To write this story is a distress, to read it must be well-nigh an anguish. Yet we may well endure to know what our countrymen and countrywomen have suffered. Their sufferings are part of the price at which a great empire has been built. Into what a passion of fury—half generous, half devilish—the soldiers who looked on these things were kindled may well be imagined. It will be remembered that Neill compelled some of the Sepoys captured at Cawnpore, and guilty of a share in this tragedy—high-caste Brahmins—to clean up, under the whip, a few square inches of the blood-stained floor, and then immediately hanged them, burying them in a ditch afterwards. These Brahmins, that is, were first ceremonially defiled, and then executed. That was an inhumanity unworthy of the English name, which Lord Clyde promptly forbade. Nana Sahib had fled the palace. Principality, and power, and wealth, all had vanished. He was, like Cain, a fugitive on the face of the earth. In what disguises he hid himself, through what remote and lonely regions he wandered, where he died, or how, no man knows. His name has become an execration, his memory a horror. The Bebeeghur has disappeared. The site where it once stood is now a beautiful garden. In the centre of the garden, circled with a fringe of ever-sighing cypresses, is a low mound, with fence of open stonework. The circular space within is sunken, and upon the centre of the sunken floor rises the figure—not too artistic, unhappily—of an angel in marble, with clasped hands and outspread wings. On the pedestal runs the inscription: “Sacred to the perpetual memory of the great company of Christian people, chiefly women and children, who, near this spot, were cruelly massacred by the followers of the rebel Nana Doondoo Punth, of Bithoor, and cast, the dying and the dead, into the well below, on the 15th day of July 1857.” CHAPTER VI LUCKNOW AND SIR HENRY LAWRENCE And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England flew.—TENNYSON. On the night of May 30, 1857, the steps of the Residency at Lucknow witnessed a strange sight. On the uppermost steps stood a group of British officers in uniform. Sir Henry Lawrence was there, with his staff; Banks, the chief commissioner; Colonel Inglis, of the 32nd. The glare of a flaming house a hundred and fifty yards distant threw on the group a light as intense almost as noonday. Forty paces in front of the group stood a long line of Sepoys loading in swift silence. The light of the flames played redly on their dark faces, on their muskets brought quickly into position for capping. For weeks the great city had been trembling on the verge of revolt, and an officer of his staff had brought Lawrence news that gun-fire that night, nine o’clock, was to be the signal for the outbreak. [Illustration: SIR HENRY LAWRENCE _Reproduced by permission of SIR HENRY WALDEMAR LAWRENCE, from a drawing in his possession_]