PART II. (Continued).

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 79, 6 December 1884, Page 4

PART 11. (Continued).

When the voyage was ended, Abel Dunlethe found himself at Melbourne, with one i decent suit of clothing, which was on his i back, with a few dollars in his pocket, j which had been given him by the grazier. He was thousands of miles away from any man he knew, under the dominion of the English Hag, out of work, desperate, recklesf, and, as he said, at odds with luck. Ho wandered about for a day or two, seeking employment, but finding none. He had again got down to his last dollar, after two years of labour in the mines. Then the devil, who tempted him so never before, tempted the lonely, deserted vagabond with liquor, and made him drunk. Just then the air of Melbourne, of ■ Europe, of States, was thick with such; tales of bloody horror, of such foul deeds being done in India, that the hearts of ■ men sickened within them. The sepoys, had risen on their masters, and England called for troops to go out and save her children from massacre, and her possessions from being retaken. Recruiting stations vere opened in Melbourne, as elsewhere among the English possessions, and Abel Dunlethe, drunk and desperate, enlisted to tight the sepoys in India, awakened one morning to tind himself possessor of the Queen's shilling, and a new suit of clothes, the collar of the jacket being uncomfortably tight and stiff about his neck. When the morning came he looked out at the newly-risen sun through the barred windows of the guard-house, a place vilely dirty, damp, and foul. He was quite Bober then, and his mind quicker and clearer than it had been for many a day past. Then, in the bright, reproachful sweetness and purity of the morning, Dunlethe sat down on the rough bench of his den, and reviewed the latter portions of his life. All the black, dirty years which he had thought wore lying dead behind him, rose up before him with their ugly records bare, and reading them slowly in the light of that fair day, he saw tlio man he had come to be— a miserable, desperate wretch, who had sowed the wind, and was reaping plentifully the whirlwind. It is not much to say for him, that he never meant to be the criminal he was ; that temptation came to him unawares, and that he weakly, willingly yielded to it, as other and better men have done. But the review wus scarcely satisfactory to her English Majesty's new recruit; so unsatisfactory, indeed, that the man, hidden somewhere in the heart or brain of Abel Dunlethe, revealed himself, and the Indian soldier came to a sublime determination— not to rise out of the awful slough into which he had surely dragged himself, not to atone for the old, ugly life, by living a new and beautiful one. All that was above and beyond him. He rose to the best heights he knew, and for him, they were sublime ones. He would deba-e his Maker's image no longer ; creep into no moie sweet souls, polluting as he went ; but he would go out there to India to die - to die like a soldier, while the eyes of a hundred comrades should look upon him a3 he fell. He already fancied the battle over, the next day's review, his place vacant in the ranks, his name called when his General rode by, and his comrades' answer to it—" Dead upon the field *f honour." * Later in the day his door was thrown open, and a corporal's guard had come to fetch him to the barracks. Passing the officers' quarters, the men were noticed by their captain, a wiry, quick-eyed little fellow, who stood at his door, a eood deal bored, apparently, with Melbourne inactivity, idly tapping his boot. He coolly surveyed the recuit for a moment as he passed, then called to him. He went into his quarters and sat down, Abel Dunlethe closely following him, stand- j mc at last a few feet from the officer's chair twirling his regulation cap in his grimy hands. A miserable looking devil, surely, on the surface, but for all that, something of the ruined gentleman shining through all his coating of shame and debasement. The Captain left him standing there, not : speaking for a moment, but surveying him | with more interest than he had shown in anything but those India reports, for a long time " You enlisted for the India service ?" ho asked. "Why?" " I wa.s drunk." "Yet you don't look like a drinking man. Why drunk ?" the officer asked. "Not being a drinking man, it took but little to make me drunk. I have no head for liquor ; am easily upset. I could get but little, my money was all gone." " You had no better reason, then ? Your English blood did not fire up as you heard tho^e talefe from India, and make you hungry to get at those tawny devils over there?" asked the Captain, who, wishing to believe there was yet left in Dunlethe at least a spark of patriotism or humanity, tried hard to strike it out of him, and make it burn again "No," Dunlethe said. "I enlisted yesterday, because I was drunk. I would en- j list to-day, when I am sober, becau&el want to be shot. I should like to die doing some good." The little man looked up at this, and the air of something which was not altogether indolent curiosity dropped away from his manner, and he looked at his recruit with a new interest in. his eyes. "You want to be shot ? Well ! that is not the highest ambition, and a man like you might do better ; but you know best. Being shot is better, I suppose, than dying in the gutter. Are you quite sure, my man, that you are English ?" "Yes, English. From Surrey. "No. English you may be, but not from Surrey. I happen to be from Surrey, and to know overy reppectable family name thereabouts, and yours is not among them." t , _ _! " Yet all the same, lam from Surrey. I would like to go if you are done question- ! ing me," Dunlethe said doggedly. ! Captain Duncan leisurely took his feet] off the table before him, and picked up a I papcr-knifo,with which he cut the leaves of j an English novel lying there. He did not answer Dunlethe's question until he had cut the last fold of the book ; then he looked ao-ain at the man, and with no change in his bored, indifferent manner, said to " You are at the bottom of the hill now, and it is none of my business how you got there ; but did it never occur to you that it might be worth your while to climb up " No, it is no use. My luck is down on me • it is not worth while. I thank you heartily, though, for the interest which your question shows, but it ia not worth

" Yes, you can go." When ho was gone, the Captain went to tho door, looking after the miaerablo, trombling figure. "He wants to be shot," he said. "Well, he stands a chance to have his wish soon gratified ; we sail to-morrow. I wonder why I feel interested in that fellow? I have seen so many going down into the depths. A gentleman turned blackguard, and at the bottom of the hill, maybe he will turn now, and go up again ; but he is not English I think ; not from Surroy certainly, j and if he is, his name is not Abel Dun- ; lethe. He is, though, a miserable devil, j and to get shot is probably the best thing he could do." The Captain lounged at his door a long ] while afterwards, looking along the path Dunlothe had gone, not quite able to get that gentleman turned blackguard out of his thoughts. The long voyage across the Southern seas to the Indian shores was drearily slow to Abel Dunlothe, who found no companion, ship among the rough sailors and soldiers on board. He sat alone, mostly on the forecastle or rigging, looking out seaward, with no healthier nor more cheerful company than Ms own sombre thoughts. Sometimes Captain Duncan came forward among his men, and then Dunlethe, without looking up, know that the little Captain's eyes were upon him, and was glad to think that he had not forgotten him. He thought a good deal of the Captain's question, if it might not be worth while to try to climb the awful steep down which he had fallen. But to get shot, he thought, would be the easiest way, soonest ending and mending all trouble. They were not permitted to go into quarters at Calcutta, where they landed, but were immediately marched forward to join the old G4th at Allahabad. Already the force at Cawnpore had been betrayed and butchered with horrible atrocity. Lucknow was still held by Lawrence, but ' the murderous sepoys had trapped him into the Residency, and there threatened his command and "the women and children with him, with the same horrors meted out to the garrison of Cawnporo. In the camp and march and drill. Dunlethe, a quiet, intelligent m»B, was ambitious to learn his duties rapidly and well, but his wish did not yet reach beyond the desire to be shot, and to have his comrades say he was a good as well as a brave soldier, and after those days in Melbourne he never touched liquo* again ; besides, the soldier's active- round of duties was medicine against thought, and when it was whispered through the camp that in another day Havelock would maroh to relieve Lucknow and recapture Cawnpore, Dunlethe was the most eager of all for the day to come. But two or three more days passed in preparation before tho march began, and then Abel Dunlethe went forward under the eyes of the little Captain, to find an honourable field to die on. He hoped it might be at Lucknow, doing some great, heroic deed for the starving women and children there, but no matter where, he thought, so that it came soon. Through the streets of Allahabad, as they passed, they met tho fierce scowls of the Hindoos, and the Mahommedans turned away their faces, that the hatred might not j be seen in their eyes. Beyond, the rains i fell incessantly, and the fields bordering ] the roads they marched over were turned! into morasses ; but the men pressed on to the relief of the threatened, beleaguered garrison of Lucknow. ! ' On the tenth day of that fierce July, with a torrid sun blazing down upon them, they marched fifteen miles to Khaga, live mile.from Futtehporo, where tho insurgents had entrenched themsoUo* in great force. On the twelfth the attack began, and Abel Dunlethe, with a whimpered prayei breaking; upon his Avhite lips, went down into the battle, with the old determination strong upon him to fill a place no more among J living men. He fought like a man drunk with wounds, drunk unto madness with the carnage and tumult ; he saw his Captain far in advance, surrounded by a horde of yellow devils, trying to strike him down ; lie hewed a path through the dusky Mahrattas to his officer's side ; together they cut their way to the mouth of the enemies' guns ; later he was again alone among their cannoniers, blackened with smoke and powder, seeking death at a hundred hands, and finding it nowhere ; but pressing on in the farthest advance, wheie brave men fell thick about him, struggling hand to hand for the possession of the guns ; then he knew that he was at the Captain's side again, that the Captain had spoken to him brave, encouraging words, and that his manner was that of a man speaking to an equal and a friend ; that he was blooding and dizzy ; that they had been closed upon by hordes of yelling sepoys ; that their comrades had dashed in to their support, and that he lay under the captui ed guns, stiff and sore and bleeding, and that the little Captain was kneeling over him. Being not badly hurt, he opened his eyes and smiled up into the Captain's face, and the smile was so frank and boyish that the officer knew that under the man's shell of crime and debauch there wore elements of good yet alive, and strnggling to assert themselves. "You are not dead, then?" he said. " You have come back to join us again. You saved my lite to-day, comrade. After all, may it not be worth while to live— to be a man again ?" Dunlethe closed his eyes then, to shut in feomc unmanly tears. He had came there to lose his own life ; the battle was over, and he had given life, not lost it. Already to-day a brave gentleman had spoken to him as to a friend, and now he had sought him out from among the dead and wounded, to tell him he had saved his life, and to call him comrade. After all, there might be a chance— it might be worth while to try to be a man again. Havelock buried his dead in the night, and beyond Futtehpore, in a grove ot mango trees, sheltered from the fatal sunbeams that carried off" more men than the enemy's bulled, ho pitched his tents. There they rested during the next day, and on the fourteenth, when the march was resumed, Abel Dunlethe was in the ranks, and the day following he was in the thickest of the fight at Aong ; but while death touched his comrades behind and before him, upon the right and the left, it pas&cd him by, and when the battle closed ho was still among living men, a hero among his comrades, a brave soldier whom his regiment admired and honoured. Led on by Major Renaud, ho was at the battle of the Bridirc of Pandoo Muddee, at Ahirma, at Cawnpore, always where death came oftenest, but never finding it ; still a living man, whose name came at last to the oars of Havelock ; came at Cawnpore to be found in his letters. In an unofficial note to General Neil, speaking of the battle, he said, "I never saw a braver man than a private of the 64th, named Dunlothe. He placed himself, in the last charge, opposite the murale of a gun that was scattering death into our ranks, and led on a dozen of his comrades amid a shower of grape to its capture, His Captain, Duncan, of the detached service, has applied for tho man's promotion." The little Captain and Sergeant-major Dunlethe met often after the capture of Cawnpore, for some idle time followed, and cholera had got among the troops, filling the hospitals more rapidly that the enemy [had been able to do, and these two men twessa goodefcai among the sick and dying ;.

tbo Sergoant-major being as active among his prostrated comrades now as ho had ever boon in tho fight. But they never said anything about that old determination of Dunlethe's to get shot. When promotion camo to the man who had saved his life, Captain Duncan only pressed his hand in silence, and somehow Dunlethe knew better than any words could have told him of the Captain's satisfactfon at his advancement ; but he never knew that the Captain had applied for it, and had told to Havelock the whole history of his brilliant deeds, and tho story of their first meeting. "Recognition would make a man of him again," the Captain had urged. The two men were tacit, undemonstrative friends, and the Captain knew as surely as the Sergeant-major did that the manhood in him, asleep and covered up so long, was asserting itself, and that a better, nobler resolve had taken the place of the old one. The lonely watches in the hospital, the : marches and the battle under the blazing India suns, went on, day by day and week i by week, and tho army of Havelock settled down before Lucknow, to wrest it from the | grasp of the murderous sepoys, and to rescue the starving garrison, the women ! and children there. But wherever the army of tho grand old Christian soldier went, thero was carried with it, among all that sudden making of splendid names, the name of Sergeant-major Dunlethe. and al- ! ways coupled with a record of a hundred brave or humane deeds. Men dying of the cholera, blessed him as he carried water to their lips; men battling in the deadly breach, struggled forward to fight or fall by his side ; wherever the sublime deeds of that army were known, men heard and respected the name of Abel Dunlethe. I The fame of it had gone through that India army, had been heard in England ; i and wherover there were heroic men living to honour a brave soldier, they honoured Abel Dunlothe. On that last day's fight at Lucknow, the day of the deliverance of the Residency, the flag of the 64th had passed through many hands ; early in tho day the Ensign had been killed ; another and another had pressed forward to raise again the fallen standard ; later it was caught up from the stiffened hands of its dead bearer by Abel Dunlctho ; it wa.s at that moment that they were sweoping on through seas of firo, and pour of shot and shell, to the capture of the last redoubt. Ho raised it high above his head, that those in the rear might tee it was still safo, shook out its tattered folds, cand then leaped into tho ditch already heaped high with his dead and wounded comrades. Followed by tho scanty remnant of his regiment, ho clambered up the slippery sides of the redoubt, and amid a yell of triumph, taken up by regimont after retritnent, and echoed again by an army, Abel Dunletho planted the flag he bore upon tho enemy s ramparts ; but falling, sorely wounded, ho yielded his charge to another, and as the victorious ranks pressed on to the Residency, he felt that at lasc he had done a man's work, and that thereafter the shame and crime of his life would be less heavy to bear. l< Your friend Dunlethe has got an ugly scalp wound, and a shattered arm, Captain Duncan," the surgeon said, as the two men stood over his bed in the hospital; "but ho will come out of this all right." He was among the wounded carried out in the hushed flight of that night, through the long line of piquets to the Alum Bagh ; he was later among those who were called from the ranks to go up higher ; the flag he had carried into the redoubt he was? accounted fit to bear always, and he was known thereafter throughout the India iv my as Ensign Duuiethe ; later again he stood bufoio the dyintc Havelock, leady to sail for England," relieved on account of wounds, and bearer of despatches home ; later still, he stood among the heroes of the India war, in the presence of a mighty concourse ot people, waiting proudly to be decorated with the Victoria Cross. After the ceremony, Captain Duncan touched the decoration shining on the Ensign's breast, and looking over the brilliant assemblage that had witnessed its bestowal, said, "That is better, after all, than being Phot !" " Yes, it is better : it has made me a man again, and I have before me a nnn's work to do. We part here for a while. I left something undone over thero in America I am going now to do it." The two friends said farewell, after the manner of men whose love is deep, with no groat show of fteling, yet the pain of parting was no less bitter.