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But Delhi itself with all its age-long memories was around one to provide the historic setting for an historic scene, and Delhi still stands under the sign of the Kutub Minar, the splendid minaret a landmark for miles and miles around which dominates the vast graveyard of fallen dynasties at its feet and the whole of the great plain beyond where the fate of India, and not of India alone, has so often been decided.
And thus ended in a most successful find my connection with the loot of Delhi. Though many years have elapsed, the events of those three weeks seem as vivid in my memory as though they had happened yesterday the brightness of the jewels, the dazzling gold, the nerves wrought to the highest pitch of tension while waiting in eager expectation for the result of a search.
"See here, Hawke!" abruptly said the host "I want you to serve me to-night, and to stand by me while this she-devil is in Delhi. I've got to run down to Calcutta on business for a few days. She will not be here. She has some business of her own down there, also. First, find out for me, for God's sake, all about her. How she came here; where she hides in Europe; who her friends are.
If Delhi could be taken, the rebels would be paralyzed and the rescue of beleaguered details would be easier; so, although odds of one hundred or more to one are usually considered overlarge in wartime when the hundred hold the fort and the one must storm the gate there was no time lost in hesitation.
On the evening of the next day, Sunday, as the Europeans were gathering for Church, the Sepoys rose, murdered their officers, hastened to the parade ground, liberated their imprisoned comrades, opened the jails, raised all the villainy of the native town, massacred the Christians whom they met, men, women, and children, set houses on fire, and then set out for Delhi, the great old imperial city.
But, when they heard that the means of my salvation from the lance of the scoundrelly Christino had been the Magazine containing my own history, their laugh was changed into wonder. "But how is this?" said Cabrera. "You surely have other adventures to relate?" "I left off in the very middle of the battle of Delhi, which ended, as everybody knows, in the complete triumph of the British arms.
They cared nothing for the Mogul, nothing for the pageant King at Delhi; but they had been panic-stricken by extravagant stories of coming destruction. It was whispered among them that the parade-ground was undermined with powder, and that Hindus and Mahometans were to be assembled on a given day and blown into the air.
The empire of the Great Mogul, whose capital was Delhi, was tottering from decay. It had been, in the sixteenth century, the most powerful empire in the world. The magnificence of his palaces astonished even Europeans accustomed to the splendor of Paris and Versailles. His viceroys ruled over provinces larger and richer than either France or England.
Then two members of the court-martial, who lived nearest at hand, ran home, and quickly returned, one with his father's slippers, the other with his mother's hubble-bubble; and having tied the slippers, that were a world too big, on Mungloo's little feet, and lighted the hubble-bubble, that he might smoke, they mounted him on a buffalo, captured from the village hurkaru, who happened, just in the nick of time, to come riding by, on his way to Delhi, with the mail.
"Then," pursued Muzio, "I woke up and played that song." "But who was the woman?" said Fabio. "Who was she? The wife of an East Indian. I met her in the city of Delhi.... She is no longer among the living. She is dead." "And her husband?" asked Fabio, without himself knowing why he did so. "Her husband is dead also, they say. I soon lost sight of them." "Strange!" remarked Fabio.
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