Devil's Wind (16 page)

“Why don't you help with the children?” said Helen. “They are such dears, and some of the mothers have more than they can manage.”

Lizzie pouted again.

“Oh—children,” she said. “No, I want to be like you. I do think you are so splendid. I want to nurse the wounded, and be useful, and for John and mamma to know I was quite grown-up and sensible. They do treat me like a child, really they do, and if I were like you, they couldn't.”

Helen laughed, and kissed her.

“I sha'n't be splendid if I am late,” she said. “Don't be in too great a hurry to be grown up, Lizzie,” and she passed out through the shattered doorway.

It was a relief to come out of the close, unwholesome room, even though it was almost hotter outside. The trampled mud underfoot, the piles of rubble, the brick walls of the barracks, radiated the day's heat to an almost unbearable degree.

Helen had left the hospital thermometer standing at 126 degrees, and the air had not yet grown perceptibly cooler, though the absence of the sun's glaring light was a relief to eye and brain. She stood for a moment in the angle between the two buildings, and looked at the sunset. A belt of dull, yet glowing orange lay along the horizon. The black mass of one of the unfinished barracks rose against it and the trees on the road beyond. Above, the dusty air was all full of a crimson glow which deepened into great streaks and blotches, like smears of new-spilled blood. One narrow purple cloud lay like a menacing bolt between west and south, but all the rest of the sky was cloudless, hazy, and penetrated with soft dying shades of blue and green, that failed as the eye rested upon them, and darkened into shadowy grey.

Helen stood and looked. She remembered the crimson light behind the tamarisk trees at Urzeepore, and how she had watched it with Dick. It was the same sun—the same light—the same glow, but everything else was changed. Of the little party of eight who had escaped the massacre at Urzeepore, three were gone already: George Blake, who had died in the cart, with her hand in his; Mrs. Crowther, dead of heat apoplexy; and Grace Elliot, struck by a flying bullet. Carrie Crowther's reason was gone, and Charles Purslake was dying.

Helen felt a weary reluctance to return to the crowded hospital, where the tainted air was full of groans and the breath of dying men. To suffer oneself was not much—at least, it occupied the mind—but to see children suffer, and brave men who had been strong once—from these things her flesh shrank.

Some one came to the hospital door and opened it. A confused murmur of sound came out, a sound of muttering, a sound of groaning—a man's voice singing.

Helen caught the words as she lifted her stained skirt out of the dust, and moved across the open space.

It was Charles Purslake, who sang in a voice high with delirium:

“Dey try for to sleep, but it ain't no use;

Sing song Kitty, can't you ki me oh,

Dere legs hang out for de chickens to roost,

Keemo, kimo, dar oh whar,

Wid my hi, my ho—”

The voice strangled on a groan, and as Helen came to the doorway she heard the man in the next bed to Mr. Purslake praying aloud in a harsh and melancholy voice. He was the runaway son of a Methodist minister, and the unheeded prayers of his wild boyhood thronged his clouded mind. He, too, was dying.

Helen turned for a last breath of air before she went in. As she did so, one of the lights that marked the enemy's lines seemed to rise swiftly into the air. It travelled towards her with an inconceivable rapidity that paralysed her reasoning faculties. As it came she heard a loud whistling, hissing noise. Then it passed overhead, so close that she thought she could feel the heat of it. A man came behind Helen and pulled her through the door.

“You shouldn't stand there with the lights behind you,” he said.

“What was it?” asked Helen.

“That? They are trying to set us on fire. That's all. I should like to wring the neck of the man who roofed this old death-trap with thatch! It will burn down as sure as fate some day.”

It was burned down that night, and with the burning of the hospital, horror rose to its height.

Helen never forgot the roar of the flames, as they lifted in a pillar of fire and smoke to the arch of the midnight sky. It was like the roar of all the waters of the world falling over some high and dizzy precipice. They fell thundering, and sent up a continual blinding spray, that shone, and showered, and burned the living flesh of any creature upon whom it came down. And it came down on many.

Heroism had become part of the daily round. The men who all day long endured the sun, that they might defend the low mud wall, and braved a drift of bullets to draw water for the women, were trained to a courage beyond the common. They met the furious heat of the fire, as they met the tropic heat of the day, and all the time, as they went to and fro, dragging out the

wounded, and struggling with the flames, the enemy's fire poured in on them, and man after man went down, with a shattered limb or some wound more mercifully mortal.

Some of the wounded perished in the fire, and all the medical stores, all the surgical instruments were destroyed. To be wounded meant an almost certain death henceforward, since it was impossible to extract a bullet, perform an operation, or dress wounds.

At the very height of the fire, the enemy attacked in force; the crackle of musketry and the roar of the guns were added to the tumult, and children woke screaming to see their mothers upon their knees. The slate-roofed barrack stood, but it was soon overcrowded, and many women and children and wounded men were driven into the open, where they cowered down in any angle of the wall which could afford a temporary protection from the stinging drift of bullets, and the gusts of scorching air which blew from the blazing hospital.

Helen found herself on the south side of the barrack, with two wounded privates, one of them in agony from a broken thigh, and the other the man whose bed had been next to Charles Purslake's; Charles Purslake himself was dead. It seemed to Helen that he had been dead a long time, but this man was not dead yet, and whilst he lived he raved wildly about the burning lake of torment, and the worm that dieth not, the fire that is not quenched.

Jenny and her mother crouched beside Helen, and Lizzie Carthew was with them. They had moved from their place near the door, and had been unable to get back to it. There were also two other women whom Helen did not know, one of whom had a baby in her arms, and two trembling children at her skirts. The baby fretted, and Jenny cried all the time, but the other children did not cry. Only they shook all over, and in the lurid light that failed and flared, and flared and failed again, Helen saw their eyes wide with a dreadful unchildlike terror, and their faces fixed in a dreadful unchildlike self-control.

“Hell—burning, burning hell,” whispered the delirious man, and the intense horror in his voice made the words audible through all the din. “Burning, burning hell, and the smoke of their torment going up for ever and ever and ever. Amen, so be it.”

Jenny gave a loud, terrified scream.

“I daren't move,” said the mother. “But this is so dreadful. Will he die soon, Miss Wilmot?”

Then she broke off with a quick “God have mercy!” as a cluster of drifting sparks showered down not a couple of yards away, and with a loud and terrifying concussion which shook the ground upon which they sat, the guns of Ash's battery broke upon the assault.

At once there was a loud, wild outcry and a shrill, screaming sound that sank away again into the common clamour of battle, as the men in the trenches poured out successive volleys of musketry. Helen was past being afraid, but her heart ached for the children. She crawled a little nearer to the two who sat and trembled, and slipped an arm about each.

“I am going to tell Jenny a story,” she said, “such a nice story. Come and listen.”

The children shook a little more when she touched them, and the mother said under her breath:

“Don't take them away. Don't take them away.”

“Oh, no. I will sit just here. Jenny, don't you want to listen? It's a story about a palace made of fire, a beautiful golden palace.”

There was less noise now, and here in the angle of the building they could hear themselves speak.

“Don't like fire,” fretted Jenny, who had almost cried herself to a standstill.

“Oh, but it is ever so beautiful,” said Helen cheerfully. She pulled the strange little boy and girl close down on either side of her, and this time they yielded, and pressed against her like silent, frightened animals.

“It is ever so beautiful, you know. Let us count the colours in the sky. I have counted eight already. That is one more than the rainbow has, and the eighth colour is the fire colour—the beautiful rosy pink colour—there, see, Jenny, up there. And just look at the golden, golden birds flying up there in the sky. Look, quick. I saw a whole cloud of them go by, and there comes a swarm of shining bees. I wonder what hive they belong to; I expect they will fly right on, and on, and on, till they come to the golden sun, and then they will hang down all in a cluster on the sun tree's topmost branch, till the Angel of the Sun throws them one by one out into the dark sky, to shine in the night, and be beautiful golden stars.”

Helen had a very full, soft voice. It filled the children's ears, and their terror of the flying sparks was changed into interest.

“They are sparks, not bees,” said the little boy doubtfully. “And they hurt. One hurt my hand. It fell on it, and hurt it.”

“He doesn't ever cry, because he is a boy, and boys don't cry, but it did hurt. It hurted dreadful,” said the little girl.

“Bees sting,” said Helen wisely. “All bees sting if they are touched; but we forgive them, because of the honey they make, and these bees made star honey for the baby angels.”

“Is there baby angels?” demanded Jenny.

“Oh, yes! Little darling baby ones, with baby wings, and baby hymns to sing.”

“And do they eat the star honey?”

“They do. And then they grow up big and strong, and able to take care of the little earth babies, and sing them to sleep at night if they are frightened.”

“Sing a baby angel's song,” said Jenny imperiously. “Jenny's sleepy, sing to Jenny.”

The sick man in his delirium threw out his hands and groaned lamentably.

“Water!” he cried. “Across the great gulf—one drop to cool my tongue, one single drop—Lazarus, Lazarus—”

Helen crawled to him on her hands and knees, and when she came near he snatched at her dress, and she felt the burning fever in him strike through its tattered folds. She put her hand on his forehead, and he gave a sort of gasp, and said in an altered voice:

“Mary—is it Mary? I have had such a dream. But it is all—right—now.”

The words came slowly and sleepily. With the last he turned his head. There was only a strip of sacking between it and the trodden ground, but he lay still and slept Death's sleep. The man beside him was drawing the long breaths of endurance. He never spoke nor moaned, only lay staring at the sky, and drawing those deep breaths.

Helen stayed for a moment longer, bending her head, and praying. Then she came back to the children and sat down.

“Has the noisy man gone to sleep again?” said Jenny. “Jenny wants to go to sleep. Sing to Jenny.”

Helen's own throat was burning, but the sleepy little voice was insistent. She put an arm about each of the stranger children, and sang:

“I dreamed a dream the other night,

And long before the dream was done

I had seen the Angel of the Moon

And the Angel of the Sun.

“The Angel of the Moon was white,

He had the strangest, kindest eyes;

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 pious 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.”