by Captain Medwin.
Originally published in Ainsworth's Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance (Chapman and Hall) vol.2 #6 (Jul 1842).
There are two memorable epochs in life: entering a public school, and joining a regiment. If the political world is split into parties, so these microcosms have also their Whigs and Tories; and the leaders of these sections, or factions, are always on the alert to swell their ranks. The corps to which I belonged was not free from such influences; nor were there wanting in it surdangars, as they were nicknamed (dealers), on the look-out to accommodate new comers with a horse or buggy, a dog or gun, epaulettes or cloth, or any other article they could persuade him he required. I was not to be done. I had already seen something of mankind, having, at a very early age, been my own master; and was resolved to make no profession of faith; to be friendly with all, but intimate with none, till I had thoroughly scanned their characters. It was this determined neutrality, at the outset of my career, that made me acquainted with Major B --, whom, if I had adopted the prejudices of others, I should never have known. But before I present him to the reader, I have some preliminary observations to make, that I deem essential to my narrative.
No contrast can be greater than between English quarters and an Indian station. Instead of barracks, or lodgings, I found my brother officers inhabiting spacious bungalows, with their thatched roofs, verandahs, and Venetians, surrounded, for the most part, by extensive paddocks, and these belted by Parkinsonia. Each of these compounds (a corruption of campagnes,) presents, on entering it, a scene not destitute of beauty: fields of lucerne, continually irrigated, form a refreshment and relict to the eyes, aching with the dust and glare of the cantonment; gardens, kept in the nicest order, contain most of our vegetables, and some of our fruits, in addition to those of tropical climes—such as plantains, laquots, custard apples; the jack, the gauva, the orange, and lime, and trellised vines, form a delightful walk and shelter from the sun. The life, too, of a military man differs, toto calo, from that passed in a garrison-town at home. An officer, instead of being subject to continual interruption—intrusion, I was near saying, from his friends, who endeavour to shake off their own ennui, by hanging it like a leaden mantle on him—lives, as it were, to himself. The heat of the day necessarily confining him much within doors, he has ample leisure for cultivating his mind, and no longer comes under some writer's definition of a man who passes his time in leaning over the parapet of a bridge, and watching the water glide through its arches.
Nor is his library confined to Dundas, the Newgate Calendar, or the last novel or magazine, but possesses works of a more serious kind; and even mathematics and metaphysics form, not unfrequently, part of his studies. Then, the mess! what a parody on a regimental one at home!
Often and often, in the season of the hot wind and rains, have I found myself, as orderly officer, half an hour after sunset, seated alone, or faced only by the assistant-surgeon, at the table groaning with huge barons of beef, legs of veal, and other substantialities—a sight from Which, having tiffed at two o'clock, I recoiled in disgust. A disciplinarian or martinette would have been shocked at this non-attendance at the mess, and have thought that we had too many married officers, both field and subaltern—at least, too many that were not single—in our regiment. In this latter predicament was Major B—, but more of this anon.
At the first parade in watering order which I attended, he particularly attracted my notice, for he came to the ground mounted on a huge elephant, with a silver howdah, and richly caparisoned with blue and yellow supertine cloth. He was a little slender man, of about forty, with very regular features, that bore strong traces of a lengthened abode in the East; such indeed, was the fact, for he had served in the Egyptian campaign. His dress, though strictly uniform, was innocent of a fit, for his trowsers were of almost Turkish size; and his white jacket, if unconfined by the belt, would have contained the corporation of another of our officers, who was once caricatured as the major part of a regiment of light dragoons; and of whom a witty A.D.C. of Lord Hastings observed—that he ought to have the best seat of any man in the cavalry, if balance formed a criterion. But to return to our hero. It must be confessed, that he was not the most graceful of riders—the same may be said of Napoleon—but, nevertheless, an excellent officer. No troop (Major B— had only brevet rank) was in such good order as his. The horses were always in good condition, as the men were. He had thoroughly studied the characters of every one of them, and even written their memoirs, chronicling the least of their misdeeds. He was a great friend to regimental courts-martial, and an advocate for corporal punishments—scenes I could never witness without shuddering, but which were then of constant occurrence, though rare at the present day, when flogging has been so much superseded by the Congee house and solitary confinement.
What led to my intimacy with Major B— I forget; certainly, it was not a sympathy or magnetism of ideas that attracted us. One penchant, indeed, we had in common—a fondness for field sports, and my admiration for his Hattee, Doorgha, the most celebrated tiger elephant in the Upper Provinces, perhaps contributed to our friendship, and has enabled me to become his biographer.
B— went out to India very young; his early education was so neglected, that when he obtained his cornetcy in the 27th Dragoons, he could scarcely put two sentences together without a grammatical error. Cobbett has shewn that even kings' speeches have this defect; and Tam inclined to think, from my own observation, in more instances than one, with that self-taught writer, that the system of our schools—the premature forcing of the intellect—perhaps I might say, memory — after the manner of an overstrained bow, weakens the powers of the mind, cramps its energies, and destroys its originality. B— soon redeemed the lost hours of his boyhood. Having taken into his service a very learned Moonshee, he soon made considerable proficiency in that, if not the most perfect, certainly the most copious of languages, and in which, to the disgrace and shame of our countrymen, they have been surpassed by the Germans—Sanscrit; to this, and its dialect, he added Persian and Arabic: and, when I arrived at —, was acknowledged to have become one of the most distinguished of Oriental scholars. In acquiring the vernacular tongue, Hindostanee, he possessed, as I have already hinted, the advantage of a female interpreter; and, as this personage forms the principal character in our drama, it is time I should bring her on the scene. Let it be premised, that whatever defects my story may have, want of fidelity is not one: there are many persons now living who can corroborate the facts.
During the march of the regiment from Cawnpen to Meerut, where, previous to the extension of our frontier beyond the Indus, the king's cavalry regiments in Bengal were always stationed, B—'s chokadar one evening informed him, that a suttee was about to take place in a neighbouring gong. These fire-sacrifices, though not made absolutely penal at that time, were strictly prohibited by the Company, and prevented, as often as the judges of the district obtained any notification respecting them; but this rite is so intimately interwoven with the whole texture of Hinduism, that it would be as difficult to put them down altogether as to prevent Teeruts to Jugeernaut, and the census of the last year, in spite of all the exertions of the authorities, is said to have amounted to five hundred. Do not be afraid, reader, that I am about to describe one of these scenes of horror, though I once had the misfortune of witnessing, without being able to prevent, a suttee. Suffice it to say, that B—, having taken with him a sufficient force for the purpose, succeeded in rescuing from the funeral pyre of her husband, a girl of twelve years old, the daughter of the potail, or village-chief. Seta, for that was her name—a name well-known in the Hindu mythology, as being always associated with that of Rama—was, in consequence, discarded by all her relations, fell under a ban, civil and religious, had become an orphan and an outcast, and her future destiny now depended on her rescuer. It was, indeed, a charge; and perhaps B-- had little calculated on the responsibility that had devolved on him. She was conveyed to his own tent. No bride had ever tenderer attentions lavished on her; and from that hour he treated her as though she had been united to him by indissoluble ties. Among the Hindus there are four castes which, according to their traditions, sprang from Brahma: those belonging to them are easily recognised by their features and fairness, the highest grade being the fairest. Seta was the descendant of a Rajhpoot. I had once an opportunity, and only once, and that by accident, of seeing her. Her complexion came nearest to what the French call châtaignue brun; she was somewhat above the standard considered as the perfection of woman, about the height of Canova's Venus; her eyes, large, dark and languishing as the nielgau's, expressed also its timidity and shyness; her hands were miguonne in the extreme; and her feet of Chinese model, to judge by the diminutive size of her slippers; her face, a perfect oval, would not have lost in comparison with that of a Grecian statue, so finely moulded was it, and set off to advantage by the classical disposition of her hair, fine, black, and luxuriant, whose great charm consisted in its simplicity. Behind this elegant knot, imagine to yourself a muslin shawl of dazzling whiteness and aërial texture, crossed over one breast, and descending in ample folds to the ground; a body of network, closely fitting her shape; loose satin trowsers, striped, and fastened round the waist by a cord of silk, and papooshes richly worked in gold; and add to this graceful costume, armlets and anklets of massy gold——rings out of number encircling the ears, and one, better omitted, called a nut, which, passing through the lobe of the nose, defines the size of the mouth—and you have a portrait of this Indian belle. The fragments of Megasthenes convince us that the Hindus have adopted no innovations since he flourished; and I was shewn at Bombay, a bas-relief found in an old well, representing a Nautch girl, in precisely the same dress: and attitudes as those used at the present day. The infinite superiority of the Oriental over the European costume, I saw one day exemplified in the house of an English lady, whose beauty was not a little enhanced by its adoption; but there was wanting that natural ease and grace, the poetry of motion, so conspicuous in Seta.
The attachment of B-- for this odalisk almost amounted to adoration. I have often heard him expatiate on her gentleness, her sweet compliance, and perfect devotion to the lord of her affections—contend that she had no wishes that extended beyond the limits of her Zenanah—that
"She loved as sisters all the forms that breathed
The breath of life—in the still woods disporting,
Peopling the air, or gliding in the waters,"[1]
looking upon them only as spirits in captivity;—that she believed the basil tree, which she had reared from childhood, and watered and nursed with the tenderness of a mother, was grateful to her—knew that it owed to her its being and fragrance; that she found companionship, in his absence, from her mina and parrot, and thought them, like those in the Totee Nameh, capable of divulging her most secret thoughts and actions, though neither one thought or act of her life was the immaculate Seta afraid of their revealing; in short, that she animated all nature with one soul, deeming the minutest of its creations as parts of a great whole, as links in one general chain. This metempsychosis of the Hindus seemed to him as the only rational way of justifying the ways of God, seeing that, for no fault of their own, certain men and beasts enjoyed unequal degrees of happiness. Nor did B--'s admiration for these Pythagorean doctrines stop there. There is no absurdity, however great, that familiarity with it will not reconcile to us. Buckhardt lived in the East till he became a Mahommedan; Sale, the translator of the Coran, has been suspected of a strong belief in the Arabian lawgiver's divine mission. Taylor died a Platonist; and Shelley's very peculiar opinions—witness his Ode to Intellectual Beauty, and Adonais—shew that he was equally imbued with the doctrines of the great easuist, whose works were ever in his hands. I might fill pages with names, known to the world, of those whose minds have taken a certain religious bias from continually brooding on some peculiar text or favourite tenet, a lamentable proof of which may be instanced in the monomania of the excellent Cowper. But not to enlarge further on this topic, I will only say that B-- became a Hindu, at least as far as doctrine went, for they admit of no converts. He used to contend that Christianity was borrowed from India; that our Saviour was only the reflex of Chrisna, the shepherd god, whose concealment by the Gopees, and the mystery that hung over his education, were but the types of the flight to Egypt; that the doctrine of the Incarnation, the Trinity, were derived from the Hindus. For his part, however, he said that he was no believer in mysteries; and, like Rammohun Roy, with whom he was in constant correspondence, was persuaded that these, as well as the polytheism of the Hindus, had been devised, like that of the Greeks, solely to meet the capacities of those who could form no metaphysical notions of a God.
It may be supposed, that with such habits, studies, and pursuits, Major B-- was not a popular man in the regiment: he lived in a world of his own, was a magician for good or evil, who admitted none into the magic circle he had drawn about him. His brother officers called him the Qui-hi, the Pundit, the Hindu, the Brahman, and though he did not perform Poojah, nor make his daily ablutions in the Saviour waters of the Ganges, nor had entered upon a vow of pilgrimage to the sacred shrines, he, as I have already said, believed that the Brahminical was not only the oldest, but the best religion in the world; and looking upon the use of the flesh of swine and oxen, the first as an abomination, the second as a sacrilege, confined himself to a strict vegetable diet, and only on indispensable occasions shewed himself at the mess.
It is time that I should return to the regiment, but I only do so in order to mention, that at the general peace and the reduction of the army, the -- Dragoons were disbanded.
Major B--, who was utterly unfitted for an European life, and destitute of connexions in his native country, resolved not to return home; and, in consequence of his well-known proficiency in the Oriental languages, his services as interpreter during the Pendaree campaign, and established character as a zealous officer, he obtained the command of an irregular corps, called, after his name, B--'s Horse. It was the height of his ambition. He was now become a Burra Sahib, or great man, and took the field with a retinue of horses, elephants, and camels, more than suitable to his rank.
Seta, too, had her share in his elevation, and was become a personage of no small consequence in the eyes of the natives, who, if they were not disposed to overlook her loss of caste, were ready enough to profit by her influence with her paramour. She indeed held a little court in the regiment—was what Lady Lowden had been in the army, the disposer of all the appointments to her cousins, down to the fourth and fifth degree: thus, two of them were promoted to the rank of jemadurs, soon after their entrance into the corps, and her brother had been promised a subadarship at the first vacancy. This nepotism was loudly murmured at. Major B-- was also, as we have already shewn, a strict disciplinarian. He drilled them more than troops of that description are accustomed to be drilled; repressed, and punished severely, any attempts at plunder, to which these irregulars were too prone, because, like the gendarmerie of France, finding their own horses and accoutrements, at a fixed monthly stipend, they were disposed to provide for themselves at the cost of the Raiots. The licence of these Kopack soldiery had been winked at by B--'s predecessors, and therefore they were greatly dissatisfied at what was considered an infringement of their rights, and this discontent almost amounted to mutiny, when one of their number, unwisely, was subjected to corporal punishment. Nor were the native captains and lieutenants better pleased than the men: a conspiracy was formed, in which many of them took part, and lots were cast by whom the Major was to be cut off.
The time chosen for the perpetration of this cowardly act was after parade; and, when he was surrounded Hy his officers, a trooper suddenly rushed through the circle and planted a dagger in his breast: its point had not penetrated through the ribs; and before the man could stab him a second time, the subadars, after the manner of Macbeth arid the pages, drew their sabres, and dispatched the assassin.
With his death was extinguished all evidence of the plot, and the crime was attributed to private revenge.
Any one who had been an eye-witness of Seta's anxious and apparently fond care of Major B-- during the long and lingering illness occasioned by his wound, would have looked upon her as the pattern of womanhood, a ministering angel. She scarcely left him night or day, stretched herself on a carpet by his couch, springing up at his slightest indication of pain, to soothe, and with her gentle accents pour balm into his spirit. His sherbet was not only prepared by her own hand, but the limes and promegranates plucked from the trees selected by herself. She was also acquainted with some secrets in the healing art, not committed to books, but traditionally brought down to her, through her immediate family, from remote times. B—'s recovery was slow and precarious, but recover he did, to love his fair nurse more dotingly than ever—an expression not unintentionally used, nor, as will soon appear, misapplied. It had long been Major B—'s determination to bequeath to Seta, at his decease, all that he possessed; but the late attempt upon his life, and the possibility of its recurrence, and the thought that she might, by fraud or chicanery, be deprived of his bequest, induced him at once, and without delay, to settle on her, with all the formalities of the law, his whole fortune, leaving himself a dependent on her bounty. But this feeling was to him a delightful one. Did he not owe to her his life—more than his life? Was she not his spirit's mate, his solace, his all in this world; and would she not more fondly, dearly love him, if her love could admit of an increase, for this great and noble act of disinterestedness? Thus argued B—. He might have had before his eyes the example of Lear and his daughters; but he was blind, infatuatedly blind,
How difficult is it to dive into the recesses of the human heart! Seta had a speculum ring, which, when she had presented to B--, she would coquettishly turn to her heart, to shew that he was reflected there. Why had he not a mirror by which he could read the workings of her soul, and detect the falsehood, the inconceivable, and almost incredible treachery of that fiend in human shape! Moore, in his life of Byron, has written a long homily, embodying the reasons why poets make bad husbands; I might pen an equally long, and not less tedious one, to prove why native women make bad wives; but facts are worth a thousand homilies.
The spot where the events I have so briefly detailed took place, was the Dhoon, which lies in the second range of the Himalayas. Enna, itself, in the days of Ceres and Proserpine, was not more beautiful, nor could it boast a richer verdure, or more enamelled carpet, than this enchanting valley. Above it rises, tier above tier—till surmounted by perennial snows—mountains more varied in form, more rich in colour, than any that Europe can boast: the lower ranges of these are covered with forests, and intersected with ravines, that render them almost inaccessible. The tiger here reigns securely, and after carrying his nocturnal depredations into the low country, retires unmolested into his fastnesses. It is only in the hot winds, when driven by want of water into the morasses, or jungles, as they are called, that here and there stretch themselves over this extensive plain, that the hunter has an opportunity of attacking his prey, even there protected by a dread of malaria and the ague, from which, indeed, for some months in the year, no part of the Dhoon is free. But it was now the cold season, and during the stillness of windless nights, of a starry brilliancy rare in our hemisphere, might frequently be heard the yahoo of the tigresses, So near were they disporting to the camp.
It was in a night such as this, that Major B—, mounted on an Arab, might have been seen, after a long march, and an absence of a few weeks, galloping to his head-quarters. He had been at Massorie, that sanatorium of Anglo-Indians, whose houses, perched on the side of the hills, and cemented into the rocks, may be compared to swallows' nests. Behold him, then, having passed the last vidette, and his cofilah, pitched at a little distance from the rest of the encampment, glittering in the moonlight. He had written to Seta, to announce the very hour of his return, and deemed that she would in a few moments be in his arms. He entered the enclosure of red cloth—expected, as usual, that the sound of his horse's feet would have brought her to the door of his tent, but she appeared not. Strange! stranger still—no light, no sound of voices from within greeted him! He leapt from his saddle, and hastened on the wings of love to the verandah of the Gyneecum. It was deserted! where were her attendants, some of whom always slept there? Where was Seta herself? That question is soon answered, She had taken advantage of his temporary absence:—with her women, her slaves, her jewels, and, more than these, the title-deeds of her wealth, had decamped, and was now far advanced on her journey to the place of her birth. For some time Major B—'s servants dared not acquaint him with these damning tidings; but at length one bolder than the rest ventured to communicate his mistress's elopement. Like one stunned by a heavy blow, b— stood for some time motionless, speechless. At length he roused himself, ordered a fresh horse, and telling his Sayee not to accompany him, rode into the forest, and was soon lost in its intricacies.
Day dawned, but he came not—another, and another day passed on. Alarm spread through the camp—troopers were dispatched in all directions, and searched the mountain paths in vain; but a week had scarcely expired, when a grass-cutter brought a chaco that had belonged to my poor friend—near it were lying the mangled remains of a horse. Conjecture thus became certainty; he had fallen a prey to the tiger.
Seta, when I last heard of her, was dwelling in her native village, in the full enjoyment of her ill-acquired riches. By her munificent gifts to the Brahmans, and through the mediation of a Yogi of great sanctity, who had, as an atonement for her sins, undertaken to perform the penance of living for five years in a hole in the ground, the ban was removed from her, and she was again restored to her caste. My informant also added, that she was building a tomb for herself of great magnificence; and no doubt, in after times, long processions, such as I frequently witnessed in the city of Aurungzabud, of women to the shrine of Lalla Rookh, will strew flowers on the ashes of the faithless and infamous Hindu.
1. Goëthe.