Free The Gallant by William Stuart Long

desires of our own hearts. We have offended against Thy holy laws . .
    . and there is no health in us. But Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders. …”
    Jenny whispered the words after him, her eyes tightly closed. “Spare Thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore Thou them that are penitent. According to Thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for His sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of Thy holy name… . And give me the courage, O dear Lord,” she added earnestly, “to say, as Ruth said, “Whither thou goest, I will go” and to mean it, with all my heart.”
    Throughout the service, Jenny found herself silently repeating her prayer for courage, and the rector’s lengthy sermon fell, so far as she was concerned, on deaf ears; but the act of prayer, performed in such surroundings, gave her consolation and fresh hope. She joined, happily enough, in the Osborne family’s belated luncheon, and later, after riding round the sheep paddocks with William and their host, took part in a lively game of charades that the younger members of the family enthusiastically organized following dinner.
    That night, as she lay in the sanctuary of William’s embrace, after his tender lovemaking, she began to believe that her prayer had been answered, since her fears for the future seemed, at last, to have faded. But then, to her bitter dismay, with sleep came a nightmare so hideous that she wakened, sobbing uncontrollably, her body drenched in perspiration. Like the dream she had had when William had been in the Crimea, on the eve of his regiment’s fatal charge on the Russian guns, every detail was so clear that she felt she had been present in reality, and it took all the resolution she possessed to refrain from waking her sleeping husband in order to describe the vision that still filled both mind and senses.
    Jenny drew a long, shuddering breath and somehow managed to stifle her sobs, as William slept on, undisturbed and seemingly as deaf as she had been to the rector of Dapto’s sermon earlier that day.
    In the dream, she had been crouching beneath the shade of a great, gnarled tree-of a species she had never seen before-and there had been a wide, fast-flowing river some distance below her. Boats, their brown lateen sails in flames, were aground on what had appeared to be a sandbar. The boats, rough, cumbersome wooden craft, were filled with dead and wounded people comsoldiers in red coats, and women and children, too crying their agony aloud, as volleys of musketry and the boom of cannon rent the sultry air.
    She had huddled, petrified, beneath the tree, Jenny recalled, stunned and powerless to move, as the ghastly slaughter went on and screams and cries of the wounded in the boats gradually faded into silence. There were men all about her hiding place-men with dark faces, some in blue-and-scarlet uniforms, others in
    flowing white garments, with turbans on their heads, and … as the firing ceased, she had watched them run to the river’s edge and wade across to the sandbank, to complete the killing at close quarters with spears and sabers or, in some cases, with their bare brown hands.
    Then the terrible scene had vanished, cloaked by darkness, but … just before the nightmare ended and she had awakened, she had seen the dawning of a new day, and-almost more horrifying than what had gone before-heralded by the

William Stuart Long
    loud beat of wings, a vast flock of obscene, bald-headed birds had descended from a bloodred sky to waddle, squawking and quarreling, on the boats with their lifeless cargoes.
    Surely, Jenny thought, seeking desperately for consolation as she relived her nightmare-surely such horror was not possible? India, William had told her repeatedly, was at peace, a well-governed, orderly country now that the Sikhs had accepted British domination by right of military conquest.