James Grant

“ THE ABODE OF THE KHOND.
Seated on the floor were Zohrab Zubberdust and two other men.
One was the Hindoo banker. He was slight in figure, with diminutive hands and feet; like all his vast race, he was of a dark-brown colour, with straight black hair, that seemed almost blue when the light struck it, hanging straight and lankly behind his large ears—an undoubted worshipper of Brama, of the monkey god, and of all those unnumbered idols that for forty centuries have been the objects of adoration to millions upon millions—even before the Temple of Juggernaut was built. ”

“ The six months or so which had elapsed since that stirring morning on which the army, under its aged and dying general, with its mighty encumbrance of camp-followers, began its homeward march for India from the old familiar cantonments seemed as so many ages to Mabel Trecarrel now! So many well-known faces and happy existences had been swept away; so complete a change had come over all the few who survived, and their prospects seemed so strange and dark. So much misery, so many sent to untimely deaths—it could not be said to their graves, as the Afghans never interred one of our dead. ”

“ Ah, were she but once more back in the hitherto abhorred fort of Saleh Mohammed—back to the sad companionship of the hostages—to the shelter and counsel of her own sex and people! In the power of the Khond she felt, truly and terribly, that if they had much to dread and to anticipate when in the fort, she had much that was more immediate to dread now; that within every shade there may be a deeper shadow. Rose could never know her fate, or how she had perished in seeking to rejoin her; and she might have to die and never know the story of the younger sister she loved so dearly. ”

“ At a quick pace he crossed the arid desert that surrounds the city, and ascended into the well-wooded and magnificent mountain ranges that rise all around it, but more especially to the westward, whither his route lay, and his spirits rose as his party spurred onward. "What pleasure there is in a gallop!" says Paul Ferroll; "the object is before one, at which to arrive quickly; the still air becomes a wind marking the swiftness of one's pace—the fleet horse is his own master, yet one's slave; the bodily employment leaves care, thought, and time behind. ”

“ He was only inspired by the emotions of triumph and passion, by the sure conviction that this fair Feringhee, this daughter of a vanquished tribe, this outcast unbeliever, so lovely in her whiteness of skin, her purity of complexion, and wondrous colour of hair, in her roundness of limb, and in stature so far surpassing all the maids of the twenty-one Afghan clans or races, was his—his property—to become the slave of his will or his cruelty, as it pleased him!
Of the paradox that woman's weakness is her strength, with the Christian man, Zohrab knew nothing, and felt less ”

“ Who can read the book of destiny? The same flower which gives a sweet to the bee gives poison to reptiles?"
"Does all this mean that you will neither sell nor barter?" asked Zoolficar, shaking haughtily his huge turban and white heron's plume.
"Exactly—that I will do neither," replied the Dooranee, with a mocking laugh.
"Then, by the hand of the Prophet, there perhaps come those who may deprive you of all you possess!" exclaimed the young Toorkoman, with fierce triumph, as he pointed suddenly along the road that led towards the Akrobat Pass. ”

“ The discovery of Rose Trecarrel—an event so unexpected and unlooked for after all that had occurred—seemed to Waller as an omen of future good fortune, and his naturally buoyant spirits rose as he rode on. The expedition was full of excitement, especially for a time: it was an act of courage, mercy, and chivalry, that all Britain should eventually hear of; and Mabel was at the bourne, for which they were all bound. Even poor Denzil, so recently interred, was partially forgotten: soldiers cannot brood long over the casualties of war, especially while amid them ”

“ Audley had been duly informed by letters, that his brother-officer, Waller, and the Trecarrels were also coming down country, and should ere long be at Ferozpore or Simla; and Sybil, who had now heard all the story of Rose and Denzil, longed, with a longing that no words can describe, to see her.
There is no emotion in this world more delightful, and nothing perhaps more beautiful, than a young girl's first dream of love; for a young man's first affair of the heart is even different in some respects. It is so full of innocence, of simplicity and truth, if the girl is pure and ingenuous ”

“ To Rose Trecarrel it had seemed as if, once upon a time, the world was quite running over with lovers. Now, her world was, oddly enough, narrowed to the boundary wall and grassy fausse-braye of Shireen Khan's fort. That a girl, in her extreme youth, chances to have been, like Rose, a flirt, is no proof that she is incapable of a very deep and enduring affection; it is often quite the contrary, and Rose was just a case in point. Here, with her and Denzil, the pretty biter was bitten. ”

“ Waller did not find Mabel quite so much changed as he had feared she might be; yet she was the wreck of what she had been in happier times—the tall, full-bosomed, and statuesque-looking English girl, with clear, calm, bright, and confident eyes. The latter were still bright, but their lustre was unnatural; their expression was a wild and hunted one; her colour was gone, and her cheeks were deathly pale. But all in the group of hostages were alike in those respects. For many months, had they not been daily, sometimes hourly, face to face with death? ”

“ In his lawless roving life, now serving the Khan of Khiva, on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, now the Emir of Bhokara, far away beyond the waters of the Oxus, and lastly Ackbar Khan, he had, in predatory war, carried off many a girl with all her wealth of bracelets and bangles, the spoil of his spear and sabre, trussing her up behind him like the fodder or oats for his Tartar nag; but never had he felt before as he did now, for, unlike the maids of the desert, the Feringhee failed to accept the situation. ”

“ If the sense of exile is so strong in the heart of the Anglo-Indian, even amid all the luxuries and splendours of Calcutta, the city of palaces—amid the gaieties and frivolities of Chowringhee,—what must that sense have been to the heart of this lonely English girl, far away beyond Peshawur, the gate of Western India, beyond the Indus, fifteen hundred English miles, as the crow flies, "up-country," from the mouth of the Hooghley and the shore of Bengal—where the railway whistle will long be unheard, and where Murray, Cook, and Bradshaw may never yet be known! ”

“ There is much that is touching in the helplessness of any woman, but more than all a beautiful one, though we, whose lines are cast in pleasant places, and in a land of well-organized police, may seldom see it—a clinging, imploring expression of eye, when all is soul and depth of heart, and strength avails not. But Zohrab Zubberdust felt nothing of this. She on whom he looked might be pure as Diana, "chaste as Eve on the morning of her innocence," yet, as a Mohammedan, he had a secret contempt for her—perhaps a doubt of her—as a Kaffir woman. ”

“ Sybil had seen the Hindoo maidens—slender, graceful, and dark-eyed girls—launching their love-lamps from the ghauts upon the sacred waters of the Ganges—watching them with thrills of alternate joy and fear, as they floated away under the glorious silver radiance of the Indian moon. She had heard their wails of sorrow if the flame flickered out and died; or their merry shouts and songs of glee if they floated steadily and burned truly and bravely. Audley's affection had been to her as a light in her path that had vanished ”

“ You have won my heart, my love, my soul, subduing me—even Zohrab! Learn in turn to be subdued, submissive, and obedient. Happy is he who shall call you wife; and that happy man—is Zohrab!"
The intense bewilderment of poor Mabel increased to extreme fear at those words, so absurdly inflated, yet so blunt in import, and she shrunk back, but could not turn from the dark, glittering eyes that gleamed with a serpent-like fascination into hers. ”

“ Much of that deep misery which Sybil had endured elsewhere, when crouching in the damp and mist outside her mother's door, came over Rose's spirit now. Henceforward, she felt that life must be objectless; that safety or pursuit, freedom or captivity, sea or land, must be all alike to her; and for a time her poor brain, so long oppressed by successive sorrows and excitements, became almost unconscious of external impressions, and she sat as one in a dream, hearing only the buzz of the summer flies and the voice of the pagoda-thrush. ”

“ Stunned and confused, the savage Afghan at last sank downward, and by some mischance got his head into the stirrup-leather of Waller, whose left foot was unavoidably pressed upon his throat; and as the horse, terrified by this unusual appendage, plunged wildly, and swerved round and round, the wretched Khan was speedily strangled, and sank into a state of insensibility, from which he never recovered, as a couple of the 13th passed their fixed bayonets through his body, and one tore off his beautiful steel cap, from which Waller afterwards obtained the jewel—a sapphire of great value. ”

“ On one side was savage terror; on the other, civilized men thirsty for justice and vengeance; and so on all sides the turbaned hordes were stricken down by those who felt that to them was left the task of atoning for the betrayal and death of friends, comrades, and relatives; and there, on the heights of Tizeen, the standard of Ackbar Khan was trod in the dust, never to rise again!
Once more the sun went down in blood upon the passes of the Khyberees; but once again they were open, and the way to Cabul was clear. ”

“ Her eyes were dark, her lashes long and black, her complexion colourless and pure, and her thick hair was in waves and masses, dressed Audley scarcely knew in what fashion, but in a somewhat negligent mode that was sorely bewitching.
Her face was always half turned away from where he stood; for she, utterly oblivious of the Oordoo harangue of his Excellency, was toying with her fan or the white silk tassels of her gloves, while chatting gaily, confidently, and with a downcast smile to a young officer of the Anglo-Indian Staff, and clad in the gorgeous uniform of the Bengal Irregular Cavalry. ”

“ THE SCHEME OF ZOHRAB.
Time, to the young, seems but a slow and cold comforter (alas! how different it must appear to the old) ; so Denzil knew that, though sluggish, time must eventually bring about some change in the captivity he was enduring in the hands of Shireen Khan—a mode of life that, but for the sweet companionship of Rose, would have been simply so intolerable that he should certainly have attempted to escape even at the risk of death. ”

“ Then he smiled with proud disdain as he placed his steel cap on his head, and twisted the turban-cloth around it. Next he drew a pistol from his belt, while the diminutive Hindoo became pea-green with fear, and an expression of almost mad ferocity seemed to pass over the face and to swell the great chest of the Khond, Ferishta Lodi. Danger and death were at hand, he knew; but not on whom they might fall.
Zohrab rushed to a window on one side. The narrow alley was filled by a mass of armed men on foot and on horseback. ”

“ Isolated as they were in that lonely Afghan fort, surrounded by towering green hills, the interest that Denzil and Rose had in each other grew daily and hourly deeper; so that at last she learned to love him—yes, actually to love him—as fondly as he had ever loved her, and to feel little emotions of pique and jealousy when he strove to address the daughters of the house and teach them a very strange kind of broken English. ”