The Flower of Forgiveness Part 4

The boy at his side stirred in his sleep. "Son of my son! Son of my son!" came the low murmur again. Ay! and his son after him again, if the woman said true. It had always been so. Father and son, father and son, father--and son--for ever--and ever--and ever.

So, lulled by the familiar thought, the old man fell asleep beside the boy, and the whole bare expanse of earth and sky seemed empty save for them. No! there was something else surely. Down on the hard white threshing-floor--was that a branch or a fragment of rope? Neither, for it moved deviously hither and thither, raising a hooded head now and again as if seeking something; for all its twists and turns bearing steadily towards the sleepers; past the boy, making him shift uneasily as the cold coil touched his arms; swifter now as it drew nearer the scent, till it found what it sought upon the old man's hands.[8]

"_Ari_, sister! straight, I say, straight!" murmured the old ploughman in his sleep, as his grip strengthened over something that wavered in his steady clasp. Was that the p.r.i.c.k of the goad? Sure if it bit so deep upon the sister's hide no wonder she started. He must keep his grip for men's throats when sleep was over--when this great sleep was over.

The slow stars wheeled, and when the morn brought Justice, it found old Jaimul dead among his corn and left him there. But the women washed the stains of blood and sweat mingled with soil and seed grains from his hands before the wreath of smoke from his funeral pyre rose up to make a white cloud no bigger than a man's hand upon the bitter blue sky--a cloud that brought gladness to no heart.

The usurer's boys, it is true, forced the utmost from the land, and sent all save bare sustenance across the seas; but the home guided by Jaimul's unswerving hand was gone, the Taradevi's tribe of budding soldiers drifted away to learn the lawlessness born of change. Perhaps the yellow English gold which came into the country in return for the red Indian wheat more than paid for these trivial losses. Perhaps it did not. That is a question which the next Mutiny must settle.

FOR THE FAITH.

I.

An old man dreaming of a past day and night as he sat waiting, and these were his dreams.

Darkness, save for the light of the stars in the sky and the flare of blazing roof-trees on earth. Two shadowy figures out in the open, and through the parched silence of the May night a man's voice feeble, yet strenuous in appeal.

"Dhurm Singh?"

"_Huzoor!_"

The kneeling figure bent closer over the other, waiting.

"The _mem sahiba_, Dhurm Singh."

"_Huzoor--dhurm nal_."[9]

Then silence, broken only by the long howl of jackals gathering before their time round that scene of mutiny and murder.

Darkness once more. The darkness of daylight shut out by prisoning walls. The sweltering heat of July oozing through the shot-cracked walls; the horrors of starvation, and siege, and sickness round two dim figures. And once again a strenuous voice--this time a woman's.

"Dhurm Singh!"

"_Huzoor_."

The answer came as before--broad, soft, guttural, in the accent of the north--

"Sonny _baba_, Dhurm Singh!"

"_Huzoor--dhurm nal_."

Then silence, broken only by the _whist-ch-t_ of a wandering bullet against the wall of the crumbling fort, where one more victim had found peace.

Both the May night and the July day were in old Dhurm Singh's thoughts as he sat on his heels looking out from the Apollo Bunder at Bombay across the Black Water, waiting, after long years, for Sonny _baba's_ ship to loom over the level horizon. A stranger figure among the slight, smooth coolies busy around him with bales and belaying pins than he would have been among the dockers at Limehouse. Tall, gaunt, his long white beard parted over the chin and bound backwards over his ears, his broad mustache spreading straight under his ma.s.sive nose, his level eyebrows like a white streak between the open brown forehead and the open brown eyes. A faded red tunic, empty of the left arm, a solitary medal on the breast, and above the unseen coils of white hair--long as a woman's--the high wound turban bearing the sacred steel quoit of the Sikh devotee.

Such was Dhurm Singh, _Akali_; in other words, Lion of the Faith and member of the Church Militant. Pensioner to boot for an anna or so a day to a Government which he had also served _dhurm nal_ as he had served his dead captain, his dead mistress, and, last of all, Sonny _baba!_

Twenty years ago. Yes! twenty years since he had answered those strenuous appeals by his favourite word-play on his own name. He had used it for many another promise during those long years; as a rule, truthfully. For Dhurm Singh, as a rule, did things _dhurm nal_--partly because a slow, invincible tenacity of purpose made all chopping and changing distasteful, partly because fidelity to the master is sucked in with the mother's milk of the Sikh race: very little, it is to be feared, from conscious virtue. Twenty years ago he had carried Sonny _baba_ through the jungles by night on his unhurt arm, and hidden as best he could in the tiger-gra.s.s by day, because of his promise. And now, as he sat waiting for Sonny _baba_ to come sailing over the edge of his world again, the broad simple face expanded into smiles at the memory. He pa.s.sed by all the stress and strains of that unforgotten flight in favour of a little yellow head nestling back in alarm against the bloodstains on the old tunic, when the white _mems_ in the big cantonment of refuge had held out their arms to the child.

Sonny _baba_ had known his friends in those days; ay! and he had remembered them all these years: he and the _mem's_ sister, who had taken charge of the boy in the foreign land across the Black Waters whence the masters came--a gracious Miss who wrote regularly once a year to ex-_duffadar_ Dhurm Singh, giving him the last news of Sonny _baba_ and as regularly urging her correspondent to safeguard himself against certain d.a.m.nation by becoming an infidel. For this, briefly, crudely, was the recipient's view of the matter as he sat staring at the little picture texts and tracts in the Punjabi character which invariably accompanied the letters. They puzzled him, those picture cards in the sacred characters which were printed so beautifully in the far off land by people who knew nothing of him or his people, and who yet wrote better than any _mohunt_.[10] Puzzled him in more ways than one, since duty and desire divided as to the method of their disposal.

Respect for the _captan-sahib_, whom he had left lying dead at the back of the native lines on that May night, forbade his destroying them; respect for his own religious profession forbade his disseminating the pictures, irrespective of the letterpress, as playthings among the village children. So he tied them up in a bundle with his pension papers, and kept them in the breast pocket of the old tunic under the bloodstains and the solitary medal which was beginning to fray through its parti-coloured ribbon--an odd item in that costume of a Sikh devotee which he had a.s.sumed when the final loss of his arm forced him into peace and a pension. As a rule, however, the tunic was hidden under the orthodox blue and white garments matching the turban, just as the huge steel bracelets on his arms matched the steel quoit on his head; but on this day loyalty to the dead had spoken in favour of the old uniform. It may seem a strange choice, this of devoteeship, but to the old swash-buckler it was infinitely more amusing, even in these degenerate days when _Akali-dom_ had lost half its power, to go swaggering about from fair to festival, from festival to fair, representing the Church Militant, than to lounge about the village watching the agricultural members of the family cultivate the ancestral lands. They did it admirably without his help, as they had done it always; so Dhurm Singh, at a loose end now legitimate strife was over, took to cultivating his hair with baths of b.u.t.termilk instead, adopted the quoit and the bracelets, and used the most pious of Sikh oaths as he watched the wrestlers wrestle, or played singlestick for the honour of G.o.d and the old regiment. And there were other advantages in the profession. A man might take a more than reasonable amount of opium occasionally without laying himself open to a heavier accusation than that of religious enthusiasm; since opium is part of the _Akali's_ stock in trade.

As he sat among the tarred ropes with his back against a consignment of beer and rum for the British soldier, he broke off quite a large corner of the big black lump he kept in the same pocket with the tracts, and swallowed it whole. Sonny _baba's_ ship was not due, they told him, for some hours to come, so there would be time for quiet dreams both of past and future. The latter somewhat confused, since the Miss-_sahib's_ letters had not always been adequately translated by the village schoolmaster. Only this was sure: Sonny _baba_ was three and twenty, and he was coming out to Hindustan once more as an officer in the great army. In fact, he was a _captan_ already, which was big promotion for his few years. So Dhurm Singh--who to say sooth, was becoming somewhat tired of the Church Militant now that younger men began to beat him at singlestick--had returned to the old allegiance and made his way down country, like many another old servant, to meet his master's son and take service with him. You see them often, these old, anxious-looking retainers, waiting on the Apollo Bunder, or coming aboard in the steam launches with wistful, expectant faces.

And some beardless youth, fresh from Eton or Harrow, says with a laugh, "By George! are you old Munnoo or Bunnoo? Here! look after my traps, will you?" And the traps are duly looked after, while the Philosophical Radical on the rampage is taking the opportunity afforded by baggage parade to record in his valuable diary the pained surprise at the want of touch between the rulers and the ruled, which is, alas! his first impression of India. In all probability it will be his last also, since it is conceivable that both rulers and ruled may be glad to get rid of him on the approach of the hot weather. Mosquitoes are troublesome, and cholera is disconcerting, but they are bearable beside the man who invariably knows the answers to his own questions before he asks them.

Dhurm Singh's dreams, however, if confused, were pleasant; full of strong meats and drinks, and men in buckram. He could not, of course, serve the Sirkar again with the chance of _batta_ and _loot_, but he could serve the _chota sahib_ and wear a badge. After all, a badge-wearer had his opportunities of hectoring. And then, how he could talk round the camp fires! What tales he could tell!--bearing in mind, of course, the advancement of G.o.d and the _Gurus_. He fell asleep finally in the sunshine, blissfully content. The tide ebbed in the backwaters, the guardship lay white and trim in the open, the tram horses clattered up and down, the Royal Yacht Club pennant flew out against the blue sky, a match was being played on the links hard by, and the very coolies, as they hauled and heaved, used a polyglot of sailors' slang. Only the palm-trees on the point over the bay gave an Oriental touch to the scene.

"Dhurm Singh! my dear, dear old friend! Look, comrades, this is the man who carried me to safety in his arms even as the Good Shepherd carries His lambs."

The speech had that unreal sound which is the curse of the premeditated, except in the mouth of a born actor, which Sonny _baba_ was not. And yet the young curves of the lips quivered. Perhaps the commonplace exclamation of the British boy mentioned before would have come more naturally to them, but Staff-captain Sonny _baba_ of the Salvation Army was on parade, and bound to keep up his character.

Nevertheless there was no lack of warmth in the grip he got of the old man's reluctant hand.

"_Huzoor_," faltered Dhurm Singh, taken aback at this condescension, and letting the sword he was about to present fall back on its belt with a clatter. The fact being that the said sword had been an occasion of much mental distress; as an actual ex-_duffadar_ it was irregular, but as a possible bodyguard it was strictly _de rigueur_. Perhaps, however, times had changed in this as in other ways during those twenty years. The very uniform worn by the score or so of men drawn up on the deck was strange; and what did that squad of _mem sahibs_ mean? Their dress did not seem so strange to the old _Akali_, since in those palmy days before the Mutiny the fashions were not so far removed from the costume of a Salvation la.s.s; but the tambourines!

"Come and speak to the General," said Sonny _baba_ somewhat hurriedly.

He spoke in English; but just as the formula, "Look after my traps" is "understanded of the common people" at once, so the word "General"

brought a relieved comprehension to the old Sikh's face. There were blessed frogs on this one's coat also, which, like the word Mesopotamia, were charged with consolation.

The General looked at him with that curious philanthropic smile which, while it welcomes the object, has a kind of circ.u.mambient beam of mutual congratulation for all spectators of the benevolence.

"You have seen service, my good old friend," he exclaimed in fluent Urdu, as he pointed with a declamatory wave of his hand to the solitary medal, "but it was poor service to what we offer you now. Come to us, be our first-fruit, and help to carry the colours of the Great Army in the van of the fight."

A speech meant palpably for the gallery.

Dhurm Singh, however, took it at attention, and saluted--

"Pension-_wallah_, _Huzoor_, unfit for duty," he replied with modest brevity, indicating his empty sleeve.

The General caught at the occasion for even greater unction with a complacency which could not be concealed.