ON A VERY DIFFERENT PLANE OF INterest I regard my experience of two
delightful old people whom I found living, the one a mile or two on
the Brindlington side of Thurswell, the other on the Broadminster side,
“where the Dean lives.” The former is an old general who once
commanded a regiment of Sikhs and spent fifty years in India. He is now
eighty-three years of age, and has two sons with the rank of colonel, a
grandson who is a captain of Sappers, and two who are lieutenants in
the navy. The old man has nothing of the bristling retired general about
him--not even the liver. He is of a gentle, genial nature, not very
anxious to hear the latest news, and not at all eager to make his
visitors acquainted with his experiences in India or his views as to the
exact degree of decadence reached by “the sarvice.” He speaks in a low
and an almost apologetic tone, and is interested in old Oriental china
and tortoiseshell tea-caddies. One could never believe that this was
the man whose sobriquet of Shire-i-Iran (Lion of Persia) was once a
household word along the turbulent northwest frontier, or that he had
been the most brilliant exponent of all the dash which one associates
with the cavalry leader. His reputation on that long frontier was that
of an Oriental equivalent of the Wild Huntsman of the German ballad.
People had visions of him galloping by night at the head of his splendid
Sikhs to cut off the latest fanatical insurrectionary from his supports,
and then sweep him and his marauders off the face of the earth.
Certainly no cavalry leader ever handled his men with that daring
which he displayed--a daring that would have deserved to be called
recklessness had it once failed.... And there he sat at dinner, talking
in his low voice about the fluted rim of one of his tea-caddies, and
explaining how it was quite possible to repair the silver stringing that
beautified the top. Once I fancied I overheard him telling the person
who sat by him at dinner about the native regiments--I felt sure that
I heard the word “Sepoy,” and I became alert. Alas! the word that I had
caught was only “tea-poy”--he was telling how he had got a finely cut
glass for a deficient caddie out of an old nineteenth-century mahogany
tea-poy. That was the nearest approach he made to the days of his
greatness.
But I noticed with satisfaction that he partook of every dish that was
offered to him--down to the marmalade pudding. At dessert he glanced
down the table and said that he thought he would have an apple. “No,
dear,” said his daughter, gently but firmly removing the dish beyond his
reach. “You know that you are not allowed to touch apples.”
“Why, what harm will an apple do me--just one--only one apple?” he
inquired, and there were tears in his voice--it had become a tremulous
pipe, the tone of a child whose treat had been unjustly curtailed. “No,
dear, not even one. It is for your own good: you should have an apple if
it agreed with you; but it doesn't.”
“I want an apple--I can't see what harm an apple would do me,” he cried
again. But his daughter was firm. It was very pathetic to witness
the scene. The Lion of Persia becoming plaintive at being denied a
rosy-cheeked apple. The man who, with a force of only six hundred sabres
behind him, had ridden up to Mir Ali Singh with the three thousand
rebels supporting him, and demanded his sword, and got it, not being
able to get his apple when he had asked for it nicely, seemed to me to
be a most pathetic figure. I pleaded for him as one pleads for a child
in the nursery: he had been a good boy and had eaten all that had been
set before him quite nicely--why might he not have an apple to make him
happy?
But the daughter was inexorable. She told me that I did not know her
father, while she did. An apple would be poison to him; and so the old
hero was left complaining, with an occasional falsetto note, upon the
restrictions of his commissariat. I am pretty sure that there was no
falsetto note in any of his complaints in regard to commissariat forty
years ago.
He was a noble old warrior, however, for when his daughter had, with the
rest of the ladies, left us after dinner, he never put out a hand to
the apple dish, though there was no man at the table who would have
interfered with him had he done so; the Newtown Pippins remained
blushing, but not on account of any disloyalty on his part to the duty
he owed to the daughter who had his welfare at heart.