A Wedding Day (Wentworth)

TORIES of the great mutiny year all bear a certain resemblance to one another. They have been told, and retold. They are crude and violent as only real things that have really happened are crude and violent.

Elizabeth Oswald’s story is a little different from the others, It moves in the same three dimensions of battle, murder and sudden death, but at one point at least it verges upon some unnamed fourth dimension, where the clash of actuality falls away into silence, and the conflict is that of things elemental in an elemental space.

It was the end of May in Golpore, and the hot daylight paused on the edge of withdrawal. Where the sun sank a flare of orange held the sky, and above it the pale dusty green melted by imperceptible degrees into dim heavy shades of hyacinth.

Elizabeth Oswald stood at the edge of a wide, shady verandah looking over a garden where the roses were all dead of the heat, and their place usurped by a wild tangle of neglected shrubs, with here and there a burst of brilliant colour among the dusty leaves. Beyond were silvery-leaved oleander clumps and a grass walk that wound between black tamarisk trees to the ravine on whose edge Golpore was built.

Elizabeth stood very still, her hands so tightly clasped that the edge of her new wedding ring cut deep into her finger. She was trying to realise that she was married, that she was a wife—John Oswald’s wife. It was rather difficult. Things had happened so quickly. After five and twenty years of placid monotony everything had happened at once: her mother’s death, her summons to join an unknown father, her arrival in Golpore to find that father also dead, and then Colonel Oswald’s offer of marriage, the offer—according to rumour—of a man who had had his romance, and now lived only for his work, to a woman who told herself that romance had passed her by.

Elizabeth, married that morning, had just begun to realise that the marriage ceremony was a gate, not a goal; a gate into an unknown place, where the shadows of the past and future met and made a strange, terrifying twilight. A feeling that she and her husband were groping for one another in this twilight, and that, miss or meet, it was their inevitable portion, oppressed her heart, and weighted it with a weight like that upon the hot and heavy air.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw Kirpa Ram, the native orderly, pass with a lighted lamp between the long glass doors of her husband’s office. At once the dark interior sprang into view, and she saw the bare room with its whitewashed walls and matted floor and John Oswald’s strong, half-frowning face bent over a pile of papers.

“Even on his wedding day,” she thought; and turned again to the sunset with a long breath that was nearly a sigh.

Colonel Oswald fastened the official despatch which he had just completed, pushed it on one side, and taking a new sheet of paper began a second and less official letter to the same person. He wrote fast and without pause until he turned the page, then stayed a moment and wiped the moisture from his brow before he wrote on:

“Whatever may happen in other regiments, I can answer for my own with my life, and with more than my life. Owing to the regrettable feeling of panic which has invaded the community since the news from Meerut and Delhi became known, the ladies and children left here this morning under escort for Cawnpore, where they will seek shelter with Sir Hugh Wheeler. My own advice was in direct opposition to this course being taken. When I inform you that my marriage to Miss Ryan took place to-day, and that by my express desire she has remained at Golpore, you will, I hope, be persuaded that my reliance upon the loyalty of my regiment is absolute. And loyalty should be met by trust. It is the most earnest desire of every man in the regiment to be allowed to serve against the mutineers, and I trust my official request to this effect may meet with a favourable reply.”

He closed the letter, addressed it in a firm hand, and, rising, looked out to where Elizabeth stood, her fine profile dark against the sky, and her black hair massed low upon her neck.

Something smote him; some sudden sense of a responsibility only just realised and too great to be borne. If—Ifand then with a iron wrench he brought his mind back to the certainty and the conviction of those closing phrases in his sealed letter. They represented no impulse, but a settled, devoted faith which took rank in his inmost being only below his faith in God.

He came forward abruptly, but the agitation of that moment’s conflict still hung about him. Elizabeth started at his voice.

“I am going to the lines,” he said. And on the impulse she asked quickly:

“Is anything wrong?”

“Wrong, what should be wrong?” he said harshly. “Are you regretting your decision? Do you wish already that you had gone with the others?”

Elizabeth’s head lifted. Her eyes dwelt on him with a serious, troubled look that saw his suppressed emotion and wondered at it.

“Why do you ask?” she said; “you know—you know quite well I wanted to follow your wishes.”

Colonel Oswald walked a few paces and came back again.

“The regiment is volunteering for service. If we march, you will go to Cawnpore and join the others. If I asked you to stay here now it was not because”

He broke off, very agitated.“Elizabeth, you have not thought I held you lightly; would expose you to the least risk to gratify my own selfwill, prove myself right; you have not thought that?”

Elizabeth shrank a little. This new note found her unprepared. Emotion which she did not share repelled her.

“I must go,” said Colonel Oswald abruptly. Then he came nearer and suddenly took her in his arms. “Elizabeth,” he said under his breath, and for a moment as he strained her to him, his head fell to her shoulder, and she felt the heat and the throbbing of his brow through the thin muslin of her bodice. Then, without a word or kiss, he put her from him and was gone, and she sank trembling into a chair and hid her face.

It was as if a stranger had embraced her, for this was a John Oswald she had never seen before. For the man she knew she had respect and a grateful affection, but for this stranger? She did not know; oh, she did not know, but she was glad that the daylight was ebbing, and she was glad that she was alone.

Suddenly she sat up. There was a noise and a shouting over there beyond the Mess where the lines were. There was a drumming of tom-toms, and a confused medley of sound. Then clear and sharp a shot, a strange cry, another shot, another, and upon the shots a sound of confused clamour rising into uproar.

Elizabeth got up and stood listening, but her heart beat so that the other sounds seemed very far away, and what she heard most clearly was the flutter and the rush of a cloud of startled birds, who rose screaming into the twilight and looked like black, swarming bees.

There was a last shot, and then, dusky red and smoke-clouded, rose a flare of fire. That was the Mess-house burning, thought Elizabeth, with a curiously clear realisation of what it meant. Yes, that was the Mess, and the Mess was only a couple of hundred yards away.

“They'll come here next,” said Elizabeth, and did not know she spoke until the sound of her own voice startled her. She shivered then, and turned to the house with an odd, helpless gesture. Here was no shelter, and yet where else to turn? But with her hand on the split bamboo screen, which veiled the door, she paused and looked in, herself invisible.

Kirpa Ram, the orderly, stood by the office table, the lamp light striking upwards on his face. He stood motionless and listening, as Elizabeth had listened, and his expression frightened her. It might be a trick of the light, or it might be fancy, but something in the listening, waiting attitude, and the half-smile which showed the man’s white teeth, brought a rush of panic terror to Elizabeth’s brain, and, dropping the chick, she ran down the verandah steps, across the garden where the rising dew struck damp upon her ankles, and, panting, pushed her way into the heart of the oleanders, whose spikes of crimson flowers stood stiff above her head, like serried, blood-tipped spears.

In the middle of the thicket she halted, taking breath, and trying with all her might to think, to plan; but with every moment the tumult swept nearer, and she could distinguish high, unsteady laughter as of drunken men, and loud savage shouts of “Maro, Maro! Kill! Kill! Kill!”

She was wondering if there were anyone left to kill besides herself, when, above the noise, and from the opposite quarter, she heard the short, sharp clattering noise that shod hoofs make when a horse is either bolting, or being ridden at a speed which spells out panic.

Elizabeth parted the stiff oleander stems and looked out. The air was grey with the twilight now, but she could see the mud wall that bounded the garden, and beyond it the dusty road. As she looked the dust flew up in a thick cloud, and a man on a black horse drove into sight. Still at the top of his speed he set the animal at the wall, and with a crash they were over it, and urging through the bushes towards the house.

“Mrs. Oswald! Mrs. Oswald!” called the rider with a shout, and as Elizabeth recognised young Carter, one of the subalterns in the regiment, the shout was answered by a roar.

A crackle of wide-flying shots sputtered out, and the mutineers, like a black wave, broke through the open gateway and surged towards the house.

James Carter glanced at them over his shoulder and called again, halting at the verandah steps, his fretting horse reined in, and the girl in the bushes measured the distance with her eye, and half started to run towards him. Then she shrank, for the black wave was very, very near, and as she hung irresolute, another shot rang out, and young Carter flung up his arms and pitched sideways on to the verandah.

He was not dead, for he moved, and then Elizabeth saw a man come running through the study door, bend where the prostrate figure stirred, and stab once, twice, and again, with something that caught the lamplight the first time, and then was dulled and wet. Kirpa Ram had done his part! With a shrill whinny, James Carter’s horse flung up its head, and crashed back through the bushes along the way that he and it had come. Far down the dusty road the clatter of the flying hoofs resounded, and Elizabeth thought that they hammered on her heart.

With a scream she turned and ran towards the ravine. Her hands beat back the red oleander flowers, her feet scarcely felt the ground, and behind her she heard a shouting and the thud of pursuing feet.

There was wild panic in her soul, wild horror in her brain. In a throat as dry as a wounded man’s, her breath soon failed, and her eyes dimmed like the eyes of the dying. Death seemed, indeed, to lurk between each laboured heart-beat and the next, and all the time she ran as, once started, those who are pursued must run until the end.

Now the ground sloped sharply and the undergrowth thickened. She had left the path, and stumbled downwards amongst stones and sharp descents and strange prickly plants that caught at her light dress and tore her ankles. At each wrench for freedom more of her strength seemed left behind, and momentarily the dusk fell nearer darkness.

Suddenly through it there was a gleam of something white just below her. A small tomb-like building of crumbling marble, pressed against the side of the ravine, and glimmered amongst the dark undergrowth which grew breast high all round it. A gaunt, twisted tree pushed between two of its ruined blocks, and lifted over head strange scrawling branches whose hand-shaped scarlet blossoms caught the last reflected afterglow.

Elizabeth tore her soft hands against the roughness of the trunk, but it helped her down the declivity, and with her last strength she crept into the dark, hard-won opening, and leaned panting in a darkness that showed her nothing.

She knew where she was now. It was a tomb that had given her shelter. Radha’s tomb they called it. When she had first heard the story, how far away had seemed its terror and its passion! Now she stood on the same plane, the passion sought her life, the old, old blood-lust which is never sated, and the terror that sleeps but never dies, caught her heart and wrung it.

She wondered if it had taken them long to die—Radha and the white lover whom a jealous king had buried alive in a white marble tomb. Had they kissed and clung together to the last, dying not unhappily, because they died together, or had he cursed her, and his own evil fate, and fought the death that came inexorably on, dying at last unsatisfied with love, hot with his manhood unfulfilled, and fierce with undispelled desire?

“All the kingdoms of the earth.” Who had said that? “The desire of the flesh, and the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life.”

And the feet of the pursuers came on. Elizabeth’s heart beat louder, the dusk seemed full of tongues of fire, full of a murmur like great voices that spoke a far-off unknown tongue. She tried to rise, but her groping fingers slipped on the smooth marble, and she went down into dark depths of faintness.

It seemed to her that a very long time had passed when she opened her eyes again. They saw nothing, but slowly remembrance came back. She raised herself, she tried with straining sight to pierce the gloom, and thought that it grew thinner as she gazed. She could see the glimmer of her own white dress, the pallor of her outstretched hand, and the strange thought came to her that the darkness was settling, as dust settles after it has been stirred, and that she could hear it falling. falling about her, with a faint eerie sound like the ghost of falling rain.

Now the shadows lay heaped in the corners, high over the heaped dust, and as her power of vision grew, Elizabeth saw that she was not alone. So near, that when she started the folds of her dress brushed him, stood a man of her own race whose eyes dwelt on her, and smiled. They were dark eyes, and his face was very pale.

“Where are we? Did I faint? Did you bring me here?” she said, and then stopped because her own voice frightened her. In the far wall a gnarled tree trunk had split its way between two crumbling blocks. There was a wide crevice in the wall—perhaps what light there was came through it—perhaps outside the moon was shining, and the stars.

Suddenly Elizabeth knew that this was the real tomb, the real burial chamber hollowed in the side of the ravine, and that it was here, here, that Radha and her lover had died. She looked at the crevice with an unspoken thought, and the stranger spoke at her ear in a deep, whispering voice.

“No, there was no opening then, and the king set guards.”

Elizabeth trembled a little; there, where the dust was heaped so high, what lay below? Had dust returned to dust and the spirit to God who gave it, or did the white bones lie there still, mocking those lovers in their sleep, and did the effluent life still linger unrecalled?

As she looked something stirred where the shadow was thickest, and instantly she looked away, and felt a damp heat tingle over her whole shuddering body. Her eyes averted met the stranger’s full. They were intent upon her with an expression whose quality was beyond her experience. A dark gleam rose and flooded them. Elizabeth’s heart beat as, they changed, and throb by throb all fear died out of it, leaving behind a tremor and a glow. Of the pursuit she heard no more. It had dropped out of their world, or she has dropped out of that world where pursuit had been. Here silence held—silence, and consciousness, and life—too new to be called by the old names. Elizabeth felt the life rise in her as if it obeyed some unknown tidal force. Its wonderful flow, its no less wonderful ebb, its vital ecstasy, its intensity—all these things came to her irradiated consciousness as if they were new made in a new Universe. John Oswald was dead, and young Carter, who had died trying to save her, and others, so many others; but she, Elizabeth, had her life, her strong beautiful life, brimming in each full vein. Her blood ran hot, pulsing with a strange cadence. Thoughts she had never known before beat in her brain and fired it with some alien intoxication. Her will swooned, and above her in the darkness she saw the stranger’s smiling eyes, the stranger’s smiling lips.

There was a little sound in the stillness. Once again there was that stir where the shadows and the dust lay thickest. A slow shudder passed over Elizabeth. Her eyes left the eyes that looked into hers and searched the darkness.

“Does the dust move?” said the voice in her ears, and at the words she saw that it did move. A cloud of it rose up, hung mistily, and then settled. Once more Elizabeth thought she could hear it fall, and through its veil saw one of the dark shadows ripple nearer, moving soundlessly, as a black trickle might flow from the slow unsated waters of Death. It eddied upon itself, coil upon coil of dimly seen undulation, and above the coils the cobra’s hooded head swayed, and stayed swaying, evil and rhythmical. Elizabeth saw its eyes like two blown sparks of the fire that is not quenched, and behind, where it had moved the dust aside, a gleam of something white like bone, white like a hand, and a glow of something red as rubies are, or blood.

Her breath struck cold as she drew it sharply in, her eyes dilated. The snake, the heaped dust, the whiteness, and that red stone, like a wound on a dead hand, all swam together. Her ears were full of a whispering voice.

“The living and the dead—love, and the dust of lovers—the dream and the awaking. But the dust dreams of the rose, and the dreams of the dead—what of the dreams of the dead?”

The great snake swaying above its coils loomed large, and larger. Her pulses drummed. Her life seemed flowing from her like an unseen river, bearing her very soul upon its tide. What was the force that drew it, and whither did it tend? She did not know, nor did she know whence came the power of her own desperate resistance, a resistance that tore her, making as it were wounds through which her strength ebbed fast. With the last of it she gasped: “Oh, God, let me go!” and fell again to blackness and the void.

Her next consciousness was of the air upon her face, and the wind that follows the sunset stirring her loosened hair. There was no moon, but above her in the darkened sky one burning star shook like a shaken brand. She was outside the tomb, though how she came there she did not know, and never would remember. Night voices of wild creatures came to her bewildered ears, the trees stood round her densely black, with outstretched arms that rustled in the breeze, and as they moved the shadows seemed to deepen and darken into gloom unfathomable. Elizabeth stood trembling. She had come out of a life’s daylight into very night of very night. Was there a star at all?

Far, far away in the strange lonely Eastern darkness something wailed, and at the sound panic came upon her with a rush. She ran wildly back along the way she had come, back to Golpore, to any place where there were houses, and men, and things real, though dreadful, and as she ran her terror rose almost to madness. Bush and tree, shadow and sound, all seemed things saturate with a mystery and a terror past all bearing.

She was still running when she came to her own garden and she neither stopped nor checked. Knife stab and pistol shot were no longer things to dread. Through the office window the lamplight still shone steadily upon young Carter—dead. A hundred yards away the Mess still flared like a great bonfire; but the terror that had touched her left behind no power to fear such things as these. Elizabeth saw the lamplight and came to it panting and hurrying, till she reached the verandah, and there sank down just in the shadow, and caught one of poor young Carter’s cold, stiffening hands in hers, as if it comforted her to have something to hold on to. Then she waited, waited and hoped it would not be for long, and trusted that someone would come soon and kill her. Also she prayed that nothing might follow her out of the darkness she had left.

The air was full of sounds. The crackle and roar of the burning Mess, further off in the bazaar the shouts of men half drunk with murder and strong drink, and, like a continuous undercurrent, a monotonous unceasing drumming of tom-toms. The native servants had all fled in terror, and the house and compound were quite deserted. Elizabeth wondered if she would have to wait all night before someone came and killed her. The thought frightened her. She began to pray, and because she could think of nothing but her old childish prayers, she said them over and over, still with the dead boy’s hand in hers.

Away in the lines John Oswald lay in the deep shadow between two native huts. He had been shot in the open as he turned to speak to his adjutant; but someone, perhaps a friend, had dragged him out of insults' way, and to this he owed his life. He had a bullet in the knee and a broken thigh, but he was not dead, though for a long time now he had lain as if he were, with thick darkness like a veil between him and the world he had inhabited. Now through the veil came a faint persistent sound. It went on, and on, and on, and on. It came out of the depths beneath all consciousness, and rose mournfully, strangely, eerily, until something seemed to wear thin, and break. Then it would fall again back to the mournful depths from which it had arisen. John Oswald’s brain ached with the monotonous iteration, and his first conscious thought was a prayer that it might stop. Then he moved, and the sheer stab of pain brought a cold sweat to his brow, and a fuller knowledge to his mind. The jackal howled on, and now Colonel Oswald knew what it was that had roused him. He tried to rise, and again he felt the stab. Slow effort brought the realisation that both legs were helpless. Then blindingly, like a lightning flash on midnight darkness, came remembrance, and he thought of Elizabeth, and writhed in an anguish beyond all pain of body. His fault, his own fault. Oh, God, the torment and the sting! But for him she would be in safety. By his fault she was here, dead, or lying wounded, or worse, worse, worse.

He jerked himself on to his side, and the world went spinning round. When it had steadied a little, one thought stood out with all his will behind it: he must get to her, alive or dead he must get to her; and since the body is the mind’s servant it must be forced into obedience. He turned a little further and lay gasping in the dust. Then, after a long minute, he rose upon his elbows, stretched out his right hand, let his weight rest on it, and dragged his racked limbs a bare half-yard from where the dust was darkened by his blood.

When the will drives the impossible is done. It has driven men through every torment man could devise or the devil inspire. It has conquered the kingdoms of the earth, and even the kingdom of Heaven has suffered its violence. It drove John Oswald now, drove him in spite of his own quivering nerves in his own living agonising flesh. A hundred times he dragged his torture a pace further, and a hundred times sank under it, his grey face wet with a frightful sweat. But all the time he saw Elizabeth’s eyes watching for him, appealing to him; and knowing that he must surely be too late he yet constrained himself to another burning effort, and another still.

In the verandah Elizabeth still crouched and waited. The night was quieter now. Drunkenness had claimed most of the mutineers. Sleep had descended upon the bazaar, and only an intermittent tom-tomming and the steady jackal howl broke the silence.

It was whilst the drumming was for a moment still that Elizabeth first heard a new sound, and one that, often repeated, caught her attention. It was a slow, trailing sound which broke on a low gasp and then began again. When it had gone on for some time Elizabeth moved her stiff limbs and got up. Where she had been sitting it was dark, but outside in the garden there was a sort of ruddy dusk lit by the dying flare of the burnt Mess. Elizabeth stepped down on to the drive and looked towards the gate. There was something there, something that moved and made the sound that had disturbed her. She was reminded of a dog she had had—oh so long ago in England—a dog that had been poisoned and had dragged himself home to die, with just that heavy trailing sound, just that painful panting breath.

Elizabeth was past being frightened now. She turned back to the house, stepped over young Carter’s body, took the lamp from her husband’s table and went out with it towards the gate. She held the lamp well up above her head, and her hand was as steady as a rock. She had no fear of being seen. The dust was in John Oswald’s throat, and the dust was in his eyes. Through its blinding, choking clouds the lamp shone, and he looked up out of his torment and saw its light falling upon Elizabeth.

She seemed to stand in the midst of a glow with a rainbow edge to it. He saw her white dress, her loosened hair, her white, white face, and in a spasm of incredulous joy he called her name, and slipped again into the dark from which the one insistent thought of her had drawn him.

Elizabeth set down the lamp, knelt in the dust and caught his hand in hers, which trembled now. In that twilight place of her imagining they had met, she knew that once and for all, and with the knowledge apathy melted from her heart, and with a warm rush came back the desire for life. If death had let them go, should they not take their lives?

With her fingers on John Oswald’s pulse she urged her mind to thought. The pony and the trap. If they were still there? If she could harness the pony? If she could? She must! With that she rose, took the lamp again and went to the deserted stable. Her unaccustomed hands bungled and mistook, but what was misdone she did again with a strange, composed patience. If anyone were to see the light and come their chance was gone, but she did not believe that anyone would come, and no one did.

In a quarter of an hour she led the pony to the gate, and knelt, reins in hand, at John Oswald’s side.

“John, John,” she called softly, and he opened his eyes and smiled at her. Then she bound up his thigh with a rough splint and got him into the trap. How did she do it? God knows, but neither he nor she could tell. Only it was done somehow, and she took the reins and started along the Cawnpore road.

There was a little moon now, and she could see the way quite plain, all white, with a scrawled pattern of shadows across the dust. At the edge of the Cantonment a bridge crossed the head of the ravine, and as they came round the turn of the road to it the pony laid back his ears and stopped with a jerk.

Colonel Oswald groaned through the swoon that held him, and Elizabeth peered anxiously ahead, expecting she hardly knew what.

What met her gaze was a man’s figure standing right in the midst of the road, with the moonlight full on his pale, dark face. His eyes smiled at Elizabeth, and his hand beckoned once.

Then she wrenched down the right-hand rein, the trap swung round, and the frightened, sweating pony broke and dashed on, back through Golpore where a man shouted drunkenly from the bazaar, and still on, on, away from doomed Cawnpore.

It was in the second dawn that they came to the Fort at Allahabad.

The tired pony swayed between the dusty shafts; Elizabeth swayed in her seat, the reins hanging loose from nerveless fingers, and at her feet John Oswald lay like a dead man.

In Elizabeth’s dazed mind was a faint remembrance of a burning day spent amongst sheltering trees. There were quiet village people, and a kindly wide-eyed woman who brought them milk, and helped her to bind John’s wounds, and prop him against the jolting of the trap with piles of new dried grass. She had talked softly and unintelligibly all the while, and all the while John had moaned, and kept on moaning until Elizabeth’s brain was full of the two sounds.

Now there was no more strength in any of the three. They had come to the end. Only the end was life this time, not death, after all.