Then followed the delays at Benares and Allahabad; the stoppage of reinforcements; the hope deferred that maketh the heart sick. To crown all, the Indian sun was burning fiercely on the barracks, and the hot winds of June were blowing through the rooms. Many Europeans were carried off by sickness, and their fate was almost to be envied, for life itself was becoming intolerable. Had the Europeans been all men, they might have cut their way to Agra, and forced a passage down the river to Allahabad. But Sir Hugh Wheeler had 300 women and children on his hands, and it was impossible to carry them away in the face of sepoys and rebels. No other alternative was thought of for a moment. No European could dream at such a crisis of leaving women and children to the tender mercies of sepoys. [Sidenote: Nana Sahib at Cawnpore.] §7. All this while there were no suspicions of treachery as regards Nana Sahib; yet in reality the Mahratta Brahman was moving about like an evil spirit in disguise. To show his loyalty and attachment to the British, he left his palace at Bithoor, and took up his quarters at a house within the civil station at Cawnpore. His real purpose was to excite the sepoys to revolt, but to prevent them from rushing off to Delhi, and rallying round a Mohammedan sovereign. He was not a Mohammedan, but a Hindu; besides that, he was a representative of Hindu sovereigns, the extinct Mahratta Peishwas, who, according to his own views, were the rightful rulers of India. In his secret heart he fondly dreamed of upsetting British supremacy, and restoring the old days of Mahratta anarchy, when the Brahman Peishwa ruled at Poona as the head of the Mahratta confederacy, whilst his lieutenants, Sindia and Holkar, plundered Hindustan in his name. [Sidenote: Blindness of the Europeans.] A more dangerous character than Nana Sahib never entered a British cantonment in India. The civil officials and the army officers were alike deceived. No one believed in his truth or honesty, but they imagined that he was looking after his own interest with that pertinacity which characterises Mahrattas. In other words, that he was rendering ostentatious services in the hope of being rewarded with the life pension of the deceased Peishwa. [Sidenote: Unpopularity of Nana Sahib.] But Nana Sahib encountered overwhelming difficulties from the outset. Like all Mahratta Brahmans he had the highest opinion of his caste and claims. Indeed his assumption was unbounded. But the Brahmans and Rajputs of Oudh and the North-West Provinces, who formed the bulk of the sepoy army of Bengal, were by no means inclined to accept a Mahratta sovereign, unless they were highly paid for their allegiance. They were prepared to make him their tool, and to tender him sham reverence, so long as he was liberal with money and bangles of gold or silver; but they had no more respect for the Mahratta, than the sepoys at Delhi had for the Mogul Padishah. [Sidenote: Secrecy and duplicity.]