Chapter XXXIV: Appendix: B

DELHI, Christmas Day, 1858.

DEAR MRS. ERLTON: I can scarcely believe that two whole years have passed since I helped you to decorate a Christmas-tree in the Government college here. Those long months before the walls, and those others of wild chase after vanishing mutineers over half India seem to belong to someone else's existence now that I--and the world around me--are back in the commonplaces of life. I was down to-day helping the chaplain's wife with another tree--she has a very pretty sister, by the way, just out from England--and I almost fancied as I looked into the dim screened veranda where we are going to have an entertainment, that I could see you sitting there with little Sonny Seymour on your lap as I found you that afternoon half asleep--that interminable play about the Lord of Life and Death (wasn't it?) had been too much for you.

Well, I can only hope that Mr. Douglas' health and the pleasures of that Scotch home, of which you wrote me such a delightful description, will allow of your returning to India sometime and giving me a sight of you again.

Meanwhile I am reminded that I sent you off a small parcel by last mail which I trust may arrive before the wedding, as this should do, and convey to you the kindly remembrances of friends many thousand miles away. Not that you will need to be reminded. I fancy that few who went through the Indian Mutiny will ever need to have the faces and places they saw there recalled to their memory. Terrible as it was at the time, I myself feel that I would not willingly forget a single detail. So, being certain that it holds your interest, your imagination also, I am inclosing something for you to read. Can you not imagine the Silent and Diffident Dashe writing it? I can, and the careful way in which he would order the gallows to be removed and lay down his sword in favor of his pen at the earliest opportunity. You see he favors clemency Canning. So do most of us out here except those who have not yet recovered their nerves. I remember hearing Hodson--sad, wasn't it? his death over a needless piece of dare-devilry--very angry over something Mr. Douglas said about our all being in a blind funk. I am afraid it was true of a good many. Not Dashe, however, he kept his district together by sheer absence of fear, and so did many another. This report, then, will carry you on in the story, as it were, since you left us. For the rest, there is not much to tell. You remember our old mess khânsaman Numgal Khân? He turned up, with his bill, and out of pure delight insisted on feasting us so lavishly that we had to make him moderate his transports. Even with _batta_ and prize money we should all have been bankrupt, like the royal family. I can't help pitying it. Of course we have pensioned the lot, but I expect precious little hard cash gets to some of those wretched women. One of them, no less a person than the Princess Farkhoonda Zamâni, that beast Abool-bukr's ally, has set up a girls' school in the city. If she had only befriended you instead of turning you out to find your own fate, she would have done better for herself. Talking of friends and foes, it is rather amusing to find the villages full of men busy at their plows with a suspiciously military set about the shoulders, who, according to their own showing, never wore uniform, or doffed it before the Mutiny began. I was much struck with one of these defaulters the other day; a big Rajpoot, who, but for his name, might have stood for the Laodicean sepoy you told me about. But names can be changed, so can faces; and that reminds me that I had a petition from that old scoundrel Tiddu the other day--you know I have been put on to civil work lately, and shall end, I suppose, by being a Commissioner as well as a Colonel. He has had a grant of land given him for life, and he now wants the tenure extended in favor of one Jhungi, who, he declares, helped you in your marvelous escape. It seems there was another brother, one Bhungi, who--but I own to being a little confused in the matter. Perhaps you can set me straight. Meanwhile, I have pigeon-holed the Jhungi-Bhungi claim until I hear from you. The old man was well, and asked fervently after Sonny, who, by the way, goes home from Lucknow in the spring. I expect the Seymours are about the only family in India which came out of the business unscathed; yet they were in the thick of it. Truly the whole thing was a mystery from beginning to end. I asked a native yesterday if he could explain it, but he only shook his head and said the Lord had sent a "breath into the land." But the most remarkable thing to my mind about the whole affair is the rapidity with which it proved the stuff a man was made of. You can see that by looking into the cemeteries. India is a dead level for the present; all the heads that towered above their fellows laid low. Think of them all! Havelock, Lawrence, Outram. The names crowd to one's lips; but they seem to begin and end with one--Nicholson!

Well, good-by! I have not wished you luck--that goes without saying; but tell Douglas I'm glad he had his chance.

Ever yours truly,

CHARLES MORECOMBE.

FOOTNOTES

[Footnote 1: From Colonel W. Wheler's defense.]

[Footnote 2: This question is one which must be asked as we look back through the years on this pitiful spectacle of the loyal regiment, unarmed, facing the disloyal one shooting down its officers. Briefly, on whom would the seventy men of the 11th, who never left the colors, the hundred and twenty men who returned to them after the short night of tumult was over, have fired if a company of English troops had come up to turn the balance in favor of loyalty?]

[Footnote 3: (How? His house lay a mile at least further off, and the Collector's office was on the only route a messenger could take. No record explains this. But the best ones mention casually that a telegram of warning came to Delhi in the early morning of the 11th. Whence? the wires to Meerut were cut. Lahore, Umballa, Agra, did not know the news themselves. Can the story--improbable in any other history, but in this record of fatal mistakes gaining a pathetic probability--which the old folk in Delhi tell be true? The story of a telegram sent _unofficially_ from Meerut the night before, received while the Commissioner was at dinner, put unopened into his pocket, and _forgotten_.

Not susceptible of proof or disproof, it certainly explains three things:

1. Whence the warning telegram came.

2. Why the Commissioner received information before a man a good mile nearer the source.

3. Why the Collector _at once_ sought for military aid.)]

[Footnote 4: From the account in the native papers.]

[Footnote 5: From a contemporaneous account.]

[Footnote 6: Chicken broth.]

[Footnote 7: 61st, 1st Fusiliers, 2d Punjabees.]

[Footnote 8: His widow died last year, having spent thirty-eight years of her fifty-four in cherishing the memory of a saint upon earth.]

[Footnote 9: (Hodson in his diary says that the promise was virtually given _two_ days before the capture. This was the 21st. It must therefore have been given on the 19th. _Most likely_ in Elahi Buksh's house. If so, on Hodson's own authority. Query. Was he there in person?)]

[Footnote 10: Every statement in this supposed report has been gleaned from a real one, or from official papers published at the time. I am responsible for nothing but occasionally the wording.]

End of Project Gutenberg's On the Face of the Waters, by Flora Annie Steel