'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 why they made him caretaker; but I've reason to believe
he was outside--not that it matters now! Well, his answer was: "The
_sahibs_ had nothing to do with it. It was the dead women and the dead
babies. Every one knows that the strength of the strongest man is water
before the ghost of a mother and child."'
They had reached the slope of that gentle hollow where, even in their
bitterest stress, the living had crept obstinately, under cover of
night, to lay their dead to rest in the shadow of the deserted church,
and he paused to point downwards to a tall cypress and add, 'There is
John Ellison's grave.'
Lesley paused too. Calm and still in the moonlight, the grassy slopes,
set with flowers and blossoming shrubs, seemed to centre on that hollow
of heroes' graves, as they, in their turn, centred round the plain
plinth, with its marble slab under the cypress tree.
There were but two words on it--'John Ellison'--but they filled the
eye, the heart, the brain.
Lesley Drummond stood looking at them silently, and Jack Raymond stood
watching her, approving her silence. But Jerry, whose round childish
face had a curious ghostly look on it, as if he were seeing visions,
went creeping on round the plinth, his grey eyes wide; a stealthy
little figure dreaming of torches and deaders and crack-bang firings
over walls. But he was back in a second, his face eager, startled.
'Oh, if you please--he's quite, quite shot--lyin' there close by.
Hadn't we better buwy him?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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