A BENGAL YARN. BY CAPTAIN MEDWIN. 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 relief 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 cœlo, 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. 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. The 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 superfine 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 I am 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 1 A BENGAL YARN. Let it be premised, drama, it is time I should bring her on the scene. 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 Juggernaut, and the census of the last year, in spite of all the exertions of the authorities, is Do not be afraid, said to have amounted to five hundred. 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 Suffice it to say, that B, having taken with prevent, a suttee. 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, It was, indeed, and her future destiny now depended on her rescuer. No a charge; and perhaps B― had little calculated on the responsibility She was conveyed to his own tent. that had devolved on him. 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 châtaigne 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 mignonne 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 The fragments of Megasthenes convince us that of this Indian belle. 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 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 casuist, 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 * Goëthe. |