The Story of Sonny Sahib Part 4

[6] John Lawrence, afterwards Lord Lawrence and Viceroy of India.

'I do not think I will make the road,' said the Maharajah reflectively.

'King, you are the wisest of men, and therefore your own best counsellor. It is well decided. But the Rajputs are all sons of one father, and even now there is grief among the chief of them that outcasts should be dwelling in the King's favour.'

'I will not make the road,' said the Maharajah. 'Enough!'

Surji Rao thought it was not quite enough, however, and took various means to obtain more, means that would never be thought of anywhere but in countries where the sun beats upon the plots of Ministers and ferments fanaticism in the heads of the people. He talked to the Rajput chiefs, and persuaded them--they were not difficult to persuade--that Dr. Roberts was an agent and a spy of the English Government at Calcutta, that his medicines were a sham.

When it was necessary, Surji Rao said that the medicines were a slow form of poison, but generally he said they were a sham. He persuaded as many of the chiefs as dared, to remonstrate with the Maharajah, and to follow his example of going about looking as if they were upon the brink of some terrible disaster. Surji Rao's wife was a clever woman, and she arranged such a feeling in the Maharajah's zenana, that one day as Dr. Roberts pa.s.sed along a corridor to His Highness's apartment, a curtain opened swiftly, and some one in the dark behind spat at him. Amongst them they managed to make His Highness extremely uncomfortable. But the old man continued to decline obstinately to send the missionary back.

Then it became obvious to Surji Rao that Dr. Roberts must be disposed of otherwise. He went about that in the same elaborate and ingenious way. His arrangements required time, but there is always plenty of time in Rajputana. He became friendly with Dr.

Roberts, and encouraged the hospital. He did not wish in any way to be complicated with his arrangements. n.o.body else became friendly. Surji Rao took care of that. And at last one morning a report went like wildfire about the palace and the city that the missionary had killed a sacred bull, set free in honour of Krishna at the birth of a son to Maun Rao, the chief of the Maharajah's generals. Certainly the bull was found slaughtered behind the monkey temple, and certainly Dr. Roberts had beefsteak for breakfast that day. Such a clamour rang through the palace about it that the Maharajah sent for the missionary, partly to inquire into the matter, and partly with a view to protect him.

It was very unsatisfactory--the missionary did not know how the bull came to be killed behind his house, and, in spite of all the Maharajah's hints, would not invent a story to account for it. The Maharajah could have accounted for it fifty times over, if it had happened to him. Besides, Dr. Roberts freely admitted having breakfasted upon beefsteak, and didn't know where it had come from!

He rode home through an angry crowd, and n.o.body at all came for medicines that day.

Two days later the Rajput general's baby died--could anything else have been expected? The general went straight to the Maharajah to ask for vengeance, but His Highness, knowing why the chief had come, sent word that he was ill--he would see Maun Rao to-morrow.

To-morrow he had not recovered, nor even the day after; but in the meantime he had been well enough to send word to Dr. Roberts that if he wished to go away he should have two camels and an escort.

Dr. Roberts sent to ask whether Sunni might go with him, but to this the Maharajah replied by an absolute 'No.'

So the missionary stayed.

It was Surji Rao who brought the final word to the Maharajah.

'My father and my mother!' he said, 'it is no longer possible to hold the people back. It is cried abroad that this English hakkim[7] has given the people powder of pig's feet. Even now they have set upon his house. And to-day is the festival of Krishna.

My heart is bursting with grief.'

[7] 'Doctor.'

'If Maun Rao strikes, I can do nothing,' said the Maharajah weakly.

'He thinks the Englishman killed his son. But look you, send Sunni to me. HE saved mine. And I tell you,' said the Maharajah, looking at Surji Rao fiercely with his sunken black eyes, 'not so much of his blood shall be shed as would stain a moth's wing.'

But Maun Rao struck, and the people being told that the missionary was dead, went home hoping that Krishna had nothing more against them; they had done what they could.

As to Sunni he told his grief to Tooni because it comforted him, and went into mourning for nine days in defiance of public opinion, because he owed it to the memory of a countryman. He began, too, to take long restless rambles beyond the gates, and once he asked Tooni if she knew the road to Calcutta.

'It is fifty thousand miles,' said Tooni, who had an imagination; 'and the woods are full of tigers.'

CHAPTER VIII

The gates of Lalpore were shut, and all about her walls the yellow sandy plains stretched silent and empty. There did not seem to be so much as a pariah dog outside. Some pipal-trees looked over the walls, and a couple of very antiquated cannon looked through them, but nothing stirred. It made a splendid picture at broad noon, the blue sky and the old red-stone city on her little hill, holding up her minarets and the white marble bubbles of her temples, and then the yellow sand drifting up; but one could not look at it long.

Colonel Starr, from the door of his tent, half a mile away, had looked at it pretty steadily for two hours, so steadily that his eyes, red and smarting with the dust of a two hundred mile ride, watered copiously, and made him several degrees more uncomfortable than he had been before.

I doubt whether any idea of the beauty of Lalpore had a place in the Colonel's mind, it was so full of other considerations. He thought more, probably, of the thickness of its walls than of their colour, and speculated longer upon the position of the a.r.s.enal than upon the curves of the temples. Because, in the Colonel's opinion, it had come to look very like fighting. In the opinion of little Lieutenant Pink the fighting should have been over and done with yesterday, and the 17th Midlanders should be 'bagging' the Maharajah's artillery by now. Little Lieutenant Pink was spoiling for the fray. So were the men, most of them. They wanted a change of diet. Thomas Jones, sergeant, entirely expressed the sentiments of his company when he said that somebody ort to pay up for this blessed march, they 'adn't wore the skins off their 'eels fer two 'undred mile to admire the bloomin' scenery. Besides, for Thomas Jones's part, he was tired of living on this yere bloomin' tinned rock, he wanted a bit of fresh roast kid and a Lalpore curry.

Colonel Starr had been sent to 'arrange,' if possible, and to fight if necessary. Perhaps we need not inquire into the arrangements the Government had commissioned Colonel Starr to make. They were arrangements of a kind frequently submitted to the princes of independent States in India when they are troublesome, and their result is that a great many native States are governed by English political residents, while a great many native princes attend parties at Government House in Calcutta. The Maharajah of Chita had been very troublesome indeed. Twice in the year his people had raided peaceful villages under British protection, and now he had killed a missionary. It was quite time to 'arrange' the Maharajah of Chita, and Colonel Starr, with two guns and three hundred troops, had been sent to do it.

His Highness, however, seemed indisposed to further his social prospects in Calcutta and the good of his State. For the twenty-four hours they had been in camp under his walls the Maharajah had taken no more notice of Colonel Starr and his three hundred Midlanders than if they represented so many jungle bushes. To all Colonel Starr's messages, diplomatic, argumentative, threatening, there had come the same unsatisfactory response--the Maharajah of Chita had no word to say to the British Raj. And still the gates were shut, and still only the pipal-trees looked over the wall, and only the cannon looked through.

By the time evening came Colonel Starr was at the end of his patience. He was not, unfortunately, simultaneously at the end of his investigations. He did not yet know the position or the contents of the a.r.s.enal, the defensibility of the walls, the water supply, or the number of men under arms in that silent, impa.s.sive red city on the hill. The reports of the peasantry had been contradictory, and this ordinary means of ascertaining these things had failed him, while he very particularly required to know them, his force being small. The Government had a.s.sured Colonel Starr that the Maharajah of Chita would be easy to arrange; that he was a tractable person, and that half the usual number of troops would be ample, which made His Highness's conduct, if anything, more annoying. And Colonel Starr's commissariat, even in respect to 'tinned rock,' had not been supplied with the expectation of besieging Lalpore. The attack would be uncertain, and the Colonel hesitated the more because his instructions had been not to take the place if he could avoid it. So the commanding officer paced his tent, and composed fresh messages to the Maharajah, while Lieutenant Pink wondered in n.o.ble disgust whether the expedition was going to end in moons.h.i.+ne after all, and Thomas Jones, sergeant, remarked hourly to his fellow-privates, 'The 17th 'aint come two 'undred miles for this kind of a joke. The bloomin'

Maharajer 'ull think we've got a funk on.'

But neither Colonel Starr nor Thomas Jones was acquainted with the reason of the remarkable att.i.tude of Lalpore.

A week before, when the news reached him that the Viceroy was sending three hundred men and two guns to remonstrate with him for his treatment of Dr. Roberts, the Maharajah smiled, thinking of the bravery of his Chitans, the strength of his fortifications, the depth of his walls, and the wheat stored in his city granaries.

No one had ever taken Lalpore since the Chitans took it--in all Rajputana there were none so cunning and so brave as the Chitans.

As to bravery, greater than Rajput bravery simply did not exist.

The Maharajah held a council, and they all sported with the idea of English soldiers coming to Lalpore. Maun Rao begged to go out and meet them to avenge the insult.

'Maharajah,' said he, 'the Chitans are sufficient against the world; why should we speak of three hundred monkeys' grandsons? If the sky fell, our heads would be pillars to protect you!'

And after a long discussion the Maharajah agreed to Maun Rao's proposal. The English could come only one way. A day's march from Lalpore they would be compelled to ford a stream. There the Maharajah's army would meet them, ready, as Maun Rao said in the council, to play at ball with their outcast heads. There was a feast afterwards, and everybody had twice as much opium as usual.

In the midst of the revelry they made a great calculation of resources. The Maharajah smiled again as he thought of the temerity of the English in connection with the ten thousand rounds of ammunition that had just come to him on camel back through Afghanistan from Russia--it was a lucky and timely purchase. Surji Rao, Minister of the Treasury, when this was mentioned, did not smile. Surji Rao had bought the cartridges at a very large discount, which did not appear in the bill, and he knew that not even Chitan valour could make more than one in ten of them go off.

Therefore, when the Maharajah congratulated Surji Rao upon his foresight in urging the replenishment of the a.r.s.enal at this particular time, Surji Rao found it very difficult to congratulate himself.

It all came out the day before the one fixed for the expedition.

His Highness, being in great spirits, had ordered a shooting compet.i.tion, and the men were served from the new stores supplied to the State of Chita by Petroff Gortschakin of St. Petersburg.

The Maharajah drove out to the ranges to look on, and all his Ministers with him. All, that is, except the Minister of the Treasury, who begged to be excused; he was so very unwell.

Some of the men knelt and clicked and reloaded half a dozen times before they could fire; some were luckier, and fired the first time or the third without reloading. They glanced suspiciously at one another and hesitated, while there grew a s.h.i.+ning heap of unexploded cartridges, a foot high, under the Maharajah's very nose. His Highness looked on stupefied for ten minutes, then burst into blazing wrath. Maun Rao rode madly about examining, inquiring, threatening.

'Our cartridges are filled with powdered charcoal,' he cried, smiting one of them between two stones to prove his words. There was an unexpected noise, and the n.o.ble General jumped into the air, bereft of the largest half of his curled moustache. That one was not. Then they all went furiously back to the palace. The only other incident of that day which it is worth our while to chronicle is connected with Surji Rao and the big shoe. The big shoe was administered to Surji Rao by a man of low caste, in presence of the entire court and as many of the people of Lalpore as chose to come and look on. It was very thoroughly administered, and afterwards Surji Rao was put formally outside the city gates, and told that the king desired never to look upon his black face again. Which was rubbing it in rather unfairly, as His Highness's own complexion was precisely the same shade. With great prompt.i.tude Surji Rao took the road to meet the English and sell his information, but this possibility occurred to the Maharajah soon enough to send men after him to frustrate it.

'There shall be at least enough sound cartridges in his bargain for that,' said His Highness grimly.

The Chitan spirit did not flourish quite so vaingloriously at the council that night, and there was no more talk about the sky falling upon dauntless Chitan heads. The sky had fallen, and the effect was rather quenching than otherwise. The previous stores were counted over, and it was found that the men could not be served with three rounds apiece out of them. When this was announced, n.o.body thought of doubting the wisdom of the Maharajah's decision to shut up the gates of the city, and trust to the improbability of the English venturing to attack him in such small numbers, not knowing his resources. So that very night, lest any word should go abroad of the strait of the warriors of Chita, the gates were shut. But all the city knew. Moti knew. Sunni knew.

Two days later, Moti and Sunni heard the English bugles half a mile away. They were playing 'Weel may the keel row!' the regimental march-past, as Colonel Starr's Midlanders did the last half mile to their camping-ground. The boys were in the courtyard among the horses, and Sunni dropped the new silver bit he was looking at, held up his head, and listened. He was the same yellow-haired, blue-eyed Sunni, considerably tanned by the fierce winds of Rajputana; but there came a brightness over his face as he listened, that had not been there since he was a very little boy.

'How beautiful the music is!' said he to Moti.

Moti put his fingers in his ears.

'It is horrible,' he cried. 'It screams and it rushes. How can they be able to make it? I shall tell my father to have it stopped.'

Presently the bugles stopped of themselves, and Moti forgot about them, but the brightness did not go out of Sunni's face, and all day long he went about humming the air of 'Weel may the keel row,'

with such variations as might be expected. He grew very thoughtful toward evening, but his eyes shone brighter than any sapphires in the Maharajah's iron boxes. As to an old Mahomedan woman from Rubbulgurh, who cooked her chupatties alone and somewhat despised, she heard the march-past too, and was troubled all day long with the foolish idea that the captain-sahib would presently come in to tea, and would ask her, Tooni, where the memsahib was.