upon discovering what has been—what has become”
Feeling her way very carefully, and with slow utterance, even in the hour of victory.
“Of his wife,” said Arthur, “and why she left his home. Speak out, Mrs. Berry—it is no time to pick words.”
O how her heart beat then! She had the whole key.
“Then, Arthur,” she said, “it is better that such a story should be told by a man than by a woman. Let Mr. Berry tell you what he knows.”
REPRESENTATIVE MEN.
Last Champions of Tribes.
cheetoo—nana sahib—schamyl—abd-el-kader.
Through all times, and all stages of civilisation, the sympathies of men of every order of mind are with the last representative of a race, nation, or tribe, against his conquerors. Whether the devoted champions of an overwhelmed people are combing their long hair in Thermopylæ, or wading through a Florida swamp, or in ambush in a cavern on Atlas, or making a lair in an Indian jungle, or holding the long bridges round Mexico against Cortez, or a pass of the Caucasus against successive Czars, the vain good wishes about events long decided, the exulting admiration and tender pity of all hearers of the story wait upon the resistants, about to be the vanquished. A handful of such heroes, out of the mass of dead generations, seem set like burning gems along the vista of human story,—the magical carbuncles of the old legend, reared aloft to shed a glow over the whole scene and time in which they lived. When our thoughts turn upon such men, we are wont to revert to history, not only because the old examples are most familiar, but because we have an unconscious impression that the time is past for the manifestation of that particular act of heroism. Such a mistake should never be made in the age in which Schamyl and Abd-el-Kader are living. The romance of human life, and of the life of nations, is not over, and never can be at an end; and whenever the age of commerce and the age of peace shall have set in, all over the world, there will no doubt be as much romance, under one form or another of human experience, as when the patriarchs were star-gazing in the Chaldæan plains, or the Romans were reaching Ultima Thule with hearts beating thick and fast under their armour.
In our own age there is certainly tragedy enough of this very kind to move all hearts to their depths: there are instances of resistance to a foreign yoke as noble as any on record. Our posterity will think so; and we may guess what they will say of us, if we do not know heroism when we see it, simply because it is modern.
As conquest is always going on somewhere or other, there would be always more or fewer such heroes before our eyes if there were not conditions through which the noble quality must be, as it were, strained, to prove and exalt its virtue. Mere resistance to an aggressor is no great matter. Almost every animal in creation is capable of it. The resistance must be sustained, deliberate, patient, honourable in its means, and patriotic in its aim, to make it heroic. It may remain a romance, and an entertaining story, if mixed up with treachery and falsehood; but its moving quality is gone. The facts then become a mere narrative, and cease to be a tragedy. We shall see this plainly enough by the shortest study of the most conspicuous Last Chiefs of our own time. I will take those only whose adventures I have myself followed, as our young generation is now following with the eye the fate of young Duke Robert of Parma and the old Pope.
When I was young, there was Cheetoo, the last of the Pindarrees. It is impossible for the most romantic to get up much sympathy for the Pindarrees. Those who like the Jack Sheppard style of literature might possibly, if their reading extend so far, get excited over the deeds of the Indian robber tribes, and fancy the leaders great heroes: but people of any cultivation can feel little beyond curiosity about tribes whose business was plunder, and cruelty their pleasure. Every year the Pindarrees assembled on the northern bank of the Nerbudda river, to the number of from ten to fifteen thousand horsemen; and thence they would part off to sweep over wide ranges of the country, seizing whatever property they could carry off, and destroying the rest. They would burn fifty villages in a day; and they subjected the inhabitants to tortures which no one would wish to tell or hear of. The tramp of their horses was listened for by ears laid along the ground, more fearfully than the first rumble of the earthquake. Their dark line far off on the plain was the signal for all who could run to fly to the mountains or hide in the jungle; and the sick and aged implored to be put to death rather than left to the tender mercies of the Pindarrees. When the freebooters bivouacked in the woods, or on the river bank, they were sure that none but wild beasts would come near them; for there was not a man, woman, or child who did not quake at the sight of their watchfires from miles off. Such were the Pindarrees that a certain Arthur Wellesley used to send home accounts of when I was young : and they had a chief who suited them exactly in the man whom we at last called “poor Cheetoo.”
Besides being a freebooter, Cheetoo was a usurper. He raised himself on the ruin of Kureem, another chief, and collected several bands under his own leadership. When Kureem got his head above water again, Cheetoo sold himself to the enemies of both, for the sake of vengeance: and thus we need not suffer from too keen a sympathy with the man. Again he got his rival’s neck under his heel, and became the chief of the last of the Pindarrees. The Company’s troops had a world of trouble with him and his force. By their swiftness, boldness, and cunning, and their knowledge of every pass and ford in the country, the marauders were always escaping when they seemed to be in a trap. When Sir John Malcolm undertook the case in 1816, their raids had become insufferable. They had inflicted horrible torture on above three thousand persons in twelve days, while plundering three hundred and thirty-nine villages. They were hunted across country, over rivers, and through forests, and sepa-