Captain Roughsedge had seen two
years' service on the Northwest Frontier; Diana had ridden through the
Khaibar with her father and a Lieutenant-Governor. In both the sense of
England's historic task as the guardian of a teeming India against
onslaught from the north, had sunk deep, not into brain merely. Figures
of living men, acts of heroism and endurance, the thought of English
soldiers ambushed in mountain defiles, or holding out against Afridi
hordes in lonely forts, dying and battling, not for themselves, but that
the great mountain barrier might hold against the savagery of the north,
and English honor and English power maintain themselves unscathed--these
had mingled, in both, with the chivalry and the red blood of youth. The
eyes of both had seen; the hearts of both had felt.
And now, in the English House of Commons, there were men who doubted and
sneered about these things--who held an Afridi life dearer than an
English one--who cared nothing for the historic task, who would let
India go to-morrow without a pang!
Misguided recreants! But Mrs. Colwood, looking on, could only feel that
had they never played their impish part, the winter afternoon for these
two companions of hers would have been infinitely less agreeable.
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