I looked at him, and all at once
I too was very wise.
“There came a golden, singing wind,
It blew so long, it blew so loud,
It hid the Angel of the Sun,
All in a golden cloud.
“I could not hear the Angel’s voice,
It blew so loud, it blew so long,
And yet I know that Angel sings
A holy, burning song.
“Because the Angel of the Moon,
He looked so deep into my eyes
That I could hear the echoes fall
Far off in Paradise.”
Jenny’s mother put her hand softly on Helen’s arm as she finished. The children were asleep, Jenny with her head upon her mother’s lap, and the other two children cuddled up against Helen. Lizzie Carthew was crying to herself.
Helen leaned against the hot brick wall at her back, and the noise and the clamour of the attack died away. The glare of the burning barrack fell lower and lower. The thick smoke drifted away northwards on a light breeze, and the stars looked down again out of the hush of illimitable space.
CHAPTER XVI
THE WAITING
It’s look your last on the Sun, my Heart,
And look your last on the Moon,
And look your last on the Stars of Heaven,
For the dark will be coming soon.
The Sun, and the Moon, and the Stars are far,
And only the dark is near,
And the dark may be full of the dream we crave
Or full of the dream we fear.
When Richard Morton had fired the last shot in his revolver, he backed his horse against a high mud wall, and got out his sword. He saw Colonel Crowther fall, and he saw a Naik cut down Major Marsh, and go on cutting and cutting at him as he lay on the ground. Then a shot struck his horse, and it reared up, and fell over with him, and he became unconscious.
When he opened his eyes he was in a small room with mud walls and a mud floor. He lay on a string bed, and one of the native officers was bending over and looking at him.
Richard Morton sat up and recognised the man. There were two other men in the little room, and he recognised them both. One was his old orderly, Issuree Singh, and the other two were Durga Ram, subadar, and Jowahir Lal, two of the four native officers who had come to see him upon his arrival at Urzeepore.
The man by the bed saluted and stepped back. Richard Morton looked at him in silence, and he put up a protesting hand.
“It is a madness, Sahib,” he said.
“And are you mad too?” asked Richard Morton.
“God forbid,” said the man. “We are your servants. Am I a dog that I should forget? When the river carried away my son, did you not save him?”
“And your son?” asked Richard Morton.
The man hung his head and fell back.
“He is young,” he muttered.
In that hut Richard Morton remained three days and nights. Neither threats, persuasions, nor promises would induce the men to let him go. They had saved him at their own risk, and were determined to keep him from destroying himself and them. When he heard that some of the ladies had escaped, and were believed to have reached Cawnpore, he gave up attempting to persuade them, and waited quietly for the next move. After three days they sent him by night to Aunut Singh, the grateful zemindar, and the whole body of Mutineers flocked into Cawnpore to join the Nana’s standard.
At Cawnpore things went badly enough,
After the burning of the hospital, there was no longer sufficient shelter for all the women and children. The one barrack which still remained standing was riddled with shot, but at least its battered walls gave some slight protection from the flying bullets and the blaze of the midday sun. But only a limited number could be accommodated under its roof, and if the wounded had not died almost as quickly as they were brought in, still more of the women and children would have had to seek the shelter of the trenches. Shelter is the word one uses, but the facts make a mockery of it. What shelter does a four-foot wall afford? At first the men put up frail canvas structures, so that the women might have a little decent privacy, a little shade from the sun; but as fast as they were reared up, the enemy marked them, and shot them down again with deadly fire, that tore the ruined canvas into shreds, and brought it fluttering down upon the crouching forms beneath. Only too often a glancing bullet would tear its way through more than the canvas, and the tattered cloth would be stained red as it lay.
When the firing slackened at nightfall, some of the men dug holes and trenches, and here the women spent the hot, dreadful days. Some died of apoplexy, and some of their wounds. One, at least, found that death came too slowly, and ran with her children into the open, waiting there for a quick end.
A day or two after the fire Helen Wilmot was sitting in the trench beneath the eastern wall. For about five yards the earth had been dug away to a depth of three feet, and in the hollow thus formed, she and others were crouching. The sun was directly overhead, so that the wall no longer afforded any shade. A narrow strip of canvas stretched between two low sticks was their only protection, and as it barely cleared their heads, the heat of the sun struck through it with torturing intensity.
The two grave-faced children whose acquaintance Helen had first made upon the night of the fire sat beside her. Their mother and her infant were dead, and they had attached themselves to Helen in a matter-of-course way, which at once amused and touched her. Little Jenny was dead too—of dysentery. Her mother sat by Helen. She had not shed a tear—no, not one, and every now and then she smiled.
Helen pressed her hand, and looked at her with brimming eyes, and the mother said in a low voice:
“I am so thankful—so thankful.”
After a moment she spoke again:
“They can’t hurt her now. No one can. My little lamb. She’s with her father. Oh, Helen, I have been so terribly afraid of dying and leaving her all alone to be hurt and frightened. She is so little to be frightened—my Jenny. Now I am only thankful.”
Helen could only turn away her head.
Lizzie Carthew, crouching behind the other woman, met her eyes with a tired little smile. She looked very white and thin, and her fair hair was rough and dusty.
“I’ve been counting up,” she whispered, “and I do believe my wedding dress will be coming out next week. All my other things were being made out here, but mamma would send home for that. My godmother was giving me a Brussels flounce to put on it, and mamma had saved her own wedding veil for me to wear. Papa said I was to wait till September, when I shall be eighteen, but mamma sent for the dress a long while ago, and if John could have got his leave the wedding would have been early in August. Mamma doesn’t ever argue, but things are generally done her way. She just lets papa talk, you know, and when he has finished talking, he gets tired of the whole thing, and says, ‘Oh, do as you like, Bessie.’ Mamma’s name is Bessie. I am Elizabeth after her. So, you see, I think it could have been August, but now”—her lips quivered childishly—“now I think it won’t be ever at all.”
She stopped suddenly, pressing her hands tightly together and struggling for self-control.
The woman beyond her made a weary movement.
“It’s terrible hot,” she said, “terrible hot it is. I heard a man swear at the heat a while ago.”
She spoke in a hoarse, gentle voice with a strong West Country accent.
Mrs. McNeil, a Scotch sergeant’s widow, looked up with reproof in her wild eyes.
“Is this a time for swearin’, an’ for takin’ the Lord’s name in vain?” she said. “The heat is the Lord’s judgment, an’ we should a’ be thinkin’ o’ our sins.”
The other woman sighed in a depressed manner.
“I don’t hold with swearing,” she said. “And I don’t swear myself, though I’ve known pio
us folk that did.”
“This is no’ the time for swearin’,” repeated Mrs. McNeil. Her face was deeply flushed, and she stammered a little in her speech. “Seek ye the Lord, whiles He may be found. Call ye upon Him whiles He is near. Let the wicked forsake his ways, an’ the unrighteous man his thoughts, for the hour is at hand, an’ the great an’ terrible day of the Lord is at hand.”
Helen leaned across Lizzie Carthew, and laid her hand on the woman’s arm.
“Please,” she said. “Oh, please. You are frightening the little girl.”
Mrs. McNeil turned her eyes upon Helen. They were so wide open that the iris could be seen as an unbroken circle, with a rim of white around it. And the white was all bloodshot.
She shook her head, and went on in a rapid, yet halting fashion. “I had a dream last night —an’ I saw a great wall, a great high wall, an’ there came out as it were three fingers o’ a man’s hand, an’ wrote upon the wall. An’ the writin’ was red, an’ the hand—was a’ bluidy.”
She fell back against the side of the trench muttering to herself, and the West Country woman shivered and drew away.
“She’s a terrible frightening woman,” she whispered to Helen. “There was one like her in our village, and my mother never would let us go by her cottage. There was a young man, she said, would live to be hanged, and hanged he was, in Exeter gaol, on the day that I was born. Edward Carey his name was, and that gave my mother a fear of her, though there were some that thought she was a wise woman, and maybe if she had told me what was to come, I’d have stayed to home with mother.”
She paused, sighing deeply.
“It’s terrible hot,” she said. “My father he was a miller, and there was a stream ran by our house. I never thought anything of water then, but oh, my dear soul, if I had a drink of it now! Many’s the time I’ve drunk out of my hand, and splashed the water about, and been punished for it. It was very cold water, and there was rats in it. We had a cat used to catch them. There’s not many cats can. But the rats they used to come up by the mill, after the grain, and the cat she used to sit and watch, and there was a little hole so big as a tea-cup, and when the rats came out through it, she’d catch ’em. Oh, my dear soul!”
The woman’s face worked pitifully.
“Don’t,” said Lizzie Carthew. “Oh, don’t, don’t!” and she put her head down on her knees. The children stared at her, round-eyed and interested. They saw her thin shoulders heave.
“Oh, I shall never see John and mamma again, I know I sha’n’t,” she said in a thin little voice.
Helen whispered in her ear, but the poor child pushed her away.
“I sha’n’t, I sha’n’t,” she gasped.
“Oh, John! Oh, mamma!” and the exceeding bitterness of the last word brought the tears to the Devon woman’s tired eyes. She began to pat the girl’s shoulder timidly, and after a while Lizzie’s sobs grew fainter, and Helen became aware of a low-voiced conversation at her elbow.
“She could,” the boy was saying. “She could, Lucy.”
And the little girl said gravely:
“You ask her, then.”
They both fixed solemn eyes on Helen’s face, and she smiled at them.
“What is it, Ernest?” she demanded.
“Lucy says you can’t, but you can, can’t you?” responded Ernest in the voice which so exactly suited his name.
“What can’t I do?”
The little boy threw a reproachful glance at his sister.
“I say you can,” he exclaimed.
“Well, what can I do?”
The children looked at each other, and then again at Helen.
“It is so hot,” said Lucy piteously, “and we are so very dreadfully thirsty, and he says”—with an accusing glance, “he says you could magic it away, like you magicked away the being frightened when the fire roared so loud, and we thought we should be all burnt up. But I said if you could magic it away, then why didn’t you?”
Helen felt the most absurd inclination to burst into tears. If she could, why didn’t she? She felt as if she had been weighed and found wanting.
“It has to be a very strong magic,” she began, and Ernest’s face fell.
“Can’t you make the strong sort?” he asked, and Helen knitted her brows and said:
“Yes, if I try very hard.”
Lucy edged nearer.
“Oh, please try,” she whispered. Her lips trembled. “I don’t want to cry, because it makes you so much more thirsty, but if there isn’t a magic soon, I’m afraid I shall cry, I’m really ’fraid I shall.”
“There’s going to be magic,” said Helen quickly.
She scrambled on to her knees, and got up very cautiously, stooping so as to avoid exposing herself. Then with a quick swing of her body, she stepped on to a big stone, and looked out over the wall. The sun’s heat struck her like a blow, as her eyes went out to the flat, dusty plain that reflected so much light and heat. To the left lay an arid space, bare and blinding in the sunlight, but away on the right there brooded the strange mirage which she looked for. Almost daily now it mocked these weary prisoners with its visions of green trees which they might not reach, and soft dim shade which would never fall on them again.
Helen lifted her head recklessly, and a bullet went past her cheek. The air which it stirred beat like a wave of fire against the parched skin.
“Get down, what are you doing!” called a man’s voice angrily, and Helen dropped again to her old place.
“It is there,” she said, nodding.
“Oh, what?”
“I’ll tell you. I thought it would be there.”
“Oh, what, what?”
“The enchanted forest,” said Helen in a thrilling voice.
“Really— truly?”
“Yes, ever so really truly.”
“Where?”
“Right over there.” She waved her hand. “I saw it quite plain. It looked lovely—all green, with high, high trees and a little blue sparkling lake, and singing birds in the bushes, and wet blue violets to walk upon. Oh, they smell so good, and the white May hangs down till it touches them, the branches are so heavy with flowers.”
“I have seen May, but Lucy hasn’t,” said Ernest in a superior tone, and the little girl fretted:
“Does it smell good? I’ve forgotten what nice things smell like.”
“Oh, no—just think.” Helen breathed the heavy, tainted air, but her voice carried conviction with it.
“Just think. All the sweet-smelling things in the whole world live in the enchanted forest. Lilac, and lilies, and sweetbriar, and myrtle trees, and down amongst the violets there are balm, and thyme, and very sweet lavender bushes. And there’s a dew on them like the baby beginnings of a rainbow. I do think we might take off our shoes and stockings, so as to feel it all cool and lovely on our feet.”
“Mine’s off,” said Lucy.
“And so are mine.”
The tattered edge of Helen’s dark grey skirt disclosed a bare brown ankle.
“I made a present of my stockings to Mr. Ash yesterday, and what do you think he wanted them for? To fill up with bullets and fire at the enemy. I am sure my stockings never did think they would live to be fired out of a gun. I hope it won’t make them proud.”
“You can’t be proud if you are in bits,” said Ernest, with the dogmatism of early youth.
But Helen replied that it all depended upon how you were made.
“Now, my left stocking was quite horribly proud—that was its disposition—and jealous too. It wanted to be a right-foot stocking.”
“How did you know it wasn’t one?” asked Lucy.
“I didn’t. They got mixed when they were babies, and no one ever, ever knew the truth, and now they are in bits, and no one ever will know, but I don’t believe even being in bits wil
l keep the left-hand stocking from being proud.”
“Oh!” said both the children, and Ernest made a gentle correction:
“Left foot—not left hand.”
“Of course,” said Helen very gravely, “I meant left foot”; and she continued to talk nonsense whilst the children listened and were magicked out of three parts of their suffering.
The interminable day passed through an hour of strange sunset splendour into night, and then the little company crawled out of their trench, and lay down in the open, where the air stirred a little and sleep might visit them.
The day’s allowance of food was about half a pint of split peas and flour, which was served to all alike, and could be made into a sort of gruel. The day’s allowance of water cost more than one man’s life in every day. Even the wounded and the children had to endure the extremest pangs of thirst for hours at a stretch, for the well was the enemy’s most constant mark, and even at night they fired upon it continually.
Helen never drank her scanty portion without remembering King David and the water from the well of Bethlehem which is beside the gate, poured out before the Lord, because, he said, “Is not this the blood of men that went in jeopardy of their lives?”
One day Helen woke in the hour before the dawn. Every limb ached from the day’s cramped confinement and the contact with the hard, sunbaked ground at night. She rose, stretching herself, and began to walk up and down.
Overhead the stars were still bright against the blue-black arch of the sky, but gradually they grew dim, and the blue turned slowly to a faint misty grey.
Helen walked to and fro, moving softly, so as to disturb no one who could sleep. She felt a new restlessness which she could not explain.
Fifteen days of siege were past, and how many more were to come? She wondered how long their scanty food would last. Yesterday a rumour had gone round that a relieving force was close at hand. Helen tried to realise what it would mean if this were true. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps to-morrow relief would come.
She stared at the eastern sky, and saw how the darkness thinned and a faint flesh-coloured tinge spread upwards, whilst all along the horizon, the grey sky turned to a pale, clear, lily green.
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