INSIDE THE FORT

The six English officers made it a practice, so far as they could, to dine together; and during the third week of the siege the conversation happened one evening to take a particular turn.  Ever afterwards, during this one hour of the twenty-four, it swerved regularly into the same channel.  The restaurants of London were energetically discussed, and their merits urged by each particular partisan with an enthusiasm which would have delighted a shareholder.  Where you got the best dinner, where the prettiest women were to be seen, whether a band was a drawback or an advantage—­not a point was omitted, although every point had been debated yesterday or the day before.  To-night the grave question of the proper number for a supper party was opened by Major Dewes of the 5th Gurkha Regiment.

“Two,” said the Political Officer promptly, and he chuckled under his grey moustache.  “I remember the last time I was in London I took out to supper—­none of the coryphees you boys are so proud of being seen about with, but”—­and, pausing impressively, he named a reigning lady of the light-opera stage.

“You did!” exclaimed a subaltern.

“I did,” he replied complacently.

“What did you talk about?” asked Major Dewes, and the Political Officer suddenly grew serious.

“I was very interested,” he said quietly.  “I got knowledge which it was good for me to have.  I saw something which it was well for me to see.  I wished—­I wish now—­that some of the rulers and the politicians could have seen what I saw that night.”

A brief silence followed upon his words, and during that silence certain sounds became audible—­the beating of tom-toms and the cries of men.  The dinner-table was set in the verandah of an inner courtyard open to the sky, and the sounds descended into that well quite distinctly, but faintly, as if they were made at a distance in the dark, open country.  The six men seated about the table paid no heed to those sounds; they had had them in their ears too long.  And five of the six were occupied in wondering what in the world Sir Charles Luffe, K.C.S.I., could have learnt of value to him at a solitary supper party with a lady of comic opera.  For it was evident that he had spoken in deadly earnest.

Captain Lynes of the Sikhs broke the silence: 

“What’s this?” he asked, as an orderly offered to him a dish.

“Let us not inquire too closely,” said the Political Officer.  “This is the fourth week of the siege.”

The rice-fields of the broad and fertile valley were trampled down and built upon with sangars.  The siege had cut its scars upon the fort’s rough walls of mud and projecting beams.  But nowhere were its marks more visible than upon the faces of the Englishmen in the verandah of that courtyard.