary risks, before
they knew what was happening elsewhere?
“Surely,” these argued, “the English will hear that four here are still
unaccounted for. Some attempt will be made to find and rescue them. But
if we find and slay them, and send their heads to Bholat, then will the
English know that they are indeed dead. Then there will be no attempt at
rescue, and we shall hold Jailpore unmolested as headquarters.”
That piece of logic won the day for a while, and parties were made up
to explore the place, and search in every nook and cranny for the three
women. and a child who surely had not passed out through any of the
gates, and who were therefore just as surely in the city. A reward was
offered by the committee of rebel-leaders and, although nobody believed
that the reward would actually be paid, the opportunities for looting
privately while searching were so great that the search was thorough.
It failed, though, for the very simple reason that nobody suspected that
the huge stone trap-door in the floor of the powder-magazine had ever
been opened, or ever could be opened. The magazine had been a white
man's watch. White men had kept guard over it for more than a hundred
years, and the natives had forgotten that a maze of tunnels and caverns
lay beneath it.
So, while bayonet-points and swords were pushed into crevices, while
smoke was sent down passages and tunnels and great, loose-limbed,
slobbering hounds were led on the leash and cast to find a trail, the
three women and the child lay still beneath the piled-up powder,
and doled out water, and biscuit in siege-time measures. They lay in
pitch-darkness, in a vault where not even a sound could reach them,
except the whispered echo of their own voices and the scampering of
the rats. They were growing nearly blind, and nearly crazed, with the
darkness and the silence and the fear.
Every second they expected to see daylight through the cracks above, as
rebels levered up the door, or to hear feet and voices coming through
the vaults below, for doubtless the vaults led somewhere. But for their
fear of snakes and rats and unknown horrors, they would have tried to
find a way through the vaults themselves. But as each movement that they
made, and each word that they spoke, sent echoes reverberating through
the gloom, they lay still and shuddered.
Once they heard footsteps on the stone flags overhead. But the footsteps
went away again, and then all was still. Soon they lost all count of
time. They were only aware of heat and discomfort and fear and utter
weariness.
One woman and an infant wept. One woman prayed aloud incessantly. The
third woman--the menial, the worst educated and least enlightened of
the three, according to the others' notion of it--stubbornly refused to
admit that there was not some human means of rescue.
“If Bill were here,” she kept on grumbling, “Bill'd find a way!”
And in the darkness that surrounded her she felt that she could see
Bill's face, as she remembered it--red-cheeked and clean-shaven--six
years or more ago.