Voices in the Night. Flora Annie Webster Steel
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I am sorry I was not so successful in my request as--as my son.'
He stared after her yet once more. Women were inexplicable. Here was this one quite happily married--he had known that for years--and yet she would have liked--what the deuce would she have liked? He turned half impatiently to the child, and said, 'Come along, young Briton, and be sentimental over the past! Come and contemplate the deeds of your ancestors and make believe you're a hero. That's the game!'
'But I am going to be one when I'm growed up, you know,' protested Jerry.
The man paused and looked down at the child. 'If you get the chance, dear little chap,' he said bitterly, 'but the mischief is that what with express trains and telegrams, you've seldom to do more than you're told to do. And so most of the C.B.'s and V.C.'s are given for doing one's simple duty.'
'My dad's a C.B.,' commented the child sagely; 'but then he can do his compound duties too. Can you?'
'Can I?' echoed the man, and his voice belied the inevitable smile on his face. 'Well! I don't know. I expect I could, Jerry--if I tried.'
So hand-in-hand the two, boy and man, crossed the carriage-drive which lay between the club and the rising ground beyond it. Ground kept as a garden in memory of the deeds which had blossomed in its dust. For on that scarce perceptible mound, the English flag, taking advantage of every available inch to stand its highest, had floated for nine long months over the rebel town of Nushapore. Had floated securely, though the hands which held it grew fewer and weaker day by day. Had floated royally, though kings' palaces challenged it from the right, challenged it from the left.
And now, more than forty years after, the mound--set thick with blossoming trees--stretched as a peaceful lawn between those palaces still; but the one was an English club and the other Government House.
'That's the gate, Jerry,' said Jack Raymond, 'where Gunner Smith asked the mutineers--they were only three feet from the wall, you know--to oblige him with a pipe light, because he had been so long on duty that he had run short.'
Jerry laughed vaingloriously, uproariously.
'That was to cheek 'em, sir, wasn't it, sir? For, of course, he didn't care if he never smoked no more, so long as he kept 'em outside! Oh! isn't it just orful nice?'--here he heaved a sigh of pure delight--' and now, please, I want where boys like me did sentry, an' where the guns got wed-hot and boomed off of 'emselves, an' where every one blowed 'emselves up like in a stwawbewwy-cweam smash, becos' the enemy was cweepin', cweepin' in, don't you know?'
The child's voice ran on, eager, joyous, hopeful, and the man was conscious of a thrill that seemed to pass into his own veins from that little clasping hand.
'All in good time, Jerry! don't rush your fences,' replied Jack Raymond, and the thrill seemed to have invaded his voice.
So across the lawns, and along the winding walks bosomed in tall trees, where the birds were twittering their nightly quarrel for the uppermost roosting-place, those two, boy and man, the present and the future of the race, with its unforgotten past linking them, strolled hand-in-hand.
And the daylight lingering with the moonlight lay hand-in-hand also; lay softly, kindly, upon all things.
'This is the east battery, Jerry,' said the man in a hushed voice, to match the peace of the garden. 'Campbell--he was a relation of your mother's, by the way, and so a sort of relation of mine--never left it for five months. He is here still, if it comes to that, for he was literally blown to bits at last by a shell he was trying to throw back on the enemy. He'd done it dozens of times before, but this time--was the last!'
There was not much to see. Only a slab in the dim grass with 'East Battery' cut upon it.
'Mum told me about that,' said Jerry in an awed whisper. 'His name was Gerald, same as mine,'--he paused to look doubtfully at the face above him--'she said it was an eggsample to me. But I'm not goin' to be blowed up first. My shells'll always burst just in the vewy wightest places, bang in the middle of the enemy, so I can laugh at 'em before I dead.'
Jack Raymond, passing on, felt a pang. 'Always in the very rightest places!' That had been the dream of another boyhood.
The sky was as a pearl overhead; a pearl set in a darkening tracery of trees. The moon began to stretch faint fingers of shadow after the retreating day, and still those two, man and boy, passed from one immemorial deed to another, while the small hand sent its thrill to the big one, so that Jack Raymond wondered at the tremor in his voice as he said, pointing through the trees--
'And there's the general's house with the English flag flying still!'
Jerry stiffened like a young pointer on its first covey, every inch of him centred on the grey tower, its flagstaff draped dimly with the royal ensign, which rose against the sky. Then, standing square, head up, he saluted.
'Mum told me to do that always when I saw it,' he explained, 'because it's the only place in all the wide, wide world where the flag flies day and night, to show, you know, that it never was hauled down--never--never.' He heaved another sigh of satisfaction, but his face took a puzzled expression. 'Only, you know, I've been here before. I weally have. I wemember it quite, quite well. An' the guns was booming, an' they was wanting to pull down the flag, an' I wouldn't let them.'
Jack Raymond looked down at the child and smiled. 'You, or some one of your sort, dear old chap; and I'll bet you'd do it again, wouldn't you, Jerry?'
Jerry pulled himself together from the mysterious inheritance of the past. 'I'm goin' to, some day,' he said succinctly. 'An' now, please, I want where they buried 'em after dark. All pwoper wif surplices an' "Safe, safe home in port," and all that; but torches and crack-bang firings over the walls--though they was deaders already.'
The description, confused though it was by excess of picturesqueness, sent Jack Raymond unerringly towards the little cemetery where so many heroes rest. But ere they reached the gate, a woman's figure showed upon a side-path.
'There's Miss Drummond; you'll have to go home now, young man,' remarked Jack Raymond, feeling that though Jerrys enthusiasm did not bore him, Lesley's might. But Jerry would have no excuse.
'Oh!' he said confidentially, 'she is only a woman. You tell her to come, and she'll come all wight.
Jack Raymond looked towards the springy step and determined pose of the head which was approaching him with alarm; but Jerry had already run forward, slipped his hand into the girl's, and said--
'He says you're to come too, because he is going to tell us all about the gwaves.'
'Not all,' protested Jack Raymond resignedly; 'but if Miss Drummond can spare us a minute, I'll show you John Ellison's.'
The girl's face lit up. 'Isn't that about all?' she asked quickly. 'The very name seems to dominate the place still. Jân-Ali-shân! That's what the natives call him, your father says, Jerry. It means the "Spirit of Kings." A good name, isn't it, for the man who held this garden against all comers, even starvation?'
Her head was up, her voice rang; but the thrill did not pass to the man's heart from these as it had from the clasp of that little hand, which some day would have a man's grip.
'There was a heap of bunkum talked, though, about the actual physical privations of the mutiny time; they had iced soda and Moselle cup on the ridge at Delhi, you know, Miss Drummond,' he said, out of pure contrariety.
'I should like to be sure of that,' she began indignantly.
'I should like to be sure of a lot of mutiny tales,' he interrupted; 'but there's a halo of romance on our side and a shadow of fear on theirs, which plays the deuce with abstract truth. I wish we could forget the whole business.'
'Forget! Forget our glorious past!'
'Was it so glorious? I asked Budlu once'--he pointed to a white ghostlike figure which had begun to follow them from the cemetery gate--'how a mere handful of us here kept their thousands at bay. Budlu is supposed to have been inside, during the siege, as a child's bearer--that's