Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/65

Rh said, put undue faith in the Sepoys. But why was it left to General Lloyd or to General or Mr. Anybody, to order the measures so obviously necessary to safety?.. My whole heart is sick and sore at what I hear; and the mental anxiety and disquietude which are produced by what is going on in the scenes of my services, I am conscious is retarding the course of my progress towards health.'

That progress, alas, was altogether deceptive. A short residence at Malvern in the summer of 1857 enabled him, indeed, for the moment to make a rally. But the calamities of the country for which he had toiled, and the deaths of the loved friends with whom he had laboured, were steadily wearing him out. 'My God ! what rending asunder is here of the household which, a few months since, was living so happily together in the Hills!' 'I have not been able to join,' he says, in the public supplications for the deliverance of the English in India, for which he heard the church bells tolling on the 7th October, 1857, 'for I have passed the last two days in bed. But God knows, my dear Grant, I do pray with all my heart for that blessing, without which even the splendid efforts which have been made for the restoration of our fame, by those who have been fighting for it in Hindustan, will have been made in vain.'

The winter of 1857-58, spent at Malta, brought no relief. Amid his private sufferings and public