still with a flutter of her heart, and Khulâsa Khânum, with an odd
flutter at her heart also, which kept the colour even from her lips,
worked and prayed, Aftâba used the privacy of a tiny kitchen for the
preparation of other things than a scanty dinner of herbs. It meant the
loss of her only silver bangle, sold on the sly through the market
woman who came every morning. It was quite the most valuable thing in
the house; yet there was but a farthing or two left by the time the
pumpkin preserve, covered with silver leaf, lay in a tinselled rush
basket with the precious brocaded bag on the top, and the market woman,
bribed to return for it in the afternoon, had received a generous
douceur which would surely ensure its due delivery.
All this took time, and was tiring, to boot; so it was nigh sunset
when, after a sleep which had taken her almost unawares in the little
cook room, Aftâba came out again to the limited life on the roof. As
she did so, the familiar tentative cough of Shamira the _bhisti_ on his
rounds, accompanied by the squelching of his water-skin, made her step
back into the screening wall.
"_Bismillah!_" she said, wondering not to hear the familiar greeting.
But old Shamira was staring helplessly at something he had never seen
before. It was old Khulâsa Khânum.
"She must be dead," he said, simply, to Aftâba's horrified disbelief.
"See! She sits with face unveiled."
And she was dead. Her retaining fee had brought justice swiftly. And
Lateefa?
Aftâba, when she realised the emptiness of the roof save for herself
and the dead woman, wondered if it was the sight of one who belonged to
it slipping downstairs from its virtue that, by its terrible
confirmation of wantonness, had sent Khulâsa to seek to a higher
tribunal.
As for herself!
That night, when the waiters had gone, promising to return at dawn, and
she was left really alone for the first time, she sat wondering what
fate her preserved pumpkins would bring. And then she did something she
had never done in all her life before. She, too, used the hole left by
the displaced brick to gain a glimpse of the world which was doing
honour to dead heroes, and to the Queen for whom they died. As she did
so the first rockets rose from the unseen Residency to commemorate its
brave defenders, and set their stars of glory in high heaven.
Up and up, valiantly, higher and higher, full of the best intentions,
they went, typical, so far, of the hands that sent them on their
mission. And then?
Then old Aftâba stepped down from her vain vantage, and creeping back
to where Khulâsa lay waiting the dawn, put her head down beside hers
and wept.
For the stars had fallen, but the dead woman's retaining fee had
reached the Mercy Seat.
HIS CHANCE
He sate biting his nails viciously. It was not a habit of his, but, at
the moment, the tangle of his nineteen years of life had been too much
for him, and he sate before it, helpless yet resentful.
He was trying to write a letter to his mother, his widowed mother far
away over the black water in England, to tell her that he had been
placed under arrest for cowardice--since that was what it came to in
the end!--and yet not to hurt her, not to blame her, whom every bit of
his being blamed. Why had she brought him up a nincompoop? Why had she
been so afraid of him?--poor little mother whose nerves had been
shattered once and for all by her hero husband's death ere her child
was born. Yet that father had been brave to recklessness....
The boy's head went down on his arm. Something like a sob quivered
through the hot air. For it was hot, though the sun was but an hour
old, in the little grass-thatched bungalow which boasted of but one
room, two verandahs, and two corresponding slips of dark enclosed
space; one a bathroom, the other full of saddles, corn, empty
boxes--briefly, the factotum's go-down. The whole house being nothing
but a square mushroom set down causelessly in a dusty plain and guarded
by two whitewashed gate-pillars, one of which bore the legend, on a
black board, "Ensign Hector Clive, 1st Pioneers."
A good name, Hector Clive, and yet the boy's head was down on his arm.
Why had he been such a cursed fool?
A brain-fever bird was hard at work in a far-off _sirus_ tree. He could
see it in his mind's eye--green, with its red head held high among the
powder-puff flowers, as it gave its incessant cry with the regularity
of a coppersmith's hammer--for, though he had been but one year in the
country, he knew all its birds, and beasts, and flowers; aye! and had a
good smattering of its lingo also--it was that, partly, which had made
him--what was it--afraid--or--or cautious?
His brain was in such a whirl he could not tell which. And he had no
one to whom he could talk; not a friend in the whole regiment, for he
was shy. That was why he was living alone in this cursed shanty where
the centipedes and snakes, too, sometimes (but he was not afraid of
them, or of any animal, thank heaven), fell from the cloth ceiling, and
the sparrows (poor devils, after all they were only making their nests)
dropped straws over one's letters. That one had made a blot--like a
tear-mark--or was it, indeed...?
He cursed again under his breath, and a rigid obstinacy came to his
face.
Like his name, it was a good enough face, though curiously young even
for his young age. The great height of his forehead, it is true, took
away from its breadth, and the short-sighted blink of the eyes set so
close upon the high narrow nose prevented their piercing clearness from
being seen. On the lower part of his face, hair had scarcely begun to
show itself. All was callow, immature; yet the square chin showed stiff
and strong enough.
There should, at least, be no suspicion of tear marks, so he took a
fresh sheet: and then the thought struck him. He would write two
letters. One to the dear little Mother who had devoted herself to
him--him only--ever since he was born; the other to the woman
who had spoiled him and his life, whose timidity had accentuated his
birth-legacy of fear. It would do him good to have it out with himself
and with Fate--not with Her--no! never with Her!
So this was what he wrote, and left lying on the table when an orderly
came to summon him to the Colonel:
"Dear Mother,--It has come at last! I always knew it must come if you
would make a soldier of me, just because my father was one! Why didn't
you think? Why didn't you know? Poor Mother! I'm sorry to write all
this. How could you dream I have felt more or less of a coward all my
life, when _he_ was so brave!
"And then you made me worse--you know you did. I wasn't allowed to risk
things like the other boys did; because I was your only one. Ah! I
don't blame you, but it was rough on me. I should have made an
excellent parson, I expect. And yet I'll be damned--this isn't really
for your eyes, mother darling--if I can see what good I should have
done if I had ordered that Sepoy under arrest? The men wouldn't have
obeyed orders. I saw murder in their eyes. I've seen it for a long
time, and I haven't dared to say so--haven't dared to warn those who
should be warned for fear of being thought a coward--Isn't that
cowardice in itself? Oh, Mother, Mother! Well, it was very simple. A
Sepoy was cheeky over these greased cartridges; actually threatened to
shoot me if I ordered him under arrest, and--I--you see I know a lot of
their lingo, and I understand--I was afraid to do what I ought to have
done--chanced it. Of course it doesn't read as bare as that in the
Adjutant's report--but I am under arrest. Not that it matters. It must
have come sooner or later--for I'm a coward--that is what I am--a
coward...."
The words, still wet, stared up into the baggy cloth ceiling, and the
sparrows dropped straws over them while Ensign Hector Clive was being
interviewed by his Colonel. He sate stolid, acquiescing in every word
of blame; and yet he was obstinate.
"I don't see, sir, what good it would have done," he began drearily,
when the Colonel stopped him with a high hand.
"Now, I won't have a word of that sort, Mr. Clive," he said severely.
"There is enough of that silly talk amongst civilians, and I won't have
it amongst the officers of my regiment. It is as good a regiment as any
in India, and I'll stake----"
Here, feeling some lack of dignity in what he was about to say, he
stood up, and the lad standing up also, overtopped his senior by many
inches. Something suggestive in his still lanky length seemed to strike
the Colonel. "I'll tell you what it is, Clive, you live too much alone.
You're altogether too--too--why! I don't believe you even had a cup of
tea before you started. There! I was sure of it. Absolute suicide! How
can you expect, in this climate--and with a Colonel's wigging before
you--Really too foolish--my wife shall give you one now--she's in the
verandah with the boy--and--and, of course, I can't promise--but
you--you shall have your chance--if--if possible."
The--lad--for he was but that--murmured something unintelligible.
Perhaps to his dejected mind, another chance seemed to be but another
opportunity of disgracing himself.
"How very shy he is," thought the tall slim woman who gave a cup of tea
into his reluctant hand and sent Sonnie round to him with the toast and
butter. "I must get you to give my small son a lesson, Mr. Clive," she
said, smiling, trying to make conversation. "He was telling me all
sorts of dreadful things he has heard--so he says--from Budlu, his
bearer, and that he was frightened. And I told him a soldier's son
never could be frightened at anything. Isn't that true?"
Ensign Hector Clive turned deadly pale. The child standing, with the
plate of toast and butter, looked up at him confidently, as children
look always where they feel there is sympathy.
"But you are flightened, aren't you?" he asked.
There was an instant's silence; then the answer came, desperately true:
"Yes! I am--but then I'm a coward--that's what I am--a coward!"
You might have heard a pin drop in the pause. Then something in the
wise, gentle face of the Colonel's wife broke down the barriers.
"Ah! you don't know----" he began; and so with a rush it all came out.
The Colonel's wife sate quite still; she was accustomed to confidences,
and even when they did not come voluntarily she had the art of
beguiling them. The art also of comforting the confider; and so when
the lad's face had gone into his hands with his last words, as he
sate--his elbows on his knees--the picture of dejection, she just rose
gently, and came over with soft step to where he was. And she laid a
soft hand on either of his lank long-fingered ones and pulled them
apart. So, standing, smiled down upon him brilliantly--confidently.
"I don't believe it!" she said, "I don't believe a word of it! You'll
be brave--oh! so brave, when your chance comes. Now, my dear, dear
boy----" she looked at him as if he had been her son--"go away and
forget all this nonsense. And see! Come back at dinner time and tell me
before dinner that you've obeyed orders and haven't even thought about
it."
She stood and waved her hand at him as he rode away in the blare of
sunlight. Her voice echoing through the hot dry air reached him faintly
as he turned out of her garden into the dust of the world beyond. "Till
dinner-time--remember!"
* * * * *
Remember! The memory of those words came back to her idly as she sate
clasping her baby to her breast, while Sonnie, wearied out with fear,
slept in her lap, and her one disengaged hand busied itself in fanning
a half-delirious man who lay on a string bed set in the close darkness.
Dinner time! Yes, it must be about dinner time, for through a chink in
the door you could see the sun flaring to his death in the west.
What had happened? She shuddered as she thought of it. What had come
first, of all the horrors of that long hot May day? She could not piece
it together. All that she knew was that someone had taken pity on the
women and the children. And that they were all huddled together in that
one room waiting till darkness should give a chance of escape; for the
hut was built against an old ruin through which some underground
passage gave upon ground not quite so sentry-warded as the barrack
square in front. She could hear the familiar words of command, the
clank of arms as they changed guard, and she shuddered again. Aye! the
women and children might be safe, even if the almost hopeless stratagem
failed; but what of the man--her husband--the only one, so far as she
knew, of all the officers of the regiment who had escaped the massacre
on the parade ground? How had he been saved? She scarcely knew. She
remembered his running back like a hare--yes! he, the bravest of
men--all bleeding and fainting, to gasp some words of almost hopeless
directions for her safety. And then old Imân Khân--yes! it had been
he--faithful old servant! Why had she not remembered before? For there
he was, his bald head bereft of its concealing turban, keeping watch
and ward at the door.
What a ruffian he looked, so--poor, faithful Imân Khân!
Hush! a voice from outside, a reply from the bald-headed watcher
within. More questions, more replies, both growing in urgency in
appeal. Then a pause and retreating footsteps.
"What is it, Imân Khân?" she questioned dully, as the old man stole
over to her and laid his forehead in the dust.
"What this slave has feared, has waited for all the hours," he
whispered, whimperingly. "They know--Huzoor----" he pointed to the bed.
"Or, at least, they have suspicion that a man is here. And they must
search--they will search--or kill. I have sent them to await the
Huzoor's decision."
She stood up, still clasping her babe, the boy slipping, half-asleep,
to the ground, and looked round at those other women--those other
children who had lost their all. And hers lay here....
"They must come," she said in a muffled voice. Then she bent over her
husband. "Will!" she whispered, bringing him back from confused,
half-restful dreams, "the Sepoys say they must search--or--or
kill--them all. We will hide you--if we can."
If we can! Was it possible, she wondered, feeling dead, dead at heart,
as the door opened wide, letting in the sunlight and showing a group of
tense womanhood, a bed whereon, huddled up asleep or awake, lay the
children deftly disposed to hide all betraying contours.
"Huzoor! salaam!" said the tall _subahdâr_, drawing himself up to
attention, and the search party of four followed suit.
How long that minute seemed. How interminable the sunlight. Ah! would
no one shut out the light, and why did Sonnie move his hand?...
"Huzoor! Salaam!"
Oh! God in heaven! were they going? Was the door closing? Was the
blessed darkness coming?...
It was utter darkness, as, her strength giving way, she fell on her
knees beside the bed, burying her face upon her children, her husband.
"Will! Will!" she whispered.
A faint sigh came from the watching women. So Fate had been kind to
her--her only....
One who had seen her husband shot down before her very eyes rose
slowly, and taking her baby from the bed, moved away, rocking it in her
arms almost fiercely. So, in the grim intensity of those first seconds,
the sound of further parley at the door escaped them.
Then, in the ensuing pause, old Imân Khân's bald head was in the dust
once more, his voice, scarce audible, seemed to fill the room.
"Huzoor! They have seen. He must go forth or they will kill--all."
The words, half-heard, seemed to rouse the wounded man to his manhood.
He raised himself in bed, he staggered to his feet; so stood, swaying
unsteady, yet still a man. "All right--I'll go--Let me out,
quick--quick----"
But someone stood between him and the door. It was Ensign Hector Clive.
His face was pale as death, his hands twitched nervously, but in the
semi-darkness his eyes blazed, his chin looked square and set.
"No, sir," he said quietly, "this is my chance. Look here! I ran
and hid in the passage-way when the others--died like men--I couldn't
help it--perhaps if they had had the chance I had--but that's
nothing!--nothing! I heard--I understand their lingo. They don't know
you're here, sir--only a man--let me be a man--for once. It is my
chance----"
His eyes sought the Colonel's wife in bitter appeal.
Swift as thought she answered it. Her hand was on her husband's
shoulder to hold him back, for she saw in a flash what others might not
see--a martyrdom of life, soul warring with frail flesh, for this boy.
"Let him go, Will," she whispered hoarsely. "As he says, it is his
chance."
There was a faint stir amongst the listeners. The Colonel shook himself
free from his wife's detaining hand. The code of conventional honour
was his, in all its maddening lack of comprehension.
"Stand back, please--and you, Mr. Clive, obey orders--I--I----" He
reeled and would have fallen, but for the bed against which he sank.
His wife was on her knees beside him.
"Let him go, Will. It is his chance, give it him, for God's sake!"
There was no answer. Unconsciousness had come to bring the silence
which gives consent, and she stood up again, stepped to the lad and
laid her lips on his forehead.
"Thank you, dear--in the name of all these--thanks for a brave deed."
The blood surged up to his face. A boyish look of sheer triumph
transfigured it as he paused for an instant to throw off his coat and
tighten his waistband.
"I shall have my chance, too," he cried exultantly, "for I was always a
good runner at school!"
Aye! a good runner, indeed! With the wild whoop of a schoolboy at play,
he was across the barrack square, untouched. Once over that low wall in
front and he would be in cover. He rose to the leap lightly, and for an
instant he showed in all the pathetic beauty of immature strength, all
the promise of what might lie hidden in the future, against the red
flare of the sunlit sky, against the glorious farewell which is true
herald of the rising of another day. Then he threw his arms skywards
and fell, shot through the heart.
He had had his chance!
THE FLATTERER FOR GAIN
Prem Lal, census enumerator, raised to that fleeting dignity by
reason of his being a "middle fail" student (as those who have at
least gone up for the Middle School examination style themselves in
India), paused in his ineffectual attempt to write with a fine steel
nib on the fluttering blue paper held--without any backing--in his left
hand, and, all unconsciously, gave the offending pen that sidelong,
blot-scattering flick which the native reed requires when it will not
drive properly.
Then he coughed a deprecating cough, and covered the previous
act--natural enough in one whose ancestors, being of the clerkly caste,
had spent long centuries in acquiring and transmitting it--by
displaying his Western culture in another way.
"Now for the next 'adult' or 'adulteress' in this house," he said
pompously in polyglot.
The grammatical correctness of his genders passed unchallenged by his
half-curious, half-awe-stricken audience. The blue paper, ruled,
scheduled, classified, contained an unknown world to that patriarchal
party assembled in the sleepy sunshine which streamed down on the roof
set--far above the city, far above Western civilisation--under the
sleepy sunshiny sky; so it might well hold stranger things to its
environment than untrustworthy feminines.
"There is the grandfather's father, Chiragh Shah, Huzoor," replied a
man of about thirty who, standing midway between the real householder
and his grandsons, had assumed the responsibility of spokesmanship in
virtue of his possibly combining old wisdom and new culture. He used
the honorific title "Huzoor" not to Prem Lal--whom he gauged scornfully
to be a mere schoolboy, and a Hindoo idolator to boot--but to the blue
paper which represented the alien rulers, who were numbering the people
for reasons best known to themselves.
A stir came from the door chink behind which the females of the family
were decorously hiding their indignant anxiety.
"Yea! let the old man go forth," shrilled a voice to which none in that
household ever said nay. "He is past his time--let them take his brains
if they will, and leave virtuous women alone. Who are we, to be
registered as common evil walkers?"
Even Prem Lal grew humble instantly.
"Nay! mother," he said apologetically, in unconscious oblivion of his
own previous classification. "The Sirkar suggests no impropriety. We
seek but to know such trivials as age--sex--if idiot, cripple,
spinster, adult or adult----"
"Let Chiragh Shah go forth to him," interrupted the hidden oracle with
opportune decision. "Lo! his midday opium is still in his brain. Let it
bring peace to him and the eater thereof."
The chink widened obediently, disclosing a fluttering and scattering of
dim draperies. So, roused evidently from a doze in the inner darkness,
a very old man shuffled out into the sunshine, then stopped, blinking
at it as if, verily, he found himself in some new and unfamiliar world.
"The Sirkar hath sent for thee, grandad," bawled the appointed
spokesman in his ear. "They need----"
But the words were enough. The blank, dazed look passed into a sudden
alacrity which took years from the old body as it sat it a-trembling
with eagerness.
"The Sirkar," he echoed. "It is long since I, Chiragh Shah--long
since----" He relapsed as suddenly into dreams. His voice failed as if
following the suit of memory, but he supplied the lack of both by a
smile which spoke volumes.
For it was the smile of a sycophant as unblushingly false as the
teeth which it displayed--teeth which were square, dicelike blocks of
ivory, unvarying in size, strung together en a bold gold wire, and
hung--Heaven knows how--to his toothless gums.
"Sit down, _meeân-jee_," said the census enumerator, politely, for the
heart-whole artificiality of the smile admitted of no breach of
manners. "We seek but honourable names and ages."
So they brought the old man a quaint red lacquered stool, which
had once carried a certain dignity in its spindled back rail by
reason of its having come into the family with some far dead and gone
bride--Chiragh Shah's own, mayhap!--and there he sate, still with that
look of urbane smiling alacrity rejuvenating his wrinkled face.
There was a hint, beneath the semi-transparency of his frayed white
muslin robe, cut in a bygone fashion, of very worn, very old brocade
fitting closely to the very thin, very old body, and the embroidered
cap set back from his high, narrow forehead showed a glint here and
there of frayed old worn gold thread.
"His name is Chiragh Shah," yawned the spokesman, adding in a bawl,
"How old art thou, dâdâ--the Sirkar is asking?"
There was a little pause, and wintry though the sun was, its shine
seemed to filter straight through all things, denying a visible shadow
even to the blue paper.
"How old?" came the urbane voice, speaking with a long-lapsed precision
of polish. "That is as God wills and my lord chooses."
Prem Lal glanced doubtfully at the schedules. They did not provide for
such politeness, so he appealed mutely to the spokesman, who replied by
roundabout assertion:
"He was of knowledgeable years when the city fell--wast thou not,
dâdâ?" The explanatory shout brought keen intelligence to the hearer.
"Aye! it was from the palace bastion I watched the English. Half the
city watched them that 14th of September...." Here once more voice and
memory lapsed awhile. But Prem Lal's history was at least equal to the
more recent event of that memorable date, so his pen grew glib in
ciphering. "Taking knowledgeable age as ten," he commenced rapidly,
"with deduction of years 1857 from present epoch 1881----"
His face darkened. "He has the appearance of more age than
thirty-five," he began dubiously, when the suave old voice picked up
the lost thread of recollection.
"Lake sahib came to our court two days after, and the King, being
blind, saw not that the English face was no more merciful than the
French face which had been driven away, so there were rejoicings."
"He means the day which began the hundred years of tyranny," suggested
the spokesman; and Prem Lal's pen had already substituted 1805 for
1857, when the voice of her who had to be obeyed came sternly from the
chink. "Put him down as a hundred, boy!" it said scornfully. "Meat is
tough when the sacrifice is past its prime, anyhow, so what does it
matter?"
The next question presented no difficulty. No one in that house could
be aught but a descendant of the Prophet, so the answer "Syyed" sprang
to every lip with chill, almost scornful, pride.
"Profession or trade," continued Prem Lal, mechanically; "gold-thread
embroiderer, I suppose, like the rest of you."
It was a natural supposition, seeing that the high-bred, in-bred
household had for years past--since, in fact, courts were abolished in
Delhi--taken to this, the trade of so many ousted officials.