Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 87, March, 1875», sayfa 9
LA MADONNA DELLA SEDIA
A TRADITION
Raphael. Still in this free, clear air that vision floats
Before my brain. I may nor banish it
Nor grasp it. 'Tis too fine, too spirit-like,
To offer as the type of motherhood.
Color and blood and life and truth it lacks.
Gods! can it be that our imaginings
Excel your handiwork? Must life seem dull,
Must earth seem barren and unbeautiful,
For ever unto him who can create
This rarer world of delicate phantasy?
I lift mine eyes, and nothing real responds
To those ideal forms. God pardon me!
There in the everlasting sunshine sits
The Mother with the Infant at her breast.
Hence, ghostly shadows! let me learn to draw
Mine inspiration from the common air.
A peasant-woman auburn-haired, large-eyed,
Within the shade of overhanging boughs
Suckles her babe, and sees her eldest born
Gambol upon the grass: the elf has wrought
With two snapt boughs the semblance of a cross,
And proudly holds the sacred symbol high
Above his head to win his mother's praise.
Mine art may haply reproduce that wealth
Of brilliant hues—the dusk hair's glimmering gold,
The auroral blush, the bare breasts shining white
Where the babe's warm rose-face is pressed against
That fount of generous life; but ah! what craft
May paint the unearthly peace upon her brow,
The holy love that from her dark moist orbs
Beams with no lesser glory than the eyes
Of the Maid-Mother toward her heaven-born Child.
Little Boy with the Cross.
Oh, mother, such a stranger comes this way!
I saw him as I climbed the olive tree
To break the branches for my crucifix—
tall, fair youth with floating yellow curls.
Is he an angel?
Maria. Silly darling, peace!
No longer dwell the angels on the earth,
And see, he comes.
Raphael. Madonna mia, hail!
God bless thee and thy cherubim!
Maria. Amen!
God bless thee also for the pious wish!
No cherubim are these, but, Heaven be thanked,
Two healthy boys. Pray, sit and rest with us:
The heat has been too fierce for wayfarers,
And 'neath these shady vines the afternoon
Is doubly fresh.
Raphael. Thanks, 'tis a grateful air:
The weariness of travel it uplifts
From heavy brow and body with its breath,
Delicious as cool water to the touch.
Maria. Bernardo, climb yon trunk again and pluck
Some ripened clusters for this gentleman.
Raphael. Ah, 'tis a radiant child: what full, lithe limbs!
What cream-white dimpling flesh! what golden lights
Glance through the foliage on his crisp-curled head!
What rosy shadows on the naked form
Against gray olive leaves and blue-green vine!
And see, where now the bright, round face peers down,
And smiles and nods, and beckons us as one
Who leaneth out of heaven.
Maria. A wanton imp,
And full of freaks. I marvel much thereat,
Since I have named him from a holy saint,
Who bode among us many years, and gave
His dying blessing unto me and mine.
Raphael. The child could be no other than he is
Without some loss, mother. But what saint
Had here his hermitage?
Maria. Nay, pardon me,
'Twas but my reverent love that sainted him;
Yet was he one most worthy of the crown,
If austere life of white simplicity,
Large charity and strict self-sacrifice
Can sanctify a mortal.
Raphael. Yet I see
No convent nigh.
Maria. Nay, sir, no convent his.
Beyond our comfortable homes he dwelt,
Not lonely though alone: 'neath yonder hill
His hut was reared; a tall full-foliaged oak
O'ershadowed it. 'Tis not so long agone
Since he was here to comfort, help and heal,
Yet now no earthly trace of him remains.
Spring freshets from the hills have washed away
The last wrecked fragments of his hermitage,
And though I pleaded hard, I could not save
The oak, his dear dumb daughter, from the axe,
Albeit 'twas she preserved him unto us.
Forgive me, sir, my chatter wearies you,
Here be the grapes my boy has plucked: they sate
Both thirst and hunger, pray refresh yourself.
Raphael. Dear mother, it is rest to hear thee speak.
'Tis not my hale young limbs that are forespent,
But an outwearied spirit, seeking peace,
Hath found it in thy voice. Speak on, speak on.
What of this holy saint? how chanced the tree
To save his life?
Maria. Ah, 'twas a miracle.
Through summer's withering heats and blighting droughts
His own hands gave the thirsty roots to drink.
In spring the first pale growth of tender green
Thrilled him with scarcely less delight than mine
At my babe's earliest glance of answering love.
Daily he fed the tame free birds that went
Singing among its boughs; he tended it,
He watched, he cherished, yea he talked to it,
As though it had a soul. God gave to him
Two daughters, he was wont to say—one mute,
And one who spake, the oak tree and myself.
A child, scarce older than my Bernard now,
I nestled to the quaint, kind hermit's heart,
And grew to girlhood with my hand in his.
I loved to prank his wretched cell with flowers.
Twisting bright weeds around his crucifix,
Or trailing ivy wreaths about his door.
One winter came when half my father's vines
Were killed with frost; the valley was as white
As yonder boldest mountain-top; the air
Cut like a knife; the brooks were still and stiff;
The high drifts choked the hollows of the hills.
When spring approached and swollen brooks ran free.
And in the ponds the blue ice cracked and brake,
The hard snows melted and the bladed green
Put forth again, then from the mountain-slopes,
The avalanches rolled; the streams o'erflowed;
The fields were flooded; flocks were swept away,
And folk fared o'er the pasture-ground in boats.
Two days and nights the sun and stars seemed drowned,
The air was thick with water, and the world
Lay ruined under rain and sliding snows.
Then day and night my thoughts were with the saint
Whose poor hut clung to yonder treacherous slope:
My dreams, my tears, my prayers were all for him.
Not till the flood subsided, and again
A watery sun shone forth, my prayers prevailed
Upon my father, and he went with me
To seek the holy man. "Just God!" he cried,
And I, with both hands pressed against mine eyes,
Burst into sobs. No hermitage was there:
Naught save one broken, tottering wall remained
Beneath the unshaken, firmly-rooted oak.
Then from the branches came a faint, thin voice,
"My children, I am saved!" and looking up,
We found him clinging with what strength was left
Unto the boughs. We led him home with us,
Starving and sick, and chilled through blood and bone.
Our tenderest care was needed to revive
The life half spent, and soon we learned the tale
Of his salvation. He had climbed at first
Unto his roof, but saw ere long small chance
For that frail hut to stand against the storm.
It rocked beneath him as a bark at sea,
The hard wind beat upon him, and the rain
Drenched him and seemed to scourge him as with flails.
He gave himself to God; composed with prayer
His spirit to meet death; when overhead
The swaying oak-limbs seemed to beckon him
To seek the branches' shelter and support.
His prayer till death was that the Lord would bless
His daughters, and distinguish them above
All children of the earth. For me his suit
Hath well prevailed, thank God! A happy wife,
A happy mother, I have naught to ask:
My blessings overflow.
Raphael. Thanks for thy tale,
Most gracious mother. See thy babe is lulled
To smiling sleep.
Maria. Yea, and the silence now
Awakens him. Ah, darling rogue, art flushed
With too much comfort? So! let the cool air
Play with thy curls and fan the plump, hot cheek.
Raphael. Hold, as the child uplifts his cherub face,
Opens his soft small arms to stroke thy cheek,
Crowing with glee, while the slant sunbeams light
A halo of gold fire about thy hair,
I see again a canvas that is hung
Over the altar in our church at home.
"Mater amabilis," yet here be traits,
Colors and tones the artist never dreamed.
Sweet mother, let me sketch thee with thy babe:
So rare a picture should not pass away
With the brief moment which it illustrates.
Maria. Art thou a painter too, Sir Traveler?
Where be thy brush and colors?
Raphael. Ah, 'tis true,
Naught have I with me. What is this? 'twill serve
My purpose.
Maria. 'Tis the cover of a cask,
Made of the very oak whereof I spake:
My father for his wine-casks felled the tree.
Raphael. A miracle! the hermit's daughters thus
Will be remembered in the years to come.
My pencil will suffice to scratch the lines
Upon the wood: my memory will hold
The lights, the tints, the golden atmosphere,
The genius of the scene—the mother-love.
EMMA LAZARUS.
EARLY TRAVELING EXPERIENCES IN INDIA
In August, 1849, when I had been living at Calcutta nearly three years, I was warned by my doctor that I must go on a sea-voyage or else to the Himalaya Mountains, if life was an object with me. Such it was, and very keenly. The four-and-twenty years of it which I had divided between study and rollicking had approved themselves, like this poor old world when it was new, "very good," and I had a strong objection to parting with it on so short an acquaintance. True, my hepatic apparatus, as the doctors grandly call the liver, had got miserably out of gear, though I was a water-drinker, and though I had a wholesome horror of tropical sunshine. But I had a good constitution, and I had the word of the medical faculty for it that many a man with not half so good a one as mine had pulled through a much worse condition than I was in. To go away somewhere, however, was proposed as my only alternative to migrating down to the hideous cemetery among the bogs and jackals of Chowringhee. But where should I go? After having been shot once and drowned twice when a boy, I had been ship-wrecked at the mouth of the sacred and accursed Ganges, and had just escaped with my life and Greek lexicon. Shooting—and I may throw in hanging—I felt proof against, and as for drowning, I had no fear of that. Nevertheless, I had been very near five months in coming out from Boston under the blundering seamanship of Captain Coffin (ominous cognomen!), and salt water, hard junk and weevilly biscuit were as unattractive to me in possible prospect as they were in retrospect. The sea I had weighed in the balance and had found it much wanting. I would, then, go to the Himalayas.
So I prepared to make for Simla, which, however, I never saw, nor had occasion to see, my liver complaint seeming to have been left behind, with my good wishes, in the City of Palaces. In the early days of Indian civilization to which I refer the most convenient way of journeying on high-roads was by palanquin. One of the black packing-cases so called was purchased, and an arrangement entered into, after the custom of the country, with the post-office to have relays of bearers provided on the road at stated times and places. Thus, I was to go as far as Ghazeepore, where I had a friend living, and there I was to give due notice if I wished to proceed farther. Traveling in India has so frequently been a subject of description that I shall not describe it anew. I allow myself, however, to say that if, before venturing on it, you lay in a stock of boiled tongues, sardines, marmalade, and tea and sugar, you could not do better by way of forestalling starvation and repentance. Every day I stopped once or twice at a travelers' bungalow, or rest-house; and I managed, notwithstanding that my stock of Urdú was scanty, to make my wants understood. That a great part of the copious monologue which my purveyors expended, as we settled the details of breakfast or dinner, was lost on me, did not seem, in the final result, to matter in the least. What I needed I asked for, and then listened attentively for the barbaric representative of "yes" or "no" in the Babel of sounds that followed, neglecting the flux of verbiage that engulfed it with the same lofty indifference which a mathematician professes toward infinitely small quantities. With a view to avoiding cross-purposes there is nothing like economy of speech. But how my tawny hosts could contrive to realize such a fortune of talk out of their very meagre capital of subject-matter excited my never-ending wonder. They could provide forlorn pullets, certainly from the same farmyard with the lean kine of Egypt, and to these they could add, what was much better left unadded, a villainous species of unleavened bread, a sort of hoecake, not at all improved—precisely like the run of travelers—by leaving home and wandering in the Orient. And this was about all they could provide. But, I repeat, how could expatiate on them! And how bespattered one with compound epithets of adulation!
A friend of mine, a lady, when fresh in the country once compromised herself rather astonishingly by lending an ear to their multiloquence, instead of resolutely refusing her attention to all communication but that consisting of "yea, yea," and "nay, nay." She had noted down, in her tablets, the Urdú wherewith to ask whether a thing is procurable, and to order it, if procurable, to be forthcoming, with the appropriate outlandish words for "pullet" and "hoecake," and also those for straightforward answers, affirmative and negative. She was certain that with this lingual accoutrement she could not possibly be taken at a disadvantage. The experience of a few hours, however, unsettled her self-confidence very considerably. She alights at a wayside hostelry. Khudâbakhsh, the chief servant in attendance, arrayed in more or less fine linen, without the purple, surmounted by a turban after the likeness of Saturn and his rings in a pictorial astronomy-book, presents himself, and worships her with lowly salutations. "Is a fowl to be had?"—"Gharîb-parwar," is the prompt reply.—"Is hoecake to be had?"—"Dharm-antâr," officiously cuts in Khudâbakhsh's mate, a low-caste Hindoo; and the principal thinks it unnecessary to respond to the question a second time. Now, what is to be done? What do they mean? Have they fowl and hoecake? Have they not fowl and hoecake? Here, to be sure, is a very bivium of perplexities. The lady at last, with quiet nonchalance, demands the production of a gharîb-parwar and a dharm-antâr, thus unconsciously ordering a "cherisher of the poor" and an "incarnation of justice," the pretty appellations used to designate herself. "Queer things for breakfast!" Khudâbakhsh and his mate mentally reflect, exchanging glances, but without moving a muscle. Breakfast is served, and my friend sees before her just what she meant to order. On one dish reeks the bony contour of a chicken, grinning thankfulness for extinction at every joint, and on a second dish towers a pile of things like small wooden trenchers pressed flat. Of course she has been puzzled, she self-flatteringly concludes, by some less common names of the very common viands which lie displayed before her. By and by, however, she discovers that gharîb-parwar and dharm-antâr are not articles of gastronomic indulgence, at least beyond the borders of those islands of the blest where slices of cold missionary come on with the dessert. When fully aware of her little blunder she marvels, and not unreasonably, that any one should address a lady as "cherisher of the poor" or as "incarnation of justice," rather than as plain "madam;" and she thinks it equally strange that any one should so beat about the bush as to substitute polysyllables of compliment for hân, the much more expeditious equivalent of "yes."
Everything went on smoothly and monotonously enough till I was within twenty miles, roughly computed, of Ghazeepore. At this point, on reaching the end of a stage, my bearers woke me to say there was no relay waiting for them. It may have been midnight. I told them to set me down, to make up a fire and to go to sleep around it, but keeping watch, turn and turn about, each for an hour. Matters being thus disposed, I shut and hooked the palanquin doors, readjusting my blankets, and was soon dreaming of another hemisphere. At sunrise no new bearers had yet shown themselves. My men belonged to the region we were in, and I learned from them that the nearest European dwelt only eight miles distant. I bargained with them to take me to his bungalow. The unexpected wages which they were promised being liberal, they trotted off with unwonted briskness. In due course the bungalow loomed in sight, and as I approached it a burly figure, in shirt-sleeves and with arms akimbo, appeared in the verandah, his eyes turned in the direction of his unlooked-for visitor. "God bless you, Hugh Maxwell! I'm devilish glad to see you," shouted the burly figure, benedictory, but even in benediction not oblivious of the Old Teaser. "I wish to Goodness I was Hugh Maxwell!" I returned, stepping to the ground. "Oh, never mind," rejoined the hearty indigo-planter, perceiving his mistake and offering me his hand. "There is just time for a bath before breakfast," he added; and a good tubbing, in sufficient light to see and evade creeping things by, was far from unacceptable. I stayed with my good-natured host two days and nights, picking up, in the mean while, much curious information touching the cultivation and manufacture in which he was occupied. Like most persons of his calling, he was an ardent sportsman. The early hours of the morning he gave almost daily to a stroll with his gun; and the first evening I passed with him he invited me, in startlingly piebald phraseology, to accompany him on the morrow. "Be up by top dage," said he: "we will have chhotî hâzirî, and then a chal over the khets for some shikâr" Why he did not prefer to say "gun-fire," "tea and toast," "run," "fields," and "game," probably he could not have told himself. His way of peppering his English with Urdú was characteristic of his class, and till I got accustomed to it I found it somewhat perplexing. If he had known me all his life he could not have been more friendly. Yet his kindness and hospitality were not exceptional things in the India of a quarter of a century ago. All is changed there now—whether much for the better I am skeptical. Twenty-two hours after they were due my missing bearers made their appearance. Arrived at Ghazeepore, I addressed a complaint to the postmaster-general. Thereupon two sides of a large sheet of paper were spread for me with base official circumlocution, through the darkness of which I groped out, after some labor, the audacious libel that the blame, if there were any, rested entirely with myself. This stuff, signed by the functionary aforesaid, but doubtless concocted without his privity by one of his graceless subordinates, I knew to be the only satisfaction I was to look for. A request for revision of judgment would have been received with silent scorn, and appeal there was none. Digesting my disgust as best I could, I lighted my cheroot with the mendacious foolscap and blushed for my species.
Let us pass on to the beginning of 1851. Having then been stationary at Benares for a whole year, I was longing for a little variety. Oude, deservedly called the Garden of India, was, by all accounts, well worth visiting. I resolved to visit it. But not merely was independent exploration in that kingdom attended with risk: in strict propriety, one had no business there except by royal authority, which royal authority, as concerned a traveler, strongly recommended itself to respectful consideration from including a guard, and that free of expense. An acquaintance of mine wrote a letter for me to the Resident at Lucknow, Sir Henry Sleeman. The royal authority was obtained, and the guard inclusive was to meet me on the Oude frontier. Tents were borrowed; servants and camels were hired; long consultations were held with old stagers in the marching line. The canvas which was to shelter me for six weeks was built up in front of my house, and already I felt myself half a nomad. The last evening was spent with veterans in the ways of camping out, and at three o'clock the next morning I mounted my horse and began my journey. My road lay through Jaunpoor, and here I encountered a violent thunderstorm in the middle of the night, with floods of rain. At the cost of being almost drowned out and blown away, I learned the expediency of trenching one's tabernacle, and the wisdom of putting one's confidence in none but brand-new cordage. In the city of Jaunpoor there is not much to arrest notice, saving its very durable bridge, dating from the time of Akbar, and the Atâlâ Masjid, a mosque deformed from a rather ancient Hindoo temple; and the rest of the district of Jaunpoor which my route lay through was altogether uninteresting.
The borders of the district crossed, after traversing a narrow strip of Oude I came again to British territory. This fragment formed a perfect island, so to speak, the domains of the nawab hemming it in on every side. The one European inhabitant of this isolated but fertile spot was an indigo-planter, near whose bungalow and factory I encamped for a night. His establishment was of long standing, but he had no neighbor within many miles, and there was that about the place which filled me with a sense of utter dreariness and depression. Hard by the house was a burial-ground, and wholly by that house it had been peopled with all its many tenants. Saddening were the brief and almost unvaried histories recorded on its unpretending monuments. There was a name, and then a date, and then that word at the bare mention of which there are few old Indians who, as it calls up memories of bygone shocks and griefs, can refrain from a sickening shudder—"cholera." Among all who rested there in peace, so far away from every reminder of childhood and of home, not one had passed the prime of life. It was easy to picture to one's self the last gloomy hours of those hapless exiles, stricken down by the fell scourge in the pride of their strength, and perhaps at the full tide of their prosperity, with none to succor, and with no hope from the first but that they must perish. Nor was this quite all. How could their sole companions, their servants, people of the country, and bound to their masters by none but the mercenary tie of a hireling, soothe their dying moments with any genuine sympathy, or supply in the dread travail of mortality the room of a friend, or even of a fellow-countryman? This is no baseless sketch of fancy. Familiar facts dispense with all need to draw on the imagination in outlining the end of one who meets a destiny like theirs. The planter suddenly finds himself ill; he rapidly grows worse; a few hours of agony in his solitude, and all is over. Tidings of the event are carried to the nearest factory, and then to another and another. Two or three of his former acquaintances ride over to his bungalow, knock up a rude coffin, mumble a few sentences about "the resurrection and the life," "our dear brother here departed," and "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," bury him out of sight, and set up a decent stone over his grave. His place is filled again in a few weeks or months, and his successor, regardless of warnings, toils on in the old routine, possibly to share his miserable fate.
As I have said above, a guard was directed to await me on the Oude borders. Various, conflicting, and all of them wide of the mark, were my speculations on its outward and visible form, and the martial equipment by which it was to strike terror in all beholders. Was it to consist of horse or of foot? and of how many men? and so forth. The mystery was resolved at the time and place appointed. A camel—a picked sample, seemingly, for general ugliness and the vicious way it writhed its mouth—shambled up to my tent. Its rider, who in all specialties of repulsiveness tallied with the beast to a hair, impaled a letter on the tip of his spear and handed it down. It was from the Resident at Lucknow. In its unpromising bearer I beheld my guard. If the look of a thorough ruffian, much unwashed, with the spear just mentioned, a matchlock, and an assortment round his waist of what resembled carving-knives and skewers, was to be my sufficient defence in time of trouble, I was well provided for. However it was to be explained, no harm came to me anywhere on my march. But my guard, if he looked zealously after my interests, looked full as zealously after his own. For what I knew he was licensed, as a servant of the state, to billet himself at free quarters on his royal master's subjects: at any rate, so he did. But, greatly to his vexation, I would not hear of his compelling the shopkeepers with whom my butler had daily dealings in buying necessaries for me to provision my camp at their own charge. The man was for carrying things with a high hand; and at the period of which I am writing to do so was in Oude wellnigh the universal rule. Justice was fast dying out in the land, and violence already reigned prevalent in its stead. The taxes, exorbitant as apportioned at the court, were farmed by merciless wretches who made them more exorbitant still, and who collected them, for the most part, at the point of the sword. Open robbery, deadly brawls and private assassination had become matters of perpetual occurrence. There was scarcely a day during my tour that I was not in the close vicinity of fatal skirmishes, and that I did not fall in with parties carrying away from them the dead or wounded. Obviously, this state of affairs could not exist for any very long duration. The nawab was advised, warned, and then menaced with deposal, provided things were not righted in his dominions, radically and speedily, to the satisfaction of the East India Company. Harsh measures, equally with mild, were, however, altogether wasted on him. Personally, he was a groveling debauchee, exhausted alike in mind and in body to sheer imbecility; and his courtiers and counselors were little better than himself. To anarchy, insurrection seemed inevitably imminent. It was precluded by annexation, and the kingdom of Oude, not an hour in advance of its deserts, took its place in finished history.
Game of a humbler description I met with in abundance everywhere in Oude, but I had hunted the tiger with the rajah of Benares, and since then had conceived a disdain of feathered things, bustards excepted. Moreover, I had lately bought a superb double-barreled Swiss rifle, as yet untested in real work. With inviting jungles constantly within easy reach, not to experiment with this lordly implement on something bigger than a wild pig demanded abnegation beyond my philosophy. I had no companion, but then I would control my impetuosity, do nothing rash, and, if I could, keep out of the way of temptation. One day, therefore, breakfast despatched, I shouldered my lovely Switzer, and struck off at random across the open. Woodland was not far to seek, and before I had been away an hour I was in the heart of a dense jungle. Ordinary deer and "such-like" I might have shot at will, but I happened to be in an exclusive mood of mind, and was determined to drop a blue-cow, if anything. But let not my Occidental reader reproach me with having meditated such an atrocity as bovicide. I have literally translated the Hindoo nîl gâe, the misleading name given in India to the white-footed antelope, sometimes called also rojh. At last my slaughterous appetite was gratified, and a blue-cow bore witness to the merit of my rifle, if not to my marksmanship. It had cost me a tiresome search, and, being a shy animal, much stealthy tracking. Yet when the beautiful creature lay stretched at my feet it seemed as if I had been guilty of wanton cruelty, and I wished my aim had miscarried, proud as I had just before been of having done execution at what looked to be an impracticably long range. Not improbably I tried to extenuate my inhumanity by the argument that if I had not killed it somebody else would have done so. Be this how it may, I could never bring myself to shoot another, though I had many a fair chance. All things considered, then, I am disposed to strike a balance in my favor.
However, a little while previously I had done a bit of bloodshed which could not have lain on the very tenderest of consciences. The circumstances were these: Near my camp was a patch of sugar-cane, which I noticed bore marks of visitation by some creature with a taste for sweets. The neighborhood, I ascertained, was infested with wild hogs. In the afternoon I surveyed the fields adjoining the sugar-cane, and made my dispositions against night. The moon was at the full. As soon as it rose I took my rifle and repaired to a position selected with reference to a certain tree. This tree had a low—but not too low—horizontal branch, strong enough, as proved by experiment, to bear my weight. Presently, an unmistakable concert of snorting and grunting announced the approach of swine. I picked out their fugleman, a well-grown boar, and fired. He was only wounded, and immediately gave chase after me. I might discharge my second barrel at him, but suppose I should miss? Perched out of his reach, I might miss him with impunity, and load again. All this I had pondered beforehand. So I started for my tree, which I reached some ten seconds sooner than the boar, swung myself up on its low branch, and there took my seat. The boar rushed furiously to and fro, raging like the heathen of the Psalmist, and also, like the Psalmist's people—not a well-ordered democracy like ours, of course—imagining a vain thing. Again and again he quixotically charged the bole of the tree, no doubt thinking it to be myself in a new shape. A fine classical boar he must have been, with his poetic faith in instantaneous metamorphosis. His classicality, however, what with his unmannerly savageness and my own suspension between heaven and earth, I did not feel bound to respect. So, without the slightest emotion of sentimentality, I put a ball through his head.
Let us now hark back to the blue-cow, beautiful and breathless. Satisfied, for the nonce, with my prowess in laying it low, I plunged into the forest, just to explore. I must have rambled several miles, when I suddenly came upon an impervious barrier of quickset. Following its course a little way, I found that it curved, and at one point I espied through it a broad ditch filled with water, and a wall beyond. By and by I reached a gap in the barrier, and a drawbridge leading up to a large gate. I crossed the bridge, knocked at the gate, parleyed with an invisible porter, and was admitted. My visit was evidently viewed with a mixture of dislike and suspicion, but with no sign of alarm when it was seen that I was really unaccompanied, as, while still outside, I had said I was. Looking around, I perceived that I was in a substantial fortress. Eight or ten ruffianly fellows came about me and wished to know what I wanted. I asked who lived there, and they informed me, adding an expression of surprise at my putting such a question. Was their master at home? He was. And could I see him? They would let me know directly. On this I was conducted to a small room, and left there, The roughs paced backward and forward before the door, casting glances at me which I fancied to be sinister. In a few minutes their chief, a stalwart, brawny biped, swaggered in, twirling his moustaches, clanking his sword, and studying to seem truculent. He, no less than his men, was at a loss to know what I could have come there for. So I told him the unvarnished facts of the case, and paused for his reply. He had none to make. The latest news from Lucknow he inquired for, indeed, but as I had come from the opposite direction, and withal did not know the latest news of the capital from the stalest, I could contribute nothing to his enlightenment. Besides my rifle, I had in my belt a pair of loaded pistols. He desired to look at them, but took in good part enough my objection that I never trusted them in any hands but my own. We went on talking for a little while, when he called for betel and pan. This meant that I might go. I helped myself, took leave and recrossed the drawbridge. It was a notorious freebooter, a Hindoo Robin Hood, that I had dropped upon. But why did he not tumble me into his ditch and enrich his armory with my rifle and pistols? It may be that prudence operated, in his letting me go free, as a check on his lust for a very small gain. Despite the then disordered condition of the country—or, in some instances, by very reason of it—people of his stamp were every here and there called to a summary reckoning. A bandit would know the haunts of other bandits, and either to conciliate the government or in the hope of reward occasionally betrayed or slew a fellow-outlaw. While in Oude, one morning just after breakfast I was told there was something to show me in a basket. The cover was removed, and there I saw sixteen human heads. Their late proprietors were a famous brigand and his merry men, only looking quite the reverse of merry in the grim ghastliness of decapitation. I scarcely recovered my appetite before tiffin.
