The Story of Sonny Sahib | Page 6

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 mouth as it crossed Rajputana--and Abdul told his wife one evening, after she had put Sonny Sahib to sleep with a hymn to Israfil, that a million of English soldiers had come upon Cawnpore, and in their hundredfold revenge had left neither Mussulman nor Hindoo alive in the city--also that the Great Lord Sahib had ordered the head of every kala admi, every black man, to be taken to build a bridge across the Ganges with, so that hereafter his people might leave Cawnpore by another way. Then Abdul also became of the opinion that there need be no haste in going.
Sonny Sahib grew out of the arms and necks of his long embroidered night