The Story of Sonny Sahib | Page 6

into the
crowded, dusty road that led down to the ghat, neither Abdul nor Tooni
were in the riotous crowd that pressed along with it. They had taken
refuge in the outer bazar, and Sonny Sahib, sound asleep and well
hidden, had taken refuge with them.
As to Sonny Sahib's mother, she was neither shot in the boats with the
soldiers that believed the written word of the Nana Sahib, nor stabbed
with the women and children who went back to the palace afterwards.
She died quietly in the oxcart before it reached the ghat, and the pity of
it was that Sonny Sahib's father, the captain, himself in hospital four
hundred miles from Cawnpore, never knew.
There is a marble angel in Cawnpore now, standing in a very quiet
garden, and shut off even from the trees and the flowers by an
enclosing wall. The angel looks always down, down, and such an awful,
pitiful sorrow stands there with her that nobody cares to try to touch it
with words. People only come and look and go silently away,
wondering what time can have for the healing of such a wound as this.
There is an inscription--

SACRED TO THE PERPETUAL MEMORY OF A LARGE
COMPANY OF CHRISTIAN PEOPLE, CHIEFLY WOMEN AND
CHILDREN, WHO NEAR THIS SPOT WERE CRUELLY
MURDERED BY THE FOLLOWERS OF THE REBEL NANA
DHUNDU PANT OF BITHUR, AND CAST, THE DYING WITH
THE DEAD, INTO THE WELL BELOW, ON THE XVTH DAY OF
JULY MDCCCLVII.'
And afterward Sonny Sahib's father believed that all he could learn
while he lived about the fate of his wife and his little son was written
there. But he never knew.

CHAPTER II

Tooni and Abdul heard the terrible news of Cawnpore six months later.
They had gone back to their own country, and it was far from
Cawnpore--hundreds and hundreds of miles across a white sandy desert,
grown with prickles and studded with rocks--high up in the north of
Rajputana. In the State of Chita and the town of Rubbulgurh there was
no fighting, because there were no Sahibs. The English had not yet
come to teach the Maharajah how to govern his estate and spend his
revenues. That is to say, there was no justice to speak of, and a great
deal of cholera, and by no means three meals a day for everybody, or
even two. But nobody was discontented with troubles that came from
the gods and the Maharajah, and talk of greased cartridges would not
have been understood. Thinking of this, Abdul often said to Tooni, his
wife; 'The service of the sahib is good and profitable, but in old age
peace is better, even though we are compelled to pay many rupees to
the tax-gatherers of the Maharajah.' Tooni always agreed, and when the
khaber came that all the memsahibs and the children had been killed by
the sepoys, she agreed weeping. They were always so kind and gentle,
the memsahibs, and the little ones, the babalok--the babalok! Surely the
sepoys had become like the tiger-folk. Then she picked up Sonny Sahib
and held him tighter than he liked. She had crooned with patient smiles
over many of the babalok in her day, but from beginning to end, never
a baba like this. So strong he was, he could make old Abdul cry out,

pulling at his beard, so sweet-tempered and healthy that he would sleep
just where he was put down, like other babies of Rubbulgurh. Tooni
grieved deeply that she could not give him a bottle, and a coral, and a
perambulator, and often wondered that he consented to thrive without
these things, but the fact remains that he did. He even allowed himself
to be oiled all over occasionally for the good of his health, which was
forbearing in a British baby. And always when Abdul shook his finger
at him and said--
'Gorah pah howdah, hathi pah JEEN! Jeldi bag-gia, Warren
HasTEEN!'[1]
he laughed and crowed as if he quite understood the joke.
[1] 'Howdahs on horses, on elephants JEEN! He ran away quickly did
Warren HasTEEN!'
'Jeen' means 'saddles,' but nobody could make that rhyme! Popular
incident of an English retreat in Hastings' time.
Tooni had no children of her own, and wondered how long it would be
before she and Abdul must go again to Cawnpore to find the baby's
father. There need be no hurry, Tooni thought, as Sonny Sahib played
with the big silver hoops in her ears, and tried to kick himself over her
shoulder. Abdul calculated the number of rupees that would be a
suitable reward for taking care of a baby for six months, found it
considerable, and said they ought to start at once. Then other news
came--gathering terror from mouth to