The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Master of Aberfeldie, Volume 2 (of 3)
    
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Title: The Master of Aberfeldie, Volume 2 (of 3)

Author: James Grant

Release date: June 14, 2021 [eBook #65616]

Language: English

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MASTER OF ABERFELDIE, VOLUME 2 (OF 3) ***






  THE MASTER OF ABERFELDIE



  BY

  JAMES GRANT

  AUTHOR OF
  "THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "THE CAMERONIANS,"
  "THE SCOTTISH CAVALIER,"
  ETC., ETC.



  IN THREE VOLUMES.

  VOL. II.



  LONDON:
  HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
  13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
  1884.

  _All rights reserved._




  Contents

  Chapter

  I. Mystery
  II. A Modern Use for a Mediæval Institution
  III. Holcroft Departs
  IV. Suspense
  V. The Oubliette
  VI. Cead Mille Maloch!
  VII. Lovers
  VIII. At Maviswood
  IX. 'Alice!'
  X. 'The Mysteries of Udolpho.'
  XI. 'Gup,' and What Came of It
  XII. Olive's Visitor
  XIII. Wedded
  XIV. Mistrust
  XV. The Black Watch
  XVI. In the Belvidere
  XVII. The Route
  XVIII. 'Idiots only will be Cozened Twice.'
  XIX. In the Land of the Pharaohs
  XX. The March through Goshen




THE MASTER OF ABERFELDIE.



CHAPTER I.

MYSTERY.

So all the guests had quitted Dundargue now but Hawke Holcroft.  In
two days he was to depart for what he called 'his chambers in town;'
thus Allan was compelled to continue his polite dissimulation, and be
on suave and apparently easy terms with him as a guest, though the
latter felt that there was an undefinable change in his manner
towards him.

Indeed, it was only by a great effort of self-control that the Master
of Aberfeldie, a man with the highest and keenest sense of honour,
and knowing all he did, continued to treat Holcroft with politeness;
but he writhed and shivered when he heard him, in the drawing-room or
elsewhere, address Olive or Eveline.

All the forenoon after Cameron's departure, when poor little Eveline
was most triste and miserable, our other pair of lovers were very
happy.  They had what they were pleased to call 'a picnic' on the
tower-head of Dundargue.  Allan's portion thereof was cigars, and
Olive's a little basket of purple grapes and luscious strawberries
(though the season was autumn) from the hothouses.

So with these two, the hours passed sweetly and swiftly, with the
blue sky overhead, while far away in the distance, and steeped in
sunny haze, stretched the lovely Carse of Gowrie; and talking of
themselves, their past folly, their present joy, and the brilliant
future that was to come, they billed and cooed after the fashion of
all lovers since flowers grew in Eden.

Allan lolled at length on the stone bartizan of the tower whence
molten lead and arrows had more than once been launched on a foe
beneath, Olive with her fair head reclined against his shoulder
toying with her fruit, while he did so with her silky hair, or kissed
her lips and hands, and called her all manner of funny and endearing
names that would look rather odd in print; and yet amid their present
happiness it was strange that each wondered more than once, if
coldness or estrangement would ever come between them again.

Never--oh, never.

'You complained that the gardeners saw me kissing you in the rosery
yesterday, Olive,' said Allan.  'Now, little woman, who should I kiss
if I don't kiss you?  Well, only the crows overhead can see us up
here, at all events.'

But now as he toyed with her hands, marvelling as he did so at their
whiteness and beauty, and anon played with the bangles that encircled
her rounded arms, he bethought of the one worn--yes, actually
worn--by Holcroft, and silently he resolved to possess himself of it
without delay; so, ere the bell rang for luncheon, he made an excuse,
conducted his cousin, with many a pause and long delay which were not
idly spent, down the dark and winding staircase from the head of the
tower.

In his new-found happiness until now he had forgotten all about the
bangle, which--perhaps for some ulterior purpose of his own--Holcroft
seemed to have quietly appropriated, and by whom he wished it
returned without any fuss or explanation.

To this end he sought that personage after luncheon was over, and was
sure he would find him either practising strokes in the
billiard-room, in the smoking-room, or stables, watching the horses
and catching hints from the grooms.

He found him in the first-named place, cue in hand.

'Ready for a game?' said he.

'No, thanks.'

'Sorry; Cameron, and everyone is gone.  I'm reduced to playing the
right hand against the left.'

'And while playing I perceive that you have a gold bangle of Miss
Raymond's on your left wrist?'

'Yes,' replied Holcroft, leisurely--Allan thought impertinently.

'Did she give it to you?'

'Why do you ask?'

'_Did_ she give it to you?' repeated Allan, with a dangerous gleam in
his dark eyes.

'No.'

'How comes it to be there, then?'

'Don't take to high falutin.  I slipped it on in mere fun, and it
will not come off again.

'Indeed! allow me.'

And Allan, in a moment, by twisting the ductile Indian gold, wrenched
it off, and Holcroft's eyes had a malevolent flash in them as he
stooped to strike a ball.

'Thanks,' said Allan, pocketing the bangle.  'Now we shall have a
cigar.'

For a moment he felt a little ashamed of his sudden irritation, and
proffered his cigar-case to Holcroft, who smiled his thanks and
accepted a Havana.

The Master was younger and handsomer than he; the heir to an ancient
title and estate; he had the envied prestige of having borne himself
bravely when under fire with the Black Watch, and had a goodly crop
of medals--not so many as my Lord Wolseley, of course--but still,
when in uniform, a goodly display.

He had all the advantages over Hawke Holcroft that one man could have
over another; and in his heart of hearts the other hated--yea, with a
bitter and deadly hate--Allan Graham--a hate beyond his love, real or
supposed, for Olive Raymond, natheless all Olive's beauty and her
money--his chief lure and incentive.

While conversing and joking together in the smoking-room, or on the
terrace, amid the pleasures of the table, knocking the balls about at
billiards or so forth, how little could the unconscious Allan have
dreamed that his father's guest--the son of his old friend--had been
pondering over the art of 'Killing no murder;' of accidents brought
about in the hunting-field, at cover shooting, or hill-climbing; even
of dynamite cigars!  Had he not heard of such things at Monaco,
Homburg, and elsewhere.

He knew that there was quite a manufactory of such cigars at
Temeswar, in Austria; but wherever were such pleasant gifts 'to be
obtained in an out-of-the-way hole like the Carse of Gowrie?'

His teeth under his moustache glittered or glistened whitely when
such ideas occurred to him; though he chatted away with perhaps
forced _insouciance_ and gaiety, under all his assumed ease of manner
there smouldered a lava-like glow--mingled hate of Allan and coveting
of Olive, but with an emotion of a much coarser nature, combined with
greed.

Seeing Clairette, Olive's maid, passing, Allan made up the bangle in
a little packet as he still wished no more explanations on the
subject, and desired her to give it to her mistress.

'You and Miss Raymond seem exceedingly good friends now,' said
Holcroft.

'We were never otherwise,' replied Allan, curtly, and displeased by
the remark.

'What a prize in matrimony such a girl must be, with so much beauty
and--wealth.'

'It is sometimes a misfortune for a girl to be rich, or to be thought
so,' said Allan.

'Why?'

'Because she may become the prey of some needy fortune-hunter or
enterprising scamp.'

Holcroft winced at the reply, though it was made casually and without
the least design by Allan.

'But in marrying, Miss Raymond might perhaps be poor enough.'

'What paradox is this?' asked Holcroft, thoroughly interested, while
Allan felt some disdain at discussing such matters with such a man.

'Yes, poor as a church mouse, unless--'

'Unless what?'

'She marries _me_,' replied Allan, who, with perhaps pardonable
pique, only thought of provoking a man who had tried to rival him,
and whom he deemed a needy and adventurous gambler.

This seemed only to corroborate what Holcroft had heard before, and
gave him some occasion for thought.

'I have heard rumours of a family compact--a most fortunate one for
you,' said he, smiling; 'but suppose you--excuse me for saying
so--were to predecease her?'

'Then my pretty cousin would be a free woman; but I don't mean to die
yet awhile.  Let us take a turn before dinner,' he added, to change
the conversation he had no desire to continue.

'Where?'

'Anywhere you like; but, as the evening has become chill, suppose we
smoke our cigars in the picture-gallery?'

'All right, I am your man.'

Had Allan looked at Hawke Holcroft just then he might have perceived
a lurid gleam in his stealthy eyes, and how his hands were clenched
till the nails of his fingers bruised the palms thereof.

Olive received her bangle, and though startled by the abruptness with
which it was returned, without message or explanation from Allan, as
Clairette told her, she thought less of the circumstance then than
she did a day or two after.


Dinner was announced; Holcroft appeared in accurate evening dress as
usual, and, after waiting a few minutes for Allan who did not appear,
the meal was proceeded with in the slow fashion peculiar to
Dundargue, though only five were seated at table.

Ere dessert came, Lady Aberfeldie dispatched a servant to Allan's
room in search of him.  He was not there, though his evening dress
was laid out as usual.

'Where can he be?  Where can he have gone?' were the queries on all
hands, which, as night began to draw on without his appearing, took
the form of alarm, 'and what can have happened?'

'Did Allan drop hints of going anywhere?' asked Lord Aberfeldie.

All answered 'No.'

'It is most mysterious.'

Still more mysterious did it appear when the night, passed without
his being seen, and when his place was still vacant at the
breakfast-table next day.  Lord Aberfeldie was in dire perplexity;
the ladies were pale and already betook themselves to tears.

'If Allan has left the house as suddenly as he did before, he has
taken neither clothes nor portmanteau with him, as Tappleton assures
me; so what can it mean?' exclaimed Lord Aberfeldie.

A gun was missing from the gun-room.  Could Allan have gone to shoot
with Logan at Loganlee?  But Olive deemed it impossible that he would
do so without consulting her, and on looking at Holcroft she thought
he looked rather hot and disturbed.

'The bangle, the bangle!' thought the girl, with sudden terror.  'Can
he have gone in a fit of jealousy.  Mercy! if it should be so.'

Inquiries proved that Allan had not passed out by the entrance gates,
as the lodge-keeper affirmed, and no trace of footsteps could be
found at any of the private gates to the grounds; and it was soon
discovered that he had not taken a ticket for any place at the
railway station.

What terrible mystery was here?

The family began to look with growing alarm and dismay blankly into
each other's pale faces.

Keepers and gillies, strong, active, and keen-sighted fellows,
Hector, Alister Bain, Angus and Dugal Glas--even old Ronald Gair, the
piper--searched, but in vain, the grounds, plantations, even the
adjacent hills and glens; but not a trace was found of the missing
Allan.

He seemed suddenly to have dropped out of existence.

As this, his last day at Dundargue, drew on, none made himself more
active in searching and riding about the roads than Holcroft, and so
preoccupied were all that no one--even Olive--noticed that his face
was pale and cadaverous--and wore a very disturbed expression, and
that his pale eyes seemed to glare defiantly if anyone looked at him,
while he sedulously kept his _right hand gloved_.

How are we to relate all that really had happened.




CHAPTER II.

A MODERN USE FOR A MEDIÆVAL INSTITUTION.

'The world is not a bad world, after all,' said Allan, as he and
Holcroft, after a casual glance at the long lines of portraits
panelled in the wainscotting of the gallery, together with many a
Cuyp, Zucchero, Canaletti, and so forth, now looked out from one of
the lofty windows upon the fair domain of his family, that spread for
miles around Dundargue.

'It is easy enough for you to talk thus of the world,' thought
Holcroft, 'but if, like me, you had only debts and difficulties for
your patrimony you might take a different view.'

'I was born here in Dundargue, and all the happy memories of my
childhood centre round it,' said Allan.  'Every man, woman, and child
in the place are known to me; every rock and hill, glen and woodland,
familiar, with all their stories and traditions; and wherever I might
be with the Black Watch, in England on the staff, far away in central
India, or in the gorges of Afghanistan, my memory always fled home to
dear old Dundargue and all its surroundings.'

'How pathetic!' sneered Holcroft, silently, and puzzled to understand
the mood of Allan, who, in the consciousness of his own happiness
with Olive, felt at that moment rather inclined to take a soft and
generous view of the world at large.

'It certainly is a fine old ancestral house--one to be proud of,'
said Holcroft, aloud, 'with a special history, and all that sort of
thing.  I have heard a devil of a deal about its oubliette--where is
it?'

'Let me show you--come this way,' said Allan, lighting a fresh cigar.

Smoking together, Allan, and Holcroft following, wandered up and down
circular stone stairs in narrow turrets, where the steps had been
worn and hollowed by the feet of long departed generations; through
dusky corridors where, in some places, moth-eaten arras hung upon its
rusty tenter-hooks, and where, as Holcroft said, there was 'a loud
smell of mice;' through secret doors and past 'the priest's hole,' in
which James of Jerusalem abode, till they reached a narrow stone
passage near the summit of the great tower, closed by a massive
little door.

Allan threw this open, and the black, round mouth of the oubliette,
about four feet in diameter, yawned before them.

The great, horizontal stone slab or flagstone, which in ancient times
had closed the mouth of this horrible accessory to feudal tyranny,
had long since given place to a massive trap-door of oak, which was
held up by a wooden prop, under which the cold, dark vault showed its
mysterious profundity.

'By Jove! it is a strange affair; more like a draw-well than anything
else.'

'But supposed to be twelve feet diameter at the bottom--a fine old
relic of the days when "warriors bold wore spurs of gold," and the
rack and the red-hot ploughshare were aids to the orthodox opinions
of society in religion and politics.'

And Allan laughed as he spoke.

'How foetid its atmosphere is!  That door has not been open for an
age, and may be closed for as long again.  No one ever comes here.'

Peering downward, as if into a well, they saw the outlines of their
heads reflected in a little pool of water at the bottom, but how far
down it was impossible to say.

'Once upon a time,' said Allan, 'when parts of the Carse of Gowrie
were under water, in wet seasons especially, it flowed in here, how
no one knew, unless through fissures in the rock, and drowned like a
rat any luckless wight who was thrown in to be--to be----'

'What?'

'Forgotten.  So the phrase went then; hence its name.'

'And do you mean to say that no one who was dropped into that
confounded hole ever came up again?'

'Yes.'

'Were their cries not heard?'

'No; the walls around are so thick, and the bottom is in the living
rock on which Dundargue stands.'

'By Jove!' exclaimed Holcroft again, as if perplexed, so much so that
he had let his cigar grow cold.  'And their bones?' he asked, after a
pause.

'Were found in quantities by certain explorers, who went down with
torches, some years ago.  I have not looked into this place for
years--not since I left for the regiment in India,' said Allan,
stooping, somewhat dangerously--and, to Holcroft's sudden idea,
somewhat temptingly--over the dangerous profundity, into which he was
striving to peer.

With all the rapidity of light, many terrible thoughts now crowded
into the mind of Holcroft.  He hated Allan Graham with deadly rivalry
and hate combined.  Never again, in the desperation of his affairs,
might he have the chance of an introduction to such a prize as Olive
Raymond, or be on such a footing, as he had recently found himself
with her.

He loathed Allan for all Allan possessed, and, as we are told, 'a
coward who knows himself to be at once despised but unchastised, for
a woman's sake, can hate.'

If he lost his chances with Olive, beggary stared him in the face;
drops of perspiration started to his forehead, and chance now
confirmed his diabolical resolution.  The gloomy fiend was uppermost,
his revenge, and perhaps future triumph, stood embodied before him.
He did not pause, and all these dire thoughts occurred to him in less
than the space of one vibration of a pendulum.

Had the Master of Aberfeldie turned sharply round he might have read
in Holcroft's white face an expression that was not pleasant to look
upon just then--the face of one that would work him mischief if he
could; but the unwitting Allan was doing what he had not done since
boyhood, he was peering with vague curiosity into the profundity
below.

A fury, a clamorous anxiety, seemed to blaze up in the heart and
brain of Holcroft, who was a practised 'bruiser,' and he suddenly
gave Allan an awful blow under the left ear--a blow hit right out
from the shoulder--that shot him headlong into the vault.

He vanished from the light; there was a heavy thud far down below,
and then all became still--unnaturally so; but Holcroft could hear
the beating of his own pulses, while the blood seemed to be surging
about his throbbing temples.

Was he acting in a dream from which he would waken to find himself in
bed? or was all this happening, not to him, but to some one else?
No, there was the bruised right hand, from which the violence of his
blow had torn the skin.

He had read of dark crimes, of _murders_, but little did he think he
would ever become the participator in such a deed; but opportunity is
always the devil's game.

For a minute--an eternity it seemed, by the chaos of his mind, the
sudden inversion of all thought--he did not breathe, he scarcely
seemed to live.

There was a whisper of 'murder' on his lips, and it seemed to have an
echo, that terrible whisper, but whether from the walls, the trees
that waved below them, the blue sky, or the crows that were winging
their way through it, he knew not.  He seemed to whisper the awful
word to himself, with quivering lips, again and again, as if he
required an assurance of its truth, and then sought to rouse himself
from his lethargic stupor, quit the scene of his sudden crime, and
seek safety in flight--flight!

But, then, to quit Dundargue thus would fix suspicion on himself.
Had not Clairette, the French maid, seen him but lately with Allan?
And flight would mar the very object for which he had committed the
crime.

Should he--could he--at all risks to himself and his fortune, ere it
was too late, strive to undo what he had done; to give an alarm, and
make some excuse or explanation ere life had departed from the
shattered frame of his victim, or leave the latter to his obscure
fate--a grave under his father's roof!

Cowardice and meanness, hatred, jealousy, and avarice all suggested
the latter.

He knew not the depth of this strange prison, or how far down beneath
the foundations of lofty Dundargue and into the rock on which it
stands, the sill or floor of the noisome vault might be.

He listened; not a sound came upward, nor was there any, save the
wild beating of his own heart and the buzzing and singing of blood in
his ears.

He softly closed the wooden trap-door, let the enormous iron hasp
thereof drop over the rusty staple; he closed the massive external
entrance, and stealthily crept or glided away.

There seemed a silence all around him now; such a silence as must
have appalled the soul of the first murderer when he 'rose up against
Abel, his brother, and slew him.'

So the tragedy--the dark crime--was acted as suddenly as it was
weird--suggested by a whisper of the devil!  There was nothing very
tragic in the accessories of the scene; but, as an author says, 'Are
not real tragedies, the social tragedies that go on about us in our
every-day life, enacted like comedies, until the last moment, when
the curtain falls, and all is dark?'

Pale as death in visage (he felt himself to be so), stealthy in step
and eye, he stole away to his own apartment in a modern part of the
mansion.  How he reached it he never knew, but mechanically of
course, and he blessed his stars that he reached it unseen.

He took a long pull at the brandy flask--tore off his collar and
necktie, and cast himself half fainting on his bed, where he lay
panting and gasping heavily.

Every sound that came to his ear, every step that approached, seemed
to Hawke Holcroft the herald of discovery, and he longed with the
most intense nervous intensity to leave this loathed Dundargue behind
him!

Was the Master dying there or dead outright?  Where he lay no sound
could ever reach the external air.  But had not his victim assured
him that no cry could ever come from there--the place was so deep--so
remote?

Would the next evening, when he was to depart, never come?  Then he
had the meals, the family, and their surmises to face!

He had a haggard and hunted look that evening and all next day, which
Lord Aberfeldie, in the kindness of his heart, amid all his own new
anxiety, attributed to the pressure of his monetary affairs.




CHAPTER III.

HOLCROFT DEPARTS.

It was a considerable relief to Holcroft's mind to perceive that this
second abrupt disappearance of Allan excited more surprise than alarm
in his family circle; and in her own thoughts Lady Aberfeldie
secretly connected it with some lovers' quarrel between him and
Olive; it was so like their past relations that some such folly
should intervene.

The bell for dinner sounded much earlier than usual, as Mr. Holcroft
was to depart for the south that evening, and to see him in the
drawing-room dressed _de rigueur_ in black, with spotless shirt-front
and diamond studs, with tie and collar perfect, his hair brushed with
precision and the ends of his tawny moustache waxed out to sharp
points, who could have imagined him an actor in that scene in the
distant arched passage, or connected him with what was lying at the
bottom of that deep, dark oubliette!

Holcroft always thought that great games involved serious hazards;
but now this was a hazard beyond all his previous calculations.

The greatest chance of fortune he had ever seen in his varied life
seemed to be slipping--or to have speedily slipped--away from him,
when Olive Raymond and her cousin suddenly appeared on such amicable
terms; savage emotions of mingled disappointment and revenge filled
his heart, and certainly he had given full swing to them!

Now, what he had done was over; the rubicon had been passed.  He
was--what he dared not name himself: the thought of all that Allan
Graham must endure ere he died (if he was not already dead) was--at
times, but at times only--maddening even to his destroyer; and he
felt that he could not too soon place miles upon miles between
himself and Dundargue; and that, happen what might, he would never
set foot in Dundargue again.

Seated at that luxurious table with the hospitable father, the
patrician-like mother, the tender sister and brilliant _fiancée_ of
him he had slain, with stately-liveried valets in attendance, while
longing for the conveyance or carriage that was to take him to the
station, he _did_ feel more than once as if he would go mad if it
lasted much longer--this acting--this tension of the heart--but, as
we say, for a time only.  He was too near the scene of his awful
crime not to feel his soul shrink with selfish horror and dismay,
which made him nervously twist up, roll, and unroll his _serviette_,
as it is called in Scotland.

Was it only a few hours since he had heard that terrible _thud_ amid
the darkness and the clash of the oak trap-door?  And there were
_his_ family all seated with him--Holcroft--at the same table, all
unconscious of what was lying within a few yards of them, and yet not
considering him the blackest criminal in the world, but a departing
guest to be treated with kindness and courtesy.

Thank heaven he would be far away from them ere Allan would be found
to be hopelessly gone, and he would see nothing of their growing
misery.

To drown thought, care, and memory, Holcroft, after the ladies
retired to the drawing-room, imbibed systematically more than usual.
Ere this, Olive had thought his manner excited--strange only.  Unused
to see men under the influence of wine, she thought no more of it.
But, as Holcroft took to 'lacing' his clicquot with brandy when
occasion served, that may account for some of the peculiar remarks to
Olive yet to be recorded.

From an early period Eveline had conceived a shuddering kind of
aversion of Holcroft--an emotion not rare in certain nervous
organisations like hers; nor could she have explained why more
particularly _now_ his presence, though at table as usual, had filled
her with an undefined distrust and dread; yet so it was.

But in the drawing-room her own thoughts came more than ever back to
her, and these were all of Evan Cameron.

'He is gone!' she was always whispering to herself; 'too probably for
ever and for ever.  We shall never meet again.  How dull my world
will seem without Evan, and how old and queer I begin to feel
already!'

But poor Eveline knew not what a small place the world is--now-a-days
especially.

'You seem rather out of sorts,' said Lord Aberfeldie, who had been
eyeing 'his old friend's son,' while pushing the decanters towards
him; 'I hope there is nothing wrong with you, especially as this is
your last evening here.'

'No, nothing very wrong,' stammered Holcroft, scarcely knowing what
to say, but driven to shelter himself under what was his normal
condition; 'it is only--only----'

'What?'

'I have had more than one annoying letter,' he said, with a kind of
gasp, and paused.

'About money--of course?' said Lord Aberfeldie.

'One was a threat from a tailor,' replied Holcroft, making a terrible
effort to appear facetious, 'who says if I don't pay him he will take
means to make me do so.'

'And you?'

'Wrote back that I was delighted to hear he had the means, as this
was more than I had.'

'Well, my dear fellow, your father was one of my oldest friends; for
his sake can I square it for you?'

'Oh, Lord Aberfeldie, don't think of that!'

'What's the total?'' asked the other, opening a davenport.

'Close on £500,' said Holcroft, with an effort, which certainly was
an emotion, but not gratitude.

'There, Holcroft--pay me when you can, or choose,' said Lord
Aberfeldie, throwing down his pen, closing the davenport, and handing
a cheque for the sum named to his guest, to stop whose thanks he
plunged at once into the inevitable story of the charge of the Black
Watch along the Kourgané Hill; how he fell wounded; and how, but for
Holcroft's father, 'a squad of infernal Russians,' _et cetera_, and
so forth.

'Another glass of Moët, and then we shall join the ladies.'

'Life is a hard game with some of us now,' said Holcroft, as he
pocketed his cheque.  'As some one has written, "Men cannot go
freebooting or looting now, except in business; and it is quite a
question whether a modern _promoter_ is not quite as respectable a
member of society as a riever used to be, in the old days when right
was might."

'And Dundargue was built,' added Lord Aberfeldie, laughing.

'I did not say so.'

'Ah, but you thought it.'

And now they rose from the table.

Holcroft was not the better, but rather the worse for his potations.
He had eaten little and drunk much.  Thus he looked very pale--almost
ghastly; and a strange fixed grimness replaced occasionally the usual
restlessness of his shifty pale eyes and freckled face.

Curiously enough he had hovering in his mind a kind of vengeance just
then at Olive.  But for her sudden, and, as he thought, capricious
preference for her cousin, and throwing _him_ so completely over, the
deed he had committed would never have been done.

Eveline had withdrawn to her room, whither her mother had followed
her, bent on worry and expostulation no doubt; Lord Aberfeldie was
required by his steward, and Holcroft found Olive seated alone in a
bay window of the drawing-room, watching the last rays of the sun
fading out behind the Sidlaw Hills.

'Another hour--even less, Miss Raymond--and my place here will be
vacant,' said he, in a low and unnatural voice, while attempting to
hang over her chair in his old fashion.

'I got back my bangle, thanks,' said she, a little irrelevantly, but
feeling a necessity for saying something.

'Have you forgotten all that passed between us before and after you
allowed me to retain it.'

'I never allowed you to retain it, nor aught of mine, save perhaps a
bud from a bouquet.  I have not forgotten that you, apparently,
sought to do me a great honour, Mr. Holcroft; but I scarcely thought,
even then, that you were serious.'

'Serious!  Did you not know that I loved you better than my own life.'

'I cannot listen to this kind of thing,' said she, rising with
positive hauteur and annoyance in her face and manner; 'you forget
yourself.'

'When with you I always do--forgive me!'

'I cannot forgive you for talking to me thus.'

'You used not to dislike me, I know; and now there is no sacrifice I
would not make to win your love----'

'Permit me to pass!' exclaimed Olive, but he barred her way, and now
a glow of half-tipsy rage seemed to possess him.

'Listen, Olive Raymond,' said he, in a low, concentrated and almost
fierce tone; 'I have dared and risked much for you--more than you can
conceive.  There has seldom been aught that I have sworn to possess
that has not in time been mine--mine, do you hear!  To those who
wait, their time and turn always come.  I have sworn to possess you,
and woe to the man who comes between us.'

She regarded him with a haughty and scared yet scornful eye.  She saw
now that this melo-drama was the result of wine.

'Do you think you could compel me to love you?' she asked, with a
provoking smile.

'No.'

'What then?'

'To marry me.'

'Under what pressure, sir?'

'That is my secret---in time you may find it out,' he added, bowing
to her with ominous, not mock, politeness, as she passed him with a
haughty stare, and left the room.  'She forgets that I have yet her
photo, with her own name written on the back in her own hand; and if
ever man put the screw on a woman by such a little thing as that, I
shall put it on you, Olive Raymond, if you continue to play my Lady
Disdain to me!'

And for a moment he cast after her retiring figure a glance of
sardonic hate a devil might have emulated.

'Good-bye,' he muttered, mockingly, 'is an unpleasant thing to say;
with us let it be _au revoir_ rather; perhaps she may yet wave a damp
pocket-handkerchief from the outward wall as I ride away; who knows.'

'Sorry to say time is up, my dear fellow,' said Lord Aberfeldie,
entering the room with his hat and driving gloves; 'make your adieux
to the ladies.  There is little doubt that Allan has gone to
Loganlee--the covers are first-rate there.  I'll just drive over and
see, dropping you and your traps at the railway station _en passant_.'

A few minutes more and the pair were tooling down the avenue in a
smart mail phaeton, drawn by a pair of fine, high-stepping dark
greys.  So Lord Aberfeldie drove 'the son of his oldest friend' to
the station, and, as the distance increased between himself and
Dundargue, Holcroft's spirits revived, as if nothing had happened
there at all; he actually said,

'And you think to find Allan at Loganlee?'

'I haven't a doubt of it--some tift with Olive, no doubt.'

'_Au revoir_, Lord Aberfeldie! and a thousand thanks for all your
kindness to me--never shall forget it, by Jove! but I shall have the
pleasure of seeing you all again in town, of course.'

To this expression of pleasure Lord Aberfeldie made no response, but
shook Holcroft's hand, whipped up his greys, and was off, thinking,

'I am glad _he_ has gone; he looks sadly strange and queer, poor
fellow.'

Holcroft was intensely relieved when the peer had left, and, making
straight for the railway buffet, imbibed glass after glass of pretty
potent Glenlivat, conversing affably the while with the young damsel
thereat.

'Of what are you thinking, sir, that you stare at me so?' she asked,
with a giggle.

'Only that your mother must have been a sweetly pretty girl!'

The train was late; thus he had to spend some time in staring
aimlessly at the flaming advertisements on the station wall--an
Anglo-American fashion now spread to Scotland--advertisements of some
one's cocoa, some one's corsets, some one's whisky, and so forth;
and, after glancing with a contemptuous malediction at the thick
bible left by the Scottish something society in the little
waiting-room, he smoked a cigar, had himself weighed, had a brandy
and soda, had some more chaff with the pretty girl at the buffet,
till the night train came snorting and clanking in, when he took his
seat, spread his rugs, and was off, as he thought, to security at
last!

Though he was not without reasonable and selfish dread for the
future, as the night train sped on its swift way, and left the Carse
of Gowrie far behind, he felt no genuine compunction for the atrocity
he had committed.

He did not possess a single spark of honour, gratitude, compunction,
or compassion.  By unfair play he had rooked many; he had hocussed
horses; and once ruined a poor lad in the Lancers, on whom he
contrived to cast the suspicion of his own act.  The Lancer was
dismissed the service by sentence of a court-martial, and shot
himself next day; and Hawke Holcroft took his luxurious luncheon
quietly in the same inn where the inquest was held, at the same time.
He had extorted money in many ways--he had never precisely robbed;
but never before had he been in the dark abyss of assassination and
death till now!

The annals of our courts of justice contain many a terrible tale of
guilt; but, says a novelist with truth, these would appear like
nothing with the history of undiscovered and unpunished crime.  'The
assassin who accomplishes his terrible purpose so craftily as to
escape detection is a cool and calculating fiend, by the side of
whose supreme villainy, the half-premeditated crime of the ordinary
shedder of blood, is dwarfed into insignificance.'

So on and on sped the swift night train, and there seemed every
probability that the deed of Holcroft would be one of the crimes
referred to, that are neither discovered nor punished.

He gave a last look into his pocket-book to assure himself that the
cheque and the photo of Olive were safe, and then tried to compose
himself to sleep.

Let us hope that the attempt was vain!

He could not help pondering over the remark of Allan about how foetid
the air of the oubliette was--that the door had not been opened for
an age, and no one ever thought of going near it.




CHAPTER IV.

SUSPENSE.

Lord Aberfeldie drove home in some alarm and dismay.  Allan was not
at Loganlee, nor had he been near it!  When Ruby, the amber-haired
little beauty, heard of his visit and its object, she was not slow to
connect Allan's second disappearance with some lover's quarrel
between him and Olive, and to gather certain jealous and pleasant
hopes therefrom, for Allan was decidedly 'a weakness' of Ruby's.

Uncertainty and suspense were increasing now in all their minute
horror at Dundargue; while surmises proved endless, futile, and
unavailing.

He was gone--but where, or how, and why?

'Something has happened--something fatal--to my son!' wailed Lady
Aberfeldie.  'Give me back those fatal diamonds, Eveline.  They are
never worn, that sorrow does not come to Dundargue!'

'Take courage, my lady,' said old Tappleton, the butler; 'ill news
aye travels fast enough, and if ought was wrang wi' the Master, we
should hae heard o't ere now.'

Evan Cameron, now with his regiment, and the legal agents of the
family at Edinburgh, were alike perplexed on the receipt of letters
from Lord Aberfeldie inquiring anxiously if they knew anything of the
movements of Allan, and both telegraphed back that they could give no
information on the subject.

With these telegrams the last hope passed away, and when the third
day of his disappearance began to close a kind of horror seemed to
settle over the household, and again a general, and, of course,
unavailing, search was made through the entire neighbourhood.

On the face of the servants, male and female, there was never a smile
now, as they all loved Allan well; it was no assumed expression they
wore; but they went about their daily work with a hushed and subdued
air as if there was death in the house, and they fully felt the
weight of the mystery.

And ever at table stood the vacant chair, while covers were laid as
usual for the absent one.

An accident must have happened; but of what nature?  Lord Aberfeldie
was beginning to think grimly, vaguely, and painfully of the future.
If aught fatal had happened to Allan--his only son--an idea from
which his soul shrunk--his cherished title and the grand old house of
Dundargue would pass to a remote cousin, one who, by long residence
in England, by inter-marriage there, by training, breeding, and habit
of thought, cared no more for Scotland and her interests, or for the
traditions of the Grahams of Aberfeldie, than for those of Timbuctoo.

Such ideas and fears had occurred to him once before, he could
remember, when Allan's name appeared among the list of severely
wounded in that episode of the Afghan affair, which won him the
Victoria Cross.

To Lady Aberfeldie, such ideas, if they occurred at all, were minor
indeed to the memories of Allan as the babe she had nursed in her
bosom, and the curly-haired boy who had prattled at her knee; and on
whom, in manhood and his prime, she had gazed with such maternal
pride and admiration when she saw him with the tartan and plumed
bonnet, in all the bravery of the Black Watch.

As for poor Olive and Eveline they could only weep together from time
to time in all the girlish abandonment of woe.

So hour by hour the silent time stole on at Dundargue.

Till now Olive had never known how deeply and truly she loved Allan,
of the hold his image had upon her heart; and how she had repented
the pain her petulance must have cost him.

Her eyes in the morning light looked weary, and yet there was an
unnatural sparkle in that weariness; her rich brown hair, to the
dismay of Mademoiselle Clairette, was left almost undressed, and was
pushed back from her throbbing temples; her lips, though scarlet
still, looked hard, dry, and cracked, while the whole expression of
her face seemed changed.

What was to be the clue, if ever there would be one, to this dreadful
mystery!


Meanwhile it might be inquired by the reader whether Mr. Hawke
Holcroft was troubled by his conscience.  He certainly never betrayed
any outward signs thereof--though conscience has been described as
making cowards of us all--but he was not without certain reasonable
and wholesome fears of discovery and connection of the crime with
himself.

He was far away from Dundargue and all its influences.  In fact, it
seemed a kind of dream to him the circumstance of ever having been
there at all; and as weeks passed on nothing could exceed his
perplexity and astonishment, though located in an obscure corner of
London to avoid his creditors and, _pro tem._, everyone else, to hear
nothing of the affair at Dundargue or of the Master being missing.

Sedulously he searched the daily prints, sedulously he watched the
sensational portions of the evening third and fourth editions, but
the matter was never referred to.  No advertisements appeared
offering rewards; no detectives, or the usual machinery seemed to
have been put in motion.  What could it all mean--this silence and
mystery?

Everything however trivial finds its way into print now, and the son
of a peer--and an officer in Her Majesty's service, too--does not
vanish every day!

At last he got a shock, when a poster proclaimed in large capitals
'_The mysterious outrage at Dun--_' but his sight failed him for a
moment, and when again he looked he perceived that it was not
Dundargue, but 'Dunecht,' that was mentioned with reference to the
affair of a past time.

But in all this we are somewhat anticipating.




CHAPTER V.

THE OUBLIETTE.

In these unromantic, plodding, prosaic days of railways, telegraphs,
and telephones who would imagine that the fine old family mansion of
Dundargue would be the scene of a crime--of a tragedy--suited only to
the days of the Sir Malise Graham of the fourteenth century?

Yet so it was.

Allan was not killed--he was perhaps one of those fellows who are not
easily killed--but he was severely injured by the fall and
concussion, and it was long before he began to struggle back into a
consciousness of existence, as he had fallen partly on his head and
left shoulder.

The former had suffered from that circumstance, and from the dreadful
blow dealt him by Hawke Holcroft; and he was not slow in discovering
that his left arm was useless--broken above the elbow.

'Thank heaven, it is not my sword arm!' he whispered, huskily, as he
strove to stagger up; but only to sink helplessly down again on the
cold stone floor of his prison.

He was too weak--too confused to feel either just rage or indignation
yet.  There was a horrible dream-like sense of utter unreality in the
whole situation in which he so suddenly found himself, and some time
elapsed before the whole episode with Holcroft--his unfortunate offer
to show him this fatal place, the situation and character of which
had suddenly suggested the crime--their idling in the
picture-gallery, smoking and wandering through corridors, up and down
ancient stairs, with eventually a sudden recollection of the whole
adventure--surged into his brain, and a gasp of rage escaped him.

'Accursed coward and villain!' muttered Allan, looking upward; but
all was darkness there and around him.

The hours stole on.  He staggered up, and at last began to explore
the place in which he found himself--a somewhat needless act, as he
knew it but too well, having many a time, when a boy, with fear, awe,
and curiosity, lowered down a candle at the end of a string, and seen
it swaying to and fro far down below till the damp vapour
extinguished the flame.

Yet he felt with his right hand the circular wall of massive masonry
which enclosed him, carefully again and again, in the desperate hope
of finding some outlet, though he knew well by the history and
traditions of the place that no such thing could ever have existed;
but he could not remain still or withstand the nervous desire for
exertion--to be up and doing something; till again he sank on the
floor in utter weariness of heart, albeit that heart was aflame with
rage.

He uttered shouts for help from time to time, till his voice became
hoarse and began to fail him, and his spirit too, as he knew the
enormous thickness of the old walls around him; and tears of rage
almost escaped him as he pondered over the cold and calculating
villainy, of which he was now so mysteriously the helpless victim.

He had no doubt that the hours of the night were now stealing on, and
that long ere this his absence must have been discovered, and
speculation would be rife.  He had his watch, but he was in utter and
blackest darkness, and his box of cigar lights having dropped from
his pocket he had no means of consulting the dial.

He could but lie there in great pain and passive misery--a misery
that seemed so unnatural that it was like a nightmare, an unreality,
that must pass away as suddenly as it had come upon him.

How terrible and indescribable, however, grew his aching thoughts as
the weary time went on!

He might die of cold, of hunger, of agony--die within a few yards of
his own hearthstone--die thus under his father's roof, and close by
where at that very moment the whole family were a prey to
bewilderment and distress by his sudden disappearance!

Oh, it was all too maddening to think of.  So there he could but lie,
buried, immured, entombed in darkness; chill as death, not a breath
of pure air in his nostrils; not the faintest glimmer of light, and
no human sound in his ears.  As the hours crept on he could scarcely
distinguish waking from sleeping, a dream from reality; and at times
all seemed to become chaos, and he could think of nothing unless it
were a buzzing in his head and the acute agony of his broken arm.

Anon he would utter a feeble shout for 'help,' but his own voice
seemed to return to him; beyond the walls that enclosed him it would
not go.  He knew that there are situations in life incident to misery
and painful excitement, when the human machinery by the rapidity of
mental action is worn out sooner than its alloted time, and he began
to consider how long it was possible to exist without food or water.

Wearily, agonisingly the hours dragged on.

By this time he was certain that night had passed and day had come
again; and what must the thoughts of his people be?  Inquiries and
searches would be made he knew, but who would ever dream of searching
for him where he was _then_.

He had not yet begun to suffer from hunger, but he had a considerable
thirst, and hunger would come too.

He thought of all he had read of the endurance of men on rafts and in
open boats at sea; of entombed miners buried deep in the bowels of
the earth, and his hair seemed to bristle up at the recollections.
Hunger, thirst, and an unknown death--or death at such craven hands.

'Oh, God,' he moaned, 'will aid never--never come?'

In that gruesome place and time there occurred to him--ghastly
memory!--thoughts of the unknown and forgotten dead whose matted
bones had been found in it by antiquarian explorers, as he had
mentioned to Holcroft--the remains of unfortunate creatures flung in
there by his forefathers.

Could it be that this unlooked-for fate of his was to be a species of
expiation for them?  And was he to die now by this death, when life
had become to him so much dearer than ever?

If his disappearance remained utterly unaccounted for, and his death
became--as of course it would be--a thing of the past, and forgotten
even by those to whom he was dear, might not Hawke Holcroft regain
such influence as he had ever possessed over Olive and make her his
own?  She would be free then; there would be no obstacle, and no
other rendering of the will necessary, now that _he_ was removed.

Never again to see her face or the faces of those he loved and who
loved him so; to die a rat's death, within arm's length of them
almost!  Could his ancestor have foreseen, when he formed this
infernal trap, that one of his own race was to perish therein, and
thus!

After a time, amid all this tangle of terrible thoughts, he began to
forget where he was; his senses partly left him; he believed himself
to be with the regiment--the Black Watch, with their dark tartans and
historic crimson plumes; he heard the crash of the drums, the braying
of the pipes, and saw many familiar faces around him, those of
Cameron and Carslogie among others.  Now the regiment was going into
action; he saw the line forming, the eyes of the men lighting grimly
up as they loaded, and the sunshine flashed upon the ridges of
levelled steel.  The dream seemed a palpable one, and, with a shout
louder than he thought he could utter, he called upon them to follow
him in the charge!

His own cry awoke or roused him; the glorious vision of the charging
line melted into opaque darkness, and now Allan found himself weaker
than ever.  He thought all was nearly over with him now.  He turned
his thoughts to prayer, ere it might be too late, and from pondering
on release and vengeance and the things of this life, he began to
think, as his powers ebbed, of the life to come.

He felt that he must resign himself to the inevitable, and to die--to
die there after all, and at last he became totally insensible.




CHAPTER VI.

CEAD MILLE MALOCH!

The shout uttered by Allan in his delirium had not been uttered in
vain.

It chanced that Mr. Tappleton, the silver-haired old butler, who had
been custodier of the wine binns and the massive old plate in its
iron-bound chest, since the present Lord Aberfeldie was a baby in
long clothes, had entered his dusty and cobwebbed repositories, and
was seeking through their stone shelves for some fine old crusted
port of a peculiar vintage, kept alone for the use of his master and
himself, when the cry of Allan and some other strange sounds reached
his ears, as he thought, and seriously startled him.

We say he thought, for the recess of his wine binns was an unlikely
place to hear any other sound than that made by a scared rat.

It was now the dead, dull silence of midnight, when the sounds that
are unknown amid the buzz of mid-day life are heard, and seem so
oddly, so preternaturally loud and strange--a crack in a door panel
or wainscot, the tap of a moth against the window-panes, distant
noises that come we know not how or from what on the still damp air.

In a country house at night there is usually a solemn stillness that
is painful and oppressive to the wakeful; and it was amidst this
silence, the cry--for a human cry it was--reached the butler's
startled ear.

But whence had it come?  Out of the stone wall, or from the ground
beneath, or from the throat of a raven in one of the great chimneys
of the old house?

'Impossible!' thought Tappleton; 'it was the voice of a man--or a
ghost.'

At the latter idea he closed the wine-binn door, and retired with
precipitation to his cosy room, and thought the matter over as he
stirred and sipped his hot whisky toddy, but feeling ever and anon
that wild throbbing of the heart, and 'that electric chill and rising
of the hair which accompanies supernatural panic.'

The old man had a most uncomfortable feeling about the voice he had
heard, and its strangely muffled sound seemed to come in fancy to his
ear again and again; and now he, not unnaturally, began to associate
it with the mysterious disappearance of Allan, the Master.

With earliest dawn he betook himself to his wine cellar again, and
felt that he was a bolder man in daylight than in the gloom of
midnight; but 'most men are,' says Charles Dickens; yet when an
unmistakable moan or two reached his ears, his fear of the
supernatural so nearly gained the ascendancy that he was about to
take to flight again.

However he paused, while his old heart beat painfully, and began to
think of what adjoined his cellars, and at once there flashed upon
his memory the locality of the horrible old vault; for the butler
knew all the 'outs and ins' of Dundargue as well as if he had built
it.

In the course of modern alterations and repairs a portion of the
originally enormous wall of the vault had been thinned and cut away.
There were crannies in the masonry, and it was through these the
voice of the imprisoned had reached the butler during his casual
visit to his cellar.

'Some one is there.  Good Heavens! if it should be the Master--the
Master after a'!' exclaimed Tappleton; and, quick as his old legs
could carry him, he rushed up stairs, through the picture-gallery,
along the arched corridor, and reached at last the oak trap-door; but
when he saw it, with its great iron hasp over the rusted staple, hope
died away, and his soul sank within him.

Loth to linger in a place where, as we have stated, superstition
believed that those who did so, had a creeping sense of having near
them shadowy forms and intangible presences, he was on the point of
turning away, when, controlling his silly fears, he thought he might
as well pursue his investigations further.

He raised the trap-door, and almost immediately a voice ascended to
his ear from the darkness below.  He peered down, but could see
nothing.

'Wha is there--wha spoke?' asked the butler.

'I--I, the Master,' replied the weak voice of Allan Graham.

'You, sir--heaven be gude tae us!  You sir! hoo in God's name cam' ye
to be doon there?' cried Tappleton, in mingled joy, horror, and great
perplexity.

'Summon help--there's a good old fellow; get me out, and then you
will know all--quick, Tappleton, or--or I shall not last much
longer,' replied Allan, faintly, and at intervals, in a voice so low
that his last words seemed to die away, while Tappleton rushed off as
fast as his years would permit, to seek Lord Aberfeldie and alarm the
whole household, which he did very effectually by a sudden and
furious application to the great house-bell, causing a very general
idea of fire, and bringing all from their rooms in various kinds of
_déshabille_ at that early hour of the morning.

'The Master's found--the Master's found!' he kept shouting on every
hand.

'Where--where?' asked twenty voices.

'Ay, ye may weel ask _whar_,' was the tantalizing response.

In the breast of Lord Aberfeldie and all his household incredulity at
first, and then profound astonishment, reigned for a time on the
butler making himself understood, and all hastened to the scene of
his discovery.

'The Master--the Master down there,' muttered the servants, looking
inquiringly in each other's faces.  'How came such a thing to pass?'

They jostled and impeded each other; but Lord Aberfeldie's authority
and soldier-like promptitude soon defined a line of action.

'Lights--lights and ropes; look alive, men!' he exclaimed.

These requisites were soon brought.

'Lower away--take courage--we'll soon have you out,' exclaimed his
father.  'Tie the ropes tightly round you.'

Allan, in a faint voice, made them aware that this was impossible, as
his left arm was broken, tidings which added commiseration and grief
to the blank amazement of Olive, Eveline, and his mother.

'Who will go down?' asked Lord Aberfeldie, looking around him.

'I--and I--and I!'

Every man in the house was ready to descend, but Angus Glas, the
active young deerstalker, slid down the rope with a lanthorn in his
hand, followed by the prayer of Olive, who would not be kept back,
her eyes wild, her now pale lips apart, her sweet face blanched, and
a strange stiffness in all her usually lithe limbs.

Pale as death, his face plastered with dried blood--blood that had
flowed from a contusion in his head--livid and helpless, his left arm
hanging limp as an empty sleeve by his side, his eyes half closed, as
if unable to endure the glare of the day after being so long in the
dark, Allan was brought up, and, on beholding him, the exclamations
of commiseration and astonishment redoubled; and yet it could be seen
that he was almost past questioning, and mounted grooms were
instantly despatched to summon all the medical aid of the district.

Had the butler's nocturnal visit to his binns been twenty-four hours
later, Allan Graham must have perished, and his fate might never have
been known in his own generation perhaps.

The whole catastrophe seemed so strange, unintelligible, unnatural,
and harrowing that the nerves of Lady Aberfeldie were terribly shaken
by it; so were those of her daughter and Olive, and each needed all
the comfort and support the other could give.

Some wine, which he drank thirstily, first revived the patient after
he was conveyed to his room.

'How in the name of heaven, Allan, came you to fall into that place?'
asked his father.

'I did not fall in,' replied Allan, in a species of husky whisper.

'How then?'

'Holcroft!' was all Allan could utter, when the room seemed to swim
round him and he became insensible.

Lord Aberfeldie knew not precisely what to make of the reply, but
suspicion gave him a certain clue to what he thought had happened,
and the same idea seemed to occur to young Angus, the gillie, who was
assisting to undress his master and put him to bed, for his eyes
gleamed under their shaggy brows, and he could only mutter from time
to time,

'_Cead mille maloch!_'

A malediction in which Lord Aberfeldie heartily concurred.

When ultimately the Peer learned all that had transpired, the
incident of the cheque he had so innocently and generously given
Holcroft was completely forgotten.  He felt only rage, mingled with
utter stupefaction, that a man could act so basely as his recent
guest had done.  It was altogether out of his calculation and
experience of human life in every way.

'But what is to be done now--to search out and punish this malignant
scoundrel?' he exclaimed; while Lady Aberfeldie, all her motherly
feelings outraged, was for raising fire and sword, and letting loose
all the terrors of the law on Holcroft's head.

Lord Aberfeldie, however, after a time thought differently.  He had a
horror of publicity, of newspaper gossip and scandals, of making his
honoured and ancestral home and the affairs of his family a _point
d'appui_, as he said, for such things--a world's wonder, even for a
time; and thus he declined to attempt to punish Holcroft for an
outrage none had seen him commit.

He would leave that to the course of events, and to Time, the avenger.

More than all, the name of Olive Raymond might crop up in the
unseemly matter.

'His father was a brave, good fellow, and my dearest friend!' said
Lord Aberfeldie sadly; 'how comes his son to be such an utter
villain?  He has drawn his evil tendencies from some past generation;
it is said that such a kind of poison is at times transmitted in the
blood, and that no human being can truly value the resistance of sin
or folly.'

But Lady Aberfeldie was stormy, and declined to be pacified.

'We have the future to think of,' said her husband again; 'evil
tongues to guard against for the sake of Olive, our whole family, and
my old comrade the General, who is now in his grave--the father of
that foul ingrate.'

Thus it was that no mention of the affair was made by the daily
prints, to the surprise, certainly, and perhaps the relief, of
Holcroft's mind.

'Say no more on this subject, Eveline,' said Lord Aberfeldie, as he
sought to soothe his wife.  'Gladly would I forget that we had ever
sheltered at Dundargue a guest so degrading in character; gladly
would I forget as soon as possible--if it be possible--the hours of
intense suffering we have undergone, more than all that Allan must
have undergone in that horrible place, and yet under his own roof!'

Many a silent and reproachful tear Olive shed in secret, as she knew,
in the recent past time, how much her pride, petulance, and suspicion
had done to further jealousy and resentment in the mind of Holcroft
against her cousin; and she felt that too probably she had caused all
this.

But Holcroft was a bankrupt and a blackleg now, and never more, at
London or anywhere else, she thought, could he cross _her_ path
again.  Till now she never believed that the world could contain a
man so utterly unprincipled, so thoroughly base!

The household servants supposed that the Master had fallen into that
gruesome vault by accident, and they were allowed to adopt the idea.

'But who closed the trap and dropped the hasp over the staple?'
thought old Tappleton; yet eventually he allowed himself to be talked
into the idea that he had made a mistake in that matter.

Allan lay long ill and delirious after all he had undergone; but when
it was announced that he was past danger, great was the rejoicing of
all the servants and the household at Dundargue, for all loved the
Master well, and were faithfully attached to the family by ties of
residence and clanship, even in this Victorian age.  'The devoted
loyalty of the clansmen to their chiefs existed undiminished for
generations after the system of clan government was abolished in
1746,' said the _Standard_ newspaper recently; 'and it would be
wholly erroneous to contend, _even now_, that the peculiar affection
between the people and their chief, altogether different in nature
and degree from any relationship known in a Saxon community, has died
away.'

But the family of Aberfeldie had not seen the last of Mr. Hawke
Holcroft.




CHAPTER VII.

LOVERS.

The early days of the spring subsequent to the events we have
narrated, found the Aberfeldie family located at Maviswood, a
handsome modern villa to the west of Edinburgh, whither they had
removed from Dundargue, that Allan, on whom a kind of protracted
illness had fallen, might avail himself of the great medical skill
which is always to be found in the Scottish Metropolis.

By what means Allan was discovered and got out of the vault into
which he had been flung, and, as Hawke Holcroft hoped, was entombed
for ever, the latter never knew, from the plan adopted by the family,
but the public prints had informed him more than once, that 'the
Master of Aberfeldie had met with an accident--a fall--from the
effects of which he was slowly recovering; wounds received when on
service with the Black Watch retarding his progress to health.'

Evan Cameron, Carslogie, and others of the regiment, then in the
Castle of Edinburgh, heard of Allan's affair or illness in a vague
way, as Lord Aberfeldie shrunk from all gossip, publicity and
surmise; and the first-named learned that Eveline's marriage had been
delayed in consequence of that illness, chiefly through a letter
written to him by Olive, at Allan's request.

So the early days of spring were passing on, and no particular change
had taken place in the relative positions of our characters since we
last saw them at Dundargue.

Eveline was alone one afternoon in a room at Maviswood--a room of
vast proportions.  The ceiling was divided into deep panels of oak
colour; a dado of dead gold tint was carried round the walls to
within eight feet of the cornice, and the chairs and ottomans were
upholstered in blue maroquin leather, studded with elaborate gilt
nails.  The hangings were blue, with yellow borders, lining and
tassels; great china bowls, full of conservatory flowers, stood on
ornate tables and pedestals, within the recess of a great triple bay
window, beyond which spread away southward the lovely landscape that
is bounded by the Pentlands.

Spring is a lovely and joyous season everywhere, but nowhere is it
lovelier than in the fertile Lothians; and nowhere may the eye rest
upon a more varied and beautiful landscape than that which spreads
from the southern slope of Corstorphine's wooded crags to the base of
the green and undulating Pentlands, the highest summits of which
range from sixteen hundred to nearly nineteen hundred feet.

There are corn-fields teeming with fertility, rows of stately trees,
pretty cottages, stately white manor houses, and cosy farms embosomed
among old woods and orchards; the picturesque rocks of wooded
Craiglockhart, wherein the kites and kestrels build their nests; the
rich alluvial land, where for ages a great loch once spread its
waters; the quaint old village church, on the spire of which the red
sunset loves to linger; and westward the Queen of the North, in all
the glory of castled rock, and hill and crag, spire, tower, and
countless terraces; and on all of these the wistful eyes of Eveline
Grahame were wandering dreamily.

A golden glory was cast along the eastern slopes, the fleecy clouds
were every moment assuming new forms and lovelier colours; the woods
were budding forth; the Leith and its tiny tributaries were brawling
along as if their waters had no time to toy with the brown pebbles.
Seated, at times, sideways on their horses, the happy ploughboys were
already going home from their labours.  The early-yeaned lambs were
frisking about the ewes, and cloud and sunshine seemed to chase each
other over the tender grass, where the wild white gowan was opening
its petals, and old folks were remembering that 'a peck o' March dust
was worth the ransom o' a king.'

Of late, Eveline's bursts of girlish merriment had been few and far
between.  She was fretful--unusually so for a girl who by nature was
so sweet and gentle, and at the mere mention of the name of Sir
Paget--to whom she felt herself doomed, as it were, or allotted--she
became more fretful, silent, and abstracted.

She shrank from smiling people, turned her back upon inquisitive
ones, and often was found to answer briefly and beside the point.

In short, the pretty Eveline's heart or mind was quite unhinged.

The tenth day of her residence at Maviswood was creeping slowly on,
and she was pondering, full of thought, alone in that stately room,
when a servant startled her by announcing and ushering in 'Mr. Evan
Cameron,' and, though her mind was full of him--of the evening of the
carpet-dance at Dundargue, and the hour of joy in the half-lit
corridor, a kind of gasp escaped her as she rose from her seat to
receive him.

But why should he not call, reason suggested to her.

The Grahams had been for ten days, we have said, at Maviswood; and
Cameron, who had been counting every hour of those ten days, and
watching the villa with his field-glass from his quarters in the
distant castle, had now ventured to make an afternoon walk, and
found, beyond his hopes, that Eveline was alone.

Allan and Olive were out together in a pony-phaeton; Lord and Lady
Aberfeldie were he cared not where; anyway, they were absent too.

Olive, feeling that she was in some way responsible, by her past
thoughtlessness, petulance, and flirting with the daring and unworthy
Holcroft, for much that had befallen Allan, now 'waited on him hand
and foot,' as the old nurse Nannie phrased it.  She was with him from
hour to hour, and, though their marriage was delayed, how happy they
seemed to be!

Fearing interruption as before, Cameron, too tender and true not to
be a timid lover, found a difficulty just then in taking up the
thread of the old story, and they stood in the bay-window talking
commonplaces, while heart was speaking to heart and eye to eye.  But
'what is speaking or hearing when heart wells into heart?'

Cameron heard all she chose then to tell him about Allan's
'accident,' the bewilderment and alarm of the family, and so forth.
Many friends were spoken of, but Sir Paget was of course referred to
by neither.

Eveline, though so young, had the frank and perfect air of repose in
her manner that came of gentle breeding, and made her seem older than
she was, but gave an assurance that whatever she said, or whatever
she did, was said and done in the right way.  Without coquetry, her
manner was full of simple fascination; but it was undeniably nervous
now, for she read by Cameron's softened voice, and in his brightening
eye, the clear necessity for something else than common-place talk,
when he discovered by a casual remark that Lord and Lady Aberfeldie
were not in the house.

Eveline felt that she had given herself to Evan, and that the tenor
of their interview in the corridor amounted tacitly to an engagement.

An engagement!  But to what end?  It all seemed but a dream, a
delicious dream, of which there was nothing to remind her, not even a
ring, a lock of hair, or the tiniest note.

Unlike Cameron, Eveline, while loving him dearly, had, singular to
say, no thought of marriage with him in the ordinary sense of the
word; for, hemmed round as she was, and destined as she was, the idea
was a hopeless one, judged from her parents' point of view.  She only
felt, poor girl, that she loved, and was full of sad joy--if we may
use the paradox--in the belief that she was truly loved in return.

'How silent you have become,' she said, in a low tone, after a
nervous pause.

'I know not what to say; but love has no need of words, Eveline, nor
needs he many at any time,' he replied, drawing closer to her.  Then
he took a conservatory rose from a vase and exclaimed, 'Eveline
darling, you love me well and truly, don't you?'

'Well and truly, you know, dear Evan,' she replied, as his arm went
round her, and her head dropped on his shoulder.  'What need to ask
me?' she whispered, in a breathless voice.

'Because I cannot hear the beloved assurance too often.'  He kissed
her tenderly, we cannot say how many times, nor would it matter,
while she lay passive in his arms, and then he said, 'Shall we try
our fate with this rose?'

'How?'

'By plucking it, leaf by leaf, saying each time "Lucky, Unlucky,"
till the last leaf comes.'

'Something _à la Marguerite_.'

'Yes.'

'No, decidedly no, dearest Evan.'

'You are superstitious.  Well, so am I.'

'Thus an omen would only torment us, and surely we have
enough--enough----'  Tears choked her voice, and she could only add,
'Trust, dearest Evan, trust.'

'In what, my darling?'

'The great goodness of God.'

The spell of a great love was on both.  Their lips met in a long and
silent kiss, and the rose fell at their feet between them.

A sound roused them--nay, startled them.  They had only time to
separate and affect a sudden interest in the artistic effects
produced by light and shadow on the landscape, when Lord and Lady
Aberfeldie entered the room together, a pretty palpable cloud of
annoyance resting on the brows of both as they politely, but far from
warmly, greeted the visitor.

The peer, who had evidently been out riding, appeared in a black
morning coat and white cords, whip in hand, and the lady, who had
been in the grounds, wore her garden hat and shawl.  She had seen a
visitor ride up to the door from a distant part of the lawn, and had
hurried home, her heart foreboding truly who that visitor was.

And now, while their hearts were vibrating with tenderness, and with
their lips yet tremulously sensible of the sweetness of kisses--the
first kisses of a new and early love--they had to talk enforced
commonplace--or, at least, Evan did so, while Eveline remained
silent--of the news of the day, the expected plans of the ministry,
the probable despatch of a fleet to Egyptian waters, of the chances
of an army following it, of Arabi Pasha and the Khedive, the plot
formed by the Circassian officers, and so forth, till it was time for
the lingering Cameron to resume his hat and depart at last.

Cameron tried to ignore that which, under other and more prosperous
circumstances, would have galled and roused his haughty Highland
spirit--Lord Aberfeldie's coldness of manner when he spoke even of
the regiment, and how certainly it would go to the East, 'as the
Black Watch, thank God, was always in everything, and always with
honour,' while Evan's eyes irresistibly wandered to the face of
Eveline, and memory went back to the twilighted corridor at Dundargue.

But so did the memory of my Lord Aberfeldie.

The peer must have undergone a good deal of training or "drilling"
lately at the hands of Lady Aberfeldie before he could have brought
himself to behave so coldly to one he really liked so well as young
Stratherroch, and one of the Black Watch especially; but then,
perhaps, he was just a little soured by the sequel to the hospitality
and kindness accorded to "the son of his old friend," which son had
contrived by skilful lettering and figuring to add the sum of eighty
pounds to his cheque.

As he bade them adieu Stratherroch observed that Lord Aberfeldie did
not ask him to call again at Maviswood, and keenly did he feel the
omission and all it implied, and with it came the conviction that he
must call no more!

Slowly he rode back to his quarters full of alternately exultant and
bitter thoughts--exultant that Eveline loved him and would never
cease to love him, but bitter ones as he asked himself, to what end!

If poor Cameron had vague and lingering hopes to which he clung (and
doubtless he had)--hopes when seeing Eveline, of proposing or hinting
of meeting elsewhere in the future--they were doomed to blight, for
no such bore fruition; and they had now parted, and her father and
mother thought they should part, as mere friends, who might meet
casually in society, but at all events had better _not_ meet again.

And Cameron feared that, so far as monetary matters stood with him,
his friend Allan might endorse the same view of the situation.

'Stratherroch is a gentleman by birth and position, but poor,
miserably poor,' said Lady Aberfeldie, after he had gone; 'so was
that precious Mr. Holcroft, and when a declension takes place in
tone, manner, and habits, as in his instance, we never know where it
may end,' she added pointedly to Eveline.

'How can you speak of the two men in the same sentence!' exclaimed
the peer, with an asperity for which his daughter thanked him in her
aching heart.

At anytime when Eveline looked south-eastward from Maviswood she
could see the Castle of Edinburgh, and the towering mass of the
western barrack, with all its windows shining in the sun, and she
always did so with tenderest interest, as she knew that _he_ was
there; but, natheless, her experience of at least one London season,
there was much of the guileless child and mere girl in Eveline still,
and she was so sweet and soft, so pliable, and so impressed with her
mother's will and her father's authority, that--that how could Evan
Cameron tell what pressure might be brought to bear upon her, to make
her seem to transfer the allegiance of her heart to another--even to
the wealthy old English baronet, Sir Paget Puddicombe?

Alas! there was to be, in time, a pressure that none could then
foresee.




CHAPTER VIII.

AT MAVISWOOD.

The reports which Mr. Hawke Holcroft--spinning out his precarious
existence by skill with the billiard cue, cards, and the betting
ring--heard concerning the health of his intended victim, one whom he
still absurdly and grotesquely deemed his successful rival, were
undoubtedly true.

With all his natural strength.  Allan Graham recovered but slowly
from all he had undergone, and the many hours he had lingered in that
vault with his fractured limb unset, together with the effect of
certain sabre wounds received when he served in India, retarded his
progress to restoration; but amid his protracted convalescence how
sweet it was, as the pleasant days of sunny spring stole on at
Maviswood, to have the society, the hourly care and attendance of
Olive, in whom he was always, he thought, discovering some new charm
of mind or grace of manner, with much soft tenderness of heart and
hand.

Thus, twice--once in India and again at home--rescued, as it were,
from the verge of death, he had learned the sweetness of life, and
that, whatever its sufferings and sorrows may be, what a priceless
gift it is--a reflection that never occurred to him when going under
fire, or leading a line of Highlanders in their headlong charge.

Lady Aberfeldie was content and happy; Evan Cameron seemed now a
banished man; even Allan never spoke of him, and the progress of
matters between the cousins proved all she could desire.

'Nothing could be more fortunate, dearest Olive, than the attachment
which now subsists between you and Allan; it fulfils all your
father's fondest wishes,' said she, as she met them one day in the
garden, slowly promenading between the flowerbeds, Allan leaning, or
affecting to do so, on the soft, round arm of Olive.

'Yes, mother dear--I agree with you, and also with Peter Simple,'
replied Allan, smiling.

'In what?'

'That the life of a man seems to consist of getting into scrapes, and
then getting out of them again.'

'And you forget now that I ever teased and tormented you so, my poor
Allan,' said Olive, patting his rather pale cheek with her pinky palm.

'Of course I do, darling.  I am not much of a philosopher, but Balzac
is right in his view of human life--that it would be intolerable
without a vast amount of forgetting.'

'And forgiving, too, he might have added,' said Olive, as she
tendered her lips playfully and poutingly for a kiss, which he was
not slow in according.

Poor Eveline, as she watched this happy pair daily under her eyes,
sighed with natural and irrepressible envy; she thought of her own
love for Evan Cameron--secret, ignored, and so liable to excite
maternal scorn and bitterness, with paternal reprehension, when it
came on the _tapis_; while even Allan, at all times so loving and so
brotherly, amid the great selfishness or absorption of his own
passion, seemed, as she thought, to have withdrawn his sympathy from
her now.

One circumstance she deemed most fortunate--Parliament was sitting,
and Sir Paget Puddicombe was in London.

It would seem, then, that between the botheration of Ireland and the
interests of Egypt the affairs of Slough-cum-Sloggit--monetary,
municipal, and commercial--were as likely to be forgotten and ignored
as if that quiet borough had actually been an integral part of
Scotland--a state of matters not to be tolerated.  So Sir Paget was
in his place at Westminster, jerking his head and puffing out his
chest more than ever, and Eveline was freed for a time from his
presence, and the would-be lover-like regard of his suspicious and
keenly-critical old eyes.

And she knew not that almost daily, the moment that he was free from
duty or parade was over, Evan, drawn by an irrepressible craving and
desire to be near her--to see the roof under which she dwelt, the
windows through which she might be looking, the trees under which she
might be walking, was always hovering in the vicinity of Maviswood;
while, by a strange fatality, she, filled by a similar desire, might
be riding with her father, or driving with her mother, through
stately George Street, along the magnificent terrace of Princes
Street, and other great thoroughfares, looking eagerly, but in vain,
for a chance glimpse of him, and perhaps a bow--a mere bow, and
nothing more.

Circumstanced as they were, what more could she look for?

Twice only, and at long intervals, did she see Evan, and on each
occasion how wildly did her loving heart beat as she detected his
well-known figure; but he saw not her, as she rode slowly on by her
father's side, who, if he saw Evan on the first occasion, steadily
ignored the fact, and stared up at the Castle ramparts, where the
sentinels of the Black Watch trod slowly to and fro.

Certainly Evan did not see her.  He was on the garden side of Princes
Street the wooded walk which somewhat resembles a continental
boulevard--in close conversation with a young lady, who seemed to
listen to all he was saying with great _empressement_.

The second time she saw him was after an interval of some days, in
the same place, at the same hour, and with the same fair companion,
to whom her father--thinking, no doubt, to utilise the
circumstance--drew her attention somewhat pointedly.

'Cameron _again_!' said he; 'our friend seems to find other
attractions in the gardens than trees or spring flowers.'

Eveline's heart beat painfully, and the second episode gave her
occasion for much and rather harassing thought.  Her father, by this
remark, showed that he had observed Evan before; but who was the
latter's companion?

Eveline blushed violently up to where the brim of her smart
riding-hat pressed her bright brown hair upon her brow, and down to
where a stiff and snow-white linen collar encircled her slender white
neck; then she grew very pale with constrained emotion, which,
fortunately, her father did not detect.

She did not speak, but pretended to smile, with an effort of
self-mastery, while a lump seemed to rise in her slender throat; for
though the circumstance of Evan, who was debarred from coming to see
her, being seen there again with the same young lady might be a
casualty, a trivial coincidence, and quite explainable, her pride was
piqued and her affection wounded.

Still more were they piqued and wounded when, some days after, as she
was seated in the carriage at the door of a shop in which Lady
Aberfeldie was giving some orders, she saw this girl loitering in the
same spot, looking anxiously around her, as if waiting for some one
who did not come, and whom Eveline's heart foreboded could only be
Evan Cameron!

She snatched from the carriage-basket or reticule a lorgnette,
through which she could see that the girl was more than pretty, very
pale, and though plainly yet fashionably dressed, with an undoubtedly
ladylike air and bearing.

If he was Evan she waited for, he did not keep his appointment, for,
after a time, the stranger turned sadly, lingeringly away, and
disappeared.

A dancing-man, a popular young fellow like Evan Cameron, in one of
the most popular of Scottish regiments, could not fail to have many
lady friends in Edinburgh; but to have been seen twice in the same
place, with the same girl, at the same time, and apparently expected
there a _third_ time, was a little peculiar, and apt to cause Eveline
to speculate upon it unpleasantly.

Was this companionship a matter of daily occurrence?  Or was he, amid
the enforced separation from herself, beginning to replace her image
by another already--already?

The tenderness of their last meeting, in the bay-window at Maviswood,
seemed to preclude this cruel idea, and to the hope that tenderness
inspired, she clung most lovingly; thus, as yet, she did not speak of
the matter to her cousin Olive, who--full of her own love-affair and
her new-found happiness--might not have sympathised with her as once
she would have done; and, to add to her trouble, in a little time she
would have her old admirer beside her again, as the member for
Slough-cum-Sloggit was making arrangements to pair off with another,
and would soon be able to leave London.

However, some happiness was in store for her still.

Cameron, to do him justice, spent too much of his spare time in
hovering about the vicinity of Maviswood not to be rewarded.  Thus,
one clear, bright afternoon, in a lovely and lonely green lane, where
the holly hedges grew close and darkly, where the wood violets spread
their velvet leaves on the sunny banks, and where the mavis and merle
sang, they suddenly met each other, as he came walking slowly along
on foot, leading his horse by the bridle, which was flung over his
arm.

His heart was so full of her that, when he met her suddenly face to
face thus, he scarcely evinced surprise, while tremulously she put
both her hands into his.

'Evan!'

'My darling--at last--at last!'

No eye was upon them there as his arms went round her, and in the
great joy of seeing him, of meeting him thus, the two occasions on
which she had seen him with another, promenading slowly under the
trees in Princes Street, were forgotten and committed to oblivion;
though ere long they were to be roughly brought to her memory.

'Oh, Evan--such long looked-for--such unexpected joy!' she exclaimed,
as hand in hand they gazed into each other's eyes.

'Joy indeed, my own one.  I had begun to fear we might never meet
again; and I shall not leave you now but with the assurance that we
shall meet as often as we can till--till----'

'When, Evan?'

'The regiment marches--marches for the East, as it is sure to do
before long.  Eveline, you must be out in the garden, in the grounds
often; can I not meet you there or here again?'

She shook her head sadly, and looked at him lovingly and imploringly.

'The meetings in secret--without permission--would be wrong, Evan,'
said she.

'Permission--who will give it?  Whom--what have we to consult but our
own hearts?' he continued, passionately.  'We may have but little
time--less than we reckon on now--for the interchange of love and
joy, my dear one; and meet me you shall--you _must_,' he added, as he
folded her to his breast and covered her sweet passive face with
kisses, while something of hostility and defiance at her whole family
and at Sir Paget welled up in his heart.  'You will meet me again?'
he urged.

'Yes,' she replied, in a scarcely audible whisper.

It could be no sin, no crime--if an error--to meet one who loved her
so well as Evan did, and whom she loved so dearly too.  It could not
harm her elderly adorer, from whose image just then she shrank with
intense loathing; and, if it was a wrong against her parents, surely
they were in error to coerce her, she thought.

On the other hand, the temptation was great; the joy of meeting Evan
would end sadly and bitterly when, as he said, the regiment departed,
and after that they might never see each other more!

'Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant,' say
the Scriptures; and not less sweet and pleasant were the interviews
that might be stolen thus in a green and lonely lane.

'God help me and direct me!' thought the girl, as she nestled her
face in Cameron's neck, and, yielding to the natural impulses of her
own heart, promised to meet him again and again, when time and
opportunity served; and they did so in the lane between the holly
hedges, by the rural woodland road that deep between the hills, leads
to Ravelston Quarry and haunted Craigcrook; and at times near the old
church, where the buried Forresters lie under their altar tombs with
shield on arm and sword at side; and as the days went on each
meeting--as it seemed to take place without suspicion or
discovery--served to cement their hearts together more and more.

But once, when Evan was riding home in the dusk in the vicinity of
Maviswood, he passed a wayfarer afoot, in whose face he thought he
recognised--nay, was certain he saw--the features of Holcroft.

'Holcroft!' thought Evan; 'a man to guard against, by Jove.  What can
_he_ be about in this neighbourhood--what but mischief?'

He wheeled his horse round, but the man he had seen, had stepped over
a stile and disappeared.




CHAPTER IX.

'ALICE!'

My Lady Aberfeldie was all unconscious of the little romance that had
been going on for some weeks past in the green lanes and wooded paths
near Maviswood; while Eveline seemed now but to live for the purpose
of meeting Evan Cameron, and her loving heart and busy little head
were full of cunning schemes and contrivances to escape detection and
achieve their meetings, which now seemed to make the whole sense of
her existence; and when not with Evan, or if they failed (which was
seldom) to see each other, even for a few minutes, her manner became
abstracted and triste.

But a rude awakening from her joyous dreams was at hand, and certain
past events that seemed trivial in themselves were doomed to be
recalled to her with a new and terrible significance!

They had one more than usually tender meeting and tender parting,
because Sir Paget Puddicombe--the _bête noir_, the bugbear of
both--was certainly coming to Maviswood, and Eveline was weeping
bitterly.

'Take courage--take courage, my darling,' said Evan, as he kissed the
tears from her eyes and strained her to his breast before he leaped
on his horse; 'for my sake and your own have strength to resist, and
all may yet be well--for my sake and your own, dearest Alice,' he
added, with quivering lips, and was gone.

'_Alice!_'

Another's name uttered by his lips involuntarily while his heart
seemed to be teeming with tenderness for herself--uttered in that
moment of supreme sorrow, passion, and endearment--escaped him
mechanically, as it were, yet too evidently by use and wont!

What did it mean--what could it mean, but one thing?

Her heart stood still for a moment and then beat wildly; she did not
hear the noise of his horse's hoofs dying away in the distance, nor
did she see his lessening figure, for the powers of hearing and of
vision seemed to fail her.

She had received a cruel and terrible shock.  Had she heard aright,
or was it all a delusion of her ear, yet she repeated to herself with
pallid face and quivering lips the word 'Alice!' while memory flashed
back to the girl she had seen thrice--twice with Evan, and once
evidently waiting for him at what seemed their trysting-place.

She remembered that the second time she had seen them they were
walking silently together--full of their own thoughts apparently--and
making no effort to entertain each other, and she had read that it is
only 'the nearest and dearest' of kinships--the closest and sweetest
of human intimacies that could explain such "wordless proximity."
Strangers, acquaintances, when thrown together _must_ politely talk;
brother and sister, husband and wife, may be confidently, blessedly
silent!'

She remembered now, with ready suspicion, that, when she and Evan
first met suddenly afterwards, he scarcely evinced surprise.  We have
said that it was because his heart was full of her image, but this
idea, this hope, did not occur to Eveline then--her mind was a chaos.

How she got through the remainder of that day she never knew; she had
but one wish: to shun her mother's eye.  To seclude herself in her
own room would attract attention; thus she remained in the
drawing-room and affected to read.  She opened a book at the page and
point where she had last left off.

Alas! it was beyond the power of books to soothe or win her from
herself now.  The Lethean power of the novelist had departed, and her
whole mind seemed out of tune.

She threw aside the volume and took up another, but a cry escaped her
as it fell from her hands.  It was Bulwer's 'Alice, or the
Mysteries;' the name seemed to enter her heart like a knife, and she
rushed away to her room.

The dressing-bell for dinner, when it rang, found her very pale, and
wrestling, as it were, with a strange and unusual pain that was
eating its way into her heart.

She bathed her face again and again, but failed to hide the dark
shadows under her eyes or the inflammation of their delicate lids.

And at dinner-time that evening an additional stab was given to her
in the most casual and unexpected way.  Her father had brought from
his club to Maviswood Carslogie of the Black Watch, a heedless and
thoughtless young fellow, of whom she overheard Allan making some
inquiries concerning Cameron of Stratherroch.

'Oh, Strath is jolly as a sandboy,' replied Carslogie, 'but he has
some mysterious affair of the heart on just now.'

'How?'

'In the usual way.  There is a pretty girl he goes about with to all
public places, but introduces to no one.  She is without a chaperone,
and no one knows whether she is maid, wife, or widow; funny, by Jove,
isn't it?'

Carslogie said this in a low voice to Allan, yet not so low but that
it reached the ears of Eveline, who had some difficulty in concealing
her agitation.

With instinctive tenderness Allan glanced at his sister and skilfully
changed the subject to the then invariable topic of Arabi Pasha and
'the coming row in Egypt.'

Times there were when she had thought that she would condescend to go
once again to their trysting-place, and seek an explanation; but now,
after what Carslogie had said, wild horses should not drag her there!

She would never upbraid Evan with his baseness, never more would she
go there; she would simply tear his image out of her heart, and let
the matter end.  But this was easier to say than to achieve.

Her soul seemed to have become numbed within her--frozen, if we may
use such terms.

Even in the matter of Sir Paget, she was conscious now of feeling
neither repugnance nor ridicule, though she felt a little repentance
at her opposition to the wishes of her father and mother, and for the
duplicity of which she had been guilty towards them in her love for
an unworthy object, and meeting him in secret, as if she had been a
sewing-girl or waiting-maid, and not the daughter of a peer, and
putting herself, perhaps, in an equivocal position.

She confided in Olive; otherwise her heart, she thought, would burst.

'The heart is said to be "deceitful above all things, and desperately
wicked,"' said Olive, 'but I must confess that this affair passes my
comprehension.  He cannot be in love with _two_ at once; yet I have
read of such things.  Forget him; you must do that--at least.  You
endure too much, Eveline; you believed in him too much, and, I fear,
hoped too much.  Even friendship has its limits; how much more so
love.'

'And but yesterday I was so happy--happy in a love the end of which I
could not foresee!' wailed poor Eveline, on her cousin's bosom.

What was she like, this Alice?  Her rival--oh, disgrace!  Fair or
dark--she remembered that she was pale and pretty.  But what did it
matter, thought the now crushed girl, as she tossed feverishly on her
pillow in the gloom and solitude of the night, when even our thoughts
seem to assume distinct outlines that become sharp and vivid.

Night had passed--a new day dawned, and how far, far off seemed
yesterday!  The sun had risen in his glory; the blackbirds were
singing in the dew-laden shrubberies of Maviswood; and the pale mists
were clearing off Torduff and Kirkyetton Craig, the highest summits
of the lovely Pentlands.

It was late ere Eveline had wept herself to sleep; but to her it
seemed as if she had not slept at all.  Thus it was proportionately
late when she awoke heavily to the morning of a new day.

She had given her whole soul with joy to her hopeless love for
Evan--hopeless, but pure--though any happy end to it she could not
foresee; but this was a bitter collapse she did not anticipate, and
now her 'occupation was gone.'

Was she the same Eveline Graham who but yesterday morning shook off
sleep so lightly, and rose fresh, strong, and full of hope, with the
conviction that her secret lover was true to her and to this hopeless
passion?

Her affectionate heart was crushed; her self-esteem was in the dust;
her proud head lay low indeed; and for the first time in her young
life she had learned what it is to be cut to the soul--to be
completely humbled.

And Alice--who and what was _she_?

'And oh, Olive, how am I to meet mamma?' was the first exclamation
after they had got rid of Mademoiselle Clairette.

She knew she would have to join in the conversation of the
breakfast-table, when all her vigilance would be requisite to prevent
her from pit-falls of suspicious silence or confusion of manner, with
the helpless air and uncertain voice of one who seeks to conceal a
new and hitherto unknown sorrow: and to undergo, with her sad, white,
humiliated face, her mother's critical and observant eyes.

If, in desperation, she did not act a part, that watchful mother
would be sure to detect a change, and that there was something wrong.

Eveline knew well that she would soon detect every flicker of her
eyelashes, every tremor of the heavy white lids, that would droop in
spite of her now; but luckily Lady Aberfeldie was busy in her boudoir
with the housekeeper and Mr. Tappleton, the butler, giving orders;
for Sir Paget Puddicombe would arrive ere long!

Carslogie had gone back to Edinburgh, of course, last night.  He
would be with Evan Cameron this morning on parade and so forth; would
the latter question him about his visit to Maviswood, about _her_
perhaps?  But what did it matter now whether he did so or did not?
Nothing--less than nothing!

How long the hours seemed now when they were empty--_quite_ empty of
all but bitterness.

Meanwhile days passed on, and Cameron came, as was his wont, to the
usual places of meeting, but Eveline was never there.

What had happened--how was she detained?  Had an illness come upon
her?  His mind was a prey to the keenest anxiety, which he was
without the means of allaying.  He could not write to ask for any
explanation, neither could he call at Maviswood after the somewhat
studied coldness of his last reception there by her father and mother.

At each place and spot where so lately they had met and wandered, the
thoughts that found utterance there, and many a tender caress came
potently and poignantly back to memory now.  Where was she, what
doing, how engaged and with whom--in sickness or in health?--he asked
of himself with endless iteration.

Trivialities are often associated with the greatest eventualities in
our lives.  Thus long in the memory of Evan would his last visit to
one of these beloved spots be associated with the shrill notes of a
mavis perched upon the topmost bough of a tree.

Ignorant as yet of what he himself had done, ignorant also of the
mischief his friend Carslogie had unintentionally done him by
retailing some mess-room gossip, in the vagueness of his thoughts and
ideas of the whole situation, which we shall ere-long unravel,
Cameron was inclined to attribute the total cessation of Eveline's
meetings with him to some mysterious influence of Hawke Holcroft--if
Holcroft it was whom he saw in the dusk.

From Carslogie he learned that 'she was looking well and jolly,' as
he phrased it.  When Allan rejoined he would hear more of her, he
hoped; but Allan's sick leave was protracted from time to time, and
none seemed to know _when_ he would be with the regiment again.

Once these parted lovers saw each other but for a moment only!

Accompanied by a groom, Eveline rode at a canter past him on a lonely
part of the road near Maviswood, her eyes full of unshed tears, her
face pale with resentment, and her veil in her teeth.

Past him, as if he was a stranger!

'Why stop to speak or expect an explanation?' thought the girl.  'In
this world do not actions speak louder a thousand times than words
can ever do?'

She was a Graham of Dundargue, and would show him that she was not of
the kind of stuff that facile Amelias or patient Griseldas are made!

Yet to pass him by thus, cost her a mighty effort, though to Eveline
it seemed that there was nothing left for her now 'but to wrestle
valiantly with that pain which, in the world's eye, degrades the
woman who smarts under it--the pain of an unshared love.'




CHAPTER X.

'THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO.'

'Young Stratherroch seems to have accepted the situation.  He is much
too sharp and well-bred a man not to have seen that he was--well--in
the way rather,' said Lady Aberfeldie to her husband one afternoon.
'One thing is certain at least, he has ceased to visit here.'

'Dropped out of the hunt--yes,' assented the peer, as he filled and
lit his briar-root.  'Poor fellow! he was--or is--undoubtedly fond of
our little girl.'

'Such fondness was folly in one so poor; and now, as Sir Paget comes
to-day, I do not see why we should not have the two marriages at
once.  I am most anxious to have all this fuss ended and done with.'

'There are several deeds to draw and so forth in the matter of Allan
and Olive; and as for Eveline she has not yet consented.'

'She must do so now, I presume,' said Lady Aberfeldie, impatiently
wafting aside with her white hand a cloud of smoke the peer was
creating.

'Both marriages,' said he, reflectively; 'but how if the regiment
goes on foreign service--and the corps expects orders of readiness
daily, I understand?'

'Allan can send in his papers.'

'Impossible!  You do not consider what you say.'

'He is not well enough to go abroad.'

'He is too well to remain behind; and if well enough to marry I fear
that F.M. the Commander-in-Chief will deem him well enough to march.'

'Anyway it will secure Olive's fortune in the family.'

'It is secured as it is by her father's will so long as Allan is
willing to consent; but as our loving daughter-in-law, there will be
no necessity for the enforcement of the clause that is so grotesque.
As regards Sir Paget and Eveline----'

'Leave me to manage Eveline,' said Lady Aberfeldie, bluntly and
loftily.

The result of her management was soon apparent, though she knew not
that circumstances, of which she was as yet unaware, were playing
into her hands, and would yet more completely do so.

'Sir Paget, as you know, Eveline, will be here to-day,' said she,
with an arm round her daughter's neck, 'and we--that is, your papa
and I--trust, child, that you will receive him as you ought, and wear
the jewels he sent you.'

Lady Aberfeldie used her softest yet firmest voice as she spoke to
Eveline, but it sounded to the latter as the voice of one who was a
long, long way off.

She made no immediate reply; but with her hands tightly interlaced,
as if thereby she would quell emotion, seemed to be gazing down at
her nicely pointed little foot that rested on a velvet fender-stool.

'Why mope here, growing pale and thin, for a thing without
substance--a dream--a shadow, Eveline; you understand me?'

'A dream--a shadow, indeed, mamma!'

'You hear me, child?' said her mother.

'Yes, mamma,' replied Eveline, who seemed to shiver with cold as her
mother left her, but with a long backward glance that had more of
menace than entreaty in it.

'He never loved me,' Eveline was thinking.  'I have given my heart
for nothing, and am now cast aside for another, like a broken toy
discarded by a child.  He dared to trifle with me--my father's
daughter!  It is clear now that he fancied, or merely pretended to be
in love with me, while all the time his heart was given to--_Alice_!'

And she would have been either more or less than human, if with her
just indignation there did not mingle a certain sentiment of revenge
that bore her up in the part she meant to act now; though she shrank
as yet from the conviction that, when esteem dies, love dies with it.

So that evening Eveline wore the suite of jewels--such jewels as Bond
Street alone can furnish--and Sir Paget, as he sat by her side,
jerked his little bald head about, in the exuberance of joy, and in a
way that was really alarming.

Olive was looking radiantly beautiful, in a brilliant dinner costume,
with Allan's Maltese suite of diamonds and pearls sparkling on her
neck and arms, which Lady Aberfeldie had urged her to don in honour
of Sir Paget, and in defiance of a _moue_ and pitiful glance of
Eveline, who had no small difficulty in acquitting herself at dinner
in her new role of _fiancée_, but nearly broke down when she heard
Sir Paget raise his voice and say to her father something that he was
not sorry he might say with a clear conscience, and as a
matter-of-fact.

'Oh, by the way, Aberfeldie, when I arrived at the rail way-station
this morning I witnessed a very tender leave-taking between a young
friend of yours and a most charming girl--gad, the fellow has
taste--a girl whom he was seeing off, to London, I presume, by the
Flying Scotsman, it was quite pathetic, by Jove!'

'A young friend of ours--who do you mean, Sir Paget?' asked Lady
Aberfeldie.

'Cameron, of the Black Watch, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at
Dundargue--you remember,' said Sir Paget, playing with the stem of
his champagne-glass, and not daring to look at Eveline, whose white
hand he saw trembling as she toyed with her grapes.

'Oh--oh--indeed--and the young lady----'

'Had "Mrs. Cameron" painted on all her luggage--great Indian
overlands, some of it.'

'_Mrs. Cameron_,' repeated Lady Aberfeldie, whose aristocratic face
shone in spite of herself at these tidings, while Lord Aberfeldie
looked flushed and perplexed, and like Allan, who pitied his poor
sister, remained silent.

This astounding intelligence was to poor Eveline as 'the last straw'
to the over-laden camel; she betrayed no outward emotion, though her
heart and spirit were completely broken down, for a phase of
duplicity which she could never have conceived was now suddenly laid
bare to her.

When, with her aunt and cousin, she retired to the drawing-room, the
latter pressed her hand affectionately and caressingly, while the
former, too proud or too prudent to refer to what they had just heard
so greatly to her satisfaction, sat in a shady corner and slowly
fanned herself in silence with a great round feather fan.

An emotion of jealous spite at young Cameron, with rivalry, passion,
and ambition to possess a young, beautiful, and highly-born wife, all
now inspired Sir Paget, who, to do him justice in the anecdote he had
told, had told no more than the truth, and, for the happiness of Evan
Cameron, we are sorry to say it.

But though now permitting herself quietly to drift with the stream of
events, and to become a tool in the hands of others, it was
impossible for Eveline, when with Sir Paget in the grounds, or when
alone in the drawing-room, not to shrink from his now privileged
caresses and attentions; thus once she shocked him by saying, as she
withdrew her hands from his clasp,

'Oh, Sir Paget, do you really mean to marry a woman who does not and
never can love you?'

'Do not say "never can."  How can we know what the future may have
for me--for _us_, my dear girl?'

'Who, indeed, save One!' sighed the girl, wearily.

'I would rather have half your heart than the whole of any other
woman's,' said Sir Paget, gallantly, while recapturing her hands, and
jerking out his head in turtle fashion.

'My whole heart,' thought Eveline, 'is--oh, no--was full of Evan, but
can have no vacant corner for any other, especially such a man as
this.'

And even while she thought this she shivered as if with cold, when in
right of his new position he caressed her.

'How, with all their innate pride, papa and mamma are content to
abandon me to this absurd little man Puddicombe, as they do, passes
my comprehension,' said she to Olive.  'Puddicombe--such an absurd
name too,' she added, with a little laugh that was hysterical; 'and
what object can the splendour of his settlements be to them?  They
seem to ignore the fact that the Grahams of Dundargue were barons of
the Scottish Parliament when the ancestors of half the British
peerage were hewers of wood and drawers of water--peasantry and
artisans!'

So in the bloom of her youth and beauty, the time 'when the light
that surrounds us is all from within,' Eveline Graham was to become a
victim at the altar after all--after all!

And Cameron seemed to have prepared the path for her, for, stunned by
his too apparent duplicity, she schooled herself for the _rôle_ of
indifference to fate; but this was chiefly by day, for often at night
she would lie where she had thrown herself, across her bed,
forgetting even to undress, her tear-blotted face covered by her soft
arm, and so in the morning the wondering and sympathising Clairette
would find her.

June was creeping on now, with its sunny, fragrant breath; there were
white and purple blossoms in the parterres of the garden; the
graceful laburnums were dropping their golden petals in showers over
the rosebuds and green lawns that were bordered by dark shining
myrtles and deep-tinted laurels and rhododendrons.

From the fields came the rasping sound made by the mower as he
whetted his scythe, before which the rich feathered grass and the
wild flowers are done to death; elsewhere the joyous haymakers were
hard at work, and the dust of June began to roll along the roads
before the wind in the sunshine.

'June!' thought Eveline.  'Where will the winter find me?'

The preparations for her marriage were hurried on with a rapidity
that appalled her; but, dear as the scheme was to Lady Aberfeldie, a
somewhat unexpected event delayed that of Allan and Olive Raymond,
and gave the Aberfeldie family once more something else to think of.

One evening when all the others were in Edinburgh save himself and
Olive--for Eveline's forthcoming marriage kept all rather busy
now--Allan, full of his own happy thoughts, and the joy that would be
his ere long, was smoking in the grounds, when he was startled by a
shrill cry that proceeded from an open window of the house--a French
window that opened to the ground--and swift as light a man dashed
past him and disappeared among the thick shrubberies.

'A thief!' was Allan's first thought; 'but whose cry was that?' was
his second.

The face of the intruder, who passed near him--a pale and familiar
one, seen just as Cameron had before seen it--seemed to be that of
Hawke Holcroft.

'Impossible,' thought Allan, as he hurried towards the house; but it
was not until he had further proofs that he became aware that the
face he had seen--the face of ill-omen--was that of Holcroft!

He hurried into the apartment through the open window, and was
horrified to find Olive prostrate on the floor, with her arms
outspread, and in a fainting condition.  He raised her up and laid
her on a sofa, withdrawing the pillow from under her head, and looked
round for water to lave her face and hands, one of which clutched a
pen.

A large sealskin cigar case, with Rio Hondo cigars in it--a case
which he well remembered to have seen in possession of Holcroft--lay
upon the floor.

How came it there, unless the man he saw was, beyond all doubt, Hawke
Holcroft?

Olive's cheque-book--for she had a bank account of her own--lay open
on her davenport, and Allan's eye caught the counterfoil of one,
dated that very day, and almost wet still, for £400.

'Four hundred pounds!' he gasped, and tried to tear open his necktie,
while the room swam round him.  'Oh, God! can it be that she is
playing fast and loose with me and that double-dyed villain?'

That she should have any intercourse, verbal or written, with such a
wretch excited in Allan a gust of rage and bewilderment, disgust,
horror, and intense perplexity.

Yet it might be all quite explainable--even the cheque.

She opened her eyes and closed them again, and pathetically he
besought her to tell him what had happened, but could elicit no
reply.  Her slender throat seemed parched, as she failed to
articulate.

'Oh, Olive,' said he, 'if I alarm you, forgive me.  You know how I
love you.  Why torture me by this silence--tell me all--_what_ has
happened--_who_ has been here?'

But he urged and pled in vain; her teeth were clenched.

'Is it some folly--some girlish imprudence? _what_ is it?  Dear love,
only tell me?'

Still she was silent, and Allan's brows knit darkly and ominously,
while, in the excited state of his nerves, he felt sharp twinges in
the arm that had been fractured, and, when consciousness came
partially back to Olive, she covered her face with her hands, and
sobbed heavily and spasmodically.

What had happened?  Why was she so suddenly cast down, hurled, as it
were, from the joy, rapture, and repose of an hour ago, to the
apparent agony and shame of the present?

Nothing could be elicited from her, and the next day found her in a
species of hysterical fever, and in the hands of the doctor.

In a short time it was discovered that her cheque--an open
one--payable to Mr. Hawke Holcroft, and duly endorsed by that
personage, had been presented and cashed at a bank; yet no
explanation could be elicited from her about it.

'She had on the ill-omened diamonds, mother,' said Allan,
interrogatively.  'How was this?'

'I lent them to her, as the bride of the house, and doubtless she had
been trying them on when--when----'

'This scoundrel thrust himself upon her presence?'

'I suppose so,' said Lady Aberfeldie, weeping.

'Evil always comes of these accursed stones!'

'It is simply outrageous,' said Lord Aberfeldie, sternly and loftily,
'that even the family of the most humble tradesman should be haunted
by a Frankenstein--a swindler, and worse, like this--but that a house
like mine--the house of a peer of the realm----'

And his lordship in his indignation paused as utterance failed him.

'Mystery is involved here,' exclaimed Lady Aberfeldie, 'and I dislike
it intensely, as vulgar and very bad style.'

'By Jove, I should think so,' added Allan, gloomily; 'but this
affair, like Cameron's marriage, beats the mysteries of Udolpho!'




CHAPTER XI.

'GUP,' AND WHAT CAME OF IT,

And now, ere it is too late, to let a little light on what must seem
a mystery, and to tell a story which Eveline was not to hear until
the fatal die was cast.

'Dear Evan,' said a handsome girl, as she interlaced her slender
fingers on Cameron's arm lovingly in one of the most secluded walks
of the Princes-Street Gardens, and under the shadow of the towering
castle rock, 'I cannot bear to see you looking so unhappy--what _is_
the matter?'

'Eveline Graham has ceased to meet me.  She is ill--or--or I know not
what!'

'Cannot you ascertain?'

'No.  I have no means of ascertaining; moreover, only the other day
she cut me.'

'Cut you--passed you?'

'Cut me dead!'

'Surely that was bad in taste.'

'And cruel too--so unlike her, Alice darling, that I know not what to
think.'

'She has resolved to accept her rich old baronet--that is all; and I
shall hear all about it when I am far away from you in India.  How
strange,' added the girl, dreamily, while a great, yet pensive, joy
lighted up her blue eyes, 'how strange to think that I am still in
Edinburgh, and so far away from _him_, when there was a time when I
wondered if anyone in this world was ever so happy as I, when dear
stupid Duncan asked me to be his wife!  And oh, Evan dear, but for
you and your great kindness to us, my heart must have broken and I
should never have seen Duncan more!'

The fair speaker was the Alice whose name had unconsciously escaped
Evan, as his heart was full of a great love and pity for her--the
wife of his younger brother Duncan, from whom she had been separated
in consequence of a foolish jealous quarrel, and having been, through
that, sent home by him from India, had no other friend in Europe to
whom to turn for succour and support than the kind-hearted, but
half-penniless Laird of Stratherroch, who had at last effected an
explanation and reconciliation between them.

When quartered in cantonments, in the first year of their marriage,
not far from Hurdwar on the Ganges (where Allan got the idol he gave
to Olive) there seemed to be no more loving and attached couple than
Duncan Cameron and his little wife Alice, and both were prime
favourites with the garrison; he, for his fine bearing which made him
the pattern officer of his regiment--a Bengal Infantry corps--his
skill in horsemanship, as a marksman and pigsticker, and his general
_bonhomie_ and good nature.  She, for her beauty and sweetness, her
great abundance of animal spirits, and a charming _espièglerie_ that
made her the object of attention from all.

Ladies were scarce in these cantonments so far 'up country,' and thus
Alice proved a wonderful attraction to all the young subs at the
band-stand, or on the racecourse, and elsewhere; and they hovered
about her rather more than Duncan Cameron quite relished.

She was a leading feature at all the entertainments given by Sir
Bevis Batardeau, G.C.S.I., the brigadier, and his wife; and indeed no
ball, picnic, or dance was deemed complete without the presence of
Alice Cameron.

Now, Sir Bevis was a notorious old _roué_, and the cause of much
'gup,' as scandal or gossip is called in India.  He was a middle-aged
man of fashion, grizzled and rather bald, with a reddish nose and
wicked eyes, while Lady Batardeau, his senior by a year or two, was a
kind and motherly woman, who loved Alice dearly; and 'gup' of course
asserted that the General did so too, in a fashion of his own, and
many things were said that never reached as yet the ears of Duncan
Cameron.

The latter was sent to some distance from the cantonments on a
particular duty, and poor Alice was left to mope in her bungalow
alone.

'I often thought,' she said, 'if anything should ever separate us, I
would die.  The fear smote me like a sword's point, Evan, and the
night Duncan left me a jackal howled fearfully in the compound.  Was
it ominous of evil?  I fear so--for separated terribly we were fated
to be, through no fault of mine.'

These forebodings made her pass sleeplessly the hot and breathless
Indian nights while hourly the cantonment _ghurries_ were clanged,
and the jackals howled in the prickly hedges, and the mosquitoes
seemed a thousand times more annoying--no chowrie would whisk them
out of the muslin curtains; and her breakfast seemed so insipid now,
and Gunga Ram, the _khansa-man_, or native butler, could find nothing
to tempt her appetite; yet Gunga, though, like most Hindostanees,
doubtful of the virtue of every European woman, was devoted to his
own particular _mehm Sahib_.

Every morning she had been wont to watch at the open Venetian blinds
of their bungalow for the handsome figure of Duncan returning from
the early parade, while the sun was yet on the verge of the horizon;
and every evening was spent together in delicious idleness--riding on
the course, promenading by the band-stand, or wandering among the
groves where the baubool breathes an exquisite perfume from its bells
of gold, as the oleander does from its clusters of pink and white
blossoms, and where the lovely little tailor-bird sews two leaves
together and swings in his sweet-scented nest from the bough of some
little tree.

Hourly she longed for the return of Duncan.

She was a petted favourite with Lady Batardeau, who, when calling on
her one day, found her asleep under the verandah outside Cameron's
bungalow on a long low Indian arm-chair.

Thinking how charming the girl-wife looked, Lady Batardeau, in
playful kindness, slipped on one of her fingers a rose-diamond ring,
which had been in the past time a gift to herself from Sir Bevis,
when she valued his gifts more than she had reason to do now; and,
having done this, she went softly and laughingly away.

To the joy of Alice, Cameron returned suddenly while she was yet
puzzling herself to account for the presence of the ring, and for a
time, in the happiness of their reunion, she forgot all about it,
till he, while toying with her pretty hands, observed it on her
finder.

'A magnificent ring, Alice,' said he.  'Where did it come from?'

'That is more than I can tell you.'

'How?' he asked.

'I found that it had been slipped on my finger when I was asleep.'

'By whom?'

'I cannot say, Duncan dear.'

On examining the jewel he saw graven on the inside the name of that
notorious old _roué_ and Lothario, the brigadier!

Lady Batardeau had left the cantonments for awhile, and poor Alice
could give no explanation as to how the mysterious ring with the name
of Sir Bevis thereon came to be on her finger.  Duncan loved her so
trustfully, so utterly, that doubt failed for a time to find a place
in his gallant heart; but 'gup' had playfully asserted that the old
brigadier immensely admired young Mrs. Cameron--he recalled some
jests he had heard, and now the poison they breathed was stealing
upon his senses, and his face grew white as death.

Duncan mistook the genuine confusion of Alice for guilt--her dismay
for dread of detection, and the whole affair for a feature in an
intrigue.  He knew how keen and bitter was scandal in India, and
already he saw himself a source of mockery and disgrace, and
figuring, perhaps, in the columns of the _Hurkara_!

He saw it all now!  He had been sent on duty to a distance for some
days, as he believed out of his turn, and by the express order of the
brigadier.

That circumstance had surprised him, but he believed it was fully
explained now by finding the ring of Sir Bevis on his wife's finger,
and he became transported with fury.  Alice cowered for a time
beneath the expression she read in his face.

Could it be possible, he thought, that she was proving as one of the
'dead-sea apples of life, which a mocking fate so often throws in our
lap, charming to the imagination, but bitter to the sense?'

'Duncan!' said Alice, softly and imploringly; but he felt all the
mute despair of a broken heart, the agony of a shaken faith, and he
put her soft white hands gently from him, as if he would never seek
them in this life again.

He at once sought the presence of the brigadier, who, on hearing what
he had to say, certainly--to do him justice--was rather bewildered.

'I beg leave, sir, to return to you this ring,' said Duncan, tossing
it contemptuously on the table.

'My ring--my wife's ring it was--'

'_Was_--eh!'

'Yes, Captain Cameron.  Where did you find it?'

'Where you placed it, I doubt not.'

'I do not understand your tone and manner, Captain Cameron; but I
certainly placed it on the finger----'

'Of my wife,' said Duncan, hoarsely and scornfully.  'I thank you for
your kind attention, but trust that it will end here ere worse come
of it.  I am not a man to be trifled with, Sir Bevis.'

Now, Sir Bevis had no dislike to be thought 'a gay Lothario, a sad
dog, and all that sort of thing,' so he actually simpered
provokingly, shrugged his shoulders and said, deprecatingly,

'Really, you wrong Mrs. Cameron.'

'She has deceived me!' exclaimed Duncan, furiously.

'If a woman can't deceive her own husband, _whom_ may she deceive!'
asked the unwise brigadier.

'In the days of the pistol this matter would not have ended here.'

'Come, come, don't let you and I fall to carte and tierce in this
fashion,' said the general; 'it may be explainable----'

'I want no explanations!'

'As you please.  It seems there is a little romance in most lives----'

'With your grey hairs you should have outlived all that, I think.'

Now his years proved a sore point with old Sir Bevis, and he became
inflamed with anger; but, ere he could retort, Duncan had jerked his
sword under his left arm and swept from his presence with a rather
withering expression in his face, and that very evening saw Alice in
the train for Delhi, _en route_ to Europe.

'Innocent, I suffer all the shame and all the agony of guilt!  Oh, it
is hard, Duncan--very, very hard,' were the last words she said,
brokenly, to her husband, who heard her with a stern silence that
astonished her.

Now that Lady Batardeau, on her return to the cantonments, had
explained the whole story of the ring, Duncan was--when too late, for
his wife was on the sea--full of shame and contrition for his
suspicions and severity, and had written to crave the pardon of Alice
and insure her return to him again; hence the farewell and departure
of 'Mrs. Cameron,' with her overlands and other baggage, as witnessed
by the sharp little eyes of Sir Paget Puddicombe at the Waverley
Station, and thus it was that, by an unexplained mistake, two fond
hearts were separated for ever; but separated they would have been
eventually by fate or fortune--the lack of fortune, rather--as time
may show.

But for a time poor Eveline had to ponder bitterly on the humiliating
thought that Evan Cameron had been thinking of _another_ face, form,
and name while in the act of caressing herself, and that the other
was--as Sir Paget had left them no reason to doubt, and never himself
doubted--Evan Cameron's wife!




CHAPTER XII.

OLIVE'S VISITOR,

Another mystery has now to be accounted for--the state in which Allan
found Olive when her cry reached him as he idled with his cigar in
the grounds at Maviswood in the evening, when the rest of the family
circle were in town.

Olive was seated alone in one of the drawing-rooms when a gentleman
was announced--a gentleman who no doubt thought Allan was absent in
Edinburgh also.

'Mr. Holcroft.'

'Mr. Holcroft!'  A book she was reading fell from the hand of Olive,
and she started to her feet as that personage, hat in hand, stood
smilingly before her.  For a moment she could scarcely believe her
eyes as they met the pale, watery, and shifty ones of her unexpected
visitor.

Terror and horror filled her heart on finding herself face to face
with this man--an assassin in intent!  It was too horrible--too
_outré_ and grotesque to think of.

But what was his intention now?  She was not left long in ignorance.
Why did she not rush to the bell--summon the household, and have the
daring intruder expelled or arrested?  But no--she felt a very coward
just then, with a great dread of Allan discovering him, and a heavy,
sickening foreboding of coming evil.

There came dreamily to her memory, too, some threatening words of his
when he had said that he would let no man come between them, and
that, though he might fail to compel her to love him, he might compel
her to marry him: but neither love nor marriage were in the mind of
her horrible visitor just then.

Mr. Hawke Holcroft seemed rather 'down on his luck,' and looked
somewhat shabby and seedy.  The last fragment of his patrimony had
been swallowed up; his betting-book had proved a mistake, as he had
for some time past backed the wrong horses; cards had failed him and
play of all kinds; in short, he was desperate, and hence his
appearance at Maviswood.

To attempt the role of a lover again, after all that had passed, and
after all that he was aware must be known to Miss Raymond, was, he
knew, impossible; but he had a trump card to play in the way of
extortion--plain, blunt, rascally extortion; so, conceiving that the
girl was utterly alone, he could not for the life of him resist
bantering her a little, all the more as the utter loathing and dread
her face expressed, enraged him.

'Mr. Holcroft!' she exclaimed, in a breathless voice, as she recoiled
and became white as a lily.

'Yes, Hawke Holcroft, the man your fatal beauty has made him,' said
he, with melodramatic gloom and folded arms; 'when I met you first I
met my fate--a love that was my doom.  But for you, would I ever have
been mad enough to attempt the life of Allan Graham?'

'How dare you come here--how dare you speak to me thus!' said Olive,
glancing at the bell handle; but he planted himself between it and
her.

'The love of you came to me when first you looked into my face,' he
resumed, in his melodramatic style; 'I remember it was but a smile--a
smile; yet a mist came before my eyes--a something stirred my heart.
Ah, Olive Raymond, it was your beautiful eyes that suddenly kindled
new life within me--that will only end with the old.'

Olive was more irritated than alarmed now.

'How dare you come here?' she asked.

'I can't help it--needs must when old Boots drives,' said he; 'I came
to show you a work of art.  Look here.'

From his pocket-book he drew out and held before her at arm's length
the cabinet photo of herself in a ball-dress; the photo, or one like
it, that she had the folly to give him at Dundargue; but to her
horror and dismay she saw that it had been reproduced, reversed, and
manipulated in some way by some low photographer, and combined with
one of Holcroft himself, posed as if in the act of embracing her,
forming a strange group of two, whose likenesses there would be no
mistaking, more especially that of her, as it was a miraculous work
of art in its truth and individuality.

It was Olive to the life, with her brightest and sweetest expression
now bent on his face!

'I am glad you recognise us,' said he, mockingly, as he replaced the
photo in its receptacle, and the latter in his breast pocket; 'and
now to business.  What would your drawing-room hero think of this, if
he saw it?  Ha, ha!  He did not approve of Byron at Dundargue, I
remember--would rather we stuck to Dr. Watts' hymns, I suppose--'How
doth the little busy bee," and so forth; well, like that industrious
insect, I mean to improve "the shining hour."  How would he--how will
you and your family, with all their cursed Scotch pride--like to see
this photo in every shop window exposed for sale to the British
public, among ballet-girls in snowstorms, countesses swinging in
hammocks, bishops, and generals--murderers, too, perhaps--eh?  In a
week or two I may have a million copies of this precious photo for
sale in London and elsewhere.  Do you realise the meaning of this, my
scornful beauty? and the result it must have on you, your name, your
character, your family, and your future--Miss Olive Raymond posed in
the arms of Hawke Holcroft?'

'Oh, heavens!' said Olive, in a low voice like a whisper; 'are you a
man or a devil?'

'A little of both, perhaps--I am what circumstances have made me.'

'Daring wretch--oh, what wrong have I ever done you that you should
cross my path and agonise me thus?'

Holcroft laughed; he knew that she had a more than handsome allowance
at her guardian's behest and her own bank account.  He was without
remorse or pity, for cowardice and selfishness were alike the ruling
features of his character, and he thought to control the tongue and
action of Olive through her own pride and her love of Allan with an
eye to future monetary extortions.

Pressing her left hand upon her heart, as if she felt--as no doubt
she did--a spasm of pain there, and, with her eyes almost closed, she
said,

'In the name of mercy, give me back that photo!'

'After I have had it so carefully improved as a work of art?  No; no,
Miss Raymond,' said he, in his detestable sneering tone; 'but I shall
be content to forego my interest in the copyright for a certain
reasonable consideration.'

'A consideration.  I do not understand you, sir,' said Olive,
faintly, and clutching a table for support.

'Plainly, then, I mean a cheque for three hundred--no, let me say
four hundred--pounds, and you had better be quick about it, as I have
no time to spare, and, truth to tell, have no desire to renew my
acquaintance with any of the Aberfeldie folks again.'

'Four hundred pounds?'

'That is the sum, Miss Raymond.'

Like a blind person, she feebly and irresolutely seemed to grope with
her key about the lock of her davenport, and Holcroft said,

'Permit me to assist you.'

He unlocked it, and threw open the lid.  Mechanically she seated
herself, and began to write, while conscious that this bantering
villain was still addressing her.

'And so old Puddicombe has come to the front again,' said he.  'An
odd marriage it will be--his with Miss Graham--Brummagem allying
itself with the Middle Ages--the counting-house getting a line in
Burke's Peerage.'

'There,' said she, handing him the cheque, which he received with a
low mocking bow, 'now give me the photo.'

'Thanks, with pleasure.  Perhaps you may wish to frame it.  Now,
listen to me,' he said, through his set teeth, 'if you divulge a word
of this interview, or make known the power I have over you by means
of this photograph, "then and in that case," as I believe your
father's will is phrased, I shall at once introduce it to the British
public.  I give you this copy for your four hundred pounds, but
retain the negative!'

Then it was that, as he withdrew, a cry escaped from her overcharged
breast--the cry overheard by Allan, and she had only power left her
to conceal the odious photo in the breast of her dress, when she fell
fainting on the floor, where she was found.

To destroy it was one of her first acts, when consciousness returned,
and she was alone; but what availed the destruction of this one, when
her tormentor possessed the power of producing others without limit?

A great horror possessed her now--a dread and gloom came over her,
with a painful nervous terror--a kind of hunted emotion--a fear of
what might next ensue!

Yet she took no one into her confidence, not even Allan--on her part
a fatal error.

After all her past sweet intercourse with him, their delayed
marriage--delayed by the illness incident to Holcroft's outrage--and
his too probable speedy departure on foreign service, was she now to
harrow him up by a reference to her folly, her petulance, and her
silly degrading flirtation with this man, who now proved such a
pitiful, such an unfathomable villain!

What if Allan should see suddenly that fatal photo in a shop window?
This possibility plainly stared her in the face; yet she was silent,
and believed that ere this issue came to pass, she was doomed to be
tortured and victimised by Holcroft again; and the thought, the fear
of this, gave her a kind of fever of the spirit, which made her quite
ill, and bewildered her friends.

Money had evidently been given by her to Holcroft--no small sum too;
and for what purpose?  Remembering his threat if she exposed his
rascality, her tongue was now tied by a most unwise terror.  Ill and
harrassed, she remained much in her room and avoided society.

Allan, as he said resentfully, failed 'to see the situation,' and in
a gust of pique and anger, feeling himself somewhat degraded by
Olive's bearing, resigned his extended leave and joined his regiment,
as Olive said, resolved to 'sulk in Edinburgh Castle, rather than
have an explanation,' rather unreasonably forgetting that she had
steadily refused to give one.

She felt painfully that the mystery of the money given to Holcroft
was calculated to compromise her with her kindred; but what was that
when compared with the awful thundercloud which hung over her, if he
made the public use he threatened of the photo!

Her soul died within her.  Meanwhile Allan struggled hard to make
himself believe that he might yet be happy with Olive; that he had
perhaps no solid reason for being otherwise; but it would not do.

'Hang it, what does all this new mystery mean?' he would say to
himself.  'We seem fated to misunderstand each other somehow.  After
all, she seems to love her pride more than me, still!'

And Olive knew that it was mingled pride and fear that had opened a
kind of chasm between her and Allan again; yet a little sense, a
little courage and candour, might have closed it speedily enough, and
smoothed away the anger the complication raised at times within her;
while to Allan the situation was certainly an intolerable one, and
Olive's silence or reticence made it all the more so.




CHAPTER XIII.

WEDDED.

While baffled in her attempts to bring about an explanation between
Allan and Olive, and to smooth matters over with that wilful young
lady (as she deemed her) and her naturally irritated _fiancé_, Lady
Aberfeldie pushed on vigorously all the arrangements for the marriage
of Sir Paget and the ill-starred Eveline--a marriage for which there
seemed then no other reason than an avaricious desire of grand
settlements and so forth.

All Olive's old pride and petulance (with much of irritation that was
new) seemed to have come back to her, and, until the matter was
cleared up regarding that mysterious visit of Holcroft to Maviswood,
Allan had ceased to speak of marriage, and thus her spirit took fire
at being doubted and humbled.

She shrank, unwisely, from a simple confession that might have
obviated all this, and from revealing the shame and affront to which
this man possessed the power of exposing her.

'I detest riddles, and care not to read them; but the mask she is
wearing--if a mask it be--may prove a costly one for herself and us
all,' thought Lord Aberfeldie and his son too.

'Be content, Allan, to know that I gave that money--a trifle to
me--to Mr. Holcroft in the hope to save us all--especially
myself--from a probable public affront which might destroy me,' said
Olive on one occasion, her eyes flashing through her tears.

'What mystery is this?--what can you have done? how be in his power?
The assertion is absurd!'

'Allan, cannot you trust me?' she asked, fondly and sadly, yet
proudly.

'I know not what to think, but the whole affair looks--looks to
me----'

'How.'

'Well, devilish queer,' said he, as he cut the matter short, and rode
away, on which Olive dried her tears, crested up her head, and looked
defiant.

'If this tiresome couple, Olive and Allan, continue to pout and sulk
at each other,' said Lady Aberfeldie; 'and he should decline to marry
her, her money may be lost to us by her twenty-fifth birthday.'

'Unless----' the lord twisted his moustache and paused.

'Unless what?'

'Allan gets himself killed in Egypt,' replied Lord Aberfeldie, grimly.

'Good heavens, do not say such a thing, even in jest!'

And now, perforce of their present situation, a change had come over
the two cousins, Olive and Eveline--they never read, studied, sung,
rode, or walked together, as they had been wont to do; a blight had
come over both their lives apparently.

Eveline only felt a little at ease when Sir Paget was absent from
her, and even then she was pestered by his love-letters, which, like
those written usually by men of advanced years, were of a grotesquely
impassioned nature.  'Attachments at that age are deeper, and less
anxiety not to compromise oneself is shown and felt,' says an
essayist.  'After fifty, men are often wise enough to vote the
writing of love-letters a bore, but some carry on the practice to a
very advanced age.  Their protestations are then ingeniously
flavoured with touches of the paternal, which sometimes entirely
mislead the unsophisticated recipients.'

But the mere sight of Sir Paget's caligraphy, and of his heraldic
note-paper, having a shield with some mysterious design thereon, and
the motto _Puddicombe petit alta!_ (Puddicombe seeks lofty objects),
proved always enough for Eveline, who tossed it into the waste-paper
basket unread, but torn into minute fragments, while a sigh of
weariness and repugnance escaped her.

Evan Cameron loved Allan Graham dearly as a friend, and had naturally
a desire to be on the best terms with him as the brother of the girl
to whom he had given all his heart.  Thus, while meeting him daily on
parade and at mess, he was sorely puzzled to account for the change
he felt in Allan's manner to himself, as he knew not that the latter
resented the 'Mrs. Cameron' episode as an insult to Eveline, his
sister.

'I presume you know that my sister is on the point of
marriage--indeed, that the day is fixed?' said Allan, rather grimly,
to him one day as he recalled the circumstance of how Evan greatly
admired, to say the least of it, Eveline, and how her heart had
responded thereto.

Cameron made no reply, but a sudden pallor overspread his handsome,
bronzed face, and all his studied calmness forsook him, while the
memory of past hopes and joys shook his heart as if with a tempest of
remembrance; but, stooping and half turning away to conceal the
expression of his face, he attempted to light a cigar.

'What a sly fellow--a cunning dog--you are!' said Allan, with
irritation of tone.

'In what way do you mean, Allan?' asked Cameron.

'Mean!  How dare you ask, after your open admiration of my sister,
Miss Graham, in a man in your position?'

Cameron mistook his meaning; but the mistake failed to rouse any
pride, as his heart was too crushed and sore just then.

'Allan!' he exclaimed, as tears almost welled up in his honest eyes,
'I loved her--I love her still--God alone knows how well, how
desperately, and how hopelessly.'

'Hopelessly indeed,' responded Allan, his cheek now aflame with
anger; 'and you dare to tell me this after all that we know of
yourself and Mrs. Cameron?'

It was now Cameron's turn to look indignant and astonished; but in a
few words he explained all.

'Poor Evan!' said Allan, as he wrung the hand of Cameron, whose head
sank forward, so much was he overcome by emotion; 'I am glad of this
explanation, but it comes too late--if indeed it could ever have
served any purpose so far as your hopes with Eveline are concerned.
In three days she is to be married--and now, let us talk of the
subject no more.'

But for a time black fury gathered in the heart of Cameron at Sir
Paget Puddicombe, whose deductions, however, from all that he saw at
the railway station, were most natural.

'In three days,' he muttered again and again, 'in three days, and she
will be lost to me for ever!'

Eveline as yet was ignorant of her lover's purity and innocence, nor
would the knowledge of it have availed her much.  There was a meek
abandonment of her own will--of her own judgment, and Lady Aberfeldie
caressed her more than she had ever done before, glad to find that
she had become--my lady cared not why or how--compliant at last.

She seemed quite passive and supine--resigned, Olive phrased it--and
ready to do her mother's bidding, for Evan Cameron seemed to have
quite passed out of her life, though the name 'Alice' he had uttered
seemed to be ever in her ears.

She heard her mother speaking, and felt her caresses, but her eyes
were suffused by a kind of mist.  Yet more than once she had started
amid her apathy, and thought, 'Why am I still here--why don't I run
away to where they will never find me?'

But she had no determining motive to decide her choice of place or
scheme of life, though she felt that ere long, when these last three
days were past, she would have to reconstruct her entire future, and
from that future her heart recoiled and shrank.  Her temples throbbed
as she thought of this; her heart seemed alternately to thunder in
her breast, and then to become unnaturally still.

Again and again her mother told her that she would be surrounded by
such wealth as falls to the lot of few; but she cared not for wealth,
nor would it ever remove her gloomy and bitter reflections, and at
the very name of her intended husband, though she evinced no emotion,
a secret and involuntary shudder came over her.

Society was intolerable just then, and she had much of it at
Maviswood.  How intolerable seemed lawn-tennis amid the bright
sunshine, the soft thud of the balls upon the racquets, as they were
shot over the nettings from court to court, the laughter of young and
sweet voices, and the cries ever and anon of 'fifteen,' 'thirty,'
'fault,' and so on, as the jovial game progressed; and with evening
came the inevitable dinner-party, and at night the dance.

Allan, fearing to lacerate his sister's heart, knew not how to
undeceive her in the matter of Cameron's supposed duplicity, though
the truth or falsehood thereof could not affect her fate or her
relations with Sir Paget now; but the true story escaped Carslogie
quite casually when in conversation with Olive, who in due time
related it to Eveline, in whose breast it created some very mingled
emotions.

So Evan was innocent, while she had been feeling in her heart all the
passion and pain--yea, a sentiment of vengeance--which women will
feel, when they believe they have been loving unworthily.

Early on her marriage morning she left her bed to think over all
this.  Wrapped in a snow-white _peignoir_ (or dressing-robe), with
all her undressed hair floating about her shoulders and blown back by
the warm summer breeze, she sat at the open window of her room, and
looked dreamily out with sad, sad eyes on the sunny landscape and the
lovely hills all steeped in golden haze.

How changed seemed its beauty now, and how she longed to be away from
it--to be dead, in fact!  Yet she was at an age when even to live,
ought to be in itself a joy.

The fragrance of the dewy summer morning seemed to fill the outer
world, and amid the intense stillness she heard only the voices of a
lark high in the air and of a cushat dove in the coppice.

Her marriage morning--what a morning of woe to her!  Her cheeks were
pale--very, very pale; but with her parted scarlet lips, and her
tangled waves of rich brown hair, she was beautiful as ever.

The knowledge that her lover had not deceived her, but was true,
roused her for a time, and filled her soul with a tempest of
unexpected sorrow, compunction, and joy--sorrow that she had wronged
him, compunction for the cruel mode in which she had treated him, and
joy that his honour was unstained, and that he still was true; but
oh! what must he think of her?

Burying her face in her tremulous white hands, she wept like a
child---wept as we are told 'only women weep when their hearts break
over the grave of a dead love,' and threw herself across her bed.

'God forgive me--God forgive me, and bless and comfort you, my love,'
she murmured.  'Oh, Evan, I have wronged you--wronged you; but what
does it avail us after all--after all?'

And she lay there crouched and gathered in a heap, as it were, till
Olive and others who were to be her bridesmaids roused her and lifted
her up and summoned Clairette.

So her marriage-day had come, and, unless she fell ill or died, the
ceremony was to go inexorably on.

Olive was far from well; every day she expected to hear of Holcroft's
photo being seen; her sole protection against that catastrophe as
yet, was the fear that ere it came to pass, he would seek her
presence at least once again, on an errand of extortion.  But ill or
well, she had to bear her part in the ceremony as a bridesmaid, and a
charming one she looked.

Allan, of course, was there too, but not as groomsman--a 'fogie'
friend of Sir Paget officiated in that capacity, and more than once
did the head of the latter jerk about in a way that was quite
alarming as he entered the church, which was _en fête_ for the
occasion.

To the tortured mind of his bride, she thought it would be a relief
when the ceremony was over, and the phantasmagoria that seemed to
surround her had all passed away.  'Is not certainty better than
suspense?' asks Rhoda Broughton; 'night better than twilight? despair
than the sickly flicker of an extinguishing hope?'

'In marrying in this compulsory fashion, I do this poor man a great
wrong,' thought Eveline, 'and condemn myself to a life-long sorrow.'

And amid the sacrifice Lady Aberfeldie, calm and aristocratic, stood
with a great air of dignity and grace peculiarly her own.

'She will love Sir Paget in time, if love is necessary,' she was
thinking; 'he is so good, so generous, and _so_ rich.'

So rich--yes, with her--there lay the magnet and the secret of it all!

The bridesmaids, all handsome girls, were uniformly costumed; among
them amber-haired Ruby Logan, quite jubilant with reviving hopes of
Allan.

Eveline's cold and now white lips murmured almost inaudibly the words
she was bidden to say--the few but terrible words that made her a
wedded wife--while her pallid face was but half seen amid the bridal
veil, that seemed to float like filmy mist around her.  Allan alone,
who knew the real secret of her heart, looked pityingly, darkly, and
gravely on, for it was a union of which--however his father and
mother desired it--he did not approve.

For a time Eveline had actually schooled herself to think that
marriage would give her a species of vengeance on the man who, she
thought, had wronged and oppressed her.  But now, oh, heaven! she
loved the lost one more than ever, while death alone could unforge
the fetters her lips were riveting.

Was it ominous of evil that the ring dropped from her wedding finger
as Sir Paget placed it there?

At last all was over.  The great organ pealed forth the
wedding-march.  The bells rang joyously in the great spire overhead,
and she was led forth by Sir Paget, leaning on his arm, a wedded wife.

So time would pass on--days dawn and nights close; the moon would
shine amid the fleecy clouds on the quiet pastoral hills, on the
great castellated mass of Dundargue, the woods and waters of her old
home; but never would she be as she had been--as a happy, thoughtless
girl--the Eveline Graham of the past years; never more could joy be
hers, or would she know again the love she had lost, the tenderness
she had tasted; and times there were when, amid her general passive
appearance of numbness and indifference, hot, scorching tears of
utter despair escaped her, and a passionate longing seized her to
take to flight, whither she knew not, and to rend asunder the meshes
of the marriage net that bound her now; and in this frame of mind she
departed on her honeymoon!

On that morning, there lingered long on one of the western batteries
of the old castle an officer who--if he was noticed at all--seemed to
be solely intent on enjoying a cigar, and who seemed to avoid the
society of all.

This was poor Evan Cameron, listening to the wedding bells in the
distant spire, and well he knew for what a tragedy they were ringing;
and, each time their clangour came upon the wind, they seemed to find
an echo in his heart.

So she was married at last, and more than ever lost to him!

Cards came to him in due course, and he tore them into minute
fragments.

Evan did all his regimental duties and daily work like a man--but as
one in a dream--all that was required of him, with more than ever, if
possible, strict punctilio; yet he felt himself a mere machine,
without heart or soul; and had only one longing, for the time when he
might turn his back upon his native country, and find himself face to
face with the enemy, no matter who, or where, that enemy might be.




CHAPTER XIV.

MISTRUST.

'Now that dear Eveline is off our hands,' said Lady Aberfeldie, 'I
cannot help thinking seriously of Allan's affairs and those of Olive,
and really some serious advice should be given to the foolish couple.
Could not you----'

'No,' interrupted her husband; 'I wash my hands of lovers and their
piques and plans.  You have managed the matter of Eveline and Sir
Paget--try your skill once more.'

'Neither Allan nor Olive is so compliant as poor Eveline.'

'No--poor Eveline indeed!'

'You think of her marriage thus, now?'

'Well, there is no denying it is rather a January-and-May style of
thing; but let us not speak of it.'

Considering that her husband had from the first given his full assent
to the whole transaction, Lady Aberfeldie could not help glancing at
him rather reproachfully, but she only said,

'Olive has, of course, many admirers; but the rumour of her
engagement to Allan keeps them all at a distance.'

'Poor Olive!  Her fortune is almost a misfortune to her.'

'Why?'

'She imagines it to be the attraction of everyone, rather than her
own beauty.'

'And once she conceived it to be the attraction of Allan; but she
knows better now--that he loves, or loved, her for herself alone.'

'She has already had two peers and a baronet in her train, all drawn
thither, I fear, by her money-bags alone, and young Carslogie of Ours
seemed desperately smitten, too.'

'Ours?'

'Well, I always think of the Black Watch as 'Ours'--it is force of
habit--a good-looking fellow, well-born, well-bred, with plenty of
money.'

'Allan is his equal in all these and more; but what he and she mean
by dallying and delaying as they do, I cannot conceive.'

Allan had looked upon Olive at the recent marriage in her striking
costume as a bridesmaid, and thought she had never appeared to
greater advantage.

Why should she not have figured there as a bride too?  What was the
secret spring of this doubt and mistrust that had come between them
again, and which she shrank from attempting to explain?

To do her justice, she was often on the point of doing so; but a
sentiment of miserable fear of what Allan might do, think, or say, if
made aware of the deep affront Holcroft was capable of inflicting
upon his future wife, tied her tongue.

Better would it have been a thousand times had she trusted to Allan
fully and implicitly, and to the means he might put in force to
procure or purchase the silence for ever of such a reptile as her
tormentor.

The knowledge in the minds of both, that a time for separation must
inevitably come soon now, if all the rumours of war proved true,
softened their emotions, and drew the cousins towards each other
again.

The intercourse between them had, as of old, its usual charm, but was
strange and constrained, for as Allan did not attempt again the
_rôle_ of lover, but seemed to 'bide his time,' Olive felt her pride
alarmed, and would often reply to him coldly, with a straightening of
her slim form, and a cresting up of her graceful neck and handsome
head.

Time passed on; she heard nothing of Hawke Holcroft or his threats,
and the courage of Olive rose; but it was awful to think of her name
being at the mercy of such a creature, even if she were married!

Once the love that was really smouldering in the hearts of both
nearly burst into a flame again.

Olive was seated in the garden at Maviswood so deeply lost in thought
that she was unaware of Allan's approach until he overhung the rustic
sofa she occupied.

'A penny for your thoughts, Olive,' said he.

'The sum usually offered for what might prove a perilous secret to
know.'

'Well?'

'My thoughts were of many things till your voice scattered them,'
said she, twirling her sunshade on her shoulder.

'I was in hope they were of--me.'

Olive only smiled, and remained silent, while he looked into her eyes
with a curiously mingled expression, which seemed to be both
imploring and commanding, but she only said,

'They were not of you--why should they be?'

Allan drew back a pace, with a cloudy brow.

'Forgive my being playful for a moment, Olive--I shall never in this
way offend you again.'

She gave him a sweet and deprecating, almost an entreating, glance;
but Allan did not perceive it; his face was turned angrily and sadly
from her, so her pique--ever so ready--became roused.

'Olive,' said Allan, after a pause, 'love should always be stronger
than pride.'

'Of course--when love exists,' she replied, turning a shoulder from
him.

'And with you, Olive, do not let it stand between us as before.  If
your father's will is again the cause, let me tell you once more that
I refuse to have any share in that lunatic arrangement, and will not
marry you on any such conditions.'

'Who is thinking or talking of marriage?' said she, sarcastically,
yet making an effort to restrain her tears; 'moreover, I fear that as
a husband you would be very tyrannical and cruel.'

'My character in the present and the past does not bear out this, I
think.'

'Suspicious, then?'

'Not without extreme and just reason,' replied Allan, as his mind
flashed back to the Holcroft episode.

She strove to glance at him defiantly, but failing, smiled, though
his handsome face had in it an expression of sorrow and anger.

'Ere a month be past, Olive, an Egyptian bullet may make you every
way a free woman, so far as regards your father's will.'

'I do not wish to be free from it,' she was on the point of saying
passionately, but controlled her speech and
remained--unwisely--silent.

Allan regarded her wistfully.

'Are injudicious reticence and a little aversion the best beginning
of a true love?' he asked.

'Perhaps--I am no casuist,' said she, tapping the ground with a
pretty little foot impatiently.

Lovely, pouting, and wistful, her face was now turned to his with a
mixture of petulance and shy reproach as she thought,

'Oh, why does he not take me in his arms, and kiss and make a fuss
with me as he used to do.'

But, repelled by her curious manner, Allan had no intention of doing
any such thing, and thought her a curious enigma.  So thus the chance
of a complete reunion ended, and ere long the luckless Olive was to
have cause for repenting most bitterly her lack of candour and
perfect trust, and the force of the overweening pride which
engendered mistrust in one who loved her so well.




CHAPTER XV.

THE BLACK WATCH.

War with Egypt had been declared, and in the Castle of Edinburgh, as
in every other fortress and barrack in the British Isles, the notes
of preparation were sounding, and the Black Watch, ever so glorious
in the annals of our army, was among the regiments bound for the land
where, eighty years before, it had gathered such a crop of laurels
under the gallant Abercrombie, in conflict, not against a feeble
horde of Egyptians, but when encountering forty thousand of the
veteran infantry of France.

From that day in the October of 1739 when the companies of _Freicudan
Dhu_, or Black Watch (so called from their sombre green tartans),
drawn from the Munroes of Ross, the Grants of Strathspey, and the
Campbells of Lochnelland Carrick, were first enrolled as a regiment
on the Birks of Aberfeldie, near the southern bank of the Tay, by the
gallant old Earl of Crawford, the 42nd has been second to none in
peace and war, and its very name and number are rendered dear to the
people of Scotland by innumerable ties of friendship and clanship, by
traditions and glorious exploits in battle.

In almost everything that has added strength or brilliance to the
British Empire the regiment has borne a leading part, and to attempt
to trace its annals would be to write the history of our wars since
the days of the second George.

Suffice it that the second year after the companies were constituted
a regiment, saw them fighting for the House of Austria against France
and Bavaria, and covering the rear of that British army which was
hurled from the heights of Fontenoy by the bayonets of the Irish
Brigades, and where, we are told, 'the gallantry of Sir Robert Munroe
of 'the gallantry of Sir Robert Munroe of Culcairn and his
Highlanders was the theme of admiration through all Britain.'

So it was with them in the old Flanders war, till 1758 saw them
attacking Ticonderoga in America, where, rushing from amid the
Reserve, where they disdained to linger, they hewed down the dense
abatis with their claymores, and, storming the breastworks, 'climbing
up one another's shoulders, and placing their feet in the holes made
in the face of the works by their swords and bayonets, no ladders
having been provided,' exposed the while to a dreadful fire of cannon
and musketry, under which six hundred and forty-seven of them fell;
and hence a cry for vengeance went through the country of the clans,
procuring so many recruits, and another battalion was formed, and
fresh glories were won in the West India Isles, where, at Martinique
and by the walls of the Moro, their pipes sent up the notes of
victory.

In the fatal strife of the American revolt they were ever in the van,
and the first years of the present century saw their tartans waving
darkly amid the battle-smoke of Aboukir, under the shadow of Pompey's
Pillar, and on the plains of Alexandria, where they cut to pieces the
French Invincibles, slew six hundred and fifty of them, captured
their colours, which were delivered to Major Stirling, together with
the cannon they had also seized; and ere long the mosques and towers
of Grand Cairo echoed to their martial music.

Who can record the brilliance of their valour in the long and
glorious war of the Peninsula--that war of victories, which began on
the banks of the Douro and continued to the hill of Toulouse?  And
anon, their never-to-be-forgotten prowess on the plains of Waterloo,
when, under Macara, they formed the flower of Picton's superb
division, and where, with the Greys and Gordon Highlanders, they sent
up the cry which still finds echo in every Scottish heart, the
_cri-de-guerre_ of 'Scotland for ever!' while plunging into those
mighty French columns, which rolled away before their bayonets like
smoke before the wind.

There their total casualties were two hundred and ninety-seven of all
ranks.

'They fought like heroes, and like heroes fell--an honour to the
country,' to quote the War Office Record, page 145.  'On many a
Highland hill, and through many a Lowland valley, long will the deeds
of these brave men be fondly remembered and their fate deeply
deplored.  Never did a finer body of men take the field; never did
men march to battle that were destined to perform such services to
their country, and to obtain such immortal renown.'

But equal renown did their services win on the banks of the Alma,
when old Colin Campbell led them into action, exclaiming,

'Now, men, the whole army is watching us; make me proud of my
Highland Brigade!'

And reason indeed had that grand old soldier to be proud of his lads
in the kilt, as they swept up the green hillsides to glory.  'The
ground they had to ascend,' says an eye-witness, the author of
'Eothen,' 'was a good deal more steep and broken than the slope
beneath the redoubt.  In the land where those Scots were bred, there
are shadows of sailing clouds shimmering up the mountain side, and
their paths are rugged and steep, yet their course is smooth, easy,
and swift.  Smoothly, easily, and swiftly the Black Watch seemed to
glide up the hill.  A few minutes before their tartans ranged dark in
the valley; now their plumes were on the crest.'

Into the dense grey masses of the Kazan column, over which towered
the miraculous figure of St. Sergius, their steady volley swept like
a sheet of lead; anon their line of bayonets was flashing to the
charge like a hedge of steel, and a wail of despair broke from the
Muscovites, who, crying that 'the Angel of Death had come,' threw
away all that might impede their speed and fled.

'Then,' says the brilliant author we have quoted, 'rose the cheers of
the Highland Brigade.  Along the Kourgané slopes, and thence west
almost home to the causeway, the hillsides were made to resound with
that joyous and assuring cry, which is the natural utterance of a
northern people so long as it is warlike and free.'

Their furious onset struck terror to many an Indian heart during the
dark years of the Sepoy revolt, and like sweetest music their pipes
were heard by that desperate and despairing band who fought for their
wives and children in beleaguered Lucknow; and as, of course, the old
Black Watch must be in everything, they bore their share in the
conquest of Coomassie, and were the first men in the sable city, as
their pipes announced to the army of Wolseley.

While on this subject, we cannot help quoting a Frenchman's estimate
of the Scottish troops.  In the _Moniteur de Soir_ for 1868, a writer
says,

'The Scottish soldiers form without distinction the cream of the
British army, and the Highlander is the prototype of the excellent
soldier.  He has all the requisite qualities without one defect.
Unluckily for Great Britain, the population of Scotland is not
numerous.  Saving, it is true, to the point of putting by penny after
penny, the Scotsman, for all that, is honest, steadfast, and amiable
in his intercourse with others, enthusiastic and proud, most
chivalrous when the question is about shedding his blood.  The old
traditions of clanship subsist, each company is grouped round an
illustrious name, and all and every man is sure to be the captain's
cousin.  The Highlanders have a strange sort of bravery, which
partakes of French fire and English phlegm.  They rush with
impetuosity, they charge with vigour, but are not hurried away by
anger.  In the very hottest of an attack, a simple order suffices to
stop them.  Formed in square, you would take them for Englishmen, but
in the bayonet charge you would swear they were French.  For the rest
they are of Celtic origin, and the blood of our fathers flows in
their veins.  In the eyes of the Turk, the Scots have one enormous
fault--that of showing their bare legs.  In _our_ eyes they have but
one defect, but still excessively annoying--their depraved taste for
the screaming of the bagpipes.  We know that the Highlanders would
not get under fire (with _élan_) without being excited by their
national airs being played on this discordant instrument.  One of
their generals having put down this piercing music, they attacked the
enemy so languidly that the bagpipes had to be restored to them, and
then they took the position.  In a word, we repeat that the Scots are
magnificent soldiers.'

We may smile at the Frenchman's idea of the pipes, for as the old
piper said of Count Flauhault when he expressed his disgust thereat,
'Maybe she heard owre muckle o' them at Waterloo.'

And now once again the Black Watch were going to the land of the sun
and the desert, where Abercrombie received his death-wound while
calling to them in the charge, 'My brave Highlanders, remember your
country--remember your forefathers!'  And these glories, with all
'the stirring memories of a thousand years,' were not forgotten on
that day in the August of 1882 when, under the scion of a gallant
house, Cluny the younger, the regiment received its orders of
readiness and began to prepare for its departure from the Castle of
Edinburgh, while a mighty throb seemed to pervade the heart of the
city as its hour of departure approached.

All in its ranks, of course, had friends whom they sorrowed to
leave--all save poor Evan Cameron; and all were impatient and full of
ardour to join in the coming strife; but none, perhaps, were more
impatient than he, for he had to seek forgetfulness--oblivion from
his own thoughts--a refuge from his futile regrets--among other
scenes for the lost love of one who could never be more to him than a
tender memory now.




CHAPTER XVI.

IN THE BELVIDERE.

Shakespeare tells us that men have died and worms have eaten them,
but not for love.  So Evan Cameron did not die, nor had he any
thoughts of dying; but it seemed to his young and enthusiastic heart
just then that all which made life worth living for, and all its
fulness, splendour, and joy, were over and done with for him.

Of the movements of the Aberfeldie family he knew nothing at that
time.

Allan was again on leave, and was to join the regiment on the day of
its embarkation in England.

Evan had a longing to see the place where he had last seen Eveline,
as her lover, at Maviswood.  Memories of the past days at Dundargue
came vividly upon him now--of the times when they had wandered in the
leafy woods near the old castle, talking sweet nonsense, with happy
hearts and laughter that came so readily; when eye spoke to eye and
hand thrilled when it touched hand with lingering pressure, and
glances were exchanged that, if they meant anything, meant love.

Lord Aberfeldie had been ever kind to him, and a friend of his
father; he thought he would like to press the good peer's hand once
more before he departed, for the regiment was going far away, to a
land from whence he might never return; so, as Evan was an impulsive
young fellow, he repaired at once to Maviswood.

He found Mr. Tappleton, the old family butler, airing his figure at
the front door when he approached.

Lord Aberfeldie, he was informed, was in London--his lordship was
residing with Miss Raymond at Southsea, and Sir Paget was not at home.

'Sir Paget--is he living here?' asked Cameron, with a start.

'Yes, sir, for a few days.'

'And Lady--Lady----'  He paused, unable to pronounce the name.

'Is also here,' replied Mr. Tappleton, knowing instantly who he
meant; 'but she is out somewhere walking in the grounds.'

Evan gave the butler a couple of cards and turned away.  He felt
quite startled to find that Sir Paget and his bride were resident at
Maviswood, and thought that he could not get away from the vicinity
of the house too soon.

Proceeding down the avenue, he passed a narrow, diverging path
between high old holly-hedges, the vista of which was closed by a
belvidere, or species of pillared alcove, built upon a grassy knoll,
and therein, as if in a shrine, stood Eveline.

To pass was impossible.  For a moment he stood rooted to the spot,
and then, as one in a dream, approached her.  To meet her face to
face thus, was like something of a dreadful shock to both now.

Eveline was deadly pale and trembling, while her graceful figure
looked very slight and girlish in her fresh cambric costume and gipsy
hat.

At the very moment of their meeting there, her mind had been full of
him.

How had poor Evan borne the tidings of her marriage, and with it the
total destruction of their mutual wishes?--mutual hopes they had none.

She had often pondered on this, and wondered how he had heard it, who
had told him of it, or if he had seen it in the papers, and how he
looked when the sad tidings came.  Of the cruel mockery of sending
him wedding-cards she knew nothing.  Was he striving to forget er?
perhaps learning to hate her--oh, not that!--to despise her? nor
that, if he knew all.

But they were nothing to each other now, and never could be anything
more.

Anon would come other thoughts that were perilous to a young and
enthusiastic girl.

Evan Cameron had given himself to her with all his heart, and with
all his soul, and he loved her with all the strength of both; and
now--now, with another man's wedding-ring upon her finger, she felt
unprepared to relinquish that love, for she could not doubt that it
must still exist, though he had been cruelly and selfishly treated.

And while all these thoughts had been coursing through her brain he
came suddenly before her.

'I pray that he may soon forget me--poor Evan!' had been her frequent
thought.  'Why should he think of me more, when he knows of my
marriage, and must deem me a pitiful creature.'

Each caught their breath, each clasped their hands as if in mute
misery, and the eyes of both were strained, as if the pain of
recognition was mingled with the peril of the situation.

Evan thought how pale and transfigured looked the soft face of his
lost love!

'I knew not that you where here--I came to visit your father--we
march tomorrow--and--and----'

Evan paused breathlessly, though his voice seemed to thrill with
passion, and his lips, when they touched her hands--even the hand
with the obnoxious wedding-hoop--trembled and quivered like those of
a girl.

'Evan,' she said, softly, 'Evan!'

'My darling--my lost darling!' broke from his lips, as he clasped her
in his arms, and her slender fingers softly and tremulously caressed
his dark and closely-curling hair with something that was almost
motherly, or sisterly, in the intensity of its tenderness.

'Oh, Evan,' she whispered, 'may God watch over you, spare you,
protect you, and give you some other heart to make you happy.'

It was some solace to Evan's wounded spirit that she had been in a
manner--apart from her temporary doubt of himself--forced into her
marriage; that her own free will, poor girl, had no hand in the
matter.

Clasped to his heart, hers was beating for some moments 'with the
wild music of recovered joy, her great dread silenced by her greater
passion.'

But to what end was it all?

'This is madness!' exclaimed Evan, as they stood for a minute, hand
clasped in hand, and gazing into each other's eyes.

'Madness indeed!' moaned Eveline.

'I am going far away, my darling, and shall never see you again.
That I may find a grave in Egypt is the kindest wish you can have for
me; and that you will never think but kindly of me in the time to
come, is my only and my dearest hope now.'

She was in his arms again--the girl, every tress of whose
brown-golden hair was dear to him--every expression of whose eyes and
lips, every tone of whose voice, every charm and grace of whose face
and form were graven on his inner heart; but what availed all that
now?

'You know all now--my secret, and that I was not false to you,
Eveline?' said he.

'All,' she replied, hollowly.

'Poor Alice could not come to my quarters in the Castle, consequently
I had to meet her somewhere--where you saw us.  Poor little soul, she
had no one to trust, to--to confide in, save me.'

'And now----'

'She has gone back to her husband--back to my brother in India.'

'Desperate with the idea that you, Evan, had deceived me, I was
blind--careless--passive in their hands, and heedless what became of
me; and Sir Paget bought me of them--bought me of papa and mamma--as
a slave who loathes her buyers and her slavery!' exclaimed Eveline,
wildly.

'Such a fate, my darling!'

'Such a fate, indeed!' she whispered through her set teeth.  'But we
must part now,' she added, but without withdrawing her hands from his
firm clasp.

'A parting bitter as death, Eveline.'

'And as hopeless,' she said, now sobbing heavily.

'Yet, with all its bitterness, this has been a great, an unexpected
joy to see you here, to embrace you once again.'

Of one grim fact they could not be oblivious.  She was another man's
wife, and he had to tear himself away; to lose for ever the sight of
that sweet, afflicted face, the tones of that beloved voice, to long
again for both, with eager eyes and ears, in the time that was to
come.

'Though parted thus, Eveline, you will think of me sometimes--you
will remember?'

'For ever and for ever, while my miserable life lasts, Evan.'

'My poor darling!  To remember me, to be constant to me in memory,
while another's wife.'

'I cannot realise that even now, still less what my life will be in
the future, with you not in it.'

A long, clinging kiss and he was gone, while Eveline sank down on the
stone seat within the belvidere in a state of semi-consciousness, in
which she was discovered by Sir Paget.




CHAPTER XVII.

THE ROUTE.

Few scenes are more stirring than the departure of a regiment for the
seat of war, in Scotland, perhaps, more than anywhere else, when it
is the departure of a national regiment endeared to the people by
historical and warlike associations, combined with those of clanship
and kindred.

The last toast at the mess, ere it was broken up, was '_Tir nam Bean,
nan Glean, s nan Gaisgaich_;' and now, till more peaceful times, its
magnificent and trophied mess-plate was stored away, among it that
gigantic silver tripod, with its fluted bowl, weighing eighteen
hundred ounces, bearing, with other mottoes, these:--_Na Tir chaisin
Buardh son Eiphart_ 21 _Mar,_ 1801' and--'_O'Chummin Gaidhculach d'
on Freicudan Dhu, na_ 42 _Regiment_.'

About seven in the morning the pipers of the Black Watch blew the
gathering, waking the echoes of that grand old fortress, which is the
focus of so much Scottish history, and from the gates of which by
sword or spear the tide of war was so often rolled back in the stormy
days of old; and now the sound of the pipes found a deeper echo in
the hearts of the thousands who were mustering in the streets below
to bid the regiment farewell, and wish it God-speed in the land it
was going to.

The August morning was a lovely one, and the shadows formed by the
golden sunshine lay purple and deep in the glens of the Pentlands,
and in the valleys and hollows spanned by the bridges of the city and
overlooked by the towering edifices of its terraced streets, amid
which rose every spire and pinnacle tipped with ruddy splendour.

The woods and gardens were still in all their summer beauty and
greenery, and the corn-fields in the distance were ripe with golden
grain over all the sun-lighted landscape.  Ere that corn was all
gathered, many of those who came gaily forth, mustering to the sound
of the pipes, were to find their graves in the sand of the Egyptian
desert, where the Black Watch had gathered so many laurels in the
wars of other years.

All the city was astir as it had never been since the King's Own left
the same fortress for the shores of the Crimea, and the hum of the
gathering thousands filled the clear air of the dewy morning.

Cluny trusted in his men, and thus, on this conspicuous morning, no
man failed him, and no man was absent from his place in the ranks.
The bustle of departure was past; stores had been issued; the grey
tropical helmet, with a little crimson hackle worn on the left side,
was for a time to supersede the graceful bonnet with its black
plumes; valises and haversacks had been packed; rifles and bayonets
inspected; the baggage selected and forwarded; and nothing remained
now but to march, after sixteen months' residence in the city of the
Stuarts.

Cluny had kindly given ample opportunities to his men to take leave
of their friends, and it was only for a short time before their
departure, that the great palisaded barriers of the Castle were
closed at the _tête-du-pont_ against all comers, and the human surge
that pressed against them.

At last the pipes were heard echoing under that deep archway through
which millions of armed men have marched; the brass drums rang under
the grim ports of the Half-Moon Battery; the barriers were rolled
back, and, with dragoons clearing the way, the Black Watch, in their
fighting kits, with grey helmets, white jackets, and dark-green
tartans, their colours cased, and all their bayonets glittering in
the sun like a rippling stream of steel, came marching down the
slope, while cheers rent the air, cheers and shouts, though doubtless
many a heavy heart was there, for wives and sweethearts, children and
parents, alike were being left behind by those on whose faces they
might never look again.

Each man had on his back a valise, tin canteen, and great-coat; his
haversack and water-bottle were slung, and attached to a lanyard at
his neck, each carried a large knife--like the genuine jockteleg of
the days of old--and right service-like and purpose-like they all
looked.

The officers, who were in blue patrol jackets, with kilt, claymore,
and dirk, carried knives of the same kind, together with a haversack,
field-glass, and water-bottle.

Dense were the crowds occupying every street, every window and
balcony, every coign of vantage, and the whole area through which the
regiment marched to the sound of its national and martial music
seemed instinct with life, ardour, and enthusiasm.

Many veterans were in the ranks of the regiment--men who had served
in Ashanti, and not a few who, as Albany Highlanders, had marched to
Candahar and fought in Afghanistan.  Their colonel--Cluny the
younger, son of that venerable Cluny who is chief of the Macphersons
or Clanvurich (the second tribe of the great Clan Chattan), and was
once a Black Watchman--rode at their head, and near him marched his
favourite sergeant-major, MacNeil, a tall, stately, and tried
soldier, who, though he knew not the fate before him, when the hour
came, had no fear of facing death, as became one of the Freicudan Dhu.

Evan Cameron, as he marched on, claymore in hand, had a shrewd idea
that among the many there whose tender hearts were filled with pity
and enthusiasm, would be one who was secretly and inexpressibly dear
to himself; and yet, though a kind of mortal pain was in his breast,
his heart, despite it all, beat responsive to the cadence of the old
familiar march--the regimental quick-step--the same air to which he
had so often trod in past times and in other lands; and now, as one
in a dream, he saw the seething crowds, the forest of waving hats and
handkerchiefs, and all the glorious view on which he was probably
looking for the last time--the noble line of Princes Street, steeped
in the morning sun, the Calton Hill with its line of towers and
battlements, its temples, great stone obelisk, and reproduction of
the classic Parthenon of Minerva, Arthur's Seat, and the Craigs, and
the old city with its ten-storey houses--each a stone record of the
historic past.

He was suddenly roused on seeing Carslogie playfully kiss the basket
hilt of his claymore, and wave his hand to a young lady who sat by
the side of an elderly gentleman in an open barouche.

She was closely veiled, but Evan's heart leaped in his breast when he
recognised Eveline--Eveline by the side of Sir Paget, who waved his
hat occasionally, and jerked his bald head about as usual.

'Why was such a girl as that, Allan Graham's sister, sacrificed to
that old devil of a fogie?' asked one of the Black Watch of
Carslogie, a high-spirited young fellow, who thought it very nice to
be in the 42nd, but very nasty to be also in debt, and was now right
glad to find himself _en route_ for Egypt.

'Why, indeed? you may well ask,' he replied; 'simply because her
father is one of the upper ten, and, like all that lot, selfish to
the backbone.'

And Cameron's heart endorsed his answer to the full.

Eveline saw him, and for a moment--but a moment only--raised her,
veil.

The tale of all she had endured was written in the wistful and
mournful expression of her soft hazel eyes, and all who knew her now
remarked that, though she sometimes smiled, she never laughed.

She felt her lips quiver and the lines of them tighten, for we may
control deep emotion in the eyes, but on the mouth, never.

Her whole heart and soul were concentrated in the effort to appear
calm and look on, though her eyes were dim with the tears in which
she feared just then to indulge.

'Oh, my darling!' she whispered to herself, again and again, but
voicelessly, in her heart.  'My dear love--my brave Evan--I shall
never see you again!'

Surreptitiously she concealed her tear-soaked handkerchief in her
pocket, and drew forth another--a fresh one redolent of
eau-de-Cologne.  Quickly though she did it, Sir Paget saw the act,
drew his own conclusions therefrom, and thought himself an ass for
having accorded her permission to see the Black Watch depart.

Their recent brief meeting--the memory of the passionate kisses that
should never have been given or taken--added now to the supremeness
of the present moment.

He only appeared to bow to her; but as he gazed with eyes of
passionate yearning on her flower-like face, the lips he had kissed
so often, the eyes that had so often looked with love into his, and
did so now, his heart filled with a wild and desperate longing to
take her to his breast and cover her face with kisses again.

But the drums beat, the pipes played loud and high, the crowds
cheered, and the forward march went ruthlessly on.

All this fuss of Eveline's, thought Sir Paget, could not be merely
for the departure of her brother's regiment!

At last to Eveline's ears the sound of pipe and drum died away in the
distance as the barouche was driven homeward to Maviswood; but now
the despair in her face and attitude was too palpable not to attract
the attention of Sir Paget, who jerked his face forward quite close
to hers and regarded her gloomily and in silence.

In all that followed now, Evan Cameron seemed to act mechanically,
and to do that which was his duty by mere force of habit, as the
regiment marched into the resounding railway station, where he saw
the men of his company told-off to compartments; saw the sergeants
marking on the footboard of the carriages with chalk the letter of
the company; saw the men take off their valises; and ere long the
swift special train was sweeping through the dark tunnel that pierces
the rocky bowels of Calton Hill, and the Black Watch were fairly off
for Egypt again.

How to bear his loss in the long years that were to come, if the
fortune of war spared him, was the thought that tortured most the
mind of Cameron then, and gave him an emotion of despair.

He remembered the fixed and agonised gaze of Eveline; he remembered,
too, the manner in which her spouse had looked grimly on, with an
angry, yet not unsatisfied, jerk of the head, as he, no doubt, was
thinking they 'had seen the last of Evan Cameron.'

The future!  All that was vague to the latter indeed.




CHAPTER XVIII.

'IDIOTS ONLY WILL BE COZENED TWICE.'

It was on an August evening--the sun had not set, but the sky was
cloudy and gloomy; the wind was high, and a heavy sea was on at
Spithead, and the conservatory in which Olive was lingering and
selecting a button-hole of violets and maiden-hair fern for Allan was
so dark already that the lamps were lighted in it.  She was dressed
for a dinner-party, and was looking charming--her best and
brightest--as she sang softly to herself and wandered from one shelf
of potted flowers to another, when Allan suddenly joined her, with an
expression in his face that was full of mingled sadness and
excitement, and with a telegram in his hand.

'Allan, what has happened?' she asked, changing colour, and with dire
forebodings in her heart.

He caught her hands in his and tried to smile.

'Tell me, why are you so sad?' she asked again.

'Darling,' said he, as he drew her to his breast, 'compose yourself;
I have just had great news--bad news you will deem them--to tell you.'

From these few speeches it may be gathered that the cloud that
hovered between this pair of lovers had passed away, and that
sunshine had come again.

They were at Puddicombe House, a villa of Sir Paget's, which he had
lent to Lord Aberfeldie, and from the windows of which, as it
overlooked Stokes Bay and Spithead from the Clarence Parade at
Southsea, they could daily see the departure of great white
'troopers,' crowded with soldiers--Highlanders, Rifles, and
Marines--steaming past the long line of the sea-wall (with all its
naval trophies and monuments) _en route_ for the shores of Egypt.

There, too, were in view the three forts in the Channel, with
Puckpool Battery at Spring Yale, which, with the other in a line on
the mainland, would effectually bar an enemy's ship from reaching
Portsmouth Harbour.  Ponderous indeed are these forts--one in
particular, a mass of circular masonry, girt by a black belt of iron
armour, pierced with port-holes, through which the great guns of 'the
period' may spit out shot and shell; and beyond lies the peaceful
Isle of Wight--a charming stretch of sloping land, wooded to the
water's edge, and studded with beautiful mansions.

'You have bad news to tell me?' said Olive, as the haunting terror
that was ever before her struck a pang to her heart.

'I must rejoin my regiment at once; it leaves the Castle of Edinburgh
to-morrow for Egypt, and I am to meet it at Woolwich, where the
transport awaits it.  Oh, how hard it is to part with you--even for a
time,' he added, caressing her, as her head dropped upon his breast;
'to part thus, and unmarried yet, Olive--after all our past folly,
jealousies, and waste of time.  Speak to me, darling!'

'What can I say, Allan?' replied Olive, piteously, as her tears fell
fast.

'We shall not go to this dinner-party at the Port Admiral's, of
course.  Our last evening must be spent together.'

'Oh, Allan, Allan!'

'Take off those evil diamonds, darling--those stones of ill omen.
Why did the mater let you wear them?  They are never produced without
something happening.'

'And the transport sails--when?'

'On Tuesday evening.'

'So soon--so very soon!'

'My darling--my own--don't weep so,' said he, pressing her closer to
his breast, and nestling her face in his neck, while he caressed and
tried to soothe her; but the impulsive Olive would neither be soothed
nor comforted for a time.

When, however, she became calmer, he said,

'I must leave you for a few minutes.  I must telegraph to the
adjutant, see the mater, poor soul, and send apologies, as we shall
not go to the admiral's to-night.'

He left her; and, sinking into a sofa, she abandoned herself to a
stormy fit of weeping and to sad and bitter reflections, and to many
unavailing regrets--unavailing now, as they were to be parted so
soon; and one grim and harrowing fact stood darkly out amid them
all--her affianced lover was going to the seat of war and disease, to
face unnumbered perils in that fatal land of Egypt!

A slight sound roused her, and drew her attention to a glass-door of
the conservatory that opened to the garden.

A man's face seemed glued against it--a face white and ghastly,
apparently regarding her fixedly--the face of Hawke Holcroft,
emaciated by dissipation, want, or disease--probably by all
three--his shifty eyes bloodshot and wild in expression.

In another moment she would have screamed with terror; but he opened
the door, entered, and stood before her.

'I never thought--at least, I was in hope never to see you again,'
said Olive, starting up, and recoiling from him.

'Ha--indeed.  But in this world are not those always meeting who are
better far apart?' was his mocking response.

'What brings you here--what do you want?' asked Olive, gathering
courage from desperation, and trembling in her soul lest Allan should
return and find this villainous intruder there.

'What do I want!  Money.  I am, and have been for days, starving.'

'Money I shall not be weak enough to give you again, under any threat
or any pressure.  The last I gave you cost me dearly,' said Olive,
firmly, though terrified to find herself face to face with this
would-be assassin again.

'You will not?'

'No.'

'Then give me these jewels--these diamonds,' he said, hoarsely; and,
ere she could move or speak, he snatched up the necklace and pendants
from a pedestal on which she had placed them, and thrust them into
his breast-pocket.  'For a time, now, the work of art I possess shall
be withheld from the British public--but for a time only--and in the
memory of the time when you loved me, or led me to believe that you
did.'

'Insolent--how dare you say so?' she exclaimed.

'You tried to win my heart, and won it, too--you played with me fast
and loose, as you did with your cousin, for whom you did not care one
doit, then at least, and for whom I believe you care nothing now.'

Olive glanced round her in dismay, for should such words as these,
and others that followed them, reach listening ears, she might be
lost, and she was powerless to stay the impetuous current of his
studiously mischievous speech.  Moreover, she did not see what Hawke
Holcroft saw behind some towering ferns and other plants--a form,
with firm-set teeth and flashing eye, transported by fury, while his
feet were rooted to the spot--the face of Allan Graham, who saw and
overheard, yet failed to comprehend the situation!

A vindictive desire to separate the lovers if he could, and to
humiliate the man he hated, took possession of the diabolical mind of
Holcroft, who said,

'Let me kiss your hand, Olive, but once again, ere I leave you--I,
whom you loved once so well!'

'Insolent!' exclaimed the girl, impetuously.

But, ere she could resist him or escape, he threw his arms round her,
pressed her to his breast, kissed her many times, and then--as Allan
sprang forward--he quitted the conservatory, and vanished into the
gloom outside, while, with a low wail of horror and distress at the
shameful affront put upon her, Olive covered her face with her
tremulous hands, and murmured,

'Oh, this is too much to endure!'

'Too much, indeed,' said a voice, as a heavy hand grasped her
shoulder, and she was swung round with a force that was almost rude,
to meet the white face and flaming eyes of Allan.

'Allan,' she exclaimed, piteously, and held out her hands.

'Stand off and touch me not,' he cried.  'Idiots only will be cozened
twice,' he added, unconsciously quoting Dryden.

He gave her an awful and withering glance, and, snatching up a heavy
stick, he dashed into the garden after the intruder, whom he saw in
the act of escaping by a gate that opened upon the common, across
which he fled like a hare, pursued closely by Allan Graham, whom, as
an active mountaineer and trained soldier, he was not likely to
escape.

The sun had set amid dim and lurid clouds; the evening was gloomy,
close, and stormy; the bellowing of the ocean could be heard along
the whole line of the sea-wall, from the Spur Redoubt to Southsea
Castle.  A heavy gale from the offing was rolling the waves in their
force and fury upon the shore, where, in anticipation thereof, the
boats and bathing machines were all drawn up high and dry upon the
shelving shingle.  The shipping at anchor were straining on their
cables, and sheet lightning, red and fiery, threw forward in black
outline from time to time the undulating curves of the Isle of Wight.

But Allan Graham saw none of these things; he only saw the fugitive
Holcroft, who ran madly towards the sea-shore, and disappeared round
the angle of the East Battery that overhangs the sea, closely
followed by his infuriated pursuer.

'What has happened, Olive--speak?' said Lady Aberfeldie, who was
completely bewildered by the condition in which she found Olive, and
bitterly regretting the absence of her husband, who was then in
London; and Olive, feeling now the unwisdom and futility of further
concealment, told her all about the power Holcroft had wielded over
her by working on her pride, shame, and fear, and how, by direct
acting, he had too probably achieved the very end which the evil
prompting of a moment had doubtless suggested--the placing of herself
in a false position with Allan, and causing a hopeless quarrel and
separation between them.

'And now that he has left me thus, auntie, I shall never see him
again!' cried Olive, while, burying her face in her hands, she wept
bitterly.  'I shall never forget how pallid his poor face became, and
how his eyes glared with fury through their unshed tears; and never
shall I forget the gaze of tenderness, astonishment, and reproach
that came into them as he turned from me in bitter silence.'

'It is very unfortunate,' said Lady Aberfeldie, with difficulty
restraining her own tears, though buoyed up by indignation at the
daring and insolence of Holcroft; 'but Allan will return in a few
minutes, and I shall undertake to explain the whole affair.'

But the time passed on; hour succeeded hour, till midnight struck,
and aunt and niece sat watching each other with pale and anxious
faces, for there was no appearance of Allan.

They supposed that in his first gust of anger he had gone to some
club or hotel, and would, when in a calmer frame of mind, return on
the morrow; but the morrow had passed into evening, and he returned
no more!

Olive felt that he and she were roughly rent asunder, and likely to
drift further and further apart on the stormy sea of life.

And now to account for his non-appearance.

Aware that he had no mercy to expect between the hands of Allan on
one side, and those of the police on the other, Hawke Holcroft
thought only of escape, and, dreading flight towards the town, in the
blindness of his terror or confusion he turned towards the sea, and
ran along the summit of the steep, rocky, and abruptly shelving bank
that is overlooked by the low earthen-works and square, squat tower
of Southsea Castle.

Finding Allan close upon him, so close that he could almost hear his
footsteps, amid the bellowing of the wind and booming of the sea that
rolled in white foam against the stone parapet wall which was
bordered by the narrow pathway he was compelled to pursue, he
suddenly turned in blind desperation and levelled a revolver at
Allan's head, while a tiger-like fury filled his sallow visage.

It snapped, hung fire, and was struck from his hand by Allan, on
which he turned again and fled into the grey obscurity, whither Allan
could not follow him now, as the sea with a succession of angry roars
was lashing the steep stony bank and hurling its spray over the
parapet wall, while wave after wave boiled over all the path the
fugitive had to pursue.

Again and again he saw the miserable wretch lose his footing, while
the waves tried to suck him down, and again and again, clinging with
despairing energy to the edge of the stony path, he strove to recover
it.

A low wailing cry of despair escaped him as one wave towering higher
than all the rest--perhaps a tenth wave, if there be such a
thing--enveloped him in its foamy flood and sucked him furiously
downward in its back-wash, amid which he seemed to struggle feebly as
a fly might have done.

Once or twice Allan saw his head bobbing amid the white foam and his
upthrown hands, that had nothing to clutch at, till the waves dashed
him again and again, as if in wild sport, among a row of great wooden
dolphins which are placed in the shingle there to break the fury of
the incoming sea, and stand up like a line of gigantic teeth, and in
less than a minute Hawke Holcroft vanished from sight!

Then a long breath escaped Allan.

'The sea has done it not I, though richly did he merit at my hands
the fate he has met,' thought he, as he hurried away to alarm the
sentinels and castle guard; but all too late to succour Holcroft in
any way or even to search for his body.

Darkness had set in now, the fury of the sea was increasing, and if
Hawke Holcroft was found at all, it would be as a drowned man, with
the fatal diamonds in his possession, when the tide ebbed and the
long stretch of seaweed and shingle was left dry.

But he might never be found at all, and lie, as the skeletons are
still lying there, among the timbers of the _Royal George_.

Allan knew that he was due with his regiment at Woolwich on the
morrow, and, being full of rage and bitter disappointment with
disgust at the whole of this recent event--too full to have
explanations with his mother, or hear aught that Olive Raymond might,
as he naturally thought, be artful enough to advance, perhaps to
brazen out--intent only on quitting the scene and, if possible, of
forgetting a situation so degrading and repugnant to his pride--he
resolved to write to his father renouncing his cousin for ever; and,
throwing himself into a cab, drove straight to the railway station
and took the first train to London.

Hence it was that he returned to Puddicombe House no more.

And as the train swept clanking along the line, amid the monotony of
its sound the words of Olive's song, with what he deemed her accursed
raillery underlying them, came gallingly back to his memory, with
painful reiteration,

  'I know a maiden fair to see,
          Take care!
  She can both false and friendly be,
          Beware, beware!
  Trust her not.  She is fooling thee.'


'And for what a wretched creature she has dared to fool me!' he
thought, while a bitter malediction hovered on his lips.

In due time, with all his comrades of the Black Watch, he found
himself on board the _Nepaul_, and, after she had steamed out of the
Albert Dock, amid the deafening cheers of thousands, even amid all
the bustle and high military enthusiasm that surrounded him, he felt
half mad with grief, mortification, and fury.

Night and day his mind was full of angry and bitter dreams; a
conviction of Olive's guilt and the shame of her discovery were ever
before him.

Brave young Allan Graham was stricken to the heart; yet he bore
himself graciously and gallantly, though a conviction grew strong in
his mind that he would find his grave in the land he was going to.




CHAPTER XIX.

IN THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHS.

Ismailia, by the Lake of Timsah, lay steeped in sunshine, while the
regiments of the Highland Brigade, for the second time, after the
lapse of eighty years, landed upon Egyptian soil again.

Built equi-distant from Port Said and Suez, this new town protects
the outlet of the second canal, which carries the supply of fresh
water from the Nile near Cairo to the Isthmus.  In 1862 the place
where it stands was a scene of sandy desolation.  Seven years later
saw a brilliant little French town in existence with a broad quay,
bordering the lake, with hotels, cafés, a theatre where vaudevilles
were acted, a street of well-stocked shops, a public garden with a
fountain spouting Nile water in the Place Champollion, the telegraph
wires overhead, and the bells of a Christian church ringing, where,
but a short time before, the wandering Bedouin, the nomadic dweller
in tents, the child of the desert, with glittering spear and floating
burnous, urged his camel on its solitary way from Ramses to Serapium.

The heat was intense, and to the eyes of the Scottish mountaineers
the scenery about Ismailia seemed intensely monotonous.  Cloudless
skies of the deepest and richest blue formed a contrast to the vast
expanse of yellow sand that stretched far, far away till lost in hazy
distance, but the desert is susceptible of many shades and changes of
colour.

It is said that at Ismailia the stranger can very fully realise the
purity, the balm, and beauty of the Egyptian night, especially if
seated over wine and a cigar in the Hôtel des Voyageurs, where he may
watch the Lake of Timsah, and so varied are the tints of the latter
in the light of the red sun setting in the west, amid a lurid glow of
gold and crimson, that it looks like three lakes; towards the canal
that leads to Serapium it seems a deep blue; where the ships are
grouped near Ismailia, its wavelets seem silver with gold, while the
moon comes slowly up like a silver dawn, and rosy tints yet linger
when the sun has gone abruptly down.

But no time was given to the Highlanders either to study scenery or
artistic effects, even if so disposed.  Each regiment was rapidly
formed in column--every officer and man in his fighting kit, with
tropical helmet, haversack, and water bottle; the men with their
valises and greatcoats, and the march began towards the desert where
the Egyptians of Arabi awaited them at Tel-el-Kebir.

Little was talked of then but the recent cavalry fight at Kassassin,
where our Life Guards swept the ranks of Arabi's infantry, and where
a horde of wild Bedouins, who had been hovering near the field like
birds of prey, after their departure poured in to strip and rob the
dead and wounded of both armies, killing all who were able to resist.

The mess--or regiment rather, as there was no mess now--saw that
Allan Graham had come back a sorely changed man, who had hours of
evident depression alternated by furious hilarity--not the man's old
style at all; but his world, like Hamlet's, was 'out of joint.'  The
conduct of Olive Raymond yet remained a profound, an unexplained and
exasperating mystery to him; but he felt, how bitterly, that love
lives even after trust and faith are dead and buried; and now that he
was so far, far away from her, dreams of a yearning and sorrowful
kind, with many stinging thoughts, that he feared would never leave
him, filled his mind as he marched at the head of his company towards
the darkening desert.

In his looks and manner, Evan Cameron, like others, read a marked yet
undefinable change; his bearing now was occasionally haughty and
reserved; at other times his eyes seemed strangely sad.  What could
have happened?  Cameron did not ask, and as yet Allan said nothing
about it; and, sooth to say, in his own thoughts of Eveline, the
former had cause to be sad enough too.

His memories were ever of the days at Dundargue, and the chance
parting in the belvidere at Maviswood; and again her kisses, the
touch of her little caressing hands, with her voice came vividly to
him.

In some of the last papers that had reached the transport, _viâ_ the
Continent, he could see that she was leading a life of outward
gaiety.  Could he doubt that it was otherwise than outward?  He
gathered a sombre satisfaction from the thought, and then strove to
set it aside as selfish.

Why should she not enjoy balls and flowers-shows, races and regattas,
the drawing-room at Buckingham Palace, and other brilliant
gatherings?  Yet as he read of these things a frown of mingled anger,
sorrow, and even mockery gathered on his brow in spite of himself.

In the same papers Allan could discover no trace of any body having
been cast upon the beach either at Southsea or the shore of the Isle
of Wight, and hence he supposed that the remains of the drowned
Holcroft must have been taken out to sea.

The Highland enthusiasm, the warlike spirit that blazed up within
him, kept him from a great despair, for latterly his love for Olive
had become a part of his own existence.

The novelty of the land in which our new campaign had opened, the
incessant watchfulness, the time and attention each duty brought with
it, all gave him a recklessness as to life and as to fear of death,
that after a time won him the involuntary admiration of the Black
Watch and the whole Highland Brigade.

Just as the sun set, the bugles sounded a 'halt' after a march of six
miles, but six terrible miles they were, for at every step the
Highlanders sank ankle-deep in the soft and sun-dried sand.

All around that halting-place a sea of the latter seemed to stretch
in every direction, bare and desolate, save where Ismailia lay, its
edifices looking inky, black, and opaque in outline against the
orange and primrose sky; and black looked the masts of the transports
as they rose like a forest amid the waters of the Lake of Timsah.

When the first bivouac was formed at El-Magfar, the bare-kneed
Highlanders, each rolled in his blanket on the soft sand, slept
comfortably enough; but with morning came the first instalment of
misery, when the heavy dew that soaks everything left them cold and
stiff, and longing even for the fierce unclouded sun again.

'A devil of a country this,' said Carslogie.  'By day it is too hot
to eat, to act, or even to think; and at night it is too cold to
sleep or think of anything but the bitter cold itself.'

And but for the hot tea made for all over-night, when the brigade
first came to its camping-place, some injury to health must have
ensued; but the men were too weary to eat even a biscuit, of which
each carried a two days' supply in the canvas haversack that formed
his only pillow.

Before the sun was up, Allan rose from the sand and looked about him.
Under the starlight the Highland bivouac--for camp it was
not--presented a curious sight, as the men lay in ranks, each rolled
in his blanket, beside the piles of arms; the sentinels of the
out-piquets on the way to Tel-el-Mahuta standing dark and motionless
against the blue of the sky, looking in kilt and helmet like the
statues of ancient Romans.

To get a little warmth ere the pipers blew the 'rouse,' he walked a
short distance from where the men of his company lay, and near a
fragment of ruined wall, beside which grew a patch of those prickly
plants (round which hillocks of sand occasionally gather), and a
solitary gum-tree grew, he found, rolled up in a burnous, and
evidently concealing himself in dread and fear, a Bedouin.  There was
a small palm-grove near Magfar; why did he not seek hiding there?

'Hallo, my man,' thought Allan, 'what are you lurking here
for?--mischief, no doubt.'

He drew his claymore, supposing the lurker could be but a spy who had
crept within our chain of sentries; but the wild son of the desert
raised his hands deprecatingly, and, opening his burnous, showed that
he was perishing from a dreadful wound--a sword cut that had laid
open his right shoulder and breast.

Allan put his brandy-flask to the sufferer's lips, raising his head
as he did so, and then addressed him inquiringly.  Allan had picked
up some Arabic in India, and thus could understand the Bedouin, who
informed him that he had been wounded thus, by one of those sons of
Anak, our Life-guardsmen, in the charge at Kassassin.

'An Egyptian, by jingo!' exclaimed Carslogie, who came up at that
moment.  'Are you about to become a studier of humanity?'

'Well, Cuvier was great in the study of wasps, and so forth.  Why
shouldn't I study Egyptians?' replied Allan, grimly, 'and this poor
devil seems to have been wounded in the affair at Kassassin the other
day.'

'You understand him, then?'

'Perfectly.  Please bring one of the staff surgeons quickly; he must
have been lying here when we took up our ground over-night.'

The Bedouin, whose astonishment that he was not butchered on the
instant was great, stared alternately at Allan and at Carslogie, who
was a young fellow of the best style, one whose fine face even the
hideous tropical helmet (which is such an appalling substitute for
the graceful feather bonnet) could not spoil.  His figure was slight
and elegant, his features clearly cut and refined, and his bright
brown chestnut hair was close and curly.

The Bedouin was a perfect type of his race, and, save that he had a
good Remington rifle slung over his back, was not much changed in
habit, nature, or turn of thought from his ancestors of the tribe of
Ishmael.

Though weakened now by suffering and great loss of blood, he seemed
spare of figure and light of limb, well-formed and active, tall, but
whether thirty or forty years old it was impossible to say.  He had a
long, thin, and expressive countenance, with glittering black eyes
and teeth of pearly whiteness.  His colour was a dusky brown, his
hair black and wiry.

He was evidently a Bedouin of the desert, as the two ends of the
scarlet shawl which formed his turban hung down upon the shoulder, to
distinguish him from the Arabs of other tribes.  He was clad in a
thick dark brown baracan of wool, which served as a dress by day and
a bed by night, over which was a robe with wide sleeves.

When the doctor was dressing his wound, which was certainly a
terrible sword-cut, his richly embroidered girdle was seen, and this
announced him to be a sheikh, and such he was proved to be, as Allan
gathered from him that his name was Zeid el Ourdeh, the sheikh of a
tribe near Jebel Dimeshk, between the desert and the disused railway
to Heliopolis, 'the City of the Sun;' and as he lay there in his
picturesque costume, with a group of wondering Highlanders, in their
dark kilts and white helmets, gathered round him, and the blood-red
sun in the distance, coming swiftly up out of the dry sand of the
yellow desert, as it seemed, Allan thought what a subject was the
whole for the pencil of an artist.

The Bedouin was on the point of fainting, so great was the agony
occasioned by the dressing of his wound; but a mouthful from Allan's
flask revived him more than it would have done one usually accustomed
to such stimulants.

'Some sick men are going back to the rear at Ismailia,' said Allan.
'Carslogie, please to order the ambulance people to come this way.
I'll send this unfortunate creature to the Third Field Hospital.'

Carslogie paused to scrape a vesta and light a cigar, which he
proceeded to puff with a sigh of satisfaction.

'Quick, Carslogie,' cried Allan.  'We have no time to lose.  The
bugles will sound immediately.'

And Carslogie went on his way with the air of a man who thought the
world would be none the worse for having a Bedouin the less in it.

In his own language, and in terms peculiarly his own, Allan could
make out that the sheikh was thanking him in a low and earnest voice,
and adding that while life lasted he 'would always deem him as a
brother.  You infidels are powerful as the genii of old; you can
flash a light at night brilliant as that of the sun at noon; you have
another light that springs from the unseen air.  I have seen it in
the streets of Cairo' (no doubt referring to gas); 'and you can send
your thoughts from land to land under the sea more swiftly than even
the Afrite did in the days of Solomon; and I fear that from your
hands the Egyptians will suffer such chastisement as fell on the
people of Noah, of Ad, and of Thamud,' he added, wearily and sadly,
as his head fell on one side.

A party of the ambulance had now come, and Allan informed him that he
was to be sent to Ismailia.  He did more; he placed some money in his
hand wherewith to procure necessaries, and, while the eyes of the
Bedouin gleamed with gratitude, his brown mahogany and attenuated
fingers closed avariciously and tightly on such an unusual gift as
coins.

''Pon my soul, Allan Graham,' said Carslogie, 'considering how these
rascals treated our wounded at Kassassin, your humanity, to say the
least of it, seems to me to be a little misplaced.'

'Perhaps; but I cannot help it.  I feel a little tender-hearted just
now,' said Allan, with a smile, as the wounded Bedouin--of whom he
had not seen the last--was borne away.

The pipes struck up, and once more the columns began a ten-miles'
march to Mahsameh.  The Gordon Highlanders were in advance, the
Camerons next, then came the Highland Light Infantry, and then the
Black Watch, all toiling through the soft, deep sand.  These splendid
regiments were all marching in massed columns, at one pace interval,
the cavalry moving with them collaterally on one flank, and the
artillery on the other, clattering along, with spunges, buckets,
spare wheels, and forge waggons--all forming a grand, impressive
spectacle in the midst of the wide Egyptian desert.

To Scottish soldiers, who are usually so well-grounded in their Bible
history, the soil they were treading, if the toil made it disgusting
on one hand, memory made it full of deep interest on the other.  They
knew that they were already in, or were approaching, the Land of
Goshen, where, by the tasks they had conned at school and those which
their ministers superintended, they were aware that they were nigh
unto the place where Jacob dwelt of old, that he might be near to
Joseph, who lived at Pharaoh's court; near to the place where father
and son met, and where we still find Rameses, which was built by the
Israelites in the days of their bondage; and, as our soldiers marched
on, some there were who recalled these things to each other, as their
minds went back to the village kirk, whose bells awoke the echoes of
green and lonely glens, and to the firesides of their fathers, when
expounding on these things on Saturday night, when the 'big ha'
Bible' was produced; and, though they might yawn wearily over such
matters at home, these scriptural names and localities had a very
different effect upon them now.




CHAPTER XX.

THE MARCH THROUGH GOSHEN.

On, and on, and on, through the same kind of Egyptian
landscape--tame, barren, and insipid--so terribly vapid and flatly
horrid, when compared with the Salvatoresque hills and glens of their
native land--the naked plain, bounded by occasional hillocks at vast
distances--the toilsome march of the Highlanders continued.  Yet
there are luxuriant plains in some parts of the Land of Goshen.

Sometimes date-trees were seen, with trunks bare and slender, or
mud-walled wigwams on the causeways; but it is a land that, with all
its vast antiquity and religious associations, of which no poet has
ever sung.  'What, indeed, could an Egyptian sing on the reed of
Gesner or Theocritus?' asks Volney.  'He sees neither limpid streams,
nor verdant lawns, nor solitary caves; and is equally a stranger to
valleys, mountain-sides, and impending rocks.'  Miss Martineau is
almost the only traveller who claims for Egypt the attributes of the
picturesque and varied in beauty!

And there were incessant swarms of scorpions, gnats, and more
especially of flies--one of the many plagues of Egypt--which were so
numerous that it was impossible to eat the dry ration biscuits
without the chance of swallowing these pests also.

More than once, on the summit of a sandy hillock, there would appear,
sharply defined against the clear blue sky, the picturesque figure of
a mounted Bedouin, with his white burnous floating about him, a tall,
reed-like spear, or a long musket slung by his side--a man unchanged
in aspect or ideas from his nomadic forefathers, who saw the mailed
Crusaders toiling on their way to Jerusalem--gazing with stolid
wonder at the marching columns in a costume so strange, with bare
knees, white sporrans, and kilts of dark-green tartan waving at every
step; while on the hot and breathless air there was borne towards him
the hoarse and shrill music of the pipes--the same wild music that,
eighty years before, woke the echoes of the Pyramids and of the
streets of Grand Cairo.

But what land in the world has not echoed to their music?

All our soldiers were more or less full of enthusiasm--anxious to get
at Arabi--to grapple with the enemy, 'and get the business over,' as
they phrased it; though it is doubtful if they quite believed in Sir
Garnet Wolseley's apparently boastful prediction that the war would
be ended by the 16th of that month, September.

In the exuberance of their spirits, many chorussed merrily when the
pipes ceased, which was seldom, lilting as, a writer says, only 'the
song-loving Scots' can do, as in the days when their country was
redolent of song, when the milk-maid sang some old chant to her cows
in field or byre, when the house-wife span at her ingle-neuk, when
the reapers filled the harvest-field with melody, and the ploughman
in winter when he turned the glistening furrows over the lea.

And now and anon the Bedouin scouts would wheel their horses round
and vanish ere our cavalry could reach them to bear to Tel-el-Kebir
the terrible tidings, as some said, 'that devils in petticoats' were
coming, and, as others asserted, 'devils with beards down to their
knees.'

Every man had one hundred rounds of ball-cartridge and his bottle
filled with water from the Canal, called by the soldiers jocularly
'Egyptian soup,' from its hue and quality; thus a ration of rum, when
it was served out, proved very acceptable, though some there were who
did not much affect the cold tea, and Allan could not help smiling at
a little argument that ensued between Corporal MacSnish of his
company and one of the Scripture-readers, who, to their honour, be it
said, kept up with the troops, went under fire with them, and after
the conflict did all in their power to alleviate the sufferings of
the wounded.

'Don't grumble, corporal,' said the Scripture-reader, 'though I know
it is a soldier's privilege.  He who paints the lilies of the field
and feeds the sparrow will supply all you want.'

'Oich, I hope so, whateffer; but a corporal of the Black Watch is
worth a good many sparrows, I can tell you, and as for the cold
tea--ugh!'

'Better for you than all the liquor in the world, my man,' said the
Scripture-reader.

'Even the worst whusky, whateffer, would be better to my mind; and we
have Scripture for it that we should not drink water alone.'

'Indeed!' said the reader, doubtfully.

'Yes,' urged the corporal, who knew his Bible well; 'are we not told
in Maccabees, chapter xv. and verse 39, that "it is hurtful to drink
wine or water alone, as wine mingled with water is pleasant and
delighteth the taste?"'

'For all that,' replied the Scripture-reader, 'I agree with Sir
Garnet that water is alone the drink for man.'

'Yet the only man that Holy Writ records as ever asking for it,
didn't get it.'

'Who was _he_?'

'Dives, and we all know where _he_ was then.  Scripture again!' said
the corporal, with a smirk on his sharp Highland face, and thinking
he had decidedly the best of the argument.

During a mid-day halt on this march, some of the troops constructed
out of blankets and rifles with fixed bayonets erections like gipsy
tents, to shelter them from the blazing heat of the sun, and a
singular kind of encampment they presented.

With ship biscuits and tinned meat and some brandy to flavour their
cold tea, Allan Graham, Cameron, Carslogie, and some other officers
of the corps made themselves as comfortable as they could under
shelter of their impromptu tents, and many were even jolly,
especially Carslogie, who was rather a noisy and irrepressible fellow.

Stretched on the sand with his tropical helmet tilted back on his
head, he drank his 'cold tea,' as he called it, though it was stiff
half-and-half grog, and proffered his cigar-case to all.

'Isn't this jolly!' he exclaimed.  'Instead of this, we might have
been out in the blazing open.'

Then he struck up a verse of a song to the air of the 'Garb of Old
Gaul,' and composed by an anonymous writer, though he hinted it was
Mr. John Bright:--

    'They talk of a good time, when warfare shall cease,
    And the nations hobnob o'er a big pipe of peace,
    And the lion and the lamb in auriferous mead
    On bills of exchange in beatitude feed.
  But keep your powder dry, my boys, and keep your bayonets keen;
  The world can't do without us yet, nor will it soon, I ween!
  Then stern and true, where work's to do, we'll do it as we can,
  And shoulder to shoulder still march in the van!'


'The good time predicted seems a long way off yet,' he added, with a
sigh, to find that the last of his grog was gone, for after a hot
morning's march it was, as he said, 'quite a Sybaritish luxury.'
'Well, well, a little time will find us face to face with Arabi, and
we shall exchange the fleshpots of Egypt for those of the old
country.'

This was the 11th of September, and the march was resumed at five in
the evening for the head-quarters at Kassassin, where the column
found its tents pitched.  Allan shared his with Cameron, and, like
their comrades, they proceeded to make themselves as comfortable as
they could; but it soon became known that on the morrow the Highland
Brigade was to lead in the night attack upon the formidable
entrenchments of Arabi Pasha at Tel-el-Kebir.

'The last bugle some of us may ever hear will sound at six to-morrow
evening,' said Allan, as he and Cameron, after a picnic kind of
repast, lay on the floor of the tent and smoked their Havanas, with
their jackets open, and minus collars and ties, for the evening was
hot then, though cold and dew came together the moment the sun went
down, and then there was no light in the tent save those of the stars.

'Listen to Carslogie singing in his tent; no sombre reflections seem
to come to him,' said Cameron.

'Some of us, of course, will lose the number of our mess, as the
sailors say,' said Allan again, after a pause.

'Well, it is not a cheerful thought, Allan,' said Cameron; 'but life
is not particularly rosy with me just now, so I am just the fellow to
have a charmed one when under fire again to-morrow.'

'There is a history in all men's lives, Cameron, it is said.  Well,
there is a devil of a lot in mine--more than I care for.'

'You have long seemed rather low in spirit.'

'I have reason,' replied Allan, while that inexpressible longing to
talk of himself and his sorrows, which seizes upon men now and then,
came upon him, and he related to Cameron the whole story of his
engagement with his cousin, his doubts and fears--the intrusions and
outrageous insults put upon them both by Hawke Holcroft, who seemed
to wield some degrading and mysterious power once--a power that was
ended now; 'and,' he added, after his narrative was ended, 'I trust
under heaven never to look upon her false fair face again!'

Cameron heard his strange story in silent amazement.

'Can all this not be explained?' he asked.

'I want no explanation; I have been degraded enough,' replied Allan,
bitterly.

Cameron, strangely enough, had never, as yet, even to his early
friend and comrade, made any reference to what the latter fully
knew--his love for Eveline: and never once had her name escaped him
during the long voyage in the Nepaul from Woolwich to Ismailia, nor
even on the march towards the enemy.

Poor Cameron had thought, what was the use of speaking of that matter
now, when all was hopeless--all over, and for ever, between them?
But now, encouraged or melted by Allan Graham's new confidence in
himself, he said,

'With reference to the risks we run tomorrow, I am glad that I set my
house in order, did so, indeed, before we marched from Edinburgh.'

'How?'

'About Stratherroch, or what remains of it.'

'In what way, Evan?'

We must all die sooner or later--a soldier sooner, perhaps, than a
civilian; so by will, if aught happens to me--I have left the old
place--tower and hill, wood, glen, and water, to--to Eveline--I mean
to Lady Paget.'

'Good heavens!  To Eveline!' exclaimed Allan, his face full of a
surprise that was unseen in the starlight and darkened bell tent.'

'Yes.'

'Have you no one else?'

'None save my brother Duncan, who has himself a large fortune--none
whom I love as--as I love her,' added Cameron, in a very broken voice.

'Poor Evan!  I always suspected--indeed, knew of it.'

'You did?'

'Yes, Evan.'

'And--and your sister.'

'She loved you.'

'My God!--yet was sacrificed to another.'

They wrung each other's hands in the dark, and both remained silent
for a time, each full of his own thoughts, and in the gloom seeing
nothing but the end of the other's cigar.

'Sir Paget is so rich that he will think little of Stratherroch, even
when cleared of its heavy encumbrances,' said Evan.

'But he may think rather wrathfully of the donor, though I trust and
hope he may never get it.  And now, good-night, Evan.  I have to
parade the inlying picquet.  Get some sleep if you can, old
fellow--we'll need all our metal on the morrow.'

And Allan, taking his dirk and claymore, hurried away full of
thought, for, if his friend really fell, this odd bequest of
Stratherroch might compromise his sister with her elderly spouse, and
it was impossible to make any change, circumstanced as they were then.

'It is said that "every man has a history, and that every man
outlives it,"' thought Allan; 'I wonder how it will be with poor Evan
and me.  And now to parade the picquet, with that paragon of
sergeant-majors, M'Neill.  Picquets parade at sunset--here, however,
the sun sets before we have time to think of it.  But the fight
to-morrow will be to Evan and me--for a time, at least--what opium
was to De Quincey and the author of the "Ancient Mariner."  Fool,
fool, fool that I am, to think of _her_ here at all!'

He left Evan Cameron inspired by a mingled emotion of gratitude and
satisfaction, for Evan now knew and felt certain that, had Eveline
been in Allan's gift, she might have been his bride ere this; and
with this conviction in his mind he strove to court sleep, while
roused ever and anon, as in India, by the wild cry of the jackal.

Sir Garnet Wolseley had now come up, the brigade of guards also, and
the whole strength of the British force was concentrated at
Kassassin, the place of our cavalry victory, where our horse so
gallantly charged and swept, sword in hand, through the brigades of
Egyptian guns in the dark.

With the next day's dawn those officers, who, like the Master of
Aberfeldie, Cameron, and others, advanced beyond a palm wood that
grew near the camp, could distinctly see with their field-glasses,
against the bright orange tint shed on the sky by the up-coming sun,
the strong earthworks of Tel-el-Kebir crowning the hillocks, and
manned by more than twenty thousand regular troops--the flower of the
army of Arabi, who commanded them in person; and when the sun rose
higher the infantry could be seen lining the trenches, with all their
serried bayonets flashing in the sunshine.

Beyond these formidable earthworks the Egyptian camp could be seen in
the distance spreading far away an almost unbroken line of tents,
which, if they had all occupants, betokened the presence of a very
great force indeed, as more than one reconnoitring officer remarked
to another.

Many were full of disappointment lest there might be no fighting
after all, as the preceding morning the sound of heavy firing had
been heard in the rear of the Egyptian position, and there seemed a
prospect of internal dissension facilitating a dissolution of the
whole enemy's force.

Others more wisely suggested that Arabi was only practising his
artillery to obtain the range in case his position was turned and
attacked in the rear, though some asserted that the deep booming of
the guns was too steady and continuous for mere practice of that
nature.

The British troops had only a five days' reserve of provisions, but
it was generally known that the country was rich and full of
subsistence beyond the lines of Tel-el-Kebir, and that we would carry
these no man under Wolseley doubted.  Moreover, he had with him sixty
of the finest pieces of cannon in the world.

The day passed on, and evening drew nigh, the eventful day of the
12th September, when every man was prepared to 'do or die!'  Higher
and higher beat every heart.  At six p.m. the 'fall in' was sounded
far along the lines, and quietly, as if upon parade at home, that
stately soldier M'Neill, sergeant-major of the Black Watch, paraded
and posted the markers for the various companies of his corps,
'dressing' them with his usual accuracy.

The orders were brief but emphatic.  Perfect silence was to be
maintained for the march, and, as the place was to be carried in
grand old British style at the point of the bayonet, on no account
was an order to load to be issued.

Each man carried a hundred rounds of ball with one day's provisions,
and his tin water-bottle filled with cold tea.  The tents were
struck, and the baggage piled for conveyance to the rear, in case of
a reverse, which no man thought possible.

The blood-red sun went swiftly down westward of the point of attack
beyond Zagazig, darkness fell as swiftly over the desert and the
triple lines of canal that flow between both Mahsameh and Abassa, and
then our army, fourteen thousand strong, including foot, horse, and
artillery, began in silence the midnight march for Tel-el-Kebir, the
last march as it proved to many a brave young fellow.

As the regiment moved off, Allan thought of Evan Cameron's
communication over-night, and an irrepressible regret and anxiety
took possession of him, as he had an unaccountable presentiment that
his friend was doomed to fall in the coming strife.  Of himself he
never thought at all.



END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.



LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.









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