Rujub, the Juggler

“It requires too great a stretch of the imagination, Doctor, to think for a moment, in this sweltering heat, that I am enjoying a sea breeze on our English coast. It is silly, of course, to give it even a thought, when one is accustomed to see almost every woman without shoes. I think I should mind it more than I do if my feet were not stained. I don’t know why, but I should. But please don’t talk about it. I try to forget it, and to fancy that I am really a native.”

They met but few people on the road. Those they did meet passed them with the usual salutation. There was nothing strange in a party of peasants passing along the road. They might have been at work at Cawnpore, and be now returning to their native village to get away from the troubles there. After it became dark they went into a clump of trees half a mile distant from a village they could see along the road.

“I will go in,” Rujub said, “and bring some grain, and hear what the news is.”

He returned in an hour. “The English have taken Dong,” he said; “the news came in two hours ago. There has been some hard fighting; the Sepoys resisted stoutly at the village, even advancing beyond the inclosures to meet the British. They were driven back by the artillery and rifle fire, but held the village for some time before they were turned out. There was a stand made at the Pandoo Bridge, but it was a short one. The force massed there fell back at once when the British infantry came near enough to rush forward at the charge, and in their hurry they failed to blow up the bridge.”

A consultation was held as to whether they should try to join the British, but it was decided that as the road down to Allahabad would be rendered safe by their advance, it would be better to keep straight on.

The next day they proceeded on their journey, walking in the early morning, halting as soon as the sun had gained much power, and going on again in the cool of the evening. After three days’ walking they reached the fort of Allahabad. It was crowded with ladies who had come in from the country round. Most of the men were doing duty with the garrison, but some thirty had gone up with Havelock’s column as volunteer cavalry, his force being entirely deficient in that arm.

As soon as the Doctor explained who they were, they were received with the greatest kindness, and Isobel was at once carried off by the ladies, while Bathurst and the Doctor were surrounded by an eager group anxious to hear the state of affairs at Cawnpore, and how they had escaped. The news of the fighting at Dong was already known; for on the evening of the day of the fight Havelock had sent down a mounted messenger to say the resistance was proving so severe that he begged some more troops might be sent up. As all was quiet now at Allahabad, where there had at first been some fierce fighting, General Neil, who was in command there, had placed two hundred and thirty men of the 84th Regiment in bullock vans, and had himself gone on with them.

The Doctor had decided to keep the news of the massacre to himself.

“They will know it before many hours are over, Bathurst,” he said; “and were I to tell them, half of them wouldn’t believe me, and the other half would pester my life out with questions. There is never any occasion to hurry in telling bad news.”

The first inquiry of Bathurst and his friends had been for Wilson, and they found to their great pleasure that he had arrived in safety, and had gone up with the little body of cavalry. Captain Forster, whom they next asked for, had not reached Allahabad, and no news had been heard of him.

“What are you going to do, Rujub?” Bathurst asked the native next morning.

“I shall go to Patna,” he said. “I have friends there, and I shall remain in the city until these troubles are over. I believe now that you were right, sahib, although I did not think so when you spoke, and that the British Raj will be restored. I thought, as did the Sepoys, that they were a match for the British troops. I see now that I was wrong. But there is a tremendous task before them. There is all Oude and the Northwest to conquer, and fully two hundred thousand men in arms against them, but I believe that they will do it. They are a great people, and now I do not wish it otherwise. This afternoon I shall start.”

The Doctor, who had found many acquaintances in Allahabad, had no difficulty in obtaining money from the garrison treasury, and Bathurst and Isobel purchased the two handsomest bracelets they could obtain from the ladies in the fort as a souvenir for Rabda, and gave them to her with the heartiest expressions of their deep gratitude to her and her father.

“I shall think of you always, Rabda,” Isobel said, “and shall be grateful to the end of my life for the kindness that you have done us. Your father has given us your address at Patna, and I shall write to you often.”

“I shall never forget you, lady; and even the black water will not quite separate us. As I knew how you were in prison, so I shall know how you are in your home in England. What we have done is little. Did not the sahib risk his life for me? My father and I will never forget what we owe him. I am glad to know that you will make him happy.”

This was said in the room that had been allotted to Isobel, an ayah of one of the ladies in the fort acting as interpreter. The girl had woke up in the morning flushed and feverish, and the Doctor, when sent for, told her she must keep absolutely quiet.

“I am afraid I am going to have her on my hands for a bit,” he said to Bathurst. “She has borne the strain well, but she looks to me as if she was going to have a smart attack of fever. It is well that we got her here before it showed itself. You need not look scared; it is just the reaction. If it had been going to be brain fever or anything of that sort, I should have expected her to break down directly you got her out. No, I don’t anticipate anything serious, and I am sure I hope that it won’t be so. I have put my name down to go up with the next batch of volunteers. Doctors will be wanted at the front, and I hope to have a chance of wiping out my score with some of those scoundrels. However, though I think she is going to be laid up, I don’t fancy it will last many days.”

That afternoon a messenger from Havelock brought down the terrible news that they had fought their way to Cawnpore, only to find that the whole of the ladies and children in the Subada Ke Kothee had been massacred, and their bodies thrown down a well. The grief and indignation caused by the news were terrible; scarce one but had friends among the prisoners. Women wept; men walked up and down, wild with fury at being unable to do aught at present to avenge the massacre.

“What are you going to do, Bathurst?” the Doctor asked that evening. “I suppose you have some sort of plan?”

“I do not know yet. In the first place, I want to try whether what you said the other day is correct, and if I can stand the noise of firing without flinching.”

“We can’t try here in the fort,” the Doctor said, full of interest in the experiment; “a musket shot would throw the whole garrison into confusion, and at present no one can go far from the gate; however, there may be a row before long, and then you will have an opportunity of trying. If there is not, we will go out together half a mile or so as soon as some more troops get up. You said, when we were talking about it at Deennugghur, you should resign your appointment and go home, but if you find your nerves are all right you may change your mind about that. How about the young lady in there?”

“Well, Doctor, I should say that you, as her father’s friend, are the person to make arrangements for her. Just at present travel is not very safe, but I suppose that directly things quiet down a little many of the ladies will be going down to the coast, and no doubt some of them would take charge of Miss Hannay back to England.”

“And you mean to have nothing to say in the matter?”

“Nothing at all,” he said firmly. “I have already told you my views on the subject.”

“Well, then,” the Doctor said hotly, “I regard you as an ass.” And without another word he walked off in great anger.

For the next four or five days Isobel was in a high state of fever; it passed off as the Doctor had predicted it would do, but left her very weak and languid. Another week and she was about again.

“What is Mr. Bathurst going to do?” she asked the Doctor the first day she was up on a couch.

“I don’t know what he is going to do, my dear,” he said irritably; “my opinion of Bathurst is that he is a fool.”

“Oh, Doctor, how can you say so!” she exclaimed in astonishment; “why, what has he done?”

“It isn’t what he has done, but what he won’t do, my dear. Here he is in love with a young woman in every way suitable, and who is ready to say yes whenever he asks her, and he won’t ask, and is not going to ask, because of a ridiculous crotchet he has got in his head.”

Isobel flushed and then grew pale.

“What is the crotchet?” she asked, in a low tone, after being silent for some time.

“What do you think, my dear? He is more disgusted with himself than ever.”

“Not about that nervousness, surely,” Isobel said, “after all he has done and the way he has risked his life? Surely that cannot be troubling him?”

“It is, my dear; not so much on the general as on a particular ground. He insists that by jumping out of the boat when that fire began, he has done for himself altogether.”

“But what could he have done, Doctor?”

“That’s what I ask him, my dear. He insists that he ought to either have seized you and jumped overboard with you, in which case you would both probably have been killed, as I pointed out to him, or else stayed quietly with you by your side, in which case, as I also pointed out to him, you would have had the satisfaction of seeing him murdered. He could not deny that this would have been so, but that in no way alters his opinion of his own conduct. I also ventured to point out to him that if he had been killed, you would at this moment be either in the power of that villainous Nana, or be with hundreds of others in that ghastly well at Cawnpore. I also observed to him that I, who do not regard myself as a coward, also jumped overboard from your boat, and that Wilson, who is certainly a plucky young fellow, and a number of others, jumped over from the other boat; but I might as well have talked to a post.”

Isobel sat for some time silent, her fingers playing nervously with each other.

“Of course it seems foolish of him to think of it so strongly, but I don’t think it is unnatural he should feel as he does.”

“May I ask why?” the Doctor said sarcastically.

“I mean, Doctor, it would be foolish of other people, but I don’t think it is foolish of him. Of course he could have done no good staying in the boat—he would have simply thrown away his life; and yet I think, I feel sure, that there are many men who would have thrown away their lives in such a case. Even at that moment of terror I felt a pang, when, without a word, he sprang overboard. I thought of it many times that long night, in spite of my grief for my uncle and the others, and my horror of being a prisoner in the hands of the Sepoys. I did not blame him, because I knew how he must have felt, and that it was done in a moment of panic. I was not so sorry for myself as for him, for I knew that if he escaped, the thought of that moment would be terrible for him. I need not say that in my mind the feeling that he should not have left me so has been wiped out a thousand times by what he did afterwards, by the risk he ran for me, and the infinite service he rendered me by saving me from a fate worse than death. But I can enter into his feelings. Most men would have jumped over just as he did, and would never have blamed themselves even if they had at once started away down the country to save their own lives, much less if they had stopped to save mine as he has done.

“But who can wonder that he is more sensitive than others? Did he not hear from you that I said that a coward was contemptible? Did not all the men except you and my uncle turn their backs upon him and treat him with contempt, in spite of his effort to meet his death by standing up on the roof? Think how awfully he must have suffered, and then, when it seemed that his intervention, which saved our lives, had to some extent won him back the esteem of the men around him, that he should so fail again, as he considers, and that with me beside him. No wonder that he takes the view he does, and that he refuses to consider that even the devotion and courage he afterwards showed can redeem what he considers is a disgrace. You always said that he was brave, Doctor, and I believe now there is no braver man living; but that makes it so much the worse for him. A coward would be more than satisfied with himself for what he did afterwards, and would regard it as having completely wiped out any failing, while he magnifies the failing, such as it was, and places but small weight on what he afterwards did. I like him all the better for it. I know the fault, if fault it was, and I thought it so at the time, was one for which he was not responsible, and yet I like him all the better that he feels it so deeply.”

“Well, my dear, you had better tell him so,” the Doctor said dryly. “I really agree with what you say, and you make an excellent advocate. I cannot do better than leave the matter in your hands. You know, child,” he said, changing his tone, “I have from the first wished for Bathurst and you to come together, and if you don’t do so I shall say you are the most wrong headed young people I ever met. He loves you, and I don’t think there is any question about your feelings, and you ought to make matters right somehow. Unfortunately, he is a singularly pig headed man when he gets an idea in his mind. However, I hope that it will come all right. By the way, he asked were you well enough to see him today?”

“I would rather not see him till tomorrow,” the girl said.

“And I think too that you had better not see him until tomorrow, Isobel. Your cheeks are flushed now, and your hands are trembling, and I do not want you laid up again, so I order you to keep yourself perfectly quiet for the rest of the day.”

But it was not till two days later that Bathurst came up to see her.

The spies brought in, late that evening, the news that a small party of the Sepoy cavalry, with two guns, were at a village three miles on the other side of the town, and were in communication with the disaffected. It was decided at once by the officer who had succeeded General Neil in the command of the fort that a small party of fifty infantry, accompanied by ten or twelve mounted volunteers, should go out and attack them. Bathurst sent in his name to form one of the party as soon as he learned the news, borrowing the horse of an officer who was laid up ill.

The expedition started two hours before daybreak, and, making a long detour, fell upon the Sepoys at seven o’clock. The latter, who had received news half an hour before of their approach, made a stand, relying on their cannon. The infantry, however, moved forward in skirmishing order, their fire quickly silenced the guns, and they then rushed forward while the little troop of volunteers charged.

The fight lasted but a few minutes, at the end of which time the enemy galloped off in all directions, leaving their guns in the hands of the victors. Four of the infantry had been killed by the explosion of a well aimed shell, and five of the volunteers were wounded in the hand to hand fight with the sowars. The Sepoys’ guns and artillery horses had been captured.

The party at once set out on their return. On their way they had some skirmishing with the rabble of the town, who had heard the firing, but they were beaten off without much difficulty, and the victors re-entered the fort in triumph. The Doctor was at the gate as they came in. Bathurst sprang from his horse and held out his hand. His radiant face told its own story.