COLVILLE OF THE GUARDS


  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.
  1885.

  _All rights reserved._




  CONTENTS

  I. The Queen's Shilling
  II. In London
  III. No. 60, Park Lane
  IV. 'So Near and Yet So Far!'
  V. 'Some Day.'
  VI. Jack Shows His Teeth
  VII. The Daughter of Nox
  VIII. Mrs. Deroubigne
  IX. Was It Not a Dream?
  X. Going to the Front
  XI. At Jellalabad
  XII. The Hadji
  XIII. A Fight with the Mohmunds
  XIV. In the Lughman Valley
  XV. The Fancy Ball
  XVI. The 10th Hussars
  XVII. Lost
  XVIII. The Sequel
  XIX. The Hakim Abou Ayoub
  XX. At Cabul




COLVILLE OF THE GUARDS.



CHAPTER I.

THE QUEEN'S SHILLING.

Robert Wodrow, we have stated, had disappeared from his home.

Ellinor had apparently passed out of his life, and he felt as if he
had nothing more to hope for in it; but the influence of her memory
hung over him still.

Even the love he bore his poor old mother failed to restrain his wild
impulse, his craving, to begone, he cared not where; thus her
influence also failed in getting him to resume those medical studies
which he once pursued with enthusiasm, but now relinquished with
indifference or disgust; and, under the disappointment and mental
worry produced by Ellinor's falsehood to himself, he failed to
graduate at the expected time.

'My poor boy!' his mother said again and again, while stroking his
dark brown hair caressingly with her now shrivelled hand; 'that
cold-blooded girl has come between you and your wits.'

'Don't call her so, mother.  Perhaps I did not deserve her,' said he,
humbly.

'I used to sit and watch you both when children many a time and oft,
and think what a winsome couple you would be in the days to come.  Ah
me, Robert, your one ewe lamb, and that stranger took it from you, to
be but a plaything for his idle hours too probably!'

'Mother, you torture me by all this kind of thing!' exclaimed Robert.

'It is perhaps but a sudden girlish fancy hers for that man Sleath.
It may pass away and all yet be well.'

'Never for me, mother.  And you think so meanly of me as to take that
view of the matter?  I would not and could not with my knowledge of
the present seek to have the past over again, and never more can I
look upon Ellinor Wellwood or think of her save as I would of the
dead.  The charm is broken, the flower has lost its fragrance, and
the peach its bloom.'

'Why should the weakness or falsehood of one person--one person
only--wreck the whole life of another?' asked his father, with some
asperity.  'It should not be so.'

'The old and the young view these matters differently, father,' said
Robert, gently.

'True.  I have read that "in youth grief is a tempest which makes you
ill; in old age it is only like a cold wind which adds a wrinkle to
your face and one more white lock to the others.  Yet there are
people who can feed themselves on their grief till they grow fat on
it."'

But arguments proved unavailing.  The vicinity of Birkwoodbrae had
become intolerable to Robert now, and he resolved that he would go
far away from them and the pleasant birks of Invermay; and he openly
announced his intention of becoming a soldier, adding that nothing
would make him swerve from his purpose, as by that means he would be
taken to other scenes and be under other influences.

'Most evil ones, I fear!' exclaimed the doctor, striking his hands
together.

'Oh, my poor infatuated boy!' added his mother, while her tears fell
hotly and fast, and his father started from the table on which the
untasted dinner was spread, tore open his waistcoat as if he was
suffocating, and paced about the room with impatient strides, his
whole form agitated with a kind of convulsive agony that cut Robert
to the soul, but did not make him swerve from his bitter purpose.

'Consider the society and profligacy you have to encounter--yea, such
as even our ancestor, in the third volume of his _Analecta_, details
when describing the schools of profanity in 1726.'

Then, after a time, finding that all his opposition was vain, he
said, in a very broken voice,

'God bless and protect you, Robert, and may He forgive you for all
the sorrow you are causing us, as by such a course you will be lost
to us and to yourself, after all our care and affection, after all
your painful anxieties at college, and after all your good training
and religious education.'

'In three years I shall be an officer,' exclaimed Robert,
confidently, 'and won't you and the dear old mother be proud of me
then?'

But the minister shook his silver head.

'Your future----' he began, and paused.  'Who can see the future?'

'One above, Robert.  And may He give you the grace to think overall
this terrible purpose again.'

Robert did think again, as he had thought before, deeply and
decidedly, and, to avoid more painful scenes and partings, he quitted
his bed next morning while the sky was dark, and no ray of light
gilded as yet the Ochil peaks.  He dressed himself in haste, took a
few necessaries in a handbag, and after kneeling softly and saying a
prayer at the door of the room in which his parents were asleep, he
tore himself as it were out of the house and set forth on his new
path in life, the path by which there might be no returning.

In that time of supreme bitterness little could the poor fellow see
all that was before him.

The morning was still dark, but the sky was clear and starry; the
great hills and tall silver birches in the foreground stood blackly
up against it, and he could hear that sound so familiar to his
ears--the rush of the May over its rocky bed.

He gave a lingering farewell glance at the roof of the old house
which had been his home since first he saw the light there--the
abode, with all its old-fashioned but substantial furniture, to which
his mother had come a smiling and blushing bride in the past
time--the abode, till now, of so much peace, frugality, and
happiness--and with a bitter sigh he turned his eyes resolutely away.

Then, if aught was required to nerve him, it was the next feature in
the still and sombre landscape; the smokeless chimneys and darkened
windows of Birkwoodbrae--the now empty shrine where so long his idol
had been.

'Oh, all I have ever loved!' he exclaimed, and, wringing his hands,
set out with all speed upon his way, haunted, however, by the coming
grief of those he was leaving behind when his place was found empty;
when his mother's eyes would have a vacant chair to contemplate and
his father's reverend head was bent with sorrow, as it would be in
the separation that was to come; and what is separation to the loving
but a living death?

The next day found him among the wide and stately streets of the
Modern Athens, willing to enlist in the first regiment any member of
which came in his way, for he was drawing a chance in the lottery of
life now, and to him all regiments were alike; so, as Fortune had it,
he met a hussar, to whom he expressed his wishes, and from whom he
soon receiyed, with all due formality, that magic coin _the Queen's
Shilling_, and became what is termed 'a Headquarter Recruit,'
enlisting for 'short service'--i.e., six years with the colours.

Six years!  In these days of steam the progress of events is so
rapid, what might not happen in that brief space?

He had answered all the usual questions by those entitled to make
them as to his age, name, parish, and calling, with others that were
less pleasant, as to whether he had ever served before, or been
marked D. or B.C.; this formality over, and oath of attestation taken
before a bailie of the city--the oath to 'be faithful and bear true
allegiance to Her Majesty, her heirs and successors; obey all orders
of Her Majesty, her heirs and successors; and of all the generals and
officers, &c.,' set over him--being concluded, a night intervening
between enlistment and attestation, nothing remained, as his new
friend, Sam Surcingle, said, 'but to have a drink over it.'

This opinion was concurred in by several smart but long-legged
fellows in braided trousers, and tight jackets, with caps like
scarlet muffins, jangling jack-spurs, and riding switches, who seemed
all opportunely at hand, and suffering from chronic thirst, all the
more so as the new recruit seemed to have some loose cash; and a
suitable tavern (the 'Scots Grey') being at hand, Robert Wodrow soon
found himself acting as host to a military circle which made up in
heedless jollity and noise what it might lack in rank and distinction.

Yet among the half-dozen or so of his new friends were, at least, two
of those ill-starred fellows so frequently to be found in our cavalry
regiments at all times, but more especially just now, those who by
extravagance and dissipation or failing to achieve the insane
'cramming' of the present day, had lost their chance of commissions,
and taken 'the shilling' from sheer love of the service, and the
desperate hope of rising in it.

One of these was a mere youth, who, as Sam Surcingle said, 'had a
long pedigree behind and a long minority before him;' the other, Toby
Chase, the heir to an ancient baronetcy, was older, and drank fast to
drown care, shouting, with a laugh,

'To-day--to-day is for me; to-morrow is the paradise of the fool!
Your health and promotion, Wodrow, old fellow!'

Glass succeeded glass; toasts and anecdotes--some of the latter not
very classical--followed each other fast, till the sharp trumpets
blew 'the last post' in the adjoining barrack square of Piershill,
and the hussars had to hurry to quarters, and we are sorry to admit
that for perhaps the first time in his life--even during his college
career--Robert Wodrow had contrived to get disreputably tipsy.

He had no care for the present and no anticipation of the headache
and shame of the morrow, with the disgusts of the rough riding and
'barrack fatigue,' such as carrying coals or refilling mattresses
with fresh straw; neither was he troubled with the natural reflection
of what would be the emotions of his highly-principled and
purely-minded old father and mother could they have seen him then,
when he had spent the last of his cash on his new comrades, and was
voted the king of good fellows, and with one of the before-mentioned
scarlet muffins on his head, but cocked very much over the right ear,
he flourished a riding-whip, while joining, but with a somewhat
'feathery' voice, in the song,

  'How happy's the soldier that lives on his pay,
  And spends half-a-crown out of sixpence a day!
  Little cares he for the bailiff or bum,
  When he pays all his debts with a roll on the drum.'


And so, for a time, Robert Wodrow passes out of our story; but a time
only.




CHAPTER II.

IN LONDON.

Ellinor was thinking of Redmond Sleath--when was she not thinking of
him!--during all that long, long journey from the North to London,
and Mary had been painfully struck by her alternate nervous anxiety
and dull, mechanical acceptance of her own attentions and care during
its progress.  She seemed at times like a somnambulist--one moving in
her sleep rather than one to whom the journey should have been an
excitement and a novelty after the long years of quiet and seclusion
at Birkwoodbrae, hence the strain upon her overwrought nerves was ere
long to bring a serious illness upon her.

A cab--a genuine London cab, one of those clumsy four-wheeled
'growlers,' peculiar to the modern Babylon and to no other
place--cramped, damp, frowsy, far from sweet-smelling, and sorely
perilous for ladies' dresses--had conveyed the sisters, both feeling
somewhat scared and disconsolate, from the Northern Railway to the
classic region of Paddington by day, and luckily for them not by
night.

The long drive westward by the Euston and Mary-le-Bone Roads had
seemed apparently interminable, and most weary after a long journey
by rail; and then the architecture, construction, and material of the
houses--brick, always and for ever brick--looked strange and foreign
to their eyes, and so ere long they reached the Terrace, which
adjoins Paddington Church.  They had read of and heard a deal about
the famous old Court suburb of Kensington, and thought the locality
to which a chance had taken them might prove something like it.

Mrs. Fubsby, their landlady, whose address had been given to them by
her nephew, Joe Fubsby, guard of the northern train (the chance above
referred to), and hence their selection of such a singular place,
received the weary travellers kindly enough.  She seemed a motherly,
well-disposed woman, but soured in disposition by past wrongs or
sorrows.

She was about forty years of age, had some remains of beauty, and had
seen better days and had other hopes (as usual with her class), all
of which she was not long in hinting.

The sitting-room into which she ushered them, though scrupulously
clean, had a mouldy odour, suggestive of the adjacent hideous
churchyard; it looked small, poor, and shabby.  Gaudy artificial
flowers in vases of Derby spar were on the little mantelpiece, and
some highly-coloured prints in Oxford frames were hung upon the walls.

The air felt close and heavy--oh, so heavy, the girls thought, after
the fresh, pure breezes of Invermay!  In fact, there seemed to be no
air at all.

Their sweetness and gentleness of manner, together with their
undeniable beauty, attracted and won the--at first
suspicious--landlady, who bustled about and prepared tea for them.
She, however, put great weight upon an introduction coming through
her nephew Joe; and her confidence grew apace when she found Mary
scrupulously correct in her weekly payments, and others of every
kind, and thus she complacently tolerated the presence of Jack in her
household.  To have parted with him would have stricken Mary's heart.

Ere the first day of their residence with her was past, they were in
full possession of Mrs. Fubsby's personal history, which she thrust
upon them with that loquacious communicativeness peculiar to the
English lower orders--at least so much of it as she cared to
tell--how her maiden name was Seraphina-Mary-Ann--how she had married
a gentleman, who, however, did not behave as such in the end, as he
had left her years ago, and she was now reduced to have lodgers or
boarders, and so forth.

Coming from a secluded country place like their Perthshire parish,
Mary and Ellinor had no real idea of the world or of life, as it is
called--more than all, the bustling, busy, tearing, selfish, and
suspicious life of London, or the mighty and close race for existence
there.  They knew not yet that without friends and introductions
employments in teaching music or drawing were all but unattainable.

A few days passed on.  Advertisements were studied daily and replied
to sedulously; but no answer came.  They could not know that for each
of these employments there might be two thousand applicants!  So
their poor hearts grew hopeless and weary--often sick with alarm as
money dwindled away; and day by day they looked out, either on the
frowsy churchyard, where not a blade of grass grew between the
closely packed tombstones, or the equally frowsy canal, with its
barges cleaving the muddy water and oozy slime; and as they were
totally ignorant of London, for a time, the poor girls supposed it
must be _all_ like their then sordid surroundings.

Paddington, where Francois Thurot, the famous corsair, won the bride
in whose arms he died in battle, and where in the last century the
Guards coming from Hounslow were wont to halt for the night, prior to
marching for the little London of George II., was, some fifty years
ago, a kind of suburban village, a rural and pretty place, with its
grassy green and the old 'Wheatsheaf' Tavern, where Ben Jonson drank
his beer, even after its quaint Gothic church, where the Sheldons
were entombed by its solemn yew-tree, was replaced by the present
hideous square edifice, with its pillared portico and trumpery cupola
starting from amid that veritable stoneyard of graveslabs, among
which lie the remains of the beautiful Mrs. Siddons and of the
luckless painter Haydon--an odious and festering place, where, Dr.
Ashburner tells us in his work on 'The Dynamics,' his nervous
patients were wont to see nightly the pale and lambent dead-lights
rising from the corrupted soil.

Whether it was the result of all she had undergone of late, or that
the atmosphere of the place affected Ellinor, Mary never knew; but
her colour faded out--the ruddy tint left her lips, and her dark
hazel eyes grew dull as she became prostrated by a nervous illness,
which added sorely to the cares, the troubles, and expenses of the
latter, for Ellinor required wine and many little luxuries.

Energy seemed to have left her.  Ellinor was but twenty, but already
her life seemed over and done with!

And now that her secret love affair was apparently a thing completely
of the past, Ellinor showed Mary the gift of Sir Redmond, and
bursting into a flood of hysterical tears told her all--of the
baffled elopement; and then Mary, catching up Jack, covered the dog
with kisses.

There were at least two reasons why no letters ever reached Dr.
Wodrow, and that, to him, the movements of the sisters seemed
involved in painful mystery.

Two letters that Mary wrote to him had miscarried, and, as no answers
came to them, with over-sensitiveness and doubt, she misconstrued the
silence of her good old friend, and, believing that he resented
Ellinor's treatment of his son, would now ignore their existence.

'I shall write no more,' said Mary.  'Can it be that Lady Dunkeld has
ruined us among those who knew us?  If so, there is one use in
adversity--we can tell our friends from our enemies.'

So in sorrowful doubt she did not write again; seeking for employment
and nursing Ellinor occupied all the thoughts of Mary, who became
almost distracted with a fear that the former might be sent by Mrs.
Fubsby to a common hospital.  Nothing, perhaps, was further from the
good woman's thoughts; but Mary had heard, or read, of such things.
Thus, fully occupied, she wrote no more; and, as time went past, the
mystery grew at the manse of Kirktoun-Mailler, and in the mind of
Colville also.  Everything painful, horrible, and disastrous was
fancied, and advertisements put by the latter in the _Times_, however
carefully yet pointedly worded, were never seen by Mary.  So in these
our days of penny post and cheap telegrams, they remained lost,
untraced, and undiscovered by those who loved them best.

She had both confidence and patience; and patience is mental strength
concentrated.  Her religious education had also taught her
resignation, and she felt that 'let the sands drop through the glass
ever so slowly, there is a time when they end; there is a time for us
all; no matter the hour, for God thinks it the best.'

Yet often as she sat, busy with crewel work for sale, by Ellinor's
bedside, the notes of the passing bell in the cupola of the adjacent
church--a toll unknown in Scotland--smote a gloom upon her heart with
every measured stroke.

No pessimist was Mary Wellwood in temper or heart, and no
manufacturer of artificial sorrow; yet the idea occurred to her with
terror--what if she should lose Ellinor, and be left alone in this
bitter world?

As petty trifles, like airs and scraps of frivolous songs, will haunt
the mind in times of dire calamity, even of death, Mary's thoughts
would run persistently on the feathered pets and flowers she had once
at home--even on the sparrows for which she was daily wont to spread
crumbs, where they would find none now; and she actually envied her
old owl; he, at least, was at home in his ivied ruin, that looked
down on Invermay.

Thinking thus, Mary would sit in the evening twilight by the open
window, through which came the roar of mighty London; but not the
flower-scented air that hovered over their lost home; and while the
stars, dimly seen in the smoke-laden sky of London, stole into sight,
she thought of the green Ochil peaks, over which the same stars were
shining brightly, like vast diamonds set in azure.

Ellinor recovered and gained strength, but still able to do little
with her pencil.

Evening walks, as among the green lanes and shady paths in the glen
where the May flows, they could have no more now.  They seldom saw
the sun set; and when evening fell the streets in their vicinity
became filled by people whose appearance appalled them.  There were
vicious-looking men and more vicious-looking women from the adjacent
Edgware Road; vendors of carrion on wooden skewers, known as
'cat's-meat;' vendors of roasted potatoes and chestnuts; boiled
oranges; of plums, the bloom of which was due to clothes-blue;
vendors of milk, the component parts of which made one shudder; of
queerly-painted pugs and yellow-painted sparrows; of red pots of
earth, with rootless twigs of flowers stuck in them--another London
dodge--yet declared by the vendors to be 'all a-growing--all
a-blowing.'

With such plants as these Mrs. Fubsby was not to be 'took in,' and so
preferred paper flowers.

Ellinor contrived to finish one of her best landscapes--a view on the
May--and 'room' was given it by a kind of picture-dealer close by,
but it remained in his window unsold, and apparently unnoticed by
all--save the flies, who did not improve it.

Mary's confidence at times began to desert her when she felt how hard
it would be for them, all unaided as they were, to win their daily
bread and add to the little pittance they had, among that vast human
tide of busy, cold, careless, and apparently unsympathising people
who poured past her in the streets.

Her sweet face began to look anxious, sorrowful, and pale under the
ripples of golden brown hair that fell softly over her broad low
forehead; and ere long the two sisters began to want many things to
which they had been accustomed.

'What is to be the end of it all?' Mary would think, as she came
slowly back to tell Ellinor of some fresh disappointment, or that her
picture was still unsold.  Mary was growing paler, Ellinor could
see--yes, she looked older; her figure seemed less round, though
graceful as ever.  Her street dress was beginning to look poor and
even shabby.  Oh, how sad and horrible it was!

Mrs. Fubsby pitied the girls for their want of success, while she
admired their perseverance.  A well-meaning woman, she had some
suggestions to 'hoffer,' as she said, which made Mary's blood run
cold.

Among these were two--that, as she was 'so 'andsome,' she might get a
situation in the mantle department of some great shop, or as a
species of lay-figure to show off the goods, and who knew but one of
the 'walkers' might take a fancy to her? or to work a sewing-machine
in the window in the gaze of all those men and boys who would be
certain to crowd thereat, and flatten their noses against the glass
while critically surveying her.  Another suggestion was to sell poor
Jack, whom Joe Fubsby said was well worth 'a ten pun' note;' but Mary
would rather have starved than parted with her dog.

With a burning cheek and a beating heart, and feeling certain that
she would be viewed with suspicion, and perhaps insulted, she
ventured into a shop in the Edgware Road, where an 'honest' dealer
gave her less than the third of the value for Sir Redmond's chain and
locket.  This sum helped them on a little; but again finances began
to fall, and, clasping her slim white hands, Mary began to think it
was useless attempting to struggle any more.




CHAPTER III.

NO. 60, PARK LANE.

In a work of fiction, says a writer, 'the reader will find a hundred
strange meetings and coincidences--old lovers coming face to face
after years of separation, friends thought dead rising up at the
corners of the streets, and the good characters appearing _ad
libitum_ to confound all the bad in the concluding chapters.
Critics,' he adds, 'laugh at all these wires which pull the Minerva
puppets, but _real life_ has often, more than one imagines, its
strange meetings and coincidences too--old lovers and friends do
start as from Hades into our presence sometimes, and if a good genius
in the shape of a father, or big brother, or a policeman did not come
to the rescue at times when the last hope was failing us, what a deal
more misery there would be in the world.'

Thus it was, through this doctrine of strange chances, that Mary
Wellwood was soon fated to meet Colville on two occasions, and they
came to pass as follows.

Mary had clever little hands, and had frequently made up _such_ caps
for Mrs. Fubsby, and arranged her ribbons and laces so nicely, that
she conceived the idea of obtaining some employment for her needle,
as Ellinor still required many little things that were procured for
her with difficulty.

With high beating heart she one day entered a millinery
establishment, and timidly suggested that she was clever as a worker,
at trimming, cap and bonnet-making, and entreated a trial to be given
her.  Her soft voice and pleading face went for nothing.  She was
repelled coldly, even superciliously, and the door was pretty plainly
indicated to her; so she issued forth into the bustle of the Edgeware
Road again with a heavy, bitter, and irrepressible sigh.

It was a dull and depressing day early in October, when what remains
to us of foliage and sunshine are held on a precarious tenure indeed,
and people become conscious of 'snow in the air;' when the gardener's
work consists chiefly of 'sweeping up' the leaves that come rustling
down and tidying borders after the blasts of wind.  Frost, however,
had not come, and the parterres of Hyde Park, the phloxes and the
late gladioli, still continued to make a brave show, though the
dahlias drooped heavily when the dews fell.  Overhead the sky was
dull and leaden, of the usual London tint, and no one could tell in
what quarter of it the sun was hidden.

Mary peeped into the dealer's window, and another sigh escaped her.
Ellinor's landscape was still there, and, of course, unsold; so again
she thought to herself, 'what was to be the end of it all?'

As a last effort she sought a music shop, where she had often given
specimens of her accomplishments on the piano, and where she had
frequently applied, without success, for pupils.

The proprietors liked her voice, but her pale face, with its rare
charm of expression, and soft violet-blue eyes, was beginning to have
a sad and hunted look.  They also (for they were judges) liked her
manner--who did not?--so faultless and graceful in its
self-possession even yet, and her tones so sweetly modulated and
pleasant; thus they were honestly anxious to help her if they could,
and had hinted if she took to the stage she might make a fortune in
'the profession.'

They had heard of no pupils yet; but music--a musician--an
accomplished pianist was wanted for a dance, to be given on the
morrow night--two guineas were the honorarium--would she accept it?

She thought what the sum might get for Ellinor, and accepted the
proposal at once.

The money would be paid her at the house.

'Where is it?' she asked.

'No. 60, Park Lane.'

And her informant added that she must go nicely--at least
neatly--dressed; and she hurried home with a lighter heart.
Distasteful though the position and occupation, it was at least a
beginning, and no one knew aught of her or her antecedents.

Next night she attired herself with care, gracefully, and, perhaps,
artistically, in a soft and clinging lace-trimmed dress of creamy
Indian muslin.  It was perhaps rather too much for the _rôle_ she had
to play; but it was one of her best costumes, with lace at her white
slender throat, and shading her bare and very lovely arms, while her
only ornament was a single white rose in her breast.  So, gloved,
shawled, and with her roll of music, she drove away in a 'growler,'
the last words she heard being expressions of admiration at her
appearance from Ellinor and Mrs. Fubsby.

On past the Marble Arch, and into that aristocratic line of varied
and strange-looking houses, Park Lane, which, in the time of Queen
Anne, was generally known as 'the lane leading to Tyburn,' where the
gallows bore its ghastly freight.

'Number sixty,' she again told her cabman, when he suddenly pulled
up, and she now remembered that she had omitted to ask to whose house
she was going.  Though she ought to have been there among, or prior
to, the first arrivals, the position was so new to her that she was a
little late, and already several carriages were on the line before
her, 'setting down,' at a lighted portico, duly furnished with a
striped canopy and carpeted steps.  Thus, during the brief pause that
ensued, she was enabled to see that it was a stately house she was
bound for.  Though October, the night was fine, and the windows were
open.  She obtained, through them, a glimpse of a
splendidly-furnished double drawing-room, with blue silk curtains
festooned within an arch; already several guests were gliding to and
fro, and the fragrance of flowers and perfumes was wafted outward on
the night air.

A painted and partially curtained verandah overhung the garden--a
verandah made like a fairy abode by shrubs and flowers, by Chinese
lanterns, ottomans, and couches; and she felt a strange, spasmodic
tightening of the heart, for there was a figure that seemed familiar
to her hanging over a lovely girl, who was flirting languidly with
her fan.

As one in a dream, she found herself deposited at the door, and
ascending with her music-roll the fast crowding staircase that led to
the dancing-room, attended by a footman as a guide; but the lady of
the house, whoever she was, did not condescend to receive her.  And
her pretty bare arms were noticed as she seated herself at the
piano-stool.  She had too much dress 'for one in her position,' some
matrons thought suspiciously, all the more so that many men remarked
and admired her; but she adjusted her music and programme, bent her
sweet face closely over the former, and played on, and on, and on,
till her little fingers ached, oh, so wearily, into the hours of the
night and the early hours of the morning.

But ere the latter came one or two episodes occurred.

She discovered, first, that she was in the house of Lord Dunkeld!
Parliament was sitting, and his lordship, as one of the precious
sixteen called 'Representative Peers,' was consequently in town; but
for all the good he ever did Scotland or her interests he might as
well have been at the North Pole.

To Mary Wellwood, with her sensitive pride and memories of the past,
this was a sickening discovery to make!  There was, however, no
retreating now.  She resolutely kept her face from the guests, and
played on as one in a dream, with the soft patter of feet and
whirling of skirts in her ear.

Once or twice she thought that the cold, calm eyes of Lady Dunkeld
recognised her, and then, flushing deep to the nape of her delicate
neck, she bent lower still over her music.  If it was so, the pale
and handsome peeress made no sign, and gave not the slightest
evidence of recognition.

The longing to be gone in Mary's heart was intense, and to her the
hours of that night seemed interminable.

Though 'town was empty,' as she heard, she was thankful that the
rooms were crowded to excess; that the dancers had scarcely room to
move, and thus she had the less chance of recognition.

Mouthing fools with lisping lips, parted hair, and a great display of
shirt-front were there, and men of brilliant intellect too, with many
stately women and lovely girls such as London alone can boast; and
Blanche Galloway moved among them like a bewitching little queen,
superbly dressed by all the care of Rosette.

Suddenly Mary had another shock and tightening of the heart when two
familiar voices fell on her ear, and she discovered near her
Colville--Colville and Sir Redmond Sleath, the latter, as usual in
accurate evening costume, with his tawny moustache, _insouciant_ air,
and china-blue eyes.

The sense of Colville's presence suffocated her, and memory went back
to that last interview in which he suddenly drew her towards him and
kissed her so tenderly and hurried away on their being interrupted,
leaving unsaid what he was bound in honour to say, but urging her to
do nothing rash until 'to-morrow'--the morrow that never came!

'Hah, when did you come to town?' asked Sir Redmond.

'More than a month ago,' replied Colville.

'From Craigmhor?'

'Yes; you left before I did, you remember?'

'Sudden business called me to town.  When you left how were our fair
friends at Birkwoodbrae?'

It was terrible for Mary to sit there helplessly and overhear this
conversation; but there was a buzzing sound in her ears, and she
failed to catch Colville's answer; and Sleath spoke again--

'I knew you were deuced spooney on the eldest one.  Got over it all
now, of course--_pour passer le temps_.'

'Spooney?  I do not choose to have this term applied either to myself
or the lady referred to.'

'As you please.  But surely you had no more intention of committing
yourself seriously with her than I had with her younger sister?'

'What do you mean by talking of these young ladies in this style to
me?' asked Colville, in a voice that seemed to have suppressed
passion in it, for at that moment he was recalling some of Doctor
Wodrow's communications regarding the speaker.

'Why, what on earth are they to you?  demanded Sleath, focussing him
with his eyeglass.

Mary did not hear the response, but was aware that Sleath started and
said,

'What new dodge is this?'

'I am thinking of going to India again,' said Colville, bluntly, to
change the subject.

'Again--with all your wealth--what folly!'

'I seem to have neither kith nor kin to care for, or aught to keep me
here now.'

'Ah--that red-coat business!'

'What do you mean?'

'As some one says, "We all know that half a man's life is often spent
in wanting to put on the red-coat, and the other half in wanting to
put it off."'

'No part of _your_ life is likely to be spent in either, Sir
Redmond,' said Colville, as he turned on his heel and left him.

'To India again,' whispered Mary in her heart; 'he thinks of going to
India!  Well--what is he to me--what am I to him?'

Mary observed that he danced little, if at all, and that he certainly
looked grave--even sad and preoccupied, as he had never done at
Birkwoodbrae.

Colville had never enlightened the Dunkeld family, even before
leaving Craigmhor, of his relationship to the missing sisters, or of
those views, intentions, and the little romantic plan between himself
and Dr. Wodrow, which had proved the cause of so much distress and
mischief.

Blanche Galloway, her rival, as Mary began to deem her again, was the
gayest of the throng there, and, leaning on Colville's arm clingingly
after a long swinging waltz, was fanning herself, and laughing at
some remark that was, in her own parlance, 'quite too awfully funny.'

Intent on Colville and on others too, smiling her brightest upon them
all, but on him in particular, and bestowing flowers with great
_empressement_ from her ample bouquet, as she sat with them in the
dimly-lighted conservatory, and flirted with a science born of her
partly French blood, she never bestowed a thought on the weary and
silent musician, any more than on the aiguletted valets who took
about the jellies and ices, etc.

Mary saw that Colville sat out dances, often with pretty companions,
over whom his handsome head was bent low in confidential
conversation, while he fanned them with gallant assiduity.

'You play most brilliantly, my dear!' said a soft, sweet voice
suddenly in Mary's ear.

No one, as yet, had addressed her that night, and she looked up with
a startled air to see a very handsome and motherly-looking woman
regarding her with kindly interest.

'You have a most exquisite touch,' she continued; 'how I should like
my youngest girl to have some lessons from you--even as a permanent
musical governess.  May I speak to Lady Dunkeld about it?'

'Do not--please do not!' replied Mary, imploringly; 'she knows
nothing about me; but I have another reason for declining----'

'Indeed.'

'Yes, madam.'

'A serious one?'

'Very--a sickly sister whom I cannot and would not leave to live
alone.'

'A most creditable reason to give,' said the elderly lady, and was
about to add something more, when Lady Dunkeld suddenly drew near,
and in a hard, metallic voice said,

'Dear Mrs. Deroubigne, a word with you before supper.'

So, as the lady left her side, Mary learned that Deroubigne was her
name, and, with gratitude in her heart for the little bit of praise,
recognition, and sympathy, Mary thought she would never forget her.

The guests filed off to the supper-room, whence ere long came the
murmur of voices, the sounds of laughter, the clink of plates and
glasses, and looking round the empty drawing-room, strewed with
fragments of flowers, lace, muslin, and so forth, Mary, like a hunted
creature, thought only of escape, but was informed that refreshment
for her was set apart from all the rest in a private apartment.

It was a pretty place, with carved oak furniture, valuable pictures,
and the subdued light of a beautiful lamp was shed on the dainty
napery, silver and quaint blue and gold service of the repast set
before her; but Mary was incapable of eating--food would have choked
her.  She held a glass of wine to her tremulous and dry lips, but so
tremulous too were her fingers by long playing that she had to set it
down untasted.

She then told the valet who attended her that she was too ill to
remain longer, to make her apologies to Lady Dunkeld, and to get her
shawl and cloak from the women in charge of the cloak-room.

He did so with some surprise, that increased when, on proffering her
two guineas on a silver salver as her fee, she said, sharply,

'Thanks.  Keep the money, or spend it in the servants' hall,' and
hurried away.

'Off her blessed chump, by jingo!' muttered 'Jeames,' as he thrust
the money into the pocket of his yellow-plush breeches.

Escaping recognition by Mademoiselle Rosette, who was having a
flirtation in the hall with John Gaiters (Sir Redmond's man), Mary,
in a tumult of distracting thoughts, cabbed it back to St. Mary's
Terrace, so called, though it is a narrow _street_; but that matters
nothing in London, where thoroughfares are called roads, that are
streets or squares, terraces or crescents, and even hills, such as
Ludgate, or vales, such as Maida, without being the slightest
approach to anything of the kind; but such are some of the many
idiosyncrasies of Babylon that puzzle the intelligent foreigner.

Mary was a wise girl; she knew that the wounded heart of Ellinor,
suffering from certain remorse at her treatment of the loving Robert
Wodrow, and mortification at the conduct of Sleath in never
attempting to visit or seek an explanation, would not be healed by
telling _all_ that she had overheard, and more that she suspected,
now only said that she had recognised him and Colville at the ball
and nothing more.

But this reticence proved rather a mistake eventually.




CHAPTER IV.

'SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR!'

After that night at Number 60, Park Lane, a terrible sense of
humiliation oppressed Mary, and she knew not what to do next.  Such
rencontres, she thought, were not likely to happen in the mighty
world of London; yet the next meeting she had with Colville occurred
very soon after, and gave her nearly as great a shock as that at the
ball.

It was on a murky October Sunday afternoon when Mary, finding herself
near Westminster Abbey, entered the vast building, lured alike by
curiosity to see it and hear the service, for which the bells were
tolling.

For a moment she looked about her and saw how the mighty cruciform
church towered skyward above the dingy houses, shops, and streets
that lie so near it on one side, and the handsome, open space, with
all its railings and statues, on the other, and, tripping lightly
over the flat gravestones, she entered by the gloomy northern door,
and, after a little timid doubt and hesitation, proceeded to an empty
pew in the north transept.

The vast height of the shafted columns, the darkened roof that sprang
from them, the dusky depths and ghostly uncertainties of the edifice,
which was of a size and space beyond her conception; the faint,
leaden light of the London afternoon that stole through its lancet
windows, and the grim aspect of the tombs which crowd and disfigure
the long drawn aisles, were all solemn and oppressive to Mary, yet
curiosity detained her, and she was glad to see a few persons--but
how very few they seemed--gathering to hear the service, while the
black-robed vergers glided about, imparting, she thought, something
spectral to the vistas of the place; and to her unaccustomed eyes the
white floating surplices of the officiating clergymen and of the
choir-boys seemed something spectral too.

A great sense of awe came over her as she thought of all the mighty
dead who lay there, the dead of ages, beneath her very
feet--politicians, warriors, judges, princes, and nobles,
philanthropists, actors, and physicians--the Pantheon of all the
English great--who in fighting the battle of life have added to the
renown of their country.  For a time she was drawn from the constant
sense of herself, of her own sorrows, and the contemplation of
thinking how hard it was to win one's daily bread in a vast city.

Her veil was up, and had any there regarded her face, they would have
seen how pale and sad it looked under the edge of her little hat, and
the ripples of her golden brown hair that fell over her forehead, and
how pathetic was the expression of her long-lashed, violet blue eyes.

The bells had ceased to clash overhead, and a few people were seated
or kneeling on hassocks in the chancel seats, while some gas jets
began to flicker out as the afternoon light faded from the pointed
windows; and then the deep swell of the organ, and the sweet voices
of the choristers stirred Mary's heart, and moved her to tears, she
knew not why, for the solemnity of the scene soothed, while the music
comforted her, and to hide her emotion she drew down her veil closely.

While the psalm was being chanted three ladies entered the pew before
her, and as there was not room in it for a gentleman who accompanied
them he took his seat behind them, in the pew occupied by Mary, and
close to her side.

Her heart stood still, and again the sense of suffocation came with a
spasm into her slender throat, for he who sat beside her was
Colville, and the ladies were Blanche Galloway, Lady Dunkeld, and
Mrs. Deroubigne!

She respired with difficulty, and then her heart beat fast; the
service was forgotten--unheard, all save the swelling of the organ,
which only seemed an element in the phantasmagoria around her now;
and she strove--but that was impossible--to forget who was by her
side, and almost touching her.

She wondered if he would recognise her figure; he could scarcely fail
to do so, if he looked at her; but he never did so, and seemed wholly
intent on looking into the dusky obscurities of the church, or was
lost in his own thoughts.  He had placed a hand ungloved, with a gold
signet ring thereon--a ring the crest of which Mary remembered
well--on the edge of the pew in which Blanche was seated; and making
a half turn round, with a bright and coquettish smile, she rested her
back against his fingers, as much as to say, she felt them there
caressingly.

Mary observed this, and also that after a time he withdrew his hand,
with an air of unconsciousness, she thought.

Blanche wore a magnificent sealskin paletot, which contrasted
powerfully with Mary's somewhat faded jacket and equally faded dress.
How happy and bright and well nourished she looked.  There was no
care, no thought, no anxiety in her sparkling dark eyes.  Unlike
Mary, she had no dark or dubious future looming far away before her.

Mary remembered--when was she likely to forget?--that he said he had
no one to care for, and was going away to India; and yet he seemed to
be on remarkably intimate and pleasant terms with these Dunkeld
people.  She fancied that Blanche had given him a conscious and
disappointed glance, when he left her to take his seat behind her, as
if she seemed to think his proper place was by her own side; and
perhaps Mary might have seen a disappointed look in his face, had she
seen it at the time.

They might only be friends, but somehow Blanche gave the silent
watcher the bitter conviction that she was certainly something more.

Mary knew that Colville had denied being engaged to Blanche, and
ridiculed the rumour as Mrs. Wodrow's gossip.  True--but he might be
engaged to her _now_.

'If he still cares for me,' she thought, 'what a different answer
would I give him now.  If not engaged, why are they thus together,
and why does she give him these conscious and confident glances?  Was
he deceiving me at--at Birkwoodbrae?'

When Mary had taken her seat in that pew, she felt a sense of awful
loneliness; but she felt many, many degrees more lonely now.  She
felt also far, far removed from him, and those whom he accompanied,
in her homely life and sordid surroundings at Paddington.  A vast
gulf seemed thereby to have opened between her and Colville, such as
did not exist at Birkwoodbrae; and she thought of the day when they
fished together in the May, and other days of delicious walks and
rambles under the drooping birches by the sparkling linn, or among
the scented pine woods that were overlooked by the lovely green
hills, amid the bright sunshine and the odour of the purple
heather--of thoughts that came and went--of hopes that dawned, and of
words that were uttered, or left unuttered.  At last the service was
over, and the few people who assembled to hear it--many of them
strangers only come to view the church from curiosity--were hastening
away.

As Mary rose, Colville did so too that she might pass him.

Still there was no recognition on his part; his eyes were on Blanche
Galloway, and Mary quickly glided out of the church.  The rain was
beginning to fall in the chill October evening, and drawing her shawl
close about her she set out on her way homeward, feeling that she
would be thankful for a seat in an omnibus.

When she looked back, with an impulse she could not resist, she saw
Colville come forth with Blanche, the other two ladies following, as
if the arrangement was a tacit one.  They all entered the stately
Dunkeld carriage, the driver and servants of which wore ample fur
tippets.  The door was closed with a bang, and they drove off,
passing Mary on the way, and bestowing on her a few spots of mud.

'To be so near--and yet so far!' she thought, with a greater
bitterness of heart than she ever thought to feel--she was usually so
resigned and sweetly patient; but she seemed to know the worst now,
and that all was over at last.

The very circumstance of her having to wander alone and unescorted
through the streets of London on such an evening seemed to impress
upon her still more the difference of position, and the gulf that lay
between her and those she had seen whirling away, as she doubted not,
to No. 60, Park Lane.

That she had been recognised by some one there on the night of the
ball, she thought she had mortifying proof when next she presented
herself before the hitherto friendly proprietors of the music-shop in
quest of pupils or some employment.

She found their manner curt, changed, and cold.

'You need return no more,' she was told.

'Why?'

'You failed to give satisfaction when we found you employment last.'

'In what way?' asked Mary, in a breathless voice.

'Lady Dunkeld informed us that you left the house abruptly and in a
mysterious way.'

Lady Dunkeld!  So she in the plentitude of her wealth, power, and
position was following up with a vendetta poor Mary Wellwood.




CHAPTER V.

'SOME DAY.'

The sale of Ellinor's landscape for a sum beyond what she had
expected for it, came like a gleam of hope to the two lonely girls,
and the place in the window where it had hung so long was now empty.

'I wonder who bought it?' said she.

'That matters little,' replied Mary; 'his fancy, however, will give
you encouragement, nevertheless.'

Ellinor blushed with pleasure.  Her picture was sold, but she little
knew to whom.

She was now convalescent, able to go abroad, and, like Mary, she had
also the coincidence of a strange and unexpected meeting.

One day, when the weather was clear and sunny for the season, she
went to Hyde Park with her sketch-book, encouraged to fresh efforts
by her success, to make another drawing.  The subject was to be some
quaint old trees she had noticed, and which she hoped might find a
purchaser in some one who knew the locality.

October had given these old oaks its choicest tints, and, while some
of their leaves were russet-green, others were like burnished bronze,
and were red of many hues; and, all the better for artistic purposes,
the chief of these venerable and gnarled trees had a story, for under
it Horace Walpole, as he tells us, was robbed in the winter of 1749
by the fashionable footpad Maclean.

'One night in the beginning of November,' he writes, 'as I was
returning from Holland House by moonlight, about ten o'clock, I was
attacked by two highwaymen in Hyde Park, and the pistol of one of
them, going off accidentally, razed the skin under my eye, left some
marks of shot on my face, and stunned me.  The ball went through my
hat, and, if I had sat an inch nearer to the left side, it must have
gone through my head.'

This event occurred within half-a-mile of Piccadilly, and Ellinor,
thinking how it would enhance the value of her little landscape, set
to work in sketching the group of trees.

So intent was she with her pencil that for some time she was unaware
that she was observed, or that anyone was near her in that part of
the then usually deserted Park, till she suddenly saw a soldier--a
hussar--standing before her.

'Robert--Robert Wodrow!' she exclaimed, in a strange voice all unlike
her own, as the pencil dropped from her nerveless hand.  'What does
this dress--what does all this mean?'

'Ask yourself, Ellinor.'

Tears started to her eyes at the familiar voice, and so glad was she
to see his familiar face that, but for his too probable misconception
of her feelings and the eyes of passers-by, she would have thrown her
arms round his neck and kissed him.

All unaware that he was so near her, Robert Wodrow had been strolling
through the Park, thinking the while of a song that Ellinor had been
wont to sing to him often in past days--

  'Some day, some day I shall meet you--
    Love, I know not when or how--
  Only this, only this, that once you loved me:
    Only this, I love you now, I love you now!'


The tender and passionate refrain was in his mind, and actually
hovering on his lips, when the face and form of Ellinor came suddenly
before him.

'So you can amuse yourself thus,' said he, picking up her pencil,
'and in spite of all the misery that has fallen on me.'

'I am working thus for daily bread, Robert; and, oh, I knew not that
you had taken this terrible step.'

'Becoming a soldier?'

'Yes.'

Robert Wodrow was again face to face with the girl he loved with a
love so unselfish and passionate, and so ungrudgingly given in all
its fulness and tenderness, yet he made no attempt to take her hand.

She thought that he never looked so handsome as he did then, in his
smart hussar tunic--blue, faced with red and braided with yellow.
Club drill and sword exercise had developed every muscle, while
setting-up drill and the riding-school had given him that air and
bearing our light cavalrymen alone possess.

'Why cast away thus your prospects in life?' she asked, sadly.

'I have none--I lost them with you.'

'What dear friends we might have been--nay, were, if with friendship
you would have been content, Robert!'

'A view you only adopted after Sir Redmond Sleath came.'

Her pale face coloured deeply, and perhaps guiltily, at this
response, and he regarded her earnestly.  She was pale certainly, and
her lips had a pathetic little droop in them, though their wonderful
sweetness of expression yet remained, but her cheeks had lost some of
their girlish roundness and bloom.

The atmosphere of most unclassic Paddington, with its frowsy canal
and fœtid churchyard, was truly somewhat different from the breeze
that swept the Ochil ranges and down through the Birks of Invermay.

Robert realised at that moment how dear, how inexpressibly dear to
him, was the girl he had lost, and between whom and himself he had
now opened a complete social gulf, and how their past friendship and
love had crept into his heart and settled there, making her still
more precious to him than life itself.

When he spoke again his voice was strained and husky, and the tones
of it were as those of a man in mortal pain.

'How is dear Mary?'

'Well--very well.'

'From a remark you let fall about daily bread, Ellinor,' said he,
playing nervously with the lash of his riding-switch, 'I can gather
that you are not married to that man.'

'Most certainly not.  I have never seen him since we left home--for
to us home is not here.'

'Thank God for your assertion!  I have heard a good deal about him
among our fellows; he is a deuced bad lot, and may yet find you out.
If he does, I beg of you to pause, however brilliant his offers of
marriage may be.  He dare have no other view; if he had, if he had,'
continued Robert Wodrow, with his teeth set under his dark moustache,
'and the grave had me, I would come back to have vengeance on him!
Remember my words, I implore you, Ellinor, by memory of the pleasant
past, when we were boy and girl together.  It is the last favour I
can ask of you, and too probably this is the last time we shall meet
on earth!'

'What do you mean, Robert?' she said, in an agitated voice.

'I am only here for a day from Hounslow Barracks, and in about a week
the regiment embarks for India--for Afghanistan, thank God!'

'How bitterly you speak!'

'I gave up father, mother, home, peace, and profession when I lost
you; but, pardon me, I did not mean to upbraid.'

'Forgive me for all I have made you suffer,' said Ellinor, humbly; 'I
feel how unworthy I am of all this great regard,' she added, taking
his hand caressingly between hers; and then, conscious of how her
touch thrilled through him, she withdrew her clasp, and both seemed
on the verge of tears, and might perhaps have indulged in them but
for the vicinity of one or two observant and inquisitive nursemaids,
who marvelled at the interest the young lady evidently took in the
handsome hussar.

'And now I must go,' said the latter, but lingered still, and, cut to
the heart with sorrow for him, Ellinor pressed her hands upon her
breast, as she yielded to her better nature, but felt that now it was
impossible to retrace or reverse the past.

'And you leave England for that far-away land so soon?'

'The sooner the better.'

'Won't you come and see Mary ere you go?'

'I should indeed like to see dear Mary once again--she was always
true to me,' said Robert.

'Do come, then,' urged Ellinor, heedless of the deduction.

'Not now, for I am almost due at Hounslow; but when I come, I must
be--in uniform.'

'That matters nothing; no one here knows us or cares for us.  Oh, how
happy she will be to see you in one sense, and so sorry in another!
The uniform is but a trifle in one way.'

'Moments make the year, and trifles life,' said Robert, with bitter
smile, quoting Young's satire.

Ellinor gave him their address--they shook hands like friends, these
two who might have been all in the world to each other, though in the
world their paths in life would lie far apart now--there was a
minute's pause, and in a moment more Ellinor was alone.

Her drawing was effectually marred for the day; her head swam and her
hand shook, and forgetting all about Horace Walpole's tree, she
slowly quitted the park.

'Poor fellow!' she thought, as the hitherto restrained tears flowed
under her veil, 'I have used him ill--and yet how soft and gentle he
is with me!'




CHAPTER VI.

JACK SHOWS HIS TEETH.

Fortune seemed to be looking kindly on Mary and Ellinor now, when the
former, through an advertisement, got a couple of pupils, little
girls, in the neighbourhood of Portman Square, and the latter had
actually sold her landscape, and started another.

'The Linn on the May' had caught the eye of Sir Redmond Sleath when
passing the shop window, not that he particularly cared about
pictures or art of any kind, save the culinary one, but he thought he
recognised the subject--even the style and the landscape--and on
looking more closely, after adjusting his inevitable eyeglass, an
exclamation of surprise or satisfaction, perhaps both, escaped him on
discovering the initials 'E.W.' in one of the lower corners, and he
entered the shop at once to inspect the landscape more closely.

'I think I know the artist,' said he to the bowing dealer, who was
not much accustomed to visitors of Sleath's style and bearing.  'A
young lady, is she not?'

'Yes, sir--yes--Miss Ellinor Wellwood.'

'I thought so.  I'll take her work.'

'Thank you, sir.  Shall I send it to your address, your club, or
where, sir?'

'Neither.  I'll take it with me.'

Cautious in his plans, Sleath was reluctant to give his address, but
the price was soon agreed upon, and the money paid.

'I want a pair, and will order just such another,' said he.  'Perhaps
you can give me Miss Ellinor Wellwood's address?'

'Certainly, sir.  She lives very near this.'

'Near this!  By Jove!'

He obtained the number and the street, and went off with the
landscape, and with curious emotions of hope and evil blended
exultantly in his heart.

'Paddington?' he muttered, as he walked off towards the Marble Arch.
'D--nme, what a game!  Are they so reduced, or so ignorant, as to
hang out there?  Courage, Redmond, my boy, and that charming bit of
muslin may be your own yet.'

Sleath had been told plainly enough, and sternly too, by Colville, at
Lady Dunkeld's ball, that Mary and Ellinor were his cousins, who were
ignorant of his identity; but the too-knowing baronet did not believe
a word of his assertions, and, seeing the matter through the medium
of his own evil mind, supposed the story was 'only a red herring
drawn across the scent'--a dodge for purposes of the Guardsman's
own--so he sought counsel of Mr. John Gaiters, while the latter
prepared for him some brandy and seltzer-water.

'I am awfully spoony on a girl, Gaiters,' said he.

'That is nothing new, Sir Redmond; but it won't last.'

'It never does, I fear.'

'Certainly not with you, sir,' was the flippant reply of the valet.

'Here is her name and address.  You will know her again when you see
her, but she must not know you.  Find out all about her--who she is
living with, and all the rest of it--and you will do for me that
which nothing can repay.'

'By jingo, sir, I would rather do something that could be repaid.'

'Here is a fiver, anyway, and now be off.'

Duly instructed, a couple of days afterwards, and disguised by a
false beard and moustache, and clad in a tolerably accurate morning
suit, Mr. John Gaiters, turning up his already tip-tilted nose at
having to traverse so unaristocratic a locality as Paddington, soon
found the terrace and the number, and after an external survey of the
house, by means of the knocker brought to the door a little
maid-of-all-work, on whose cheeks was the black smudge so usual to
her class.

'Is your mistress at home?' he inquired, blandly.

'Yes, sir.'

'Ah, is she handsome?  But I need not ask,' he added, insinuatingly.

'Why, sir?'

'Because, unless her beauty were not of a more than ordinary
character, she could not afford to have one so excelling as you by
her side.'

This high-flown speech, which Gaiters copied from some of his
master's, caused the little housemaid to think he was mad or tipsy,
and she was about to close the door with some precipitation, when
Mrs. Fubsby appeared, and, on inquiring for Miss Ellinor Wellwood, he
was informed she was at home.

The dealer had promptly informed Ellinor that a companion was wanted
for her landscape, and while intent among the many in her portfolio,
she was not surprised when Mrs. Fubsby announced a gentleman visitor,
who knew her face instantly, though she failed to recognise the
bearer of many gifts of flowers and game when at Birkwoodbrae.

With all his vulgar assurance, the valet felt himself for a little
time daunted or abashed by the presence and bearing of Ellinor, to
whom with some hesitation he told the object of his visit--he had
bought her picture, and a friend of his wished one precisely like it;
and while he was speaking, Jack, the terrier, with a dog's strange
instincts, maintained a most unpleasant snarling under the sofa, and
Gaiters, remembering the episode of his master, felt correspondingly
uneasy.  For 'though love be proverbially blind, hatred has a sharp
sight,' and so had Jack, who showed his white glittering teeth from
time to time.  'Human beings have their instinctive likes and
dislikes, and why not dogs?' asks a writer.  'We cannot tell what
expression of countenance they consider malevolent, or menacing, or
murderous; but certain it is that they often exhibit unaccountable
antipathy to some individual, while most affectionate and amicable
towards all the rest of the world.'

So Jack's antipathy to Sleath now extended to his emissary Gaiters.

The landscape was soon agreed about--money was no object to the
visitor, who quickly selected a subject from a rough sketch, which
Ellinor perceived with some surprise he held upside-down, a curious
fancy in a connoisseur and patron of art, and, in the interests of
his knavish master, Gaiters, anxious to learn the entire _carte du
pays_, said,

'Do you live here alone, Miss Wellwood?'

'I am not Miss Wellwood--my sister is,' replied Ellinor, with a
little hauteur of manner.

'Is she, too, an artist?'

'No.'

'And you live together--so sorry I had not the pleasure of seeing
her.'

Ellinor thought this evinced curiosity; but, thinking she might
advance the interests of Mary, she said, as Mr. Gaiters took up his
hat,

'At this hour she is usually with her pupils at Portmore Square.'

'Ah--at this hour; we must make a note of that,' thought Mr. John
Gaiters, and, forgetting again to refer to the landscape, he bowed
himself out, hailed a hansom, and drove away, having obtained all the
information his master wanted--to wit, that the sisters were living
together, unprotected, in somewhat humble lodgings, and that Ellinor,
at the particular time mentioned, was always alone.

'Such a pleasant and haffable gentleman, and with such 'ansome
whiskers,' commented Mrs. Fubsby.  'Drat that dog--why did it worrit
so about him!'

The report made to Sir Redmond by his subservient emissary piqued and
encouraged him in his nefarious schemes.

'Every woman has her price,' thought he, as he sipped his wine that
evening after a cosy dinner at his club, and dreamily gazed down the
gas-lighted vista of Pall Mall; 'if not to me, this little one will
become the prize--the prey of some other fellow; so, with the basis I
have for future operations, why not to me?  On some pretence or other
I snail get her wheedled over to the Continent, and then the game is
my own.'

In his instance it could not be said that

  'Evil is wrought by want of thought,
  As well as want of heart,'

for he gave his whole thoughts, and his heart too--such as the latter
was--to the consideration and perfection of his schemes, and exulted
in the idea of outwitting Colville, if he knew--as Sleath scarcely
doubted he did--the residence of the sisters.




CHAPTER VII.

THE DAUGHTER OF NOX.

'And you have actually found us out--here?  How strange!' exclaimed
Ellinor, blushing deeply with pleasure and surprise.

'Through my appreciative friend--appreciative in art, I mean--who
bought your charming landscape, the view of that dear old--what is
it?--Linn--Linn of the May--yes, darling,' replied Sleath--Sleath the
slimy, with the china-blue eyes and Mephistophelian smile, as he
twirled out his tawny moustache, and regarded the girl with a
passionate expression rippling over his face.  '_Après moi le
deluge!_ you will think, perhaps; but now, darling Ellinor, that I
have found you at last, we must not part again.'

Ere leaving Birkwoodbrae Ellinor had felt mortified, even insulted,
on finding that Sir Redmond, after the night of the frustrated
elopement, made no sign that he remembered her existence; but the
moment she saw him the barriers she had mentally raised between them
fell at once, and she no more sought, as she had done of late, to
erase him from her heart.

Poor foolish Ellinor!

'I had ever a hope,' said Sleath, caressing her, 'that I would come
upon you suddenly again, and take you by surprise with the
earnestness and passion of my love; and, Ellinor, the time has
come--thank heaven, the time has come!'

And he cast his eyes upward and sighed sentimentally to the ceiling.

'An age seems to have elapsed since that night,' he added.

'I was at the appointed place,' said Ellinor, softly, and colouring
deeply.

'So was I,' said Sir Redmond.

'And why--why----'

'Did I not appear, you would ask?'

'Yes--though perhaps it was as well not now.'

'I was pinned by the leg by that accursed brute of your sister's.'

'Jack.'

'D--n him--yes!  Pardon me; but there was something grotesque,
humiliating, and exasperating in the whole episode.'

'I was certain it was thus; but--but why did you never write to me?'

'Never write to you!' exclaimed Sleath, with well-feigned surprise;
'you left--what's its name--Birkwoodbrae----'

'Early in September.'

'Exactly--that is the reason you did not get my letters.'

'You wrote, then?' exclaimed Ellinor, her soft face brightening with
pleasure.

'A score of letters, and they were all returned to me from the Post
Office,' replied Sleath, unblushingly.

So Ellinor thought, 'I have wronged him; it was but a short time ago
since this man loved me passionately, and so he must love me still.
No love worthy of the name would die in a couple of months.'

'I always wrote in fear, too, dearest Ellinor.'

'Fear of whom?'

'Of your sister--of that old devil-dodger Wodrow, that sly, spying
fellow Colville--my uncle, too, who is ailing still, but whose wealth
will all be ours--ours, Ellinor!  In my heart of hearts I have ever
looked forward to the time when--on finding one who loved me truly--I
should settle down into a quiet life and be happy, in a cottage near
a wood, and all that sort of thing if necessary, my wants are so
few--so simple; but that is not required; we shall have a mansion in
Belgravia, a moor in the Highlands, a bog in Ireland for the snipe
shooting, a place in the Midlands, and a yacht at Cowes, and heaven
only knows all what more--when my uncle dies.'

And as he folded her caressingly to his heart and nestled her face in
his neck, the poor little fool believed every word he uttered; and
then Sleath began to talk to her of that dangerous and fascinating
past--the days of their early meeting among the Birks of Invermay.

Even while caressing and fondling her, his practised eye took in the
whole details of the room in which they were seated, with its
furniture and appurtenances.  There was an air of poverty--even
meanness--he thought (for his eye was accustomed to luxury and
splendour) within the place, and this, with the ugly and sordid
prospect without, as seen through the windows, encouraged him greatly
in his insolent and daring projects.

He would try again to carry off the girl somehow--anyhow and without
delay.  Who was to punish him, or who was there to protect her?

That 'cousin' story of Colville's was, of course, all bosh!  The very
circumstance of her residence in such a place as Paddington proved it
to be so.

By a man of his address and past experience in all manner of worldly
rascality, her timidity, coyness, or scruples must, he thought, be
eventually overcome.  He had entered stakes on the race; he would not
readily drop out of the hunt--the pursuit of a helpless girl; if it
did not redound to his credit, it would at least afford him pleasure,
and if successful would flatter his vanity, for her beauty was
undoubted.

Moreover, he strangely felt somewhat revengeful for the trouble she
had already given him, and to this sentiment the downfall of her
pride and the destruction, if possible, of her delicacy and purity of
nature would be soothing to his spirit.

Even amid his caresses and love-making there was an easy insolence in
his manner, born of his innate and perverse vulgarity of race and
nature, and encouraged by the girl's unprotected condition, without
parents or brothers; but it was so veiled that poor Ellinor never
suspected it till he said, with something of irritation in his manner,

'As for the old devil-dodger, we do not require his consent now, I
suppose?'

'Who--what?' asked Ellinor, with perplexity.

'Doctor Wodrow--the psalm-singing old beggar.'

'Do not speak of him so irreverently,' said Ellinor, imploringly; 'he
made a pet of me from my infancy, and I love him as if he was my
father.'

'Oh,' said Sir Redmond, jealously, 'and his son, too, I suppose?'

'How can you speak to me thus?' asked Ellinor, as the agonised face
of the young hussar she had seen in the park came upbraidingly before
her.  How little Sleath knew or appreciated the depth of her pure,
innocent, and dreamy nature, albeit that, through fanning her
ambition, he had taught her to be false to Robert Wodrow.

After a pause, resuming his softest tone, he said, while holding her
hands in his, and looking fondly and admiringly down into her soft
hazel eyes,

'Then, dearest, you will, as before, consent to a private marriage?'

'If Mary will give me permission,' replied Ellinor, slowly and with
hesitation.

'Mary--is she your keeper?'

'She is my dear and only sister.'

'But--but will she accord her permission?'

'I can only hope so.'

'If not?'

'Then we can but wait.'

'My uncle's death, for he will never consent.'

'It is a sad event to look forward to.'

'Very,' replied Sleath, with difficulty repressing a smile; 'but I
cannot wait.'

'There must be no running away--no attempt at eloping again,' said
Ellinor, firmly.

Sir Redmond thought of Jack's teeth, and looked nervously and
furtively about him.

'Jack is with Mary,' said Ellinor, who detected the glance.

'As you will--what you please, darling, so that you'll be mine.  I'll
see a sky-pilot--I mean a clergyman--on the subject,' he added,
thinking that, after a little coaching, Gaiters might officiate in
that capacity; but then how about the registrar and a church?  'Well,
that is agreed upon, and we shall soon be one.'

To change the subject for a time, that he might consider the further
development of his nefarious scheme,

'How on earth did you come to select such a queer locality as this to
reside in?' asked Sleath, looking with genuine surprise at the humble
but neat apartment, where, however, there were now many traces of
ladies' hands and work.

'It was a chance.  We were, and are, so ignorant of London.'

'And your landlady--you have one, I suppose?'

'Is the kindest, most attentive, and dearest old thing; not that she
is very old either.  And she has seen better days, it would seem.'

'Of course.  I never knew a landlady who had not.  And so she is kind
to you?'

'And to Mary--unvaryingly so.'

'Ah, I must thank her for all this.'

'Here she comes to lay the tea things.  Mrs. Fubsby,' said Ellinor,
as the latter entered the room, 'this is the gentleman who bought----'

'Fubsby!' interrupted Sleath, in a dismayed tone.  'What the
devil--Seraphina Fubsby!'

'Gentleman!' shrieked Mrs. Fubsby, letting her tray fall crash with
all its contents on the floor.  'Villain! double-dyed villain, do we
meet again--again after all these years?'

'She is mad!' said he, starting to his feet and keeping the table
between herself and him.

'This is Sir Redmond Sleath!' exclaimed Ellinor, in tones of terror
and explanation.

'The same man who married me under the name of Redmond, and then
deserted me in France.  My husband at last, after all these years of
cruel desertion.'

'Your husband?' said Ellinor, in a voice like a husky whisper.

'Yes; and look at the white-faced craven.  He does not deny it.
Listen, Miss Ellinor, though what has brought him here I know not.
No good, you maybe assured.  I was waiting-maid to Lady Dunkeld in
Paris when he and I became acquainted on the Boulevards, and he
married me under the name of Redmond.'

'You married me, you mean, or thought you did, you artful and
accursed Jezebel,' exclaimed Sleath, choking with rage.

'Oh, what is all this I hear?' moaned Ellinor, overwhelmed with
horror, dismay, and humiliation.

'The bitter truth, young lady,' said Mrs. Fubsby, beginning partly to
take in the situation.

'You have no proofs now of what you say, you infernal Jezebel, who in
your maturer years entrapped me in my boyhood!' thundered Sleath.

'No proofs!'

'No--the old devil-dodger--the curé who performed the ceremony, as I
suppose you will call it, was shot in the days of the Commune.'

'True, but the records of his chapel still exist.'

'What is all this to me?'

'You will soon learn to your cost, now that I have discovered you
under your true name.'

As related, Mrs. Fubsby (who had resumed her maiden name) was not
without personal attraction; but she was wasted in aspect, though
only about forty--perhaps forty-five--years of age; and now her dark
eyes were ablaze with rage and grief.  Thus she spoke the truth when
she said,

'I was a pretty young woman, Miss Ellinor, when I first met this
wretch in human form; but disappointment, disgust, neglect, and
shame, too, have all made me what I seem now--old-looking, wasted,
and blasted!'

At this crisis Robert Wodrow came upon the scene.  Entering abruptly
and unannounced, he regarded the trio with extreme bewilderment.  He
saw Mrs. Fubsby, whom he knew not, convulsed with just indignation;
Ellinor in tears on a sofa, her bowed face hidden in her hands, her
whole air that of one completely crushed, and sitting gathered in a
heap, as it were; while Sleath, pale with rage, spite, and baffled
knavery, was about to withdraw.

Robert Wodrow never stopped to make any inquiry.  He could only
conceive one thing--that Ellinor had been somehow insulted or
wronged.  All the jealousy, fury, and hatred that had so long swelled
in his heart now gushed up in fiercer heat, and, endued with thrice
his usual strength thereby, he sprang upon Sleath, grasped him by the
collar behind, and, with many a kick and heavy lash of his
riding-switch thrust him from the room, down the stair, and headlong
into the street, where by one final impetus from his foot he flung
him in a half breathless heap by the kerbstone, and then closed the
house door.

Gathering himself up quickly, Sleath hastened away, registering a
truly infernal vow of vengeance--a vow all the deeper that it was
unuttered.

Thus had light been suddenly and luridly thrown on the great secret
of his life--the secret which prevented him from raising his eyes to
Blanche Galloway, as stated in the fifth chapter of our first
volume--which he dared not do as a married man.

He was decidedly unfortunate in his views regarding Ellinor Wellwood;
and now the daughter of Nox--inevitable Nemesis--had overtaken him!

Panting with exertion, and with something of a grim laugh, Robert
Wodrow returned to the room, muttering to himself,

'He'll not forget that last kick with my regulation boot, in the
region of the _os coccygis_.  By Jove, I haven't forgotten my Quain
and Turner!  And now to find out what all this was about.'

We need scarcely say that Ellinor's soul almost died within her at
the contemplation of the two narrow escapes she had from ruin and
despair!

Robert Wodrow literally ground his teeth when he heard of all that
had just transpired.

He looked worn and haggard, and amid her own mortification Ellinor's
heart bled for him, for she knew that his life had been crushed by
her; while she was ever to him

  'His love that loved him so,
  His love who loved him years ago.'


'I don't think, Ellinor, said he, 'that even in my dear old
governor's "Analecta" would he find a quotation suitable to this
fellow's rascality; but I agree with Calvin and Knox in their views
of some men.'

'How?'

'That they are born to be damned, and this fellow Sleath is one of
them.'

'If men or women are bad they often become so through the faults of
each other,' said the landlady; 'but I'll bring my man to book if
there is law to be had in London.'

And now Mary arrived, accompanied by her faithful four-footed friend,
who recognised Robert Wodrow, despite his hussar uniform, and was
profuse in his delight, leaping almost to his face at times.

The minutes of this farewell interview sped like lightning!

Robert Wodrow, without a thought of himself, had always loved Ellinor
in the past, and he loved her still, 'for true love can live even in
despair,' says a writer; but true love is scarce as the phœnix;
and he had for Ellinor, despite her ill-usage of him, all the
reverence that went out with the age of chivalry.

'I am going far away,' said he, while hot tears rolled over the
cheeks of both girls, and his own too; 'and when we meet again, if
ever--if ever, Ellinor--we shall both be old and cold perhaps--old in
experience, and--thank God--cold in heart--old and cold, and feeling
none of the bitterness of an hour like this!'


A few days after the public prints announced the departure of the
Hussars for India, and the sisters thought sadly that, too probably,
never would they see or hear of Robert Wodrow again.




CHAPTER VIII.

MRS. DEROUBIGNE.

The advent of Sleath, and perhaps the influence she had upon the life
of Robert Wodrow, had a crushing effect upon the overwrought nervous
system of Ellinor.  She was again ill--ailing with something mental
rather than bodily--and many little comforts were necessary for her,
thus taxing Mary's slender exchequer sorely, and adding to her
anxieties.

Colville had passed out of the life of the latter, but not quite out
of her thoughts.  He was going to India--she had heard him say so.

Perhaps he was already gone.  So far as the newspapers were
concerned, she had seen no notice of his marriage to Blanche
Galloway, an engagement with whom he had so distinctly disavowed.

For a moment vanity whispered to Mary's heart, was he going far away
that he might forget herself?

In this idea she was, perhaps, nearer the truth than she knew.  Her
first and only love affair--if such it really was--had been a dream,
and she thought,

  'Life and the world and mine own self are changed
  For a dream's sake.'


And Colville might, to a great extent, have applied the quotation to
himself, as we may soon show.

Times there were when Mary thought bitterly, 'Why did he teach me to
love him, and then neglect me so?  It was cruel, cruel!  I was so
happy and content till he came.'

And often did this idea haunt her while she taught her little pupils
to play the sweet, low 'Birks of Invermay.'  But ere long a shock
awaited her.

On leaving the house of these pupils one day near Portman Square, she
incidentally saw, when taking her parasol off the hall table, the
visiting-cards of Lady Dunkeld and the Hon. Blanche Galloway lying
there, and a thrill, a presentiment of coming evil, filled her heart;
this emotion was verified when, on calling next day, a brief note was
handed to her, enclosing a little cheque, with the blunt information
that her services were dispensed with.

Her name had by some means caught the ears of these malevolent ones,
and this, she knew, was the result of their influence and enmity;
and, gentle though her nature, a rush of anger and disgust, not
unmingled with dismay, filled her heart.

How was she to break this new calamity to poor ailing Ellinor--the
tidings of her rude dismissal?  And, loth to return to her home, she
wandered through the streets for a time in aimless misery.

To add to the gloom of her spirit, it was a foggy November afternoon,
and she felt the most intense depression, all the more so that she
was as yet unaccustomed to the breathless atmosphere, or rather want
of atmosphere--peculiar to London generally, and never so much as in
that season--the month of death, as the French call it.

Walking onward in the aimless way described, she found herself at the
end of Upper Brook Street, where it opens into Grosvenor Square, and
there a lady was stepping from her carriage before one of the stately
mansions.  Mary, full of her own sad thoughts, nearly jostled her,
and, pausing, apologised.

The lady, a tall and handsome woman, paused too, and Mary recognised
Mrs. Deroubigne, who had complimented her upon her playing, and
spoken so kindly to her at Lady Dunkeld's dance; and something
pleading and pathetic in Mary's whole air and face now made Mrs.
Deroubigne regard her attentively for a moment.

'We have met before,' said she.  'You are the young lady I had the
pleasure of hearing play at Number 60, Park Lane?'

'Yes, Mrs. Deroubigne,' replied Mary, in a low voice.

'You know my name!'

'I heard it mentioned incidentally, and the kindness of your manner
made it dwell in my memory.'

'You look both pale and ill, my dear,' said the lady; 'come in, and
let me give you a glass of wine--it will do you good.'

Mary thought of Lady Dunkeld, with whom she had last seen this lady,
and, pausing, muttered her thanks, and accepted the invitation, but
hesitatingly.

Little could she foresee that her whole future life hinged--if we may
use the old parliamentary expression--upon that chance meeting with
Mrs. Deroubigne!

The latter would not, we may be assured--for she was very
aristocratic in her tastes and proclivities--have noticed an ordinary
'person,' young or old, employed to furnish music for any dance she
had been at; but there was something so sweet and pathetic, as
stated, in Mary's face and manner--more than all, something so
perfectly ladylike in her bearing, that Mrs. Deroubigne felt
attracted towards her.

Mary did not get the proffered wine a moment too late; so much was
she overcome, mentally and bodily, by the bitter mortification to
which she had that day been subjected, that the stately drawing-room
in which she found herself seemed to be whirling round her.

'As you know my name, my dear,' said Mrs. Deroubigne, 'may I inquire
yours?'

'Mary Wellwood.'

The lady's colour changed a little.

'Wellwood?' she repeated; 'that name was very familiar to me once.  I
knew a captain--latterly he was colonel--Wellwood, who left the Army,
and went to reside near Invermay in Scotland.  Perhaps he was a
relation?'

'He was my dear father,' replied Mary, in a broken voice.

'Indeed--your father!  He was my dearest friend.'

How very dear he had been to her once, the old lady did not say then;
but thereby hung a tale!

'Your face seemed strangely familiar to me,' she said, while
regarding Mary with tender interest, and patting her hand as she held
it between her two.  'Your father is dead?'

'And mamma too, otherwise I might not have been reduced to accept the
occupation in which you found me.'

'This is sad--very sad!' said Mrs. Deroubigne, her eyes suffusing as
she spoke.  'Your father, I repeat, was the dearest friend of my
girlhood--how long, long it seems ago now--my dear girl, I might have
been your mother, and for his sake I should like to act as one to you
now.'

Mary's heart went forth to the speaker, and then she thought of
Ellinor.  The words of Mrs. Deroubigne came as a kind of revelation
to her; she had heard a rumour of some old and early love affair of
her father's, which had led to the bitter family quarrel referred to
in the first chapters of our story.

'And you knew mamma?' asked Mary, wistfully.

'Well, indeed; she was the queen of our regiment and the belle of
every town where it was quartered.  I can say so now, when I am old
and widowed.'

'Ellinor is thought very like her.'

'Who is Ellinor?'

'My only sister.'

'If so, she must be very handsome.  And are there only you two left
in the world?'

'Yes,' replied Mary; and little by little Mrs. Deroubigne, with
growing commiseration, elicited from her some information about
herself and sister--their plans and hopes in coming to London; and on
hearing them she muttered something about her own 'two little girls,'
as if comparingly, and shook her head sorrowfully.

Mrs. Deroubigne was evidently a very charming woman, who had seen
much of the world, and as a friend and companion was clever and
delightful.  After a little pause, she said, suddenly,

'Of course you know your cousin, Captain Wellwood, of the Scots
Guards?'

'Only by name, and an unfortunate reputation.'

'Oh, I forgot--there was a family quarrel.  He is one of my dearest
friends--Leslie Wellwood Colville, as he calls himself now.'

'Wellwood--Colville!' said Mary, inquiringly.  'I beg your pardon,
Mrs. Deroubigne, but are there _two_ officers of that name in the
Scots Guards?'

'No, only one--Wellwood, who added Colville to his name as successor
to a large property--your cousin, in fact--and the peerage he claims,
Lord Colville of Ochiltree.'

A light seemed to break on Mary; she knew not what to think; she had
no voice to reply.  She felt that she changed colour, while a sudden
dryness came over her lips and tongue.

She heard the door-bell ring, and knew that Mrs. Deroubigne was
speaking again, yet scarcely understood what she said.

'He starts for India in a day or two, and is to lunch with me this
afternoon.  To meet you--a cousin so charming--will be quite a little
surprise for him; and here he comes!' she added, as the door was
opened, and Colville--the identical Colville of Birkwoodbrae--was
ushered in!




CHAPTER IX.

WAS IT NOT A DREAM?

He came forward through the long drawing-room with his usual easy
bearing, his head well set up, his military air, and calm,
unflinching eyes, which dilated on seeing Mary Wellwood, and then he
paused.

For fully a minute there was dead silence--the silence of dumb
bewilderment, and Mary felt how loudly and painfully her heart was
beating; while to both Colville and Mrs. Deroubigne it was apparent
how much she was agitated, thereby involving a secret which the
latter was yet to learn.

Mary had felt that she had cause to be indignant and to feign
indifference.  As the lover who had trifled with her, as she thought,
and gone to the very verge of a declaration or proposal, and then
paused, and he--the obnoxious cousin, the heir of entail, one and the
same person--stood before her, in her eyes of deep violet blue there
came for a brief space the light of a sudden determination, with
something of a horrified stare; but ere Mrs. Deroubigne could
approach an explanation or introduction, Colville sprang towards the
pale and trembling girl, and took both her hands within his own.

'Mary--Mary Wellwood!' he exclaimed, in a voice full of passion and
pathos; 'you here!--and do we meet again after all?  What mystery is
this?'

'Probably a portion of that which seems to have involved all your
actions of late,' replied Mary, with the slightest _soupçon_ of
hauteur in her manner, while with difficulty restraining her tears.

'But are you not glad to see me again--you whom I loved, and love
with all my heart?'

'Captain Colville,' said Mary, attempting, but in vain, to withdraw
her hands, 'this painful and degrading mode of treating me must not
to be resumed!'

'Painful and degrading?  Mary, you know that I love you.'

'You never told me so.  I wish I had never seen you, or that I were
dead!' exclaimed Mary, a little incoherently, while averting her
face, and feeling her determination giving way.

'Never told you so--but you knew; and we were interrupted when we
parted last; and then I met with that accident, the wound in my right
hand, which prevented me from writing or going to Birkwoodbrae in
time to prevent you and Ellinor from vanishing, without trace, as you
did.'

By this time she had wrenched her hands away, and, thinking with
alarm and dismay of how Mrs. Deroubigne might view this singular
scene, she covered her face with them.

'Captain Colville!' she exclaimed, with a tone of expostulation, as
he gently pulled them down, while triumph and joy sparkled in his
eyes.

'Now, don't look vexed with me any more,' said he, in a tone of
tender entreaty, while kissing her hands.  'My dear, dear
cousin--dearer than all the world to me,' he added, as the mingled
expression of indignation, perplexity, and doubt passed out of her
sweet, pale face; 'let me explain all, and tell you how I love you!'

Mary was so shaken by all she had lately undergone that she could
only weep now; thus for a moment or two she yielded to him; he
pressed her to his heart, and covered her eyes and lips with
fast-falling kisses, forgetful of the presence of Mrs. Deroubigne,
who looked laughingly on.  The good old lady seemed to like the
romance of the situation, and of the episode she had so unwittingly
brought about.

'And how is Ellinor?' he asked, as Mary drew blushingly back towards
their hostess.

'Far from well.  Of late she has suffered much----'

'Through my folly?'

'And other matters too.'

Mary felt her poor little head in a whirl, with some difficulty
recognising the whole situation.

So the Colville she had learned to love and her cousin Wellwood were
one and the same person!  Thus, much which had puzzled her on many
occasions in the bearing of Dr. Wodrow was accounted for now.  They
had been in the plot together.  Many things that had seemed
perplexing and strange were now clear as day.  She recalled the
initials, and the mystery he made about the W that stood for the
middle name, and remembered that she had seen the Wellwood crest--a
demi-lion--on his signet ring; nay, it was on it now!  She recalled,
with some shame and bewilderment, all her sharp and antagonistic
utterances about him and his father, and she cast down her long dark
lashes as these things came to memory.

And so it was of himself he had spoken, and to himself he had
referred, as having been the worse for wine in the cantonments at
Lahore; himself he had referred to as being 'not a half bad fellow,'
and being wounded in action with the hill tribes; himself on whose
supposed coldness and selfishness he heard her descant; and it was
regard for her as a beautiful and friendless girl, with the charming
tie of cousinship hitherto unknown, that had inspired him as he stood
with her side by side at her parents' grave!

'I knew not what love really was till I knew you, Mary,' said he,
caressing her again.  'In the world I live and move in, I never
thought it would touch me as it did, for there money seeks money or
rank.  Out of novels and plays, I doubted its existence; but I have
learned the sweet lesson at last, and you--the dear cousin who
loathed my very name--were my preceptor, Mary!'

'But why--oh, why all this mystery--this concealment of your real
position, name, and relationship?'

'Can you ask me, after what I have said?  I wanted to know you
thoroughly, after all Dr. Wodrow had told me about you and Ellinor.
I then wanted you to love me, not as the owner of a landed
estate--not as a lounging Guardsman--not for the pretty woods of
Birkwoodbrae, that I could perhaps give to you, and would have done
so had they not been entailed; but, like the hero of a romance, Mary,
for myself alone.'

'And now to lunch, dears,' said Mrs. Deroubigne, as she laughingly
kissed Mary.  'I am tired of playing the part of Gooseberry.'

How much they had to talk about, to describe, to explain to each
other, out of all the cross-purposes, confusion, and pain that had
arisen from her cousin's scheme, the little romance he had concocted,
and the end of which he had not foreseen; while, worse than all, but
for the doctrine of chances, they might never have met again!

He heard with astonishment of the two episodes of Lady Dunkeld's
dance and Westminster Abbey.

'To think that I should be so near you, and have no consciousness of
your presence!' he exclaimed.  'Where were my eyes--where was my
heart?  My poor little Mary, had you only thought of looking in the
Army List, you would there have seen that your wicked cousin and
Leslie Colville were one and the same man!'

The astonishment of the latter, on hearing of the recent cruel
conduct of Lady Dunkeld and her daughter, was only equalled by his
just indignation.

'Oh, for the rarity of Christian charity!' he exclaimed.

'I can forgive them _now_,' said Mary, in a tremulous voice, and with
a swift, bright glance at Leslie Colville.

'I cannot,' said he; 'forgiveness is indifference, or nearly so, but
no one can quite forgive a wrong like this.  But I see the origin of
this hostility to one who was helpless against it.  When I think
how--as you know, my dear Mrs. Deroubigne--how that half-French brat,
Blanche Galloway, in her flirty, Continental way, has sung to me,
played at me, talked to me, and made œillades, I am disgusted.'

'Come now, Captain Colville,' said Mrs. Deroubigne, 'that is scarcely
fair; did you not encourage her a little _à la soldat_?'

'Not at all!  She was ever admiring the rose or flower I had in my
button-hole, and when I begged her acceptance thereof, it duly
figured in her bosom or hair afterwards, while she flattered herself,
no doubt, in the depths of her French imaginings--but I shall teach
these Dunkelds a sharp lesson ere I go.'

'Now that you talk of it--and now especially--I do not see why you
should go to the East at all,' said Mrs. Deroubigne, while Mary grew
paler than before, and felt as if roused from a startling dream.

'True, true, but needs must now.  In sorrow for the loss of Mary, I
volunteered for special service abroad; and so I find her but to lose
her again,' exclaimed Colville.

'Special service!' she asked, in a strange voice.  'What is that?'

'It means detached for staff work where--where operations are in
progress,' said he, evasively.

'Speak to the point, Captain Colville,' said Mrs. Deroubigne.  'You
go to the north-west frontier of India.'

'India!' repeated Mary, with whitening lips.  'Has life so little joy
for you?'

'It had but little till within this hour, dearest Mary.'

'Can you not withdraw your application?' said Mrs. Deroubigne.

'As a soldier's widow, you should know that, unless overtaken by
illness, I could not do so with honour.'

'You are right.  How unfortunate it is!'

'So, my darling and I have met but to part again.'

Mary heard all this with more dismay than she dared exhibit just
then, or trust herself to speak about, and it was with a mingled
sense of joy she found herself pledged, before Mrs. Deroubigne, to be
Leslie Colville's future wife, and saw flashing on her engaged finger
the same diamond ring he had brought for her acceptance on that
eventful day at Birkwoodbrae, for then, as now, Mary Wellwood was the
one woman in the world for him.  'Whether our passion be prudent,'
says Hawley Smart, 'whether the woman we have asked to tread life's
path with us is likely to be approved in our maturer years, we reck
little.  She is the one woman, so far as we are concerned just now,
and has she not pledged herself to be so always?'

But no doubt of himself or of his choice came into the heart of
Colville.  She had already been tried like gold in the fire; and he
was yet to be further tried to an extent he little expected.

When the time came to depart, Mary left Mrs. Deroubigne with a heart
too full of regard and gratitude for utterance in words.  She could
only sob on her ample and motherly breast; and Colville, when
conveying her in a cab to that home which he had resolved she must
change for one more suitable, heard of its locality with sorrow and
dismay, and with emotions very different from those of Sir Redmond
Sleath when he obtained the address of Ellinor.

'Paddington--Paddington Green!  My Heaven, how came you to select
such a place?' he exclaimed.

'Through the guard of the train.  We asked his advice,' replied Mary,
simply.

'This is intolerable!  Such a hole--such a den--such a locality!  You
must quit it without delay,' he added, as the only homes he knew were
in Mayfair, Tyburnia, and Belgravia: and though his heart was full of
joy the first genuine laugh that escaped him was when he heard the
address he was to inquire for.

'Mrs. Seraphina Fubsby!  Good heavens, where did she pick up such a
name?'

Mary had no time then to inform him that the good woman was fully
entitled to another.  She was too full of her own thoughts, and,
though the fog of that horrible London November day had deepened and
darkened all around her, in her heart there seemed sunshine now!

Could it be that so much had passed--that events to her so momentous
had occurred--since she had turned away in gloom and almost in
despair from the great door of that house near Portman Square, afraid
even to tell and crush poor Ellinor's heart by tidings of the new
misfortune that had overtaken them?

Was it not all a dream, from which she would awake to a world of
bitterness?

But, no.  Leslie Colville's betrothal ring was on her finger; his
strong, firm and loving hand was clasping hers; and all about her was
truth and reality.

'What tidings I bring, dear Ellinor!' she thought, as the cab stopped
at the door of their humble abode, and Leslie Colville sprang out to
assist her to alight as they heard Jack's bark of welcome.




CHAPTER X.

GOING TO THE FRONT.

So they were solemnly engaged at last, plighted to each other, these
cousins, and to be married; but when?  For Colville had now to face
the perils of the war in Afghanistan ere that event could come to
pass.

He was going straight and almost immediately to the scene of strife
among the savage passes there, and for Mary to accompany him was
impossible just then, and as Ellinor could not be left alone she
would have to go too; so the idea was not considered for a moment.

They could but wait the future in trust and hope, and amid the brief
joy of the present time was a dread of that future, for he who was
departing might never--_return_.

'All is unchanged at Birkwoodbrae, and old Elspat is there in charge,
dearest Mary,' said Colville, 'so you and Ellinor may return if you
will, and live there till I come back from the East.'

The temptation to do so was strong--the crave to be at home again, to
see the faces of old friends, the dear familiar hills, the silver
birks, and the fast-flowing May.  But though understanding each other
fully as the cousins did now, and though their positions as such were
changed and strengthened, Mary in her independence of spirit and
character thought she would prefer to struggle on as they were, till
he could take her there as his wife.

For her kindness to the sisters, Colville slipped quietly into Mrs.
Fubsby's hand a cheque for an ample sum, saying, after he had heard
her story, that it would help her in her plans to prove herself Lady
Sleath and punish her wrong-doer.

This was on the following day, when Mary told him the simple story of
all their recent troubles, while he gazed down upon her with eyes
full of truth and tenderness, and her heart was beating tumultuously
with its new-found joy.  She knew that he loved her now, he whom she
felt inclined to adore.

Yet the future seemed to loom darkly before her.  There was this
terrible campaign in Afghanistan, with its certain and far
separation, its remote and fearful contingencies to be faced,
endured, and undergone; so Fate seemed still to be cruel to her.

When, in broken accents and with mingled emotions of anger and shame,
while her head reclined upon his breast, Mary told Colville of Sir
Redmond Sleath's systematic attempts, though secretly married, to
lure away her unsuspecting sister Ellinor, great was the wrath and
fury of her lover.

Whip in hand, he would assuredly have taken condign vengeance on the
back and limbs of the parvenu baronet, but that the latter had to
quit London--even England--just about that time, in some haste and in
dire disgrace.

At his club he had gambled deeply with Lord Dunkeld and others, from
whom he had won great sums of money--more than the peer especially
could well afford--and before it was discovered that his wonderful
success was due to the use of _marked_ cards.

During a game of _quinze_ one of the players--a brother-Guardsman of
Colville's--noticed that several of the cards were in some way
indicated, and, after a careful examination, it was found that all
the fives and the court cards were marked by the prick of a needle at
the corners, and some in the centre, too.

These marks, though almost invisible to the eye, were recognisable by
the sense of touch.  A storm of indignation burst over Sleath.  He
was flung down the club stairs, had to eat very 'humble pie' indeed,
and was now gone to the Continent, none knew or cared precisely
where, with a congenial friend, Mr. Adolphus Dewsnap (of whom more
anon); so whatever legal plans Mrs. Fubsby meant to adopt to
relinquish her maiden name and insist upon the adoption of that of
Lady Sleath, were partially frustrated or delayed for a time by the
baronet's disappearance.

On the very day after the engagement, Mary and Ellinor bade her
farewell--it could scarcely be said with regret, though the good
woman shed abundance of tears on the occasion.

Colville, who resented as absurd and _infra dig._ Mary's desire of
maintaining herself and adding to the slender patrimony their father
had left them, brought an invitation from Mrs. Deroubigne, in whose
care they were to be left for the future--certainly for a time at
least; and she received them with open arms, and a welcome all the
more warm that she was just then alone, her two little daughters
being absent at a boarding establishment; and, amid the new comforts
and ease that surrounded her in Grosvenor Square, Mary forgot for a
time the old wish of her heart to go 'home,' as she ever considered
Birkwoodbrae her home.

At the commencement of the present century, Malcolm says 'that this
square is the very _focus_ of feudal grandeur, religion, fashion,
taste, and hospitality, and that the novel-reader must be intimately
acquainted with the description of residents within it, when the
words "Grosvenor Square" are to be found in almost every work of that
species written in the compass of fifty years past.'

Before the house of Mrs. Deroubigne were still to be seen iron
link-extinguishers, a remnant of the past, when links were carried
before carriages at the West-End till 1807.  Though old-fashioned,
the mansion was a lofty and stately one; and Mary, when she gazed
upon the tall windows on the spacious square and the landscape garden
in the centre, with its old trees planted by Kent, wondered if she
was the same Mary Wellwood who for so many weeks past had
contemplated the frowsy view from the windows of her late abode.

In her regard for Colville, and inspired no doubt by memories of the
past and the dead, Mrs. Deroubigne, to do her justice, was unwavering
in her kindness and hospitality to her new friends; and times there
were when she actually, amid her dream-thoughts, seemed to forget her
own married life, and her heart yearned, warmly and strangely, to the
two orphan girls of her old lover--the girls who might, she averred
laughingly, have been her own daughters, had fate so arranged it.

'Your face, Mary, always reminds me of your father,' she would say,
taking the girl's dimpled cheeks caressingly between her hands; 'but
yours, Ellinor, suggests to me more of your mamma--you have the same
dreamy hazel eyes.  And you are romantic, no doubt?' she added, with
a fond smile.

'Perhaps; every girl has, it is said, at least one romance in the
course of her life,' said Ellinor, thinking of poor Robert Wodrow and
the wretched Sleath.

'And, certainly, I have had mine!' said Mrs. Deroubigne, kissing
Mary, while old memories floated through her mind, known and clear to
herself alone.

Mary thought that though it might be delightful in summer to visit
Birkwoodbrae, with Mrs. Deroubigne as a chaperone, she would never go
back to it as a home on sufferance--on that she was resolved; and
until she was a wedded wife she could but wait in hope, love, and
confidence; besides, Mrs. Deroubigne, at Colville's suggestion, had a
plan for a little tour on the Continent to occupy some of the time of
his absence, and to make the sisters forget some of the
mortifications they had recently undergone.

Though the temporary loss of Mary and the mystery involving her
movements--her very fate after leaving Perthshire--had so tortured
the heart of Colville that he had resolved to seek for change amid
the stirring scenes of Eastern war once more, he felt that he could
now leave England with emotions of comparative happiness and content.

He knew that she was in safety--surrounded by every comfort, even by
splendour--and had been saved from much he could not quite foresee,
by the slender but blessed chance of her meeting with Mrs. Deroubigne!

To him and Mary the few meetings before his departure seemed
heaven-sent--though a sorrowful separation was at hand--the happiest
of all their past existence.

Neither seemed to question, as yet, how they would feel or could
exist during the months--perhaps the more than year--of separation
that had to come.

Never, never would she forget the time when he placed the
engagement-ring upon her engaged finger, and when their eyes met in
one long and deep glance--a glance that, though no word was uttered,
proved the silent compact of his avowed and her accepted love.

So the fatal day came inexorably at last; after a farewell dinner to
him at the Guards' Club in Pall Mall.

'Good-bye, dear girls,' said he, cheerily; 'good-bye, love
Mary--another kiss and another.  I'll bring you back such wonderful
things from India--tiger-skins, and tiger claws set in gold; Delhi
jewellery from Chandney Chowk; ivory carvings, and I know not what
more,' he added, and, in spite of himself, strove to be cheerful;
'and when I do come back, Mary, you will be my own darling little
wife till death parts us.'

So the hour, the supreme moment, had come at last, and Leslie
Colville was gone!

His letters were Mary's only solace after that; long letters full of
loving and passionate expression, to be read and re-read again; from
Suez, burning Aden, and beautiful Bombay; they came regularly, but
became fewer and further between as he proceeded up country by
railway, and his last, before they left London for the Continent,
informed her that he had been appointed to the staff at Jellalabad,
where Sir Samuel Browne was concentrating his forces prior to an
advance on Cabul.  Thus he would soon be going to the Front.




CHAPTER XI.

AT JELLALABAD.

'Well, Colville, how do you like India from what you have seen of
it?' asked Colonel Spatterdash, as he sat smoking in his shirt and
pyjamas, for, though the month was March, the solar heat was already
considerable in that part of Afghanistan, and quite disagreeable by
eight in the morning.

'I don't like it at all,' replied Colville; 'besides, I have been in
India before, and you forget, colonel, that this is not India, but
rather beyond it.'

'True, I am not likely to forget that, when the rocks are bristling
with Afghan juzails!  But, if you don't like it, what the deuce
brought you out now?'

'To have a new sensation, to see a little more of the world again,'
said Colville, evasively, as he was not disposed to tell his
thoughtless listeners--some four or five officers--assembled for
tiffin (_i.e._, lunch) about his romance, and the temporary loss of
Mary Wellwood.

'A new sensation!' exclaimed Algy Redhaven, a handsome young captain
of the 10th Hussars, who had just entered the bungalow; 'you are
likely to have it soon enough.  Have you heard the news that has just
come in from the front, colonel?' he added to Spatterdash.

'No--what the devil is up?' growled the old field-officer.

'Fresh complications are likely at Cabul--the Ameer Shere Ali has
gone to visit the Russian general at Tashkend.'

'Whew!' whistled old Spatterdash; 'that will likely precipitate
matters.  I always thought the invasion of British India by Russia
would be as practicable a few years hence as that of Italy by
Austria, and now, by Jove, we seem close upon it.'

And since the date we write of the Russians have pushed on to Merv in
Turkomania!

The group of officers who were invited to the colonel's table were
all happy and heedless young fellows belonging to Sir Samuel Browne's
column, and high in anticipation of a protracted 'shindy' with the
Afghans, as a force was being concentrated at Jellalabad.

A couple were on the staff, like Colville; one--Redhaven--belonged to
the Royal Hussars; two others to a native infantry regiment; all were
somewhat airily attired, and, till tiffin made its appearance, all
were smoking cheroots so industriously that clouds of their pale
smoke curled among the rough rafters and straw roof of the bungalow.

Jellalabad, where the fortune of war had then cast them, the winter
residence of the Cabul monarchs since the consolidation of the
Dooranee Empire, is situated in an extensive valley of considerable
beauty and fertility, eight-and-twenty miles long by about four
broad, and the town had before this been rendered memorable by the
heroic stand which Sir Robert Sale, with a handful of British
soldiers, made in it against the Afghans some forty years before.

In importance it was originally only next to Cabul and Candahar, but
its fortifications had been completely destroyed by General Pollock
after the war that ended in 1842.  Like all Afghan cities of note, it
had its Balla Hissar, half palace and half citadel, with a poor
population estimated at from three to ten thousand.

Many streams fertilise its valley--namely, the Cabul River, which
flows near the walls; the Surkh Rud, or Red River, and the Kara Su,
or Black River, while around it are numerous castles, and picturesque
villages, and groups of forest trees, though an arid desert spreads
in its immediate vicinity.

Nearly four months had elapsed since Leslie Colville had parted from
Mary Wellwood, and already as many ages seemed to have elapsed since
the few brief days of reunion they had spent together at Grosvenor
Square; and now he knew that many more months must elapse, must be
faced and endured, ere he could hope to turn his steps towards
Europe; and even while sitting there, among these bantering and
somewhat noisy fellows, he looked around him as one in a dream, whose
thoughts were far away, while Mary's soft, sad features came vividly
before him in memory and in their beauty, though the latter, as some
old poet says,

  'Is in no face, but in the lover's mind.'


'How silent you are, Colville!' exclaimed old Spatterdash,
relinquishing the mouthpiece of his hookah for a moment.  'Gad, I
believe the fellow's in love.'

So full were his thoughts of Mary at that precise moment that he
almost coloured as if they had been read by the colonel, who
continued, in a tone of banter,

'With you, I suppose, it is,

  "----to bid me not to love
  Is to forbid my pulse to move,
  My beard to grow, my ears to prick up;
  Or, when I'm in the mood, to hiccup."

Is it so?  Well, anyway, stick to the _brandy pawnee_ till tiffin
comes.'

Again the old familiar sound of the cantonment _ghurries_, or
gong-bells, as they were clanged for the change of sentries, was in
his ear, and the view from the open windows of the bungalow was
strange and striking.

Far away above the misty horizon rose amid the clouds--and cloudlike
themselves, so bright and varied were their tints--the majestic
mountains that tower between the shallow valley of Jellalabad and the
ramparts of Cabul, and chief of them is the stupendous Suffaidh Koh,
fourteen thousand feet in height, then covered with dazzling white
snow; and if wondrously beautiful by day, it was perhaps still more
so by night, when the full moon lit up its chasms and peaks with its
Asiatic splendour.

In the immediate foreground, just before the windows of the bungalow,
a curious scene--one illustrative of the distant region and the
manners of our Indian fellow-subjects--was in progress.

The _Poojah_ of a battalion of H.M. Native Infantry, a Hindoo
regiment, was being celebrated towards evening.

The battalion, in full marching order, with its colours, was drawn up
in a circle.  At each cardinal point of the compass was a small clod
of earth, with barley and rice on it; and in the centre were the
attendant Brahmins with a beautiful young goat, which had been
sprinkled with pure water, barley, and rice.  Then the sacrificer
drew a huge Ghoorkali knife, and, after muttering some prayers, by
one trenchant slash severed the head of the goat from its body.  At
the moment of immolation twelve guns boomed through the air and drums
were beaten, after which the battalion was wheeled back into line,
and marched by fours into its lines, with band playing and colours
flying.

Colonel Spatterdash, Colville's host, was a thorough Indian officer
of the old school, who had broiled for so many years in Bengal that
he had lost much of his European identity, all memory of home nearly,
and religion too, and had become so bronzed that evil-disposed
fellows used to hint--but not in his presence--that he had 'a dash of
the tar-brush in him--was fourteen annas to the rupee,' and so forth.

The wags of the station at Chutneypore declared that he wore a gold
bangle given to him by the orange-visaged Rani of that place, who
liked him as 'a wicked old man,' that squeezed her brown paws when he
assisted her into the silk-curtained howdah of her great tusker
elephant, which had carried 'Colonel Wellesley's' baggage at the
battle of Assaye.

He was full of old Indian memories of the Rangoon Rangers and
Bhurtpore Bulldogs, as he had heard of them when he came out from
Addiscombe a cadet and griffin; and had many a story to tell of the
pre-railway times, when, if not marching, people travelled by _dâk_,
night and day, in palanquins; when the old Bengal colonel was a
father to his regiment, the guide of his subalterns, and was never so
happy as when he had a dozen or so at his table, all eager for
_Kowab_, fresh eggs, with Phillibut rice, kedgere, &c., and _Bhola_
in plenty.

He was a captain when the mutiny occurred; and its horrors, with the
dismay that his beloved Sepoys--the _Spatterdash-ka-Pultan_,
so-called from his father--should prove untrue to their salt, nearly
broke his heart; and he thought the end of the world had come when
they flung him down a well at Gungawallah; but he was hard to kill.
A banyan-tree that grew half way down broke his fall, and to that he
clung till rescued by some Highlanders, after which he solaced
himself mightily by blowing whole batches of 'pandies' from his guns.

And now tiffin came, curried chickens, rice, green chillis, mutton
and chutney, &c., &c., with plenty of wine and brandy, all laid out
by his faithful old Kitmutgar, wearing an enormous white turban.

'Anything,' said the colonel, 'is better than bitter beer that has
been boiling on the dusty road between Peshawur and Jellalabad, till
the cask hoops grow hot in the sun.'

So he took a huge beaker of _brandy pawnee_, as he reclined in the
cane easy-chair in his well tattied bungalow, with punkah wallahs
crouching in the verandah outside, and smoked his hookah, for he
preferred such a residence to a double-poled tent or a tumble-down
brick house in that city of earthquakes, till the troops marched.

'I knew your uncle, Wellwood, thoroughly,' said the colonel to
Colville.  'He and I were great chums, and I once saw him do a plucky
thing--a very plucky thing, by Jove!--when we were giving a fellow a
tight flogging under fire.'

'A flogging under fire--that was remarkable, surely?'

'Not so in those days; we were never squeamish about anything then.'

'And this plucky thing?' said Redhaven, the hussar.

'Convinced me that Wellwood was pretty reckless of life.  He had been
soured by some disappointment in love, we heard--the idea of such a
thing!'

And, while old Splatterdash laughed a little contemptuously at the
thought of a tender passion, Colville, remembering the secret episode
of Mrs. Deroubigne's life, listened with some interest.

'It came about in this way, you see,' said the colonel, after taking
a long pull at his hookah.  'After we advanced upon Jhansi under Sir
Hugh Rose to crush the rebellious Sepoys who held the place (which
was a town and fortress of the Mahrattas of old), we bombarded it
heavily for four days, but not without resistance, for the shattered
remains of the Gwalior contingent, augmented to twenty-five thousand
bayonets and sabres, and eighteen pieces of cannon from Kalpee, came
marching along the right bank of the Jumna, hoping to raise the
siege, d--n them!

'In that, however, the Pandies were disappointed.  During the
bombardment, when we were pitching shot and shell into each other, a
great thirteen-inch bomb from an old mortar happened to fall close by
where the soldier of a European regiment was tied up to "the
halberts," as we still called the triangles, to receive a hundred and
fifty lashes for insubordination when mad with drink and heat.  The
sudden appearance of this great missile, with its fuse burning and
hissing, caused such confusion and consternation that the companies,
formed in hollow square, fell back on all sides, even breaking their
ranks, for none could composedly await such an explosion under their
noses.

'Instead of yielding to this natural impulse, Wellwood took from his
pocket a penknife, and, walking up to the helpless and terrified
creature who was bound to the triangles, he cut the cords that bound
his wrists and ankles, setting him free, and both had barely time to
retire a little way and throw themselves flat on the ground, when the
great shell burst, and a hurricane of iron swept over them and all
around.  Thus did he save this poor fellow, who must inevitably have
perished from his inability to save himself; and Wellwood did more,
for, in consideration of the mental agony the man had undergone, he
remitted the remainder of the punishment; and, by a curious
coincidence, the culprit perished a few days after in the action of
Roohea when saving the life of Wellwood, whom some rebels were about
to bayonet as he lay wounded and helpless on the ground.'

'This will be an episode in her father's life to tell Mary of when
next I write to her,' thought Colville.  And now the conversation
drifted into the subject then uppermost in the minds of all--the
probability of serious complications if Russian intrigues proved
successful at Cabul, and none could expect them to be otherwise when
the Ameer Shere Ali had departed openly to visit General Kauffmann at
Tashkend, in Central Asia, which place, however, he was fated not to
reach.

The subject that caused our dispute with him, and brought our troops
to Jellalabad and elsewhere upon his frontier, was the dispute known
then as the "Resident" question, because he rather favoured the
Russians, and thus refused to have any such British official at his
court for three reasons--firstly, the person of a Briton would not be
safe there; secondly, that European officers might make demands that
would occasion quarrels; and thirdly, that if Britain was
represented, Russia would expect to be represented also.  But it was
known that he was in close correspondence with General Kauffman, and
only feared that a British Resident might, if present, throw some
light upon it; and in the end a convention was signed, by which
Russia bound herself to give at least moral support to the existing
Afghan dynasty.

An envoy sent by our government to Cabul never reached it, being
forced back at a place called Ali Musjid.  For this an apology was
demanded, and Afghanistan was entered by a British army in three
columns that won several victories, and the Ameer finding his case
hopeless started for Tashkend, but died on the way, and was succeeded
by his son, Yakoub Khan, who eventually showed a disposition to come
to terms with us; but in this we are a little anticipating the events
of our story, for, at the time Leslie Colville joined the staff at
Jellalabad, Sir Samuel Browne was, as stated, collecting a force
there, while General Maude relieved his post between that place and
Dakka, and the gallant Roberts, posted further forward at the Peiwar
Pass, was improving the difficult mountain road between that place
and Cabul for the passage of guns and baggage.

So thus it was that our troops were now engaged in what was known as
the second Afghan War--to counteract Russian influences.

As the evening advanced and darkness closed in, some yells and oaths
in Hindostanee and Pushtoo were heard at a little distance outside
the hedge of the colonel's compound, and Colville, who had been
looking from a window, now started to his feet.

'I can't look on and permit that!' he exclaimed.

'Can't permit what?' asked Spatterdash, tartly.

'A lot of fellows----'

'Budmashes, no doubt, by the row they make.'

'Ill-using one man; and now, as it is time for me to go, colonel, I
shall interfere _en passant_.'

'Don't think of it--don't bother!'

'But they may kill him.'

'What the devil does it matter?  A nigger less in the world won't be
missed,' growled Spatterdash, who had lost all sympathy with the
natives since the Mutiny.

'Call the nearest guard--the picket--or some chowkeydars,' said
Redhaven and others; 'but don't interfere in a row of this kind.'

Colville, however, buckled on his sword and revolver, lit a fresh
cheroot, laughingly bowed himself out, and hurried away; for, sooth
to say, he was a little tired of old Spatterdash, and as no one
actually thought he would interfere in a native row, no one followed
or accompanied him.

'The inlying pickets have been doubled to-night by order of the
general,' said the colonel.

'Why?' asked some one.

'Because rumour says that the Sirdir Mahmoud Shah, a tearing Afghan
devil, has come to lead the Mohmunds against us.'

'With what object?' asked Redhaven of the Hussars.

'A row, of course.'




CHAPTER XII.

THE HADJI.

'The world is a small place, after all!' thought Colville, as he left
the Colonel's bungalow behind him.  'Think of hearing here that
anecdote of dear Mary's father from that old subadar!  Well, well,
"life," as some one says, "is a perpetual enigma, to which no
theological system offers a satisfactory solution--against the reefs
of which all philosophies break into foam and empty bubbles."  But
here are more than bubbles, by Jove!  Now what is all this deuced row
about?' he added, drawing his sword, on seeing before him the authors
of the noise he had heard, engaged still in a wild and fierce _mêlée_.

This was in a sequestered part of the town, and near some of the
ruins of houses shaken down by the earthquakes some forty years ago.
One man was contending single-handed against no less than five, and
in the clear starlight Colville could see the flash of their gleaming
eyes, their set teeth, their dark and infuriated faces.  The man
assaulted wore an Afghan costume, a cloak, a kind of blouse with
loose sleeves, and on his head a _loonjee_.  The others had flowing
garments and large turbans, and were armed with heavily-loaded clubs,
against which the stranger was defending himself with no small
dexterity with only a pilgrim's staff; for, by his wallet, gourd, and
beads, he was evidently a hadji, who had become involved in a quarrel
with some Wahabis, who, it seemed afterwards, had been mocking him
for praying at the tomb of a Santon, and told him he should call on
God, and on no imaginary saint, on which, he had proceeded at once to
lay about him with his pilgrim's staff.

'To call a man a Wahabi,' says Sterndale, 'is, to nine-tenths of
Englishmen in India, to call him a fanatic, a rebel, a sort of
Mahometan fenian, one whom the police should take under special
surveillance, and whose every action is open to suspicion.'

Like the English Puritans, they--in addition to deriding the
intercession of saints--despoiled the mosques of their lamps and
decorations, broke down all shrines, prohibited music and dancing,
and smoking was denounced as a mortal sin; and now those whom
Colville found himself opposed to would undoubtedly--but for his
sword and revolver--have made short work of it with the unfortunate
hadji.

He drove them back a few paces, and the hadji, while panting for
breath, and streaming with blood from more than one contused wound,
continued to revile them bitterly.

'Wahabis--accursed Wahabis!' he exclaimed, 'dare they speak to me?  I
am a Soonee, not a dog!  I am not a Shiah, the follower of Ali, but
an orthodox Soonee, like my forefathers, blessed be God and His
Prophet!  Wretches,' he added, with all the ferocious rancour of
religion and race, 'your souls will yet defile hell!'

'Begone, and leave the man to go on his way,' said Colville,
authoritatively, as he waved his sword, for he knew enough of Arabic
and Hindostanee to understand what was said and the nature of the
brawl.

'Dogs!' resumed the irate hadji, encouraged by his presence and
succour; 'know ye not that the time is coming when the Wahabis shall
be judged according to their deserts, and each in passing a dead
man's grave shall say, "Would to God that I lay there!"'

'Dog of a Soonee, when will that time come to pass?' asked one,
jeeringly.

'When the sun rises in the west,' shrieked the hadji, frantic with
rage; 'when the beast shall rise out of the earth near Mecca; when a
smoke shall cover the earth, and the Mahdi shall come to everyone and
fill the earth with righteousness.'

And much more to this effect did he vow with singular force and
fluency, for the hadji was an Afghan, and, so far as regards the
external forms of their religion, the Afghans are wonderfully devout,
and so much of their conversation, whatever the subject, is so tinged
with their religion and the Koran that one would imagine the whole
people, from the Ameer to the humblest camel-driver, were engaged in
holy reflections, and scarcely is a sentence uttered by them without
some reference to the Deity.

One of the Wahabis now seemed to lose what little remains of sense or
temper he had left, and, uttering a savage yell, swung aloft his
ponderous _lohbunda_ or staff, which was heavily shod with iron--a
weapon one well-directed stroke from which would have spattered the
brains of the hadji on the street--but Colville, quick as lightning,
warded off the blow with his sword, in the process of which his right
arm tingled to the shoulder; and as at that moment the tramp of a
patrol from an inlying picquet was heard approaching, the brawlers
took to flight, and Colville was left face to face with the man whose
life he had saved.

'Sahib, I have to thank you gratefully for this prompt and courageous
succour, but for which these dogs would no doubt have slain me,' said
the pilgrim in English; 'as it is, they have handled me so roughly
that I am barely able to stand.'

'You speak English very fluently,' said Colville, with genuine
surprise.  'How is this?'

'My uncle was a _muhafez dufter_, or keeper of the records, in the
office of the district magistrate, near Peshawur, who educated me to
work in his office; but at his death I went back to the hills and
became an Afghan soldier under Shere Ali.'

'And now----'

'I am a poor harmless hadji, Mahommed Shah, seeking but to save his
soul,' said he, lowering his keen and glittering eyes, as he looked
steadily around him.  'In saving me you have done a good action, and
what says the fourth chapter of the Koran?  "Verily, God will not
wrong anyone, even the weight of an ant, and, if it be a good action,
He will double it, and recompense it in His sight with a great and
just reward."  But these thrice accursed Wahabis,' he added, grinding
his teeth with rage, and making thereby a very unpleasant sound, 'may
be swallowed up by the earth as the accuser of Moses was.'

Colville looked around him warily.  In the dark, unlighted, and
tortuous streets of the city this poor man might easily be overtaken
and murdered by these fanatics, if they were--as Colville did not
doubt--still lurking watchfully about, so he said,

'Come with me to the Balla Hissar; I am quartered there, and can keep
you in safety for the night; besides, your wounds must be dressed,
and in the morning I would advise your instantly quitting Jellalabad.'

'As-taffur-ullah! that will I, sahib; and by the five keys of
knowledge, I will never forget your kindness.'

The citadel was close by.  There Colville took his new acquaintance
past the sentries to the rooms assigned as his quarters, quaint and
lofty apartments with marble floors, and walls covered with beautiful
arabesques, splendid but comfortless, and, summoning the soldier who
acted as his servant, with lights, some wine and bandages, he desired
him to bathe and bind up the wounds of the old Afghan wanderer, who
was on the point of sinking, and would have done so, but for some
water which he took, dashed with brandy, despite the precepts of the
Koran.

'You have had a narrow escape!' said Colville, looking at some of his
bruises.

'It is perhaps useless to bind these wounds.'

'Why?'

'Because if a man is to die he will die.'

'But if a man is ailing surely he may be cured?'

'Yes,' replied the hadji, 'through the Koran.'

'Koran again!' thought Colville.  'You mean by faith in it?'

'Yes; by writing therefrom some holy sentences on paper, and drinking
the water wherein that paper has been washed clean.'

'You have heard, I suppose, that the Ameer has gone over to the
Russians?' said Colville to change the subject.

'Yes, sahib,' replied the hadji, in whose eyes a strange light now
appeared, 'but he is dying of mortal disease, and will never reach
Tashkend.'

'Then Yakoub Khan will succeed.'

'Yes; the man who has already aspired to sit on a _musnud_ (throne)
is little likely to content himself with a carpet, especially if
supported by the bayonets of the _Ghora logue_.  By the Prophet, no!'
added the hadji, referring to what was well known--that Yakoub Khan
had conspired against his father, who, in consequence, had kept him
for years imprisoned in a dungeon without light.

The hadji seemed a genuine Afghan, and considerably past middle-age.
He was tall, spare, and muscular, with aquiline--almost
Jewish--features; high cheek bones, and strong, black, glittering
eyes, with an intensity and keenness in their expression that
reminded Colville of those of a mountain eagle.  He was fairer
complexioned than most of his people, among whom even red hair is
sometimes met with; but his face had been cleft from temple to chin
by a tulwar stroke in some past battle or brawl; and now the livid
mark of that terrible slash could be seen distinctly as altering, and
in some measure distorting, features that were naturally very regular.

After partaking of a little food of the plainest kind, he performed
the ablutions enjoined by his faith, spread a white cloth over his
kneeling-carpet, and, turning his face in the direction of Mecca,
said his _salat al Moghreb_, or evening prayer, while Colville took
himself off to the mess-room; and when he returned the hadji was
lying on the verandah outside, fast asleep, and cosily muffled up in
his dark-coloured choga, or camel-hair cloak.

In the morning he had left the Bala Hissar, and gone, none knew
where, save that he had been seen going towards Cabul by the way of
the Ali Musjid Pass.

It never occurred to Leslie Colville, in performing the acts of
kindness he had done to this stranger, whether there might be peril
or evil evolved from them in the future; or whether the man was--as
he ultimately proved to be--a keen and observant spy, come to watch
and note the strength, preparations, and object of Sir Samuel
Browne's column; and, poor though the hadji looked, Colville's
servant--a more than usually sharp example of Private Thomas
Atkins--had found him in the early morning reckoning over a quantity
of gold in his wallet, and one of these which he dropped was found to
be of the last Russian mintage.




CHAPTER XIII.

A FIGHT WITH THE MOHMUNDS.

Save for flying rumours cantonment life at Jellalabad had been a
little monotonous for some time past.  Paper hunts had been resorted
to, and polo was played every afternoon by officers of the 10th
Hussars, riding Cabul ponies upon a piece of ground cleared for them
by their men about two miles from the city.

Other officers exercised their skill in 'potting,' with the
breechloader, quails, and the beautiful partridge, called the 'hill
chuckore' by the Afghans, wild sheep, and antelopes, while some of
the more adventurous brought down a wolf or hyena, but as these were
chiefly to be found at a distance some personal risk was incurred,
and one might be 'potted' in turn by the 'juzail' of some hill-man
lurking unseen behind a rock or tree.

The counterbalance to these little amusements were visitations of
wind and dust, or torrents of rain, that pattered like a storm of dry
peas on the tents of the troops who were in camp near the city, so,
when the weather had become settled, all hailed with considerable
satisfaction the advent of the expedition under General Macpherson to
look after a gathering of the Mohmunds--a tribe of about fifty
thousand souls, whose fighting men were reported as mustering for
mischief on the other side of the Cabul river, in the south-west
corner of the Jellalabad Valley, opposite to Girdi Kas, where the
stream flows away towards Chardeh.

The staff were in their saddles betimes, and on the ground in front
of the city.

'Good morning, gentlemen,' said old Spatterdash, as he came cantering
up on his Arab in the dark.  'What is the hour?'

Colville adroitly caught a firefly, and placing it for a moment on
the glass of his watch, saw the time.

'Four o'clock, colonel.'

'We have other work this morning than pig-sticking or potting jackals
and foxes; but there is time yet for a cup of coffee dashed with
brandy--a cheroot, and then away.'

'The bugles are sounding, and there go the trumpets of the Hussars
and Lancers blowing "boot and saddle."'

Disdaining the use of a regulation sword, which he stigmatised as an
'army tailor's blunt knife,' Colonel Spatterdash rode with an
enormous tulwar by his side--a weapon once wielded by the great rebel
Tantia Topee--one literally for slicing, and having such an edge that
he might have shaved with it.  He was in high spirits, and being
still practically under the influence of his potations overnight, was
humming the song of 'The Sepoy Grenadiers'--

  'The spirits of our sires,
    Who gathered such renown
  From clouds of battle fires,
    With stern delight look down,

  'To Delhi and to Deeg they point,
    Those stars of other years;
  And bid us still uphold the fame
    Of _the Sepoy Grenadiers_!'


'I'm not likely to die from "waste of nervous tissue," as the doctors
call it, whatever the devil it may be,' he added, as he unsheathed
his tulwar, that flashed in the paling starlight; 'we'll have a burra
khana' (_i.e._, big dinner) 'when we come back, after polishing off
these Mohmund fellows.'

'At least all who are able to partake of it.'

'Don't be gloomy, Colville; d--n it, I never am.'

The force for this expedition was made up of detachments from the
column; there were some of the Rifles, with some of the Ghoorkas, 1st
Sikhs, and 20th Punjaub Infantry, one hundred of the 10th Hussars
under Captain St. Quintin, and one hundred of the 11th Bengal
Lancers, in blue uniforms faced with red, under Major Princep.  De
Latour's Hazara Mountain Battery came clattering up, and two Royal
Horse Artillery guns, which latter, with a small force, proceeded at
once on observation down the right bank of the Cabul river, in case
any of the Mohmunds might have taken post in that direction.

At half-past four in the morning the whole force--not much over a
thousand men--after forming in silence and as quickly as possible,
without further sound of drum or bugle, moved off, and, with St.
Quintin's hussars in the van, crossed the river by the new bridge
erected by our Royal Engineers, and advanced into the dark country
beyond, where the only sounds heard were the wails of an occasional
jackal, replied to by those of a pack of his fourfooted brethren.

In galloping from point to point, when the troops were forming under
arms and then in columns of march, giving the general's last orders
or directions, Colville had not much time for abstract reflection,
yet a certain idea did occur to him, and he muttered, with a glow of
the purest satisfaction,

'If I fall to-day or any other day, thank God I have made all square
for my dear girl and her sister, too.'

This referred to a secret visit paid by him to Lincoln's Inn 'anent'
codicils to his will the day before he left London; and now he
recalled with astonishment the time when he either disliked these
unknown cousins or forgot that they existed.

Though Mohammed, Khan of Lalpura and chief of the Mohmunds, had made
complete submission apparently to Sir Louis Cavagnari at Dakka, in
the preceding year, it did not prevent his people from opposing us
now in arms, like many other mountain tribes.

After the hoofs of the cavalry and wheels of the artillery had made
the planks of the trestle-bridge resound, silence again fell on the
column; and when the moon came out in its oriental splendour, amid
some weird, windy, and fast-flying clouds, there was light enough to
see the column distinctly.

The sheeny bayonets of the infantry and the spearheads of the lancers
(denuded _pro temp._ of their fluttering banneroles) glittered
brightly, as did the sword-blades of all the officers; and our
cavalry are generally so gaily appointed that, when the 10th Hussars
went cantering to the front, the flashes of light reflected from
their accoutrements, if they added to the picturesque, also added to
the peril of the occasion, if any scouting Mohmunds were about, as
this alone would have revealed the advance of the force, which from
its sombre costume would have been, otherwise, almost invisible--but
the tropical white helmets were always prominent objects amid the
gloom.

At this time, all our troops in Afghanistan wore Cashmere putties, or
leg-bandages, made of strips of woollen cloth, two yards and a half
long, with a tape stitched on at the end. They were worn round the
calf of the leg from the ankle to the knee, where the tape secured
them.  For cavalry and infantry alike they were a useful and warm
addition to the clothing in cold weather; and there was but one
objection--the time necessary for binding them on.

Some natives acted as guides, and in the cold moonlight the cavalry
and artillery went clattering over rough stones, and more than one of
the former fell from his horse, and of the latter off the
limber-seats, as some sudden and deceitful ditch or water channel had
to be crossed. The enemy was in front; no one knew precisely when or
where he might be fallen on, and this added to the zest and
excitement of the time and occasion.

The orders of the cavalry were to spur on in front; to get in between
the Mohmunds and the hills, for the purpose of cutting off their
retreat; and a picturesque sight were the Hussars and Lancers, as
they dashed through the Kunar River (which joins the Cabul about five
miles from Jellalabad), in its descent from Shigar, and flashes of
light came from their glancing accoutrements as they vanished away
from the sight of the infantry in the gloom ahead, when a cloud
passed over the face of the moon.

Next came the infantry splashing through the Kunar, which rose to the
men's waist-belts, and was broad at the point where it was crossed;
and a bath such as it gave was not a desirable beginning in a cold
morning with the work they had in hand.

At one place the route lay over what seemed to have been an old
Mohammedan burial-ground. Coffins are not used in the East, the body
being simply rolled up in a sheet, and placed in the grave with only
a foot or two of earth spread over it. Into these receptacles the
wheels of the guns stuck fast in succession, compelling the gunners
to quit the limber-seats and drag them out, crushing and grinding the
human bones beneath, and causing an expression of much rough language
unfitted for ears polite. If the superstition of the Afghans, who
greatly venerate burial places, which they call 'Cities of the
Silent,' be true, that the ghosts of the dead sit at the head of
their own graves, invisible to mortal eyes, enjoying the odours of
the flowers planted there, the said ghosts must have been somewhat
scared by the row Her Majesty's gunners made till they got their
seven-pounders free from this succession of traps, and once more on
solid ground; and also by old Spatterdash, who was impatient to get
his Sepoys forward, and swore in English and Hindostanee.

Though the Kunar river, which takes its rise near the great Pamir
Steppe and Bam-i-Duniah, or 'the Roof of the World,' was left in the
rear, the troops had to splash through several tributaries of it ere
they obtained higher ground, and then they began to look upon scenery
wild and mighty, rugged and uncultured, where wolves peopled the
forest, the elk and deer haunted the brook, and the crane and the
stork hovered about the watercourses, and over all, desolate and
savage, towered the mountains of Shigar, many thousands of feet in
height.

Sometimes the route lay between groves of dark poplars, of pale green
willows, or dwarf palm, sunk amid which the tributaries of the Kunar
flowed like streaks of silver; and sometimes between vegetation
familiar to the British eye--the ash, the oak, the chestnut, and
hawthorn, though mingling with the cedar, the olive, and fig.

Major Louis Cavaguari, a handsome dark-complexioned man, whom
Colville now saw for the first time, came riding up and joined the
staff, accompanied by a brilliantly attired and accoutred Afghan
horseman, whom he introduced as the Khan of Besoot, from whom much
useful information could be gathered, among others that a range of
hills in front was full of the enemy under a fanatic named Moollah
Khalil.

The Ghoorkas, who were leading, were now ordered to seek cover as
soon as they had left in rear a village near these hills, while the
cavalry swung round to take these in flank or cut off the retreat of
the enemy, and with that force went Colville with a message from the
general.

While galloping on to overtake them he could see the files who were
to skirmish dart out in extended order with unslung carbines, and
soon the cracking of exchanged shots quickened every pulse as they
were heard among the hills.

'Push forward the mountain battery!' was now the general's order.

It was galloped to the south side of a projecting ridge, while old
Spatterdash, with some of the Punjaub infantry, began to scale its
rocky crest. There the Mohmunds were in position, but so dingily were
they attired, or so much did the colour of their costume blend with
that of the rocks and trees, that, though not a single man of them
could as yet be separately distinguished, the existence of their
masses was known by the flashing of their arms in the sunshine, or by
the fluttering out of a red or green village banner against the
sky-line.

While measures were thus being taken to have them on the flank and an
attack was delivered in front, De Latour got his mountain guns ready
for action, and sent a shell at a thousand yards' range whistling
through the air. Curving in its course, it fell and burst among them
high up on the ridge, scattering death and mutilation.  Another and
another fell, and then, as the arms ceased to glitter, it was known
that the Mohmunds were falling back.

Again the flashing of their weapons in the sunshine, and the jets of
white smoke from their long juzails, levelled over bank and rock, but
fired at long and almost useless distances, announced a rally or
pause in their retreat, the line of which lay along a plain that
extended away to the eastward, and onward through that space and
clouds of rising dust swept the cavalry, followed by the infantry at
the double.

The skirmishers of Redhaven's troop having, in the ardour of pursuit,
advanced too far into a dell, became suddenly exposed to a galling
fire, which emptied more than one saddle; and Colville dashed forward
with orders for their recall.

The trumpet sounded the 'retire,' and it was obeyed by all but one
hussar, who continued to load and fire, while the juzail balls
whistled about him, and knocked up jets of sand about his horse's
hoofs.

'Sound again!' said Lieutenant Redhaven to the trumpeter, who sat
with the bell of the trumpet planted on his thigh.

Again he blew, but in vain.

'He is too far--he does not hear it--the fellow will be lost!'

'Oh, he hears it well enough, sir,' replied the trumpeter; 'but just
now he pretends to be deaf.'

'Deaf!--what the devil does he mean?  To throw his life away?'

'Looks like it, from what I have seen of him more than once.'

'He is a brave but reckless fool!' exclaimed Redhaven, impetuously,
as he was now seen engaged with four Afghan horsemen, after having
slung his carbine, and drawn his sword; and by this time Colville,
full of pity and admiration, inspired also by the passing remarks of
the trumpeter, was already on the spur to succour him.

'Allow me, sir, that officer can't go alone; besides, the poor fellow
is my own comrade,' said a hussar, who, without waiting for
Redhaven's consent, dashed the spurs into his horse, settled himself
well down on the saddle, and in less than a minute was among the
cloud of dust, where Colville and the other hussar were in close
_mêlée_ with the four Afghans, one of whom was the Moollah Khalil,
who was armed, not with a tulwar, but an enormous maul, furnished
with a round knob of gilt metal.

'Allah Ackbar, Mohammed resool illa,' he was shrieking, with blazing
eyes, as he goaded his horse in the fray, and laid about him like a
madman, and by one blow brained or stunned the horse of the
skirmisher whose rashness had brought this combat about, and during
which the juzailchees had ceased firing, lest they might hit their
own leader.

Ere the hussar could free himself from his stirrups the maul was
about to descend on his head, when a thrust from Colville's sword,
delivered under the right arm, pierced the lungs of Moollah Khalil,
who fell to rise no more, and, protecting the hussar by a great
circular sweep of his sword, Colville dragged him up by his bridle
hand, and mounted him on the Moollah's horse.  His follower had now
disposed of a second Afghan just as his horse was shot under him, and
the two others, terrified by the fall of the Moollah, fled at a
gallop, on which the _juzailchees_ resumed firing, and the shot
whistled and whirred past Colville and his companions.

'Quick--run as best you can,' said he, putting his horse to a trot,
but loth to leave the two soldiers behind.

A wailing cry escaped one as a shot evidently struck him, and
Colville paused by checking his bridle.  The man was mortally wounded
and ghastly pale, yet he walked on for some thirty paces, erect and
steadily, his eyes fixed on vacancy; then he paused, and fell dead on
his face.

'Poor Sam Surcingle!' exclaimed the other, and at that moment
Colville also dropped from his saddle, struck by a ball in the left
ribs.

Luckily it was a spent one, and only knocked the breath out of him;
but not a moment was to be lost, as a few of the Mohmund
_juzailchees_ were creeping back, filled with the maddest rage at the
death of their fanatic leader, who had believed his life to be
charmed.

The hussar dragged Colville up, and almost lifted him into the
saddle, and taking the bridle applied one spur to both horses, and
brought the officer into the lines faint, worn, and with his mouth
full of blood.

When safe out of fire Colville dismounted near a pool covered with
crimson water-lilies--the sacred lotus of Brahma--and then the hussar
whose life he had saved, and who had succoured him in return, opened
his blue patrol jacket and proceeded, after bathing his face and
giving him a draught from the pool, to examine his hurts with a
skilful hand.

'Not a rib broken, sir, thank God' said he; 'only a contusion, and
the consequent discolouration will pass away in a few days.  I
haven't forgotten my Quain and Turner.'

'Robert Wodrow!' exclaimed Colville, recognising for the first time
the ex-medical student.

'Yes, Captain Colville--Robert Wodrow it is,' replied the other, with
a sad smile, as he proffered his brandy-flask.

'Thanks--I have my own,' said Colville, struggling into a sitting
position.  'Mary and Ellinor Wellwood told me of the step you had
taken--a very rash one I think it--when you failed in your studies
through the mischief wrought you by that scoundrel Sleath.'

'So you met them?'

'Yes--and left them well and every way, I hope, happy.'

'It is an unexpected pleasure to see you here, sir.'

'My poor fellow, if I can befriend you, I shall, believe me,' said
Colville, shaking Robert's hand.

'Thank you, Captain Colville; my officers and comrades like me
already, thank God; and I am now a corporal.'

'They are right who assert that there is nothing certain but the
unexpected,' said Colville, laughing, yet wincing the while with
pain; 'and this meeting with you has been most unexpected by me.'

'But not by me, sir.'

'How so?'

'I have seen you in and about Jellalabad for days and weeks past.'

'And why did you not speak to me?'

'I am not now what I was--when hoping to be a graduate of the
Edinburgh University, but a poor hussar--_un simple soldat_.'

'Simple, indeed, to throw your chances in life away thus--and even
your life too, as you so nearly did a few minutes ago.'

'I had none left--none that I cared for,' said Robert, hoarsely.

While this conversation was taking place, the infantry and artillery
had halted, and the brigadier, with all the cavalry, had pushed on in
pursuit of the fugitive Mohmunds as far as a place called Gurdao, in
a gorge, where the Cabul river flows out of the valley of Jellalabad.

On an islet in the river there are the remains of an old Buddhist
monastery, surrounded by a tope of hoary trees.  For here had once
been the worship of Buddha--a worship which, though now almost
banished from India, has spread over countries of an almost wider
area, and is usually ranked as the ninth avatar of Vishnu.

Here a few of the Mohmunds made their last stand, till the best
cavalry marksmen picked them off with their carbines, and the whole
troops began a retrograde movement towards Jellalabad.

Colville was once more in his saddle, and, by Redhaven's permission,
Robert Wodrow attended to him on the march.

'I wish I understood the law of crises,' says the author of _Altiora
Peto_.  'I suppose it has an intimate connection with that other
mysterious problem, the law of chances ... I have always had a
theory,' he adds, 'that from time to time our lives culminate to
crises.  Then the crisis bursts, and we begin again, and slowly or
rapidly, as the case may be, culminate to another crisis.'

Well, here was a crisis and something more in connection with the law
of chances.  The two men who loved the two sisters, Mary and Ellinor
Wellwood, under circumstances and with success so different, by the
birks of Invermay, were now face to face and together in that
far-away land of peril.

After hearing Colville's little narrative of what had transpired
before he left London, Robert Wodrow looked at him for a time in
silence, and thought how different were their fates and probable
future in the world.

Colville had hope and wealth, he (Wodrow) neither, and life seemed so
valueless; yet a couple of Afghan bullets might solve all
difficulties for both of them!

While the artillery made a detour to avoid the pitfalls of the
Mohammedan burial-place, Wodrow was remarking to the officer by whose
side he rode,

'It would seem, Captain Colville, that, as some writer says of the
romance of life, ours seems to be overtaking us pretty quickly.'

'Romance, do you call it?'

'Bitterness, in my case, would be nearer the truth.  I am a broken
and ruined man,' said the other, after a pause.  'Ellinor took the
last ray of sunshine out of my life.  She told me plainly that she
could not marry a poor man for the world, nor wait till he became
rich--a knowledge that only came to her after Sir Redmond Sleath
found his way to Birkwoodbrae.  She was wiser, perhaps, but her
wisdom, poor girl, brought her nothing--nothing!  My love was only an
ideal after all, Captain Colville; and though life does not seem to
me worth living, it must be lived--till ended--after all.'

Colville made no reply, but proffered his cigar-case to the speaker,
who accepted a cigar with a courteous bow and blush of pleasure; the
very act was a kindly recognition that they had once been equals, and
were still friends.

'You must quit this sort of thing, Wodrow, and go back to your
studies at Edinburgh,' said Colville; 'back to Quain and Turner, to
Balfour's Botany, Jackson's Materia Medica, and all the rest of it.
If you want money for that or anything else, consider me your banker.'

But Robert Wodrow shook his head with an air of decision.  'Sir, I
thank you from my heart's core, but no, Captain Colville--never
again.'

'Tuts; we'll talk about all this another time,' said Colville,
kindly, hoping to bring him to a right way of thinking and acting.

Yet while he declined all proffers of assistance, Robert Wodrow's
mind was full of thoughts--soft, subduing, and kindly thoughts--of
his reverend father, his mother so sweet and meek, so abiding and
confiding in the will and goodness of God, and the old sequestered
manse embowered among the bonnie birks of Invermay--the manse of
Kirktoun-Mailler.

By midnight the returned expedition marched into the lines of the
camp at Jellalabad.

'You have acted bravely to-day, Captain Colville,' said the
brigadier, shaking his hand as the troops were dismissed to their
tents; 'and so sure as the stars look down on us you shall have your
V.C. for saving the rash hussar and killing the Moollah Khalil.  I
wish you had polished off Mohammed Shah, too, while you were about
it.'

'Who is he?' asked Colville, to whom the name seemed somehow familiar.

'One of the sirdars of the Ameer, and a very distinguished one, now
with the Mohmunds.'

'By Jove! that was the fellow who pretended to be a hadji, and whom I
had for a night in the Bala Hissar--in the citadel actually.'

'A lesson for you to be more careful and less hospitable in future,'
said the brigadier, laughing.

Colville was duly complimented in general orders, and weeks after the
latter was read and duly appreciated by one who then was--far, far
away!




CHAPTER XIV.

IN THE LUGHMAN VALLEY.

The death of the Ameer, and succession of his son, Yakoub Khan, were
now confirmed beyond all doubt at Jellalabad; but troubles and
skirmishes seemed to be on the increase, and no man's life was safe.

In the country of the Shinwarris, a district on the Afghan frontier,
a surveying party was attacked near Maidonak, though escorted by old
Spatterdash and his Punjaub Infantry.  To the natives it seemed that
knocking little pegs into the ground, sticking up little flags, and
taking the altitude of heights by a theodolite could only be the
blackest sorcery.  Other instruments which were looked through in a
mysterious manner, with the notes made on paper, were all deemed
damnable charms, and indications of talismanic power, and the sirdar
named Mahmoud Shah, who was roving in that quarter, together with
Abdullah Mir, another adherent of Yakoub Khan, reminded the
people--as all Muslims believe firmly in magic--of the evil wrought
by the wicked genie Sacar, the inveterate foe of Solomon, of Eblis or
Degial, who, according to the Koran, was that enemy of the human race
who accomplished the downfall of Adam, and much more nonsense to the
same purpose; so the surveying party were furiously attacked by a
band of fanatics, armed with tulwar, dagger, and juzail, in a
solitary place near the base of the Suffaidh Koh.

In the conflict that ensued a non-commissioned officer was killed, a
captain of the Royal Engineers wounded perilously by the blade of a
charah, a subaltern of native infantry received a ball through his
shoulder, and several Sikhs were killed; but Spatterdash laid about
him vigorously with his tulwar, split one or two heads through the
long floating loongees like pumpkins, and brought the party off;
after which General Tytler, at Maidonak and Girda, burned the two
villages, blew up seven fortified towers, and seized hostages, to be
kept in irons till a heavy fine was paid.

In due time Colville got his V.C. for the affair with the Mohmunds,
and Robert Wodrow was recommended for promotion, and, as the coming
general war in the heart of Afghanistan was likely to make many a
vacancy, if spared, he was sure to get it.

In consequence of the skirmish at Maidonak and threatened attacks by
the hostile tribesmen in the vicinity of Jellalabad and the Lughman
Valley, early in March an expedition was ordered into the latter
quarter, under Major-General Jenkins, and with it Colville went on
the staff.  It proved a very successful movement, with many important
political consequences.

The first news he heard of it was after a supper in old Spatterdash's
bungalow.

'Turn in if you can, lads,' said he, when the cantonment ghurries
clanged midnight; 'and I must have a nap, too.  We get under arms
before daylight to-morrow.'

'For what?' asked Colville.

'To fight, of course.  Have you not seen the general orders?'

'No--I was at polo all afternoon with the 10th.  But to fight--where?'

'That depends upon where we find the enemy, who are gathering as
usual for mischief; so let us have a nightcap of _brandy-pawnee_, and
then to roost.'

Colville stretched himself in a corner of the bungalow, and was soon
in the Land of Nod.  'The soldier off duty and the sailor when his
watch is over have the faculty for getting snatches of sleep at a
moment's notice, which is denied to most other mortals, and a blessed
gift it is.'

An hour before dawn the bugles sounded, and the troops detailed for
the expedition fell in.

It was then known that the destination of the force was the Lughman
Valley, where the sirdar Mahmoud Shah was the active and ruling
spirit.

Considerable annoyance and mortification were felt by Colville at the
frequently recurring mention of this personage's name, the Hadji spy
in Jellalabad whom he had succoured and protected, a circumstance for
which he had been much quizzed and 'chaffed,' for, as Lever has it,
'a little bit of fun goes a long way in the army.'

'A fine fellow to have fostered, Colville,' said Colonel Spatterdash,
as he mounted; 'd--n him, he is worse than a Peshawur scorpion, and
we all know what it is, for size and venom.'

While the infantry rolls were called, the companies proved, and the
battalions formed, the battery of artillery were also getting in
order; the horses were champing their bits, pawing the ground, and
laying back their ears as if impatient for the trumpet call.  The
gunners stood by them--one examining the harness finally to see that
all was right, another altering his stirrup-leathers by a hole or
two, a third adjusting a comrade's accoutrements, a fourth grasping
the bow of his saddle ready to mount at the blast of the trumpet,
after which he knew his horse would no longer remain still; while the
trumpeter stood near the commanding officer, breathing into the
mouthpiece of his brass instrument, occasionally as if to keep it
ready for sounding.

Anon the men are mounted or on the limber-seats; the trumpet rings
out, the word _march_ is given; the drivers ease the reins and close
their legs to the riding horses, throwing their whips gently over the
necks of the off-horses so as to ensure their starting together; and
it is a rule in artillery that the spurs are for the ridden horse,
the whip for the off one, and to be applied over the shoulder or
neck, but never in the rear of the pad.

So the guns went clattering to the front, and the infantry broke into
columns of march, with a cavalry advance-guard, just as the sun began
to lighten the summit of the Suffaidh Koh and other snow-clad
mountains.

The Lughman Valley lies north of Jellalabad, and is overlooked by the
Himalayas, though extending to the lower ridges of the Hindoo Koosh,
while Kaffiristan borders it on the east.

Colville, of course, rode with the staff, and the ill-fated Louis
Cavagnari accompanied it.

Many narrow valleys, with torrents traversing their boulder-strewn
beds, and sides covered with beautiful vegetation, were passed in
succession, with several villages, each marked by an enormous chunar
or Oriental plane--perhaps by two or three placed near each other for
shade, where the Moollah might bring forth his Koran, and recite it
for the information of others.

As the troops proceeded the rocks around them seemed to grow darker
and darker, owing to the lead ore among them, while enormous boulders
of every kind of stone were strewn about far away from their original
beds out of which the torrents of ages past had torn them.

Shaggy goats and broad-tailed doombas, or Persian sheep, were seen
grazing near the villages, where at first the people came forth
peacefully to gaze with wonder upon the Feringhees.  No untoward
event occurred, till a tribesman drew near where a party of hussars
were halted, carrying a sharp axe concealed behind his back, and
evidently bent on mischief, as he was known by his white dress to be
a Ghazi, or fanatic devoted to death.

With his weapon, he was about to aim a blow that must have proved a
deadly one on an unsuspecting corporal, when, quick as thought,
Robert Wodrow, who had his sword drawn, clove his head to the teeth.

This was a signal for strife.  Alarm fires soon began to shoot up
redly on several eminences; yells and shouts came upon the mountain
wind from armed parties mustering fast among the rocks and eyries and
ere long a sputtering fire of juzails, or native rifles, was opened
on the column, and men began to drop dead or limp about wounded.

Out of these lofty places the tribesmen were shelled, but not without
difficulty, and ultimately driven by the rifle-fire of our
skirmishers into a narrow, rocky defile, which proved a kind of
natural cul-de-sac, out of which there was little or no exit; and
there into the wedged mass, shell after shell at a thousand yards
went smoking and whistling till it plumped and exploded among them
with terrible effect; but it was necessary to teach these treacherous
people a lesson, and a severe one it proved.

Four days the expedition remained in the Lughman Valley, and on the
fourth, when passing on the downward route the place where the
conflict had ensued, and where rifle and shell fire had decimated the
enemy, Colville, who for a considerable time past had been somewhat
unused to strife and slaughter, looked with a kind of horror upon the
scene around him.

Save the vultures and carrion crows no living creature had ventured
to approach the gorge where the dead, and dying yet lay--a picture of
human anguish and human passions indescribable.

The bodies of the torn and mutilated lay thickly there, either stark
and stiff in the refuge of death, or writhing and struggling, as if
to escape the doom of those beside them.

If this scene seemed dreadful by day, more dreadful and ghastly did
it seem to those in the rear of the column, who passed it after
nightfall, and the moon shed its cold light over the Katcha
mountains, and the rear-guard of Hussars, under Redhaven, had to pick
their way amid bodies lying half-naked, in every conceivable
position, with dark and bloody faces on the broad and ghastly grin,
distorted and battered limbs, with clenched hands and staring open
eyes; while some of the dead sat bolt upright against rocks and
boulders, with jaws dropped, and stiffened fingers grimly pointing at
vacancy.

The next expedition towards the Lughman Valley was marked by a
terrible disaster, the story of which went through the length and
breadth of the British Isles.




CHAPTER XV.

THE FANCY BALL.

From such a scene as that in the Lughman Valley we gladly turn to one
of a very different kind.

It was an evening of the early days of April, when the elms begin to
show their half-developed foliage, the buds of the oak are red, and
the sprays of the beech gleam like emeralds against the blue sky, and
the laburnum is clothed in green and gold, that Mary and Ellinor
Wellwood sat in a beautiful flower garden while idling over some
'crewel work,' and watching a glorious sunset as it shone on the
broad waters of the Elbe.

We have said that for change of air and of scene Mrs. Deroubigne, who
acted to them as a second mother, had taken them with her to the
Continent, and, after wandering through France and Holland, they now
found themselves installed in a pretty villa near Altona, about two
miles from the gay, busy, and hospitable city of Hamburg, whose
merchants are so famous for the excellence of their dinners, and the
splendour of their entertainments.

It was a lovely spring evening; the Elbe, studded with shipping under
sail or steam, was rolling in light, its blue blending into crimson;
and beyond it lay the low, green hills of Hanover, now no longer a
petty kingdom, but an integral portion of the great German empire.

The sun was setting, and such a sunset!

Separated from Hamburg only by a space called the Field of the Holy
Ghost, where daily the spike-helmeted Prussian troops could be seen
at drill, the wharves and warehouses of Altona join those of the
city, as they stretch along the waterside with stately rows of pale
green poplars behind them.

Beyond the last of these, in a little wooded creek, and on the summit
of a green bank overlooking the river, stood the charming little
villa occupied temporarily by Mrs. Deroubigne, from the windows of
which the great panorama of the Hansetown was visible, with the lofty
red-brick tower of St. Michael's Kirk (a hundred feet higher than the
dome of St. Paul's at London), bathed in ruddy gold, and casting its
mighty shadow half-way to Altona; and, as the evening sky grew
redder, the spires of St. Katharine and St. Nicholai grew redder too;
and now, impressed by the beauty of the evening and of the scene, the
influence of the season and the soft purity of the ambient air, the
two girls, in the new happiness of their hearts, sang together a duet
from 'Il Flauto Magico,' of Mozart, all unaware that a young Prussian
officer--a smart uhlan, in bright green uniform--was lingering
admiringly near them.

We need scarcely mention, though Hamburg is famous for the beauty of
its women, the officers of the garrison, the uhlans, and the
Hanoverian infantry in the Dammthor Barracks always welcomed the
appearance of the two 'charming English meeses' and their handsome
chaperone at the consul's balls, the opera, the _fêtes_ in the
Botanischer Garten, or when the bands played in the fashionable
Jungfernstieg (or Maiden's Walk), the beautiful tree-shaded promenade
by the side of the Alster, which is always covered with gaily-painted
pleasure-boats.

These amusements, with fancy work, music, and novels--Tauchnitz
editions, of course--made the sweet spring days pass quickly with
Mary and Ellinor in that gay city, where, it is said, that in summer
the inhabitants appear to work all day and amuse themselves all night.

Before their departure to the Continent, great had been the
astonishment of Lady Dunkeld and the fair Blanche Galloway when they
heard of the near relationship of Colville to the sisters, of his
engagement to Mary, and that they were to be chaperoned by Mrs.
Deroubigne till the marriage came to pass.

'The marriage!'  How Blanche elevated her eyebrows and shrugged her
shoulders.  It was bitter to lose thus the future Lord Colville of
Ochiltree.

Both those aristocratic ladies would fain have extended their
patronage and countenance to the sisters now; but, aware of their
past malevolence, Mary and Ellinor, though far from revengeful,
steadily declined all intercourse with them. Nor did Mrs. Deroubigne
attempt to control their actions or wishes in the matter.  Thus a
coldness amounting almost to a 'cut' ensued between her and the
Dunkeld family.

Leslie Colville's last letter to Mary from Jellalabad had narrated
the episode of his meeting with Robert Wodrow, and the mutual good
services they had done each other; and Mary, who had read of the
personal conflict in the war correspondent's news, felt her heart
sink within her at the contemplation of the many and incessant perils
her lover--her affianced husband--had to encounter.

And how often did Mary recall their parting, when he had held her
face tenderly and caressingly between his hands while he gazed down
into her tear-blinded eyes, so sweetly and so passionately, posed as
they both were like the pair in 'the Huguenot' of Millais's picture;
while she looked up to him as sweetly and as passionately too.

His departure had seemed to Mary but the beginning of the end.  Yet
who could foresee amid the terrible contingencies of war and climate
what that end might be?

Thankful she felt as each day passed, and with it a portion of the
time of separation; but who might know what that day had seen or
brought forth far, far away among the wild mountains of Afghanistan?
And so, with curious and persistent ingenuity, thoughtful and anxious
fancy often tormented her.

Yet under different influences and happier auspices, and amid new
scenes, both sisters regained the old glow of health and beauty they
had possessed each in her own degree in former days at pleasant
Birkwoodbrae.

Meanwhile with Ellinor, as the conviction of her own sudden
selfishness and folly grew strong in her heart, and the now odious
image of Sir Redmond Sleath faded out of it, the memory of Robert
Wodrow and of other days took their place there; but what would that
avail either of them now?

The sisters ceased their duet suddenly, when Jack the fox-terrier,
who had been nestling against Mary's skirts, started up to greet with
many a yelp of delight the young officer who fed him so often with
biscuits and chocolate creams.

'Pardon my interrupting a song so sweet,' said he, in good English,
'but my purpose must be my excuse,' he added, with a military salute,
for the Baron Rolandsburg--a visitor of Mrs. Deroubigne's--belonged
to the Uhlans, and, like all Prussian officers, was seldom or never
seen out of uniform, the green laced with gold of the dashing Lancers.

He was a fair-haired and handsome man, barely thirty years of age,
and in his fifteenth year had the glory of being the first Prussian
to enter Paris, for he it was who galloped his horse amid scowling
and assembled thousands through the Arc de Triomphe after winning the
iron cross at Sedan; and now he had brought 'for Madame Deroubigne'
and her two young ladies, tickets for a most exclusive fancy ball, to
be given in the Theatre of Hamburg, which is one of the largest in
Germany; for, though there are many public ball-rooms in that
pleasure-loving city, they are never patronised by the upper classes.

The baron had been the sisters' escort to all 'the lions' of
Hamburg--to the churches, the stately and crowded _Börse_, to
Rœdings Museum, the tomb of Klopstock, the great garden kept by a
Scotsman at Wandsbeck, overlooked by the house of Tycho Brahe, and
they had lingered again and again on the summit of the Stintfang,
from whence there is such an extensive view of the harbour, the Elbe,
and the opposite coast of Hanover, and his hand had often assisted
Ellinor in her sketches of the Vierlanders in their picturesque
costume and of their boats laden with glowing fruit, flowers, and
vegetables.

Mrs. Deroubigne deemed there was no harm in all this.  It amused the
girls, drew them from their own sad thoughts, and so far as she could
see the admiration and attention of the young baron were pretty
equally divided between them, or if he had a preference it was for
Mary, as it seemed ere long.

But the tickets for the fancy ball--a ball of a kind so peculiarly
flattering to female vanity and taste in costume and so forth--seemed
to crown all his previous good offices and kindness, and they
accepted them with a genuine delight that quite flattered him.

Bouquets (selected by those pretty Vierlander flower girls, whose
picturesque caps and embroidered bodices make them quite a feature in
Hamburg), gloves, music, even a fan or two, had come from the Baron
Rolandsburg, but always at appropriate times, with reference to a
stall at the opera or an afternoon dance.

There was no reason why Mary should not accept such gifts; yet she
would rather that they did not come, as their acceptance seemed a
kind of treason to him who was then so far, far away.

For some days their fancy dresses were an all engrossing source of
thought and topic with the girls and their chaperone; but, after many
changes of mind, costumes of the reign of Mary Stuart were selected
by them, Mary choosing blue, slashed and trimmed with white, as
suited to her blonde complexion, and Ellinor rose colour, trimmed and
slashed with black, as suited to her dark hair and hazel eyes, and
wonderfully handsome and piquante they looked.

On the forenoon of the ball the baron arrived with three magnificent
bouquets and two beautiful fans for the sisters--the best that could
be obtained in the Neuer Wall.

'How charming--how kind!' exclaimed both, blushing with pleasure.

'For our dance to-night,' said Rolandsburg, in his most insinuating
tone, to Mary, 'how many waltzes are you to give me?' he asked, in a
lower voice.

'How many do you want?' asked Mary, coquettishly.

'I would like them all of course--save those I may have with Miss
Ellinor; but that is too much to expect.'

As all this implied more than words, Mary appeared not to hear, and
addressed Mrs. Deroubigne.

In due time they were attired, and drove through the brilliantly
lighted streets to the Stadt Theatre in the Dammthor Strasse, where
the Burgher Guard, in quaint uniforms, were under arms to receive the
burgomasters and four Syndics of the city, who wear on state
occasions high-crowned hats and black velvet cloaks, with ruffs and
swords; and there, about the entrances, were a crowd of blooming
Vierlander flower-girls, selling bouquets and button-holes, their
quaint hats or gold-embroidered caps, their bodices of crimson or
black, covered with gold-broidery, and their short blue skirts,
making each a picture.

'I shall dance with no one else but you to-night,' said the uhlan, in
his softest tone, to Mary.

'No one else?' said she.

'Save your sister.'

'Our poor uhlan is evidently playing with edged tools, Mary,' said
Mrs. Deroubigne, with a smile, while the baron was intently
pencilling on their programmes and his own.

The stage and floored pit of the theatre, which had been converted
into one vast, brilliantly lighted and gaily decorated hall, was
filling fast with guests in every real and fanciful costume that can
be conceived, and already the great orchestra in their places were
playing a kind of overture; but their music was to be alternated by
the great brass band of the uhlans; and, though many handsome, even
rarely beautiful girls were present, Mary and Ellinor Wellwood were
remarked amid them all.

'Schön! schön!' (beautiful, beautiful) muttered many, as they passed
to their appointed place with Mrs. Deroubigne.

'En verité!' exclaimed a gallant little French consul; 'ces dames
sont charmantes!'

But the ball itself has less to do with our story than what it
preluded.

Many of the dresses were gorgeous in texture and decoration--silk,
velvet, gold and silver jewellery, and the richest lace, fairy-like
in delicacy of fashion and tint, and when the dancers in hundreds
flew round in the waltz it seemed a glimpse of the land of Elphin.

The music was divine, and Mary felt every nerve and fibre of her
frame respond to it as she sped round with slippered feet over the
well-waxed floor on the arm of Rolandsburg, whose step and time
suited hers to perfection.

There were beautiful Jewish matrons from the fashionable mansions on
the Alster Damm, with broods of black-eyed and equally beautiful
daughters; for the Jewish ladies of Hamburg, in style, beauty, and
delicacy of feature, excel all others of their race; but the blonde
beauties of Holstein and North Germany far exceeded them in numbers
and glow of complexion.

Off the dancing-hall were artificial conservatories and
refreshment-rooms for ice-cream, jelly, and flirtation, where
servants were in attendance clad like Turks, with turbans and
slippers, pistols and yataghans, and where, with a sound like
file-firing, the champagne corks flew up to the gilded ceilings.

Amid the dazzling scene, as Mary paused in a waltz, panting,
palpitating, and blushing to see her own reflection in a mirror, as
she almost clung to the arm of the baron in his green uhlan uniform,
and found herself the object of so much attention and admiration, her
mind reverted with a kind of dull and painful wonder to the past days
of their obscure abode in frowsy Paddington; to her struggles for
employment, and her lonely wanderings in unfamiliar streets, where
often her beauty subjected her to such observation and insolent
annoyance that often she longed to be old and ugly; and when her
chief hope had been to fill the place of governess to some one's
children--well-bred or ill-bred, yet not without a faint vision of
future good fortune, position, and admiration--perhaps even riches;
she was too young to be without such fancies and hopes.

Ellinor thought she would never forget the splendours and enjoyments
of the fancy dress ball; in all its features and details it was so
new to her, and from a subsequent event she was fated to remember it
long.

The baron, always attentive and full of _empressement_, was enchanted
to be the privileged cavalier to two such English belles.

Mary, in her piquant Mary Stuart cap, with a little ruff round her
delicate neck, her sleeves puffed and slashed, her peaked bodice, all
blue satin, with seed pearls, quite dazzled him, and matured the
passion for her that was growing in his heart; and at last, in the
intervals of the dances, though he yielded her with undisguised
reluctance to other uhlans, dragoons, and gunners, who crowded about
her, programme in hand, he ventured to speak on the subject--not to
her, but to Mrs. Deroubigne, and thus spared her some pain and
confusion.

'Madame,' said he, while conducting her to a refreshment-room, 'you
evidently love these two young ladies as if they were your own
daughters!'

'I do indeed--and they might have been,' was the somewhat enigmatical
reply of Mrs. Deroubigne, with one of her bright sweet smiles.

'Ah! who would not love them, the blue-eyed one especially.'

'Mary?'

'Yes, madame.  I thought generally that love only existed in plays
and novels.'

'And when were you undeceived?'

'When first I knew _her_.'

'Baron, you must dismiss such thoughts,' said Mrs. Deroubigne, with
some dismay.

'Why, madame?' he asked, smiling.

'The young lady is engaged.'

'Engaged--is that betrothed?'

'Yes.'

His countenance changed instantly.

'To an officer--a dear friend of mine--now in Afghanistan.'

'In Afghanistan!' he repeated, angrily; 'a _fiancé_ there is next to
no _fiancé_ at all, for a bullet may--nay,' said he, pausing, 'this
thought is ungenerous of me, and I would not like another to think
thus of Rolandsburg.  Gott in Himmel, how unlucky I am!'

'I am so sorry to hear all this.'

'So am I--so am I,' exclaimed the baron, pulling his long fair
moustaches, for a betrothal in Germany gives a young girl a kind of
wife-like sanctity among the homely and domestic Teutonic people; and
Mrs. Deroubigne, who dearly loved the romantic, felt for him; the
young man's hopes had been cruelly crushed at the very moment when he
thought them brightest.

'One cannot have everything they want--it is not given to anyone on
earth to be perfectly happy, I suppose,' said he, with a sigh, and
there was a sadness, with a ring of sincerity, in his voice that
certainly touched Mrs. Deroubigne.

'Have you spoken of love to her?' whispered she, behind her fan; 'but
I hope not!'

'No--I have never spoken--but she must have inferred what I felt,'
replied the baron, who, like most German officers, spoke English well.

'Inferred it--I scarcely think so, with her mind so occupied with the
thoughts of another.'

'But, any way, I think it does a girl good to know that a man loves
her; and then, if the proverb be true about one love begetting
another, she may incline her heart to him.'

'Not in this instance, baron.'

For Rolandsburg now the charm of the ball was over; the music sounded
faint, the lights seemed dim, and he was glad when the great
festivity ended, and he, after escorting the ladies to their
carriage, took his way slowly through the streets to his barracks
near the Dammthor Wall.

For his disappointment--and it was a sudden and sore one--he had no
one but himself to blame, he felt, as Mary Wellwood had never given
him the least encouragement to fling his heart away as he had done.

And now for the sequel to the night's adventures.

Talking gaily, as girls will talk after a ball, criticising costumes
and partners, and comparing notes, Mary, Ellinor, and Mrs. Deroubigne
reached home when day was beginning to dawn, and the blue waters of
the Elbe were beginning to brighten.  Ellinor, teasing and quizzing
Mary about the baron, had been singing to her--

  'Ilka lassie has her laddie,
  But ne'er a one have I;'

and Mary, in hot haste, anxious to see the very latest news, threw
open a London paper which had come over night, but, as she eagerly
scanned it, a cry of dismay escaped her as she read a brief telegram:


'_Terrible disaster to the 10th Hussars.--A whole squadron drowned in
the Cabul River, and two officers, when attempting to save the life
of Corporal Wodrow._'


The hearts of the sisters stood still as they read and re-read this
startling notice.

The attempt to save Robert Wodrow had evidently been a failure--so he
was gone!

Who had made the attempt and perished with him?  Mary's agitated mind
at once suggested Colville.  Both girls felt completely stunned.

The returning and growing love--a love blended with great pity--that
had been developing itself in Ellinor's heart for poor Robert Wodrow
was now absorbed and swallowed up in a gush of bitterness and intense
remorse at being the cause of his sorrowful and untimely fate.

How true it is that 'suffering is our most faithful friend; it is
always returning.  Often has it changed its dress, and even its face;
but we can easily recognise it by its cordial and intimate embrace.'


And how was it, then, at the old ivy-clad manse of Kirktown-Mailler,
where the same terrible telegram had gone like the dart of death?

There the blinds were drawn down, as if the hussar who had found his
grave in the Cabul River was lying dead in the bed he had slept on in
boyhood and manhood, and across which his mother now lay stretched in
hopeless grief.

And a sad-eyed and sympathetic congregation watched the venerable
minister when, with bent eyes, and slow, unsteady steps, he entered
his pulpit next Sunday.

All knew the dire calamity that had befallen him, and one and all
their kindly Scottish hearts bled for him, when his voice failed, his
sermon escaped him, and stretching out his trembling hands on the
pulpit cushion, he bent down his handsome old head upon them--a head
now white as the thistledown--and begged his people to excuse him,
'as all night long he had been in the Valley of the Shadow of Death!'

Then his elders led him into the vestry, and those who saw him
descending the stair of that pulpit, wherein he had ministered unto
them faithfully for more than thirty years, never forgot the painful
episode.




CHAPTER XVI.

THE 10TH HUSSARS.

And now to detail how the catastrophe referred to came about.

The evening of Monday, the 31st of March, saw Leslie Colville in his
saddle, and busy conveying orders in the camp and cantonments of
Jellalabad, where drum and bugle gave the notes of preparation for
the field.

This was between five and six o'clock, when two columns were suddenly
ordered out for another expedition towards the Lughman Valley.

One, to be led by Brigadier Gough, was to consist of seven hundred
men furnished by the 17th and 27th regiments, three hundred native
infantry, four Royal Horse Artillery guns under Major Stewart, and
two squadrons of the dashing Guide Cavalry.

This column, according to the orders repeated by Colville, was to
march out at one o'clock next morning.

'In what direction?' asked old Spatterdash and others.

'I know not,' replied Colville; 'but Lughman, I suppose, is the
object in view with it, as well as the other column, under Brigadier
Macpherson.'

The command of the latter consisted of three hundred Rifles, six
hundred Ghoorkas and Punjaubees, with a mountain battery under
Lieutenant E. J. de Lautour, of the Royal Artillery, who had served
in the expedition of 1863 against the tribes on the North-West
Frontier, some sappers, and a squadron each from the 10th Hussars and
11th Bengal Lancers, who, like the former corps, wear blue uniforms
faced with red and laced with gold.

The latter column was to be in readiness to march at nine that
evening, with four days' provisions in the haversacks.

The moon, in a sky flecked with clouds, was gleaming brightly on the
Balla Hissar, the domes and walls of Jellalabad, though it was little
more than a quarter old, as Macpherson's column got under arms; and
the rolls were called, the ammunition served out, the inspection of
saddlery and accoutrements was proceeded with.

Our soldiers always muster merrily for work such as they had in hand
that night; and, before they were called to attention.  Redhaven had
on more than one occasion to speak almost sharply to Robert Wodrow,
who was--for him, at least--unusually noisy and jubilant.

'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die!' he heard him say.

'Can't make that countryman of yours out, Colville,' said the
hussar-officer, as he scraped a vesta and lit a cigar.  'He is
usually the most silent and taciturn fellow in the troop, and
to-night he makes as much noise as all the Ghoorkas put together.'

'And that puzzles you?'

'Yes; he looks like a man with a past.'

'He has indeed a past history, poor fellow, a sorrowful and not a
happy one.'

'Every broken-down fellow takes to the cavalry now,' grumbled
Redhaven; 'but I was certain he has some secret by the expression of
his eyes, and the inflections of his modulated voice at times.'

'Poor fellow!' said Colville again.

He knew, what Redhaven did not, that Robert Wodrow was often a prey
to sad and bitter thoughts; that in the dreams of the night and of
the day when asleep in the wet-flapping tent or the comfortless
bivouac--when on solitary vidette duty, under the blazing Afghan sun,
he saw oftener before him--not the fair face of her for whom he had
sacrificed everything, and whom, he doubted not, would soon become
the bride of another--but the face of his loving mother--a kind and
happy old face--that ever beamed with love for him; and opposite her
fancy saw his silver-haired old father, reading some good or musty
volume--Wodrow's _Analecta Scotica_ perhaps; and often from such
visions of home he was roused by the trumpet blowing 'boot and
saddle,' or the yell of an Afghan scout armed with _juzail_ and
_charah_.

As a Scotsman, Colville was superstitious enough to regret that at
such a time the young fellow should show such exuberance of spirits
as the foreboding of evil, and was in the act of urging his horse
forward to accost him kindly, when the brigadier came on the ground,
the component parts of the column were called to 'attention,' and in
a few minutes after, the whole force was on the march, and, with the
glittering of sword and bayonet blades, section after section quickly
disappeared from the eyes of those who watched them in the cold
wintry moonshine that had turned to diamonds the thick hoarfrost on
every wall and tree; and the march began which was to prove the last
to many in this life.

'The line of ground between Jellalabad and Cabul, so far as it is
connected with India,' says a writer, 'is a line of tragedy and
misfortune.  That line of tragedy and misfortune may now be extended
a couple of miles further to the east, for that will give very nearly
the point where forty-six lives were on that Monday evening suddenly
swept out of existence.'

The troops moved westward, the cavalry leading.  The squadron of the
10th Hussars was under Captain D'Esterre Spottiswoode, that of the
Bengal Lancers was under its own captain, and Major E. A. Wood of the
first-named corps commanded the whole.

Guided by an Afghan mountaineer who had offered his services, and to
whom Colville paid a high bribe therefor, the orders of the officers
were to cross the Cabul river at a point where most unluckily a
temporary bridge had shortly before been removed.  On achieving that,
they were to move up the left bank of the stream, to march through
Besoot and Darunta, and enter the Lughman Valley, to which the
infantry were moving by the Jellalabad side of the Cabul.

The guide, who was mounted on a powerful and wiry yaboo, or Cabul
pony, was a singularly taciturn fellow, and Colville remarked a
circumstance which soon became a painful memory, that by twisting the
end of his loonghee, or head-dress, across the lower part of his face
he effectually concealed his features, permitting little more than
his keen, black, and glittering eyes to be seen, reminding him of the
muffled men he had read of in old Scottish Border forays.

Macpherson's column had not been long gone when the troops at the
camp of Jellalabad were roused and alarmed by numbers of cavalry
horses, all riderless, galloping wildly among the tents, with their
bridles trailing, and their saddles, valises, and trappings soaked in
water.

'What has happened--what can have happened?' were the questions asked
on every side.

No one could anticipate the catastrophe that had really occurred, as
at that season the bed of the Cabul is not always full; but when the
sun melts the accumulated snow in the Katcha range and other
mountains it is not so.  The water then rolls through many channels,
and it was in anticipation of this that the wooden bridge had been
removed to a point further up.

Where our cavalry were to cross at the Fort of Isaac, the stream now
formed two branches; the first was thirty feet broad, with an average
of only thirty inches of water, and the crossing was to be made under
the light of a dim and fitful moon, at a point where an irrigation
channel diverged at right angles from the stream.  Beyond that point
stood a kind of sandy islet covered with great boulders, and again
beyond it lay a hundred and fifty feet of water; but as the line of
this fatal ford was _not straight_, three hundred and fifty feet of
water had to be traversed upon it, as the ford formed at one point an
acute angle.

Led by the local guides, the squadron of Bengal Lancers crossed in
safety, wheeling at the given point on the acute angle.

The mules of the squadron followed next, our hussars, now riding at
ease, waiting till their turn came to cross; and to amuse the rest,
one of them, the identical Toby Chace, who was one of Robert Wodrow's
earliest comrades, and well known as a reckless fellow, began to sing
a soldier's ditty, part of which ran thus:

  'There's Bill Muggins left our village,
    Just as sound a man as I;
  Now he goes about on crutches,
    With a single arm and eye.

  'To be sure he's got a medal
    And some twenty pounds a year
  For his health, and strength, and service,
    Government can't call that dear;
  Not to reckon one leg shattered,
    Two ribs broken, one eye lost;
  'Fore I went in such a venture,
    I should stop and count the cost.

  'Lots o' glory, lots o' gammon----'


'Silence there--in front!' cried the commanding officer, and
Colville, who had some undefinable suspicion of the hussar guide,
placed himself near that personage, with his revolver case loose and
at hand.

'Do not lose the direction, men,' cried an officer, 'but keep well up
against the stream,' he added, knowing that when crossing thus there
is always a tendency to edge lower down with the current.

The leading sections began to enter the stream, the rippling eddies
of which went past them, tipped with silver by the pale moonlight;
the rest followed closely, the guide directing, and erelong Colville
and others found the water rising to their feet, then it rose as high
as their knees, and was beginning to get higher, while the pony of
the guide had quitted the angled line of the ford, and was swimming
away to another point.

'Treachery,' thought Colville; at that moment the _loonghee_ fell
from the face of the guide, and he recognised Mahmoud Shah, the
sirdir with the slashed cheek--Mahmoud, the hadji, whom he had saved
from the Wahabees!

'This is getting awkward!' exclaimed Redhaven, 'there must be some
mistake.'

'We are betrayed!' cried Colville.

He put his hand to his pistol-case, but too late, for now his horse
rolled over, and with an exulting shriek in English of 'Pigs! dogs!
Kaffirs!--drown and be damned!  Eblis and hell await you!  In vain
will ye seek the Lord of the Daybreak!' cried the treacherous guide;
then he reached the Jellalabad side in safety and vanished--pony and
all.

All was confusion, consternation, and death now, for the water,
flowing at the rate of nine miles an hour, had risen to the saddle
bows and holsters of the Hussars, whose spirited horses, finding
their footing gone, ignored the use of spur and bridle.

The line of the ford was lost now; the current pouring over it soon
forced the horses downward into deeper water, sweeping the squadron
away towards the swifter rapids, and in a mass of confusion our
gallant Hussars, with their terrified horses, were struggling
desperately and madly for existence, under the dim moonlight and amid
the fiercely rushing waters, while the bewildered Bengal Lancers
could only sit in their saddles and look helplessly on.

An officer whose horse had kicked Robert Wodrow, rendering him nearly
insensible, failed to escape, and both were swept away, so,
natheless, his reckless quotation from St. Luke's Gospel, there was
to be no 'to-morrow' for the latter.

Captain D'Esterre Spottiswoode--afterwards colonel--was mounted on a
very splendid and powerful horse, which was able to swim well, and
bore him to the other bank in safety, but not to the end of the ford.

In dangerous quicksands it sank twice to its girth, on the last
occasion falling on its rider, whose head was thrust so far below
water that he was nearly drowned ere he scrambled breathlessly to dry
land.

Colville, who had been riding with the captain and three subalterns
at the head of the troop, which mustered seventy-six sabres, felt his
horse become restive when the water flowed over his holsters; the
animal kicked and plunged till at last he was thrown off its back,
and found himself floundering in deep water.  Being a good swimmer he
thought to get rid of his sword and belt, but failed, as he sank each
time in making the attempt, and each time he came to the surface with
an invocation to heaven on his lips.

The men in the squadron were all in heavy marching order, fully
accoutred and supplied with ammunition--circumstances sufficient to
drag down a good swimmer even in smooth water.  Nearly all were
thrown by their terrified horses, which, as they rolled over and
over, lashed out with their hoofs, maiming and stunning many of our
poor fellows as they were swept into the dark rushing current of the
rapids, and where these ceased lay a little pool of deep water, and
there it was that all who had strength left to struggle succeeded in
reaching the land, but many failed, alas!

As Colville was swept downward, while in the desperate agonies of
seeking to save his own life, he could take in the terrible details
of the tragedy, and saw how the river was crowded with men, horses,
and white helmets rolling past; how heads, hands, and spurred heels
rose momentarily and vanished to rise again, and then sink for ever
beneath the cruel and greedy current.

Amid all this scene of death and horror, there came not one cry from
our perishing hussars; each battled with the waters of the hostile
river as they would have battled with the Afghans.

Colville struck out to reach the bank, after he sank a third time;
but, encumbered by his heavy boots and putties (or leg bandages), his
sword, revolver, and ammunition, he was unable to keep himself
afloat, and the agony of a helpless death was in his heart!

He knew that at the time all this was happening Mary Wellwood would
probably be sleeping, sweetly and peacefully, on her pillow; and even
in that moment of supreme anguish and terror, he wished that if death
came, his soul might flash home to her in a dream--a farewell dream!

He felt himself sinking at last, as he had only been getting
occasional breaths of air; the last of his strength seemed going, and
all hope with it, when suddenly his feet touched the bottom, and a
prayer rose to his lips.

Rousing himself for a final effort, he pushed forward, and hope began
again to dawn on him as he found the water getting shallower; but he
was too weak to reach the river's bank, and, grasping some wild
jasmine trailers that grew between two boulders, he propped himself
up to rest and breathe.

At this point, seeing neither man nor horse near him, he thought that
all must have perished--perished through the diabolical hatred and
treachery of Mahmoud Shah!

Suddenly he heard a voice cry out,

'Is this you, Captain Colville?'

The questioner, whose grammar was not very choice, proved to be the
hussar Toby Chace, who was sitting bareheaded, dripping, and
disconsolate on the river bank.

Colville was almost voiceless, so Toby waded in, and assisted him to
dry land, where he could scarcely stand from exhaustion, but was able
ultimately, with the assistance of Chace, to reach the camp, where he
found that his horse had arrived before him.

All the troop horses were heard to snort wildly as the current swept
them away, and, being overweighted by their saddles, the slung
carbines, and other trappings, they beat the air with their hoofs as
they rolled about; but only twelve were drowned.

When the roll was called, forty-six hussars, who would never hear it
again, were missing, with Lieutenant Harford and another officer.
Many of their bodies, when found, showed broken limbs, the result of
kicks from iron-shod hoofs, and many of them had their hands raised
to their heads, either for protection or through pain from blows, and
in that position they had stiffened in death.

One poor fellow was swept a long way down the Cabul river, but
clambered into a native boat, where he was found next day, dead from
exhaustion and cold.

'An awful calamity!  A devil of a business!'

'How did it happen?  Whose fault was it?'

Such were a few of the exclamations heard on every hand in camp, from
whence, on the first arrival of the riderless horses, soldiers had
rushed to the river side with lanterns and ropes, and staff-surgeons
with restoratives.

Ten rupees reward was offered for every body recovered from that
fatal river, and some were buried severally near the places where
they were found.  Colville made many inquiries about that of Robert
Wodrow, as the one in whom he was personally most interested, but no
trace of him could be discovered.

In one eddy of the river nineteen of our gallant hussars were found
huddled together in one ghastly heap.

These and the bodies of others were all buried in one vast grave at
the western end of the camp; and those who saw that solemn
scene--that grim row of bodies, each rolled in a blanket, and lying
side by side in close ranks, shoulder to shoulder--never forgot it.

Neither did they forget the funeral service of the following evening,
when the body of Lieutenant Francis H. Harford and that of a private
of the Leicestershire Regiment, who had been mortally wounded in
action, were interred about dusk.

Solemn and strikingly impressive was the episode.

The red Afghan sun had set amid dim and sombre clouds beyond the
snow-clad summits of the Ramkoond Mountains, but some ruddy light yet
lingered on the awful peaks of the Suffaidh Koh.  There had been rain
and thunder all afternoon, and the clouds were gathered in sombre
masses that were edged by the radiance of the now nearly full moon.

Athwart the clouds ever and anon shot gleams of ghastly lightning,
producing strange and sudden effects of light and shade, adding to
the weird effect of the funeral cortége--the coffins on
gun-carriages, draped with the Union Jack, followed by officers and
other mourners in long, spectral-like cloaks, preceded by the
dark-clad band of the Rifle Brigade playing a low and wailing
dirge-like piece of music.

So ended the tragedy of the 10th Hussars.

In the meantime, in perfect ignorance of that event, our troops under
Macpherson and Gough had proceeded to the scene of their services
elsewhere, to fight the Khugianis and win the battle of Futteabad,
which, as Leslie Colville was not present, lies somewhat apart from
our story.

After the defeat of the Khugianis and the subsequent dispersal of the
Afreedis, the summer of the year was drawing on, and as Yakoub Khan
showed a disposition to come to terms with Great Britain, and the
hostilities seemed to be drawing to a close, Leslie Colville began
fondly to hope that he might with honour resign his appointment for
'special service,' and return home after the treaty of peace was
signed.

The negotiations for the latter were placed in the hands of Major
Louis Cavagnari, and, after some hesitation on the part of the new
Ameer, it was eventually signed in the British camp at
Gundamack--that place of ill-omen, where the Red Hill of _Lal Teebah_
marks the spot on which the last men of Elphinston's army perished
under Afghan steel in the year 1842.

Its chief objects were to place the foreign affairs of Afghanistan
under British control, and to guarantee that country against Russian
aggression by the aid of our money, arms, and troops, to provide for
the maintenance of a British Embassy in the dominions of the Ameer,
and other details.

Thus the war came to an end--as Mary Wellwood, with many more at
home, read with joy, and our troops in the valley of Jellalabad were
withdrawn within the new frontier, lest the prolonged presence of
foreigners might inflame the ready susceptibilities of the fiery
Afghans, and render them less amenable to the influence of Ayoub Khan.

For some reasons the latter was suffered to depart from Gundamack to
Cabul alone, and the despatch thither of a British resident was
deferred for a time.  When the time came, Leslie Colville--afterwards
to his own great regret--instead of resigning and returning home,
suffered himself to be named in general orders as one of the staff to
accompany the new Resident--Major, then Sir Louis Cavagnari--on that
perilous and, as it proved, most fatal and calamitous mission, and
when Mary heard of it she sighed bitterly with apprehension, she knew
not of what.

'He should not have allowed himself to be thus prevailed upon--surely
he has done enough for honour, by winning his Victoria Cross!'
exclaimed Mrs. Deroubigne, with surprise, and poor Mary quite agreed
with her; but Colville was under certain military influences which
they could not quite understand.

Thus he wrote to Mary, stating that, when once the Embassy was fairly
established, he would lose no time in returning home.

'Does he not know how I am yearning for him,' thought the girl in her
heart.




CHAPTER XVII.

LOST.

Damped and disconcerted by the sudden hopelessness of his regard for
Mary Wellwood on learning that she was betrothed to another, the
young baron--after leaving cards subsequent to the night of the
ball--did not visit the villa so frequently as had been his wont; but
the society there was so pleasant and attractive, that he began to
drop in during the afternoons and evenings for a little music and
singing, in both of which, like most foreigners, he could bear his
part very well.

That Ellinor had undergone some grief--he knew not precisely what it
was--he was perfectly aware, but her story was not one on which Mrs.
Deroubigne cared to enlighten him fully.  He could also see that she
wore black or sombre dresses, with suites of jet ornaments, for
Ellinor felt that to do so was at least all that she might indulge
in, as a proper tribute to the memory of one who had loved her well.

The sisters were to have been photographed in their sixteenth century
ball costumes for the delectation of Colville; but this frivolity
they abandoned after hearing of Robert Wodrow's catastrophe.

Ellinor often recalled the night of that brilliant festivity, when
she had waltzed and promenaded to and fro as one in a dream of
delight, and spoke in a hushed tone as if she feared to waken from it
to a real and commonplace life, for never before had she been in so
gay and glittering a paradise; but now that was all over--gone like a
dissolving view, and she could but think of the poor heart that had
loved her so well and so fondly now lying cold and stiff in the
waters of the Cabul river.

Mrs. Deroubigne knew of Robert Wodrow only by name.  Thus her natural
equanimity on the subject of his fate, combined with her social
qualities and equally natural brightness, helped much to calm, even
to soothe, the equally natural grief, and also perhaps the remorse of
Ellinor, who, of course, became in time composed and consoled over
the inevitable, though she was still too terrified or too much pained
to write to his parents--a task which she relegated to Mary.

And in her quiet and subdued grief, most generous, unvaryingly kind
and sympathetic was young Rolandsburg, though he knew not quite the
cause from which it sprang; and charmed by her sadness, softness, and
beauty, finding that the elder sister was lost to him, it seemed to
Mrs. Deroubigne that he was already turning his attention to the
younger.

Ellinor had--as she said to Mary--wept her eyes out for poor Bob
Wodrow; and thus, after a time, the elasticity of her volatile nature
began to reassert itself, to the delight of the baron.

Nature, we are told, abhors a vacuum; so did the heart of the
handsome young Uhlan; hence he adopted a new _rôle_ in his bearing to
Ellinor, all the more easily and all the more readily that he had not
committed himself with Mary.

Blooming as the German girls are, Ellinor's softer beauty was a new
experience to him; she was like a tea-rose, a sea-shell, a
wonderfully delicate and tinted bit of feminine nature, and as
before, he first made Mrs. Deroubigne his confidant.

'Ah, madame!' said he, clasping his hands melodramatically, while
drooping his head on one side till it nearly touched his gilt
shoulderstrap, 'I suppose she could not understand anyone dying of
love--of love of her?'

'I think not,' replied Mrs. Deroubigne, laughing excessively at this
leading remark when remembering that he had been in the mood of
'dying for love' of Mary but some weeks before.

Yet he was a pleasant, handsome fellow, with so much _bonhommie_
about him that it was impossible not to be pleased with him, all the
more that the iron cross on his breast showed that he had comported
himself gallantly in the field.

'The Fraulein Ellinor is very cold and very calm,' said he; 'she can
take a man's heart--take all his love and give him none in return.'

'It is not so,' replied Mrs. Deroubigne.

'How, madame, then?'

'You do not know her story; but why should I recur to it?'

'Her story--she has had, then, an _affaire du coeur_?'

'One at least, certainly,' said Mrs. Deroubigne, laughing again at
the baron's expression of face and tone of pique.

'Der Teufel!  One at least?  How sad it is to think of a young lady
having a story!  And this--or these--render her indifferent to me?'

'Perhaps,' replied Mrs. Deroubigne, who, much as she liked the young
Prussian, did not wish to flatter his hopes, but he was not the less
resolved to put the matter to the issue.

Calling one afternoon when Mrs. Deroubigne and Mary had driven into
Hamburg, he intercepted Ellinor in the garden, with her little
camp-stool, easel, and colour-box, about to go forth and sketch; and
though he had but a few minutes to spare, as his horse was at the
gate to take him back to barracks, he resolved to utilise them.

Shaded from the declining sun by a broad garden-hat, he thought
Ellinor's face never looked so charming before.  Her eyes were
peculiarly her greatest beauty; they were of the clearest and most
luminous hazel--not very dark, and sweetly trustful and
straightforward in expression; but they drooped now and sought the
flower-beds, for something she read in those of young Rolandsburg
told her what was coming.

In the physical nature of some people who love keenly there is a
mysterious sympathy that draws them together, and the baron, thinking
that she was inspired by that now, put out his hand to touch hers,
but she withdrew it.

This was not encouraging, but he drew nearer her half-averted ear,
and whispered bluntly enough, but tremulously, nevertheless,

'This is a great joy finding you alone--alone, that I may tell you
what I have been longing--dying to tell you for weeks past--that I
love you, Ellinor, and you only!'

In his foreign accent and half-broken English, the avowal sounded
very pretty and simple, but did not touch Ellinor much, though she
trembled and grew pale, for no woman can have such things said to her
and remain quite unmoved.

'Love _me_--how strange!' said she, scarcely knowing what to say.

'To you it may seem so,' he continued, slowly and earnestly; 'for I
know or suspect that you cherish some dead--some mysterious memory,
and that you cannot or may not care for me as I wish you to do; but
that does not prevent me from loving you, and you may never
understand, even dimly, how much I do love you, and I can keep this
secret untold no longer.'

'I respect you much, baron,' replied Ellinor, for his declaration was
more formal than impetuous; 'but mere talking to me will not make me
love you in return.  I feel quite confused--most unhappy to hear all
this; and we shall have to go away from Altona.'

'Go from Altona?'

'Yes.'

'I only tell you because I can not control--can not help myself,'
said he, humbly and sadly, and not without an emotion of pique at the
ill-luck of his second venture.

'I thank you, baron, but it cannot be,' said Ellinor, shaking her
pretty head decidedly.

'You cannot--love me.'

'No--not as you wish.'

'Well,' said he, after a pause, during which he had been eyeing her
downcast face with an expression of disappointment and chagrin, 'be
it so; but I trust you will pardon any unpleasantness my perhaps
abrupt avowal has occasioned you; and I also trust that in the future
you will always view me as your friend--as one who will ever be ready
and eager to hold out the hand of a brother to you, Miss Ellinor.
Even with that conviction I shall be happy,' he added, with a voice
that certainly broke a little with emotion.

She now gave her hand frankly, and he pressed it kindly, and then,
proceeding to fill with tobacco his consolatory meerschaum pipe (that
dangled at his button-hole) prior to riding back to the Dammthor
Wall, he said, with a sigh,

'Ach--I will get over this, no doubt!'

'As you must have got over others, no doubt,' said Ellinor, laughing
now, but piqued by his philosophy, and to see that he could so calmly
canvass the prospect of ceasing to care for her already.  But what
does it matter?  Robert Wodrow had loved her as no man had ever loved
her, and what had been _his_ reward?

'Now leave me, please, baron,' she said, a little bluntly; 'the tide
is far out, and I wish to sketch the creek and villa from yonder bank
of dry sand ere the sun sets.'

'I must go--for parade awaits me; but must I recur to this dear
subject no more?'

'Yes--no more,' said Ellinor, with decision, yet with a smile
nevertheless.

The baron felt that all was over when he saw that smile; indeed, when
with Ellinor, he always felt that he was in the presence of some
feeling deeper than he could fathom; and, bowing low, he turned sadly
away.  Then in a few minutes the clatter of his horse's hoofs was
heard as he cantered off towards the Millernthor, and so ended
another little romance in Ellinor's life--at least, she thought so.
And the baron knew that now never again could they enjoy each other's
society as they had done so innocently till that afternoon.

Proceeding over the firm dry sand left by the far retreating tide,
she selected a point upon a rough pebble-covered knoll, a quarter of
a mile from the little wooded creek, set her sketching-block upon her
tiny easel, and, seating herself upon a little camp-stool, proceeded,
with her back to the setting sun, to outline the creek, with the
trees, the garden, and sandy beach in foreground, and the villa in
the middle distance.

She was very full of her work, to have it as a souvenir of Altona,
but it proceeded very, very slowly; she was too full of the late
episode to do much with her pencil--much successfully at least, and
paused ever and anon to sink into deep thought over the past, the
present, and the future.


When Mary and Mrs. Deroubigne returned home to a late dinner, Ellinor
was not to be seen, she was not in the villa, and she was not in the
garden, nor in the adjacent shrubberies, so the house-bell was rung
for her in vain; and to Mrs. Deroubigne, Ellinor, always dreamy,
delicate, and in temperament excitable, had been somewhat of a
responsibility, more than her sister Mary.

Dinner was served up, but remained on the table untasted, while
search after search was made without avail, and sunset was at hand.

She had last been seen in the garden, with Baron Rolandsburg, with
her drawing materials and apparatus, going forth to sketch.

With the baron!

'Could she have eloped with him?' thought Mary, while her heart
sank--recalling Ellinor's former folly--the folly she had been on the
brink of committing with Sir Redmond Sleath.

Oh, that was very unlikely!  Ellinor was a changed girl, and less
confiding, and the young baron was too confident in himself, his
position, wealth, and resources to love mystery or mischief when
neither were needed.

A presentiment of evil--an emotion that she could not have
explained--came over Mary's mind.  Vainly she sought to settle her
thoughts to some fixity of purpose.  A vague terror seized her, and
she could scarcely even think.

She remembered when Ellinor was ill how the tolling of the Passing
Bell in the adjacent church appalled her with the dread that she was
about to lose her--her only relation in the world; and had she lost
her now?

'Was she going far to sketch?' Mrs. Deroubigne suddenly inquired of
her now scared domestics.

'No, madame!  Only to the sands beside the river, when the tide was
out.'

'The tide!' exclaimed Mrs. Deroubigne; and, accompanied by Mary, she
rushed to the foot of the garden, to find the creek full and the Elbe
at flood tide and more.

'My God--oh, what can have happened?' exclaimed Mrs. Deroubigne, who
was aware of a periodical event of which Mary knew nothing.

It was this.  When the wind is from the west, and especially if
violent, the waters of the Elbe become swollen to such a degree that
the canals of Hamburg overflow their banks, the cellars, magazines
and all channels, become gorged and inundated--that, in fact, the
tide suddenly rises, sometimes to the height of twenty feet, with a
rapidity that is alike dangerous and terrible.  So the gorged tide,
swollen by the incoming waves of the German Sea, was rolling inshore
now, and Ellinor had been on the sands--the temporary dry sands, to
sketch!

A wild waste of water was rolling and boiling there now, and where
was she?

'Ellinor--oh, Ellinor!' cried Mary, again and again, in a voice of
agony; but, save the sough of the waves, there was no response.

Soaked to pulp her sketch-book was found at the foot of the creek
washed inshore, and, if other evidence of a tragedy was wanting,
something was seen floating in the oozy waves about ten yards distant.

Jack, the terrier--that dog which had such amazing facility for
getting into canine troubles--sprang in, and yapping and yelping laid
that something at the feet of his mistress, who recognised at once
her sister's garden-hat; and a low cry of despair escaped Mary as she
turned it over in her trembling hands, and painfully and vividly it
brought before her the face, figure, and whole individuality of the
lost one.

A torrent of tears escaped Mrs. Deroubigne, but Mary seemed to have
lost the power to shed one.

Even as the angry waves came rolling into the creek, so did wave
after wave of sorrow seem to be coming upon her again, dark and sharp
as ever.

'Oh, Lord--how long--how long!' she wailed in her heart.

She stretched out her hands as if clutching the air for support, she
swayed a little, and then, her strength failing her, she would have
fallen on her pallid face had not Mrs. Deroubigne caught her fast in
her motherly arms.

Night drew on and day came again without a trace of the lost one,
dead or alive.

Baron Rolandsburg, who was appalled by a catastrophe so sudden and
unforeseen, corroborated the story that she had gone on the stretch
of dry sand to sketch, and no doubt remained till the sudden tide had
overtaken and overwhelmed her!

He now made himself invaluable in his exertions for intelligence.
Rewards were offered to boatmen and river-pilots, and in the
_Hamburger Nachrichten_ and other journals 'for her remains' (how
horrible did this sound), but unknown to Mary, who was for several
days and nights all but unconscious.  He also put himself into
communication with their _Herrshaften_ (their Excellencies) the four
Burgomasters and four Syndics, and the Gendermerie, but all in vain.

Other traces of Ellinor than those which the hungry waves had washed
to Mary's feet were never found!

The latter was now a prey to two emotions, when a time came that she
could consider calmly.  One was an intense longing to get away from
Altona as a place which had now become hateful to her, as the scene
of so much sadness; and the other was an affectionate repugnance to
leave it, until her sister's fate was made certain, and her remains
found.

But the latter might have been washed out to sea, and never--never
might be heard of more.

The inexorable had to be accepted, but we fear that poor Mary
Wellwood could not do so with the calmness of a disciple of
Epictitus, the stoic.




CHAPTER XVIII.

THE SEQUEL.

Ellinor's sketching, as we have said, did not progress much.

She was full of thoughts, yet none of pride, of flattered vanity, or
exultation were in her mind, but a dull and curious sense of fear and
shame--a vague consciousness of doubt and wrong.

Could it be that she--unwittingly--had in any way given encouragement
to this young baron, or done aught that led up to the sudden
declaration he had made?

She could not tax herself with having done so.  She liked him very
much--who would not that knew him?--he was so suave, so gentle, and
so manly.  But love, no--she had no heart for him; and how were they
to meet now, after this?

She felt as if suddenly wakened from a dream; but a more terrible
awakening was soon to come upon her.

'Nonsense!' she thought; 'this silly young officer must evidently
love or flirt with some one.  Latterly it was Mary, now it is
Ellinor.'

The Baron Rolandsburg was--as Sleath had been in her eyes
apparently--the possessor of all she had wished for, and learned to
worship--position, rank, riches, and luxury; but neither could love
her as poor Bob had done!  And now Ellinor was--when too late for the
sake of the latter--changed from a somewhat selfish and frivolous
girl into a woman of thought, and one capable of much endurance and
self-sacrifice.

Through Sir Redmond Sleath her pride had received a severe shock; she
had long since come to loathe the very idea of him; as for his name,
it never escaped Mary or Mrs. Deroubigne, and her soul sickened when
she thought of all she had sacrificed for his unworthy sake, and of
the horrible pitfall he had prepared for her.

But why recall these things now, she thought, as she resumed her
pencil.

The deep red tints of the golden sun, setting amid fiery haze beyond
the Elbe and the tiny hills of Hanover, lay in all their richness on
the creek, on the villa and its flowers and shrubs: on Altona in the
background, with all its rows of poplars and pointed roofs; and
Ellinor often paused in her work, and, wooed by the lap, lap, lapping
and murmur of the tide, sank into a kind of dream.

The present fled--the past returned.

She no longer saw the rows of lofty poplars, the long _Palmaille_,
and the great church of Altona, or the house on the hill where
Dumourier dwelt.  She was back in the old summer garden of
Birkwoodbrae, with the fragrance of its roses and honeysuckle around
her; she heard the familiar hoot of Mary's pet owl--the owl that
Robert Wodrow had risked his life to secure; she heard again the
murmur of the May and the song of the thrush mingling with the rustle
of the silver birches that shadowed the roof under which her parents
died.

So, lulled by the beauty of the evening, by the warmth of the
sunshine, and the murmuring wavelets of the glorious river, she
dropped asleep.

She could not have sat thus above twenty minutes when she was
suddenly awakened by the flow of water over her ankles, and, starting
up, found herself surrounded by water--water on all sides, and water
between her and the shore, which was nearly a quarter of a mile
distant, but seemed to be much further off, the once dry sands being
now covered by the incoming flood-tide--a tide that flowed with
exceeding violence and fury.

A half-stifled shriek escaped her, and she started to her feet.  Her
easel had been swept away; she attempted to run shorewards; but as
the water deepened and rose to her knees she uttered a despairing
cry, and rushed back to the sandy knoll on which she had planted her
chair, and over which the encroaching water was rising and deepening
with every inward flow of the waves.

She was lost!

From the beach (that seemed now so awfully distant) not a soul seemed
to observe her terrible predicament.

From being shrill and continuous, her despairing shrieks became
hoarse and faint, and, worse than all, the wind seemed to sweep them
seaward.  Wild and black despair, with the terror of immediate death,
filled her heart.  What terrible retribution was this?  Was she to
perish by drowning--to die the same death that Robert Wodrow had
died--to perish and leave poor Mary alone in the world--all alone!

She parted the rich brown hair from her brow, and, casting her eyes
upward to the flushed evening sky, prayed for strength to die, and
for submission to the will of heaven; and, even as she prayed, a wave
that rolled nearly to her knees made her stagger.  The sandy knoll
was completely covered, and the water was rising fast.

A very few minutes more and she would be swept off her feet, to sink
and drown!  Across the waters of the broad river, the red sun, now
level with them and the flat horizon, shed his dazzling rays into her
eyes, that were becoming half-blinded by the rising spoon drift torn
from the waves by the storm.

It all seemed an unreality--a horrid nightmare.

She heard, or imagined she heard, a cry of encouragement--of coming
succour; but, blinded by terror and despair, she knew not whence it
came, whether from the land or the water.

A numbness seemed to creep fast over her--a sensation, or rather the
want of it, that threatened speedily to paralyse alike thought and
feeling.

Human endurance, in the weak and delicate form of the girl, could
stand no more; an incoming wave, stronger than the rest, struck her
above the waist, and she fell backwards into the water, and, as the
latter rose over her head, her senses left her, and darkness closed
around her.

Anon she breathed again, and the light flashed into her eyes.  She
found herself in a boat, encircled by the strong and protecting arm
of a man, and closed her eyes with an invocation to heaven, believing
that she was being rowed shoreward, for she could hear the regular
dash of the oar-blades, and the hard breathing of those who pulled
them; but she remained passive and voiceless, with closed eyes,
incapable of volition, almost of thought, and certainly of speech.

After a brief space the boat jarred against something.  It was the
side of a vessel, and she felt herself lifted upward--up--up--and
placed in the arms of a man, whose exclamation gave her a species of
electric shock.

It was the voice of Sir Redmond Sleath, and it was his astonished and
certainly bewildered face that she found close to her own when she
opened her eyes, only to shut them once more, as weakness and horror
took away her senses again.

_Sleath!_




CHAPTER XIX.

THE HAKIM ABOU AYOUB.

'I am on the eve of departing with Sir Louis Cavagnari to Cabul,'
Colville had written.  'With his mission the chances of future war
are over, and then I can come home with honour--home to you, love
Mary.'

But while the British troops were now retiring from every point
within the new frontier, Colville, to whom activity or action of any
kind was a species of relief till he could once again see her whose
varying expression of feature defied alike artist or photographer to
fix or do justice to, gladly undertook to convey to the viceroy at
Simla that letter from the Ameer which brought the embassy into
existence--the embassy which was doomed to have such a fatal end--and
a portion of that fulsome, false, and deluding document ran as
follows, after the usual solemn invocation which preludes every
chapter of the Koran, and the words of which, when sent down from
Heaven, caused, says Giaab, the clouds to fly eastward, the winds to
lull, the sea to moan, all the animals of the earth to erect their
ears and listen, while the devils fell headlong from the celestial
spheres:--

'Be it known unto your High Excellency that since the day of my
arrival in Cabul from the British camp at Gundamuck I have been happy
and pleased with the reception accorded me by the British officers.
I had resolved to visit Simla and give myself the boundless pleasure
of a joyous interview with your Excellency, for the purpose of
strengthening our friendly relations, but circumstances prevented me
carrying my intention into effect...  After completing my tour
through the country, during which I shall inspect the frontiers, I
intend, God willing, to have a joyful meeting with your Excellency,
for the purpose of making firmer the basis of our friendship and
drawing closer the bonds of our amity and affection.

'Further, what can I write, beyond expressions of friendship?'

So, encouraged by this letter, which was framed in the genuine
Oriental spirit of fraud and treachery, a brilliant embassy was
arranged.

After delivering to the viceroy, the letter with which he had been
entrusted at head-quarters, Leslie Colville lingered for a few days
at beautiful Simla, where the Court Sanatorium is in a deep and woody
dell, called--doubtless by some old Scottish officer--Annandale,
where the forests are thickly inhabited by grinning baboons, having
white bodies with black hands and feet, and where a savage tribe,
named the Puharries, dwell among the hills, some of which are so
vast--though mere vassals of the Himalayas--as to seem like the
barriers of the world on the left bank of the Indus, from which they
slope down to the steppes of Tartary, the deserts of Gobi, and the
marshes of Siberia; and then he hastened again to the front to join
Cavagnari.

The embassy and escort, the fate of which will never be forgotten in
the history of British India, consisted of seventy-six men of the
brilliant Guide Corps, twenty-six of whom were troopers, the rest
infantry, under Lieutenant Hamilton, V.C.  Their uniform was drab
colour, piped and faced with scarlet.  The ambassador was accompanied
also by a staff of medical and other officers, including his
secretary, Mr. William Jenkyns, of the Punjaub Civil Service.

All set out on their perilous though apparently peaceful mission in
high glee, while the master spirit of the whole was Major Sir Louis
Cavagnari, then in his thirty-seventh year, a gallant officer who had
served with the Bengal Europeans in the Oude campaign, was present at
the capture of a brigade of guns at Shahelutgunge, and served with
the Kohat column at the capture and destruction of Gara.

He was popular personally with the natives, as he could speak several
of their languages with fluency, while his bronzed features and dark
hair enabled him to assume when he chose, any Oriental costume with
facility, and thus he was invaluable in all cases where courage,
promptitude, and adroit demeanour were necessary.

All our columns having, as stated, fallen back, the only British
troops now beyond the new frontier of Afghanistan were his slender
escort, with which he left Ali Musjid on the 17th of June, and rode
through the savage defiles of the Khyber Pass by Lalpura, Chardeh,
and once more in sight of Jellalabad, pursuing the course and bank of
the Cabul river.

They had now traversed about sixty miles of their journey amid some
of the most stupendous scenery in the world, and the evening of the
second day's march was closing in when, near the Surkab, a stream
which joins the Cabul at the foot of the Siah Koh, a man was seen
gesticulating violently and making signs to them, on which the whole
party halted in obedience to command.

Was he the harbinger of danger, the announcer of an ambush; had armed
_sungahs_ been formed across the path, or what?

Carbines were unslung, revolver cases opened, sword-blades loosened
in the sheath, and there were whispers of treachery on every hand,
and every man's face darkened, and his brows were knit, in
anticipation of a barbarous struggle and having to sell his life
dearly, for they were all picked and tried soldiers, second to none
in Her Majesty's Indian army for daring and discipline.  All were
splendid horsemen too--the mounted guides--and, like their infantry,
picturesque-looking fellows in their uniform and bearing.

'The man is not an Afghan, but a European, so far as one can judge by
his face,' said Colville, who, with his bridle reins dropped on his
holsters, had been using his field-glasses intently.

'He wears a scarlet _loonjee_,' said another officer, 'and his dress
seems a uniform.  Strange, is it not?'

'By heaven, he is one of the 10th Hussars!' exclaimed Colville.

'What is he doing here?  His regiment fell back with the rest of the
army weeks--yes, two months--ago.  Can he be a deserter?' suggested
Hamilton.

'Scarcely, when making for us in this frantic fashion,' replied
Colville.

He came close up to the party, and, halting within ten paces,
saluted.  Then all could see that he was a hussar, but wan, pale,
bearded, and with his braided uniform sorely worn and tattered.

'Come on, my man,' cried Sir Louis Cavagnari; 'come on and tell us
how you happen to be here?'

'I am here through God's mercy, sir,' replied the hussar, coming
forward, adding, 'Captain Colville--Captain Colville, don't you know
me?'

'Robert Wodrow--Heavens above!' exclaimed the latter, holding out his
hand, which the former grasped warmly and energetically; 'so you did
not perish in the river?'

'It was a pretty close shave, sir,--I shall never be nearer death
again, but once,' replied Wodrow, who seemed so faint that he could
scarcely stand, and received with gratitude a pull from an officer's
brandy flask.

'Have you been a prisoner?' asked Cavagnari.

'No, sir--I was long ill in the hands of the enemy, and was well
treated.'

'Then you were not escaping?'

'No, sir--but making my way to your party when I saw it on the march,
and I blessed God when I first heard of it, for I was told that the
whole army had fallen back, and that I--alone--was left behind.'

'You are one of the Hussars who were swept away at the ford?' queried
an officer, suspiciously.

'Yes, sir, and my story is rather a long one.'

'We shall hear it in a few minutes,' said Sir Louis, and, riding on
slowly, the party reached the village of Balabagh, where it halted
for the night, and where the party found quarters.

The story of Robert Wodrow, who was full of joy to find himself among
comrades again, was a very simple one, and, though made in the form
of a species of report or explanation to Sir Louis Cavagnari as the
senior officer present, was principally directed to Leslie Colville,
whom, of course, he viewed as a friend, and from whom he heard, with
no small dismay, of the actual extent of the catastrophe to the
squadron.

Though kicked more than once by his own charger after he fell into
the stream, he had, after a time, got his feet free from the
stirrups; but was swept away like a cork by the current after he had
passed through the rapids.  Being a good swimmer, he contrived to
keep his head above water, but was incapable of reaching the banks,
as they were steep, rocky, and in many places rose sheer like walls
from the bed of the Cabul.  Thus he was borne for nearly three miles
below the point where so many of his comrades perished; and, feeling
that he could struggle with fate no more, was about to relinquish
further effort when suddenly voices caught his ear; he saw some
strange white figures near the bank of the river--figures like those
of witches or spectres as seen by the radiance of the stars (as the
moon was under a cloud now), and by some strange and lambent lights
that were floating on the surface of the water, and in the very midst
of which he suddenly found himself, but with a current which
shallowed so fast that he could make good his footing.

Among the Mahomedans and Hindoos there is a pretty custom--which the
former have no doubt borrowed from the latter, as they both practise
it--of going to a river or tank after the fulfilment of a vow, and
setting afloat, as an offering, small, saucer-like lamps of
earthenware, each containing oil, with a lighted wick.

After having said the _fatihar_, or necessary prayers, they watch
their votive lamps as they float down the stream, and girls often
augur their success in love by the steadiness of the journeying down
the darkening waters.

There are certain seasons of the year, such as the Shabibarat feast
in the month of Shaban, when this ceremony is carried out on a vast
and beautiful scale.

It was a fleet of votive lamps amid which Robert Wodrow now found
himself, and for a moment or two he had a striking view of some
groups of Indian girls clad in white floating drapery, their long
black hair unbound, their arms bare to the elbow, their other limbs
to the knee, half lost in shadow and half seen in light, upon the
steps of a Temple-ghaut--we say for a moment or two only, as on
beholding him rising, as it were, from the water, they fled with
shrill cries of affright.

Worn and faint, and heedless of what became of him, he reached the
marble steps of the ghaut, and lay there for a time oblivious of
everything.

When he recovered a little, though well-nigh dead with cold and
exhaustion, he could see by the light of the moon, which now shone
out clearly, a tall, thin, and venerable-looking Afghan bending over
him.

His ample beard was snowy white, his eyes were keen and glittering,
his features were of the Jewish type peculiar to the country, while
his costume was that of the primitive Afghan--wide pantaloons of blue
stuff, a brown camise with flowing sleeves, and a black fur cap.

Putting a hand on Wodrow's head, he told him in Afghani--which is the
Pushtu language spoken by all the Afghans, and the origin of which is
unknown--to take courage, as he would protect him; and Robert Wodrow,
having picked up a little Sanscrit from his father, the old minister,
made a shift to understand him, and knew also that he quoted the
fourth chapter of the Koran, which recommends charity and protection
to all helpless strangers.

And between cold and exhaustion, added to more than one kick from his
horse, poor Wodrow was helpless indeed, but he had fortunately fallen
into excellent hands--those of Abou Ayoub, a good, pious, and
intelligent hakim, or physician of the adjacent village, the
inhabitants of which were friendly to the British, or to anyone who
would protect them from the Afreedies on the one hand and the
Khyberees of the Suffaidh Koh on the other, and for defence against
these the village, which consisted of a mosque, a tank, and some
sixty houses, was surrounded by a strong wall pierced with double
rows of loopholes for musketry.

He conveyed him to his house, and there on a _charpoy_, or native
truckle bed, Robert Wodrow lay for days and weeks in fever and
delirium, attended by the hakim and his three daughters and a Belooch
slave.  The former had skill enough to dose his patient with
ipecacuanha, with infusions of manna, and food, including rice,
tamarinds, and stewed prunes; but he and they believed much more in
sentences of the Koran, written on paper, and washed off into the
drink he imbibed, which was generally cool tamarind sherbet, that
proved in times of feverish thirst a delicious draught, especially
from the hands of Ayesha, the eldest and prettiest daughter of the
three.

Among the Afghans women are not secluded from all male society, as
they are strictly in other Mahommedan communities, for the women of
the middle and lower orders share in all the domestic amusements of
their husbands, who generally content themselves with one wife, and
in the country the latter is unveiled.

Young unmarried women are distinguished by wearing their hair loose
and by their trousers being white.  Thus Ayesha and her two sisters
wore their long black hair loose, but interwoven with gold chains and
strings of Venetian sequins.  And the hakim, who never omitted an
opportunity of quoting the Koran, duly informed Robert Wodrow that
she was so named from Ayesha--one of the four perfect women, and a
wife of Mahomet the Prophet--a lady who had a very terrible adventure
in the sixth year of the Hejira.

After a few weeks of their care, Robert became convalescent.  He was
young, courageous, and buoyant with hope; he felt a trust in his own
resources and exertions, and, encouraged by the praise he had won
from Colville and other officers, had begun to take a new interest in
life--to have some hope for the future, and a desire to grapple with
any difficulties and dangers that lay before him; but certainly he
felt something akin to consternation when informed by the hakim that
the Treaty of Gundamuck had been signed; that Great Britain had made
peace with the Ameer; that all our troops had retired towards the
Indus, and that he himself was left behind among the wild mountains
by the Surkhab, some seventy miles from the frontier--a distance
which he could scarcely hope to traverse alone on foot in safety,
amid such perilous surroundings.

'Death cometh to everyone--even though he be in a lofty tower, saith
the Koran, but your time, Feringhee, is not come yet,' said the Hakim
Abou Ayoub to his guest, while smiling at the scared expression of
his face.

The house of Abou Ayoub was a low but comfortable-looking building,
surrounded by groves of tall palm-trees; it had a flat roof and a
verandah, where Robert and the Hakim sat at times in the evening
smoking, talking of the time when the former must make an effort to
get away, or listening to the girls playing the saringa, or native
guitar, and singing monotonously the odes of Rebman, the Khan of the
Khutticks.

In this verandah the Hakim received his poor patients, who gazed with
wonder and awe when the door of his sanctum or surgery was open,
though therein were only a few boxes of books and drugs--a great vase
of rose-water, and a three-lipped brass lamp suspended from a tall
iron rod--for with them the science of healing was associated with
something of sorcery and witchcraft.  Robert Wodrow, with all the
Hakim's kindness, wearied of the routine of the daily life there--the
perpetual prayers and ablutions of his host.  At each meal the old
man always poured water into a brass basin, in which Robert had to
dip his hands ere he could plunge them into the pilao, which Ayesha
had prepared; though, sooth to say, the Hakim, after uttering the
invariable Bismillah, usually had his fingers in first, selecting the
most delicate morsels for his guest, as knives and forks are unknown
in the land of Baber.  Then would come little cups of savoury
curries, chutnees, and sweetmeats; and, when evening fell, ablutions
again; a white cloth was spread over the carpet, and, turning his
bowed face in the direction of Mecca, old Abou Ayoub devoutly said
his prayers for the night.

There is a language of the eye, and a freemasonry when hand touches
hand that all women know or learn; and ere long Robert Wodrow
discovered, to his alarm, that the eldest daughter of his host had
eyes for him alone--we say to his alarm, for, if he did not respond,
her heart might grow revengeful.

This made his situation perilous amid society so strange, and more
intently did he long to be gone, though the girl was, in her own way,
very pretty, very fair for an Afghan, and coquettishly wore the
brightest coloured camises, embroidered vests, and laced trousers of
the finest muslin to attract him,

When the Hakim was absent, there was no mistaking her languishing
demeanour, which sorely perplexed the hussar.

If she loved him, as he doubted not, he at least did not know how to
fall in love again, and to what end could it be with _her_?

Too intensely had he passed through the passion not to know how it
was crushed out of him by the agony of loss; and he had but one
desire, to get well and strong, and at all risks evade this new peril.

One morning the Hakim came to him with a face expressive of
excitement and pleasure; it was to announce that a _tchopper_, or
Cabulee mounted courier, had ridden through the adjacent pass and
seen British troops marching north-westward from Jellalabad.

'British troops!' exclaimed Wodrow, starting up, and at the moment in
haste to be gone.

'Bismillah, not so fast, my son,' said the Hakim; 'you must have food
ere you go.'

In haste Ayesha prepared for him a _kafta kawab_, or dish of savoury
meat balls, with her own hands, and, unseen by Wodrow, her tears
dropped into the pipkin as she did so; but he could scarcely eat of
it, he was in such haste to be gone.

From the loopholes in the village wall the Hakim showed him the gleam
of arms as a party of troops came defiling into the narrow valley,
through which the Surk-ab flows to the Cabul river, and then they
wrung each other's hands in farewell.

'Peace be upon you!' cried Wodrow, who knew enough of the language to
say this.

'And likewise on you be peace and the mercy of God!' cried the Hakim,
in his sonorous Afghani, and another moment saw Robert Wodrow
hurrying down the hillside, and leaving the walled killa, or village,
fast behind him.

'Things in this world wag strangely,' said Robert Wodrow to Colville,
and forgetting that others heard him.  'As you may know, I didn't
care to live; but I pulled through--pulled through when those with a
happier future and more hope might have succumbed.'

What followed has already been narrated.

'After the kindness of that old Hakim to me, I shall ever think well
of these Afghan fellows in future,' said Robert.

'Quite right too, Wodrow,' responded Leslie Colville; 'but we have
yet to see how we get on with them at Cabul.'

He had his doubts, and, curiously enough, they were prophetic.

With a sigh of genuine thankfulness, Robert Wodrow accepted a few
cigars from the proffered case of young Hamilton, of the Guides (a
gallant fellow who had already won the V.C.), as luxuries he had not
known for many a day.

'And now for the march towards Cabul--nearly eighty miles from the
village of Balabagh.  As I have a spare horse, you shall ride him,
Wodrow,' said Colville.

'I shall never forget your kindness, sir.'

This was all Robert Wodrow said, but his heart was very full, for
Colville's manner and bearing to him were kind and considerate in the
extreme; and he knew that--the latter's generosity of nature
apart--much of this sprang from their mutual regard for Mary and
Ellinor Wellwood.




CHAPTER XX.

AT CABUL.

For Robert Wodrow to attempt to make his way alone to where his
regiment was now quartered far in the rear, through passes filled by
savage tribes, was not to be thought of; thus nothing was left for
him but to proceed with the ambassadors' escort to Cabul.

He was safe now, and had escaped from that terrible catastrophe at
the Ford of Isaac; but poor Robert was only a corporal, and the
public papers barely recorded the circumstance.  Now he was once more
with Europeans; his whole bearing rapidly changed; his weakness and
illness seemed to leave him, his step resumed its buoyancy, his eyes
their fire and, if sad, old devil-may-care expression.

Though Robert Wodrow, by enlisting in the hussars, had opened a
considerable social gulf between himself and Captain Leslie Colville
of the Guards, it was impossible for them both not to have many
sympathies in common; thus oblivious of that gulf the two rode
frequently together, talking of the Wellwoods and the Birks of
Invermay, on the route by Gundamuck, Suffaidh Sang, and Hazardaracht.

On service the bonds of rank and even of discipline, so to say, are
often loosened, for the experience of fighting side by side makes the
finest qualities of the soldier, forming the true and loving link
between the officer and his men.  It fires the sense of
_esprit-de-corps_, and blots out all the ignobler phases of garrison
and barrack life, teaches self-reliance, inspires _cameraderie_ and
patriotism, and makes men less coarse in speech and kindlier to each
other in spirit, and more grave and earnest with the work in hand.

After halting for the night near Hazardaracht, or the 'Place of the
Thousand Trees,' Sir Louis Cavagnari and his party pushed upwards to
the famous Shutargardan Pass, which is eleven thousand five hundred
feet in height, and from thence the road to Cabul lies through narrow
and rock-bound denies.

Immediately below this mighty mountain eminence lie lesser hills that
diminish in height as they slope down into a vast plain in the
richest state of cultivation, dotted by numberless villages, all of
the most picturesque aspect.

At Shutargardan the embassy found themselves in the land of the
powerful and most warlike Ghilzie tribe, whose fighting force was
estimated at nearly two hundred thousand men; but there they were
received with every outward honour by an escort of the Ameer's
regular troops, whose equipment caused some surprise and even
merriment among the Europeans of the escort.

'By Jove, Colville, here are some countrymen of yours!' cried a staff
officer, choking with laughter, as some of the Ameer's 'Highlanders'
presented arms.

The Ameer had actually dressed a body of his troops in tartan kilts,
in imitation of the Gordon Highlanders, whose costume had greatly
impressed him, and these they wore over baggy cotton breeches; while
the cavalry who accompanied them wore the same nether garments (minus
the kilt) with red tunics, white belts, and helmets of soft grey
felt, and in addition to tulwar and pistols, every man rode with a
whip, the wooden handle of which, when not required, was stuck into
his right boot.

They had smooth-bore carbines slung over the right thigh, muzzle
downwards.

'A precious set of dark-looking duffers they are,' was Robert
Wodrow's off-hand comment, as he surveyed them.

Escorted by these troops, Sir Louis Cavagnari and his companions
continued the remaining forty-five miles of the journey to Cabul,
passing Kushi and other fortified villages, and it was not without
emotions of interest and anxiety too, that they found themselves on
the 24th of June, entering the gates and traversing the streets of
that hitherto openly--perhaps yet secretly--hostile capital, which is
surrounded by low, barren, and rocky hills, but amid a plain which
time and human industry have made wondrously fertile and beautiful.

The dark-visaged and motley crowds in the streets--Afghans,
Kuzzilbashes, Persians, Tajiks, and Jews--scowled very unmistakably
at the Feringhees, whose presence they did not want, whose prowess in
recent wars they feared, and whose race and religion they loathed.

The streets through which the visitors rode were all built of
sun-dried bricks and wood, about two storeys high, with flat roofs,
and low, square doorways, now and then a larger one, with a
mulberry-tree overhanging a mud wall, indicating the residence of a
great man.

The city is three miles in circuit, and is dominated by the Bala
Hissar, in which the embassy took up their quarters, a place
incapable of being defended, though the citadel, in consequence of
the ruinous condition of its walls and ramparts.  It has, however, a
wide ditch, and stabling for a thousand horses.

It is half-a-mile long by a quarter of a mile broad, and presents
externally a cluster of lofty, square, embattled towers, with its
chief strength, or inner citadel, high up on the slope of a hill.

As they entered its arched gate between two circular towers, Colville
heard a voice amid the scowling crowds exclaim, with uplifted hands,

'La Ilah ilia Allah?  Why does not He shrivel them all up by a flash
of lightning, and cast them into hell for ever?'

The speaker mingled with the multitude, but not before Colville
recognised his figure, and remembered Mahmoud Shah, the sham hadji of
Jellalabad; but it would have been alike unwise to notice or pursue
him at that crisis.

In the Bala Hissar there were assigned by the Ameer apartments for
the use of the ambassador and his suite and escort--apartments having
marble floors and walls covered with arabesques, old as the days of
Tamerlane and Baber perhaps, certainly as old as those of Nadir Shah,
and for a time the whole party were to all appearance well received
by the Sovereign and his people; but after a little space the former,
notwithstanding his hollow protestations and fulsome letter to the
Viceroy at Simla, grew cold and haughty, and daily saw less and less
of Sir Louis Cavagnari, while the mobs without began to manifest
alike turbulence and insolence, and the isolated embassy was
doubtless involved in peril.

Roving brigands infested all the roads around the city, yet the
months of July and August passed, quietly enough, though some Afghan
troops who had marched in from Herat used threatening language
against Sir Louis and insulted the soldiers of his escort, on one
occasion compelling Colville and two of the guides to draw their
swords.

It has been said--but we know not upon what authority--that Cavagnari
received distinct information that the lives of himself and all his
companions were in imminent peril, but the letters which those
gentlemen sent to India, and those which Mary Wellwood received at
long intervals from Colville, gave no indications of apprehension.

Yet a stormy cloud was gathering over the picturesque towers of the
Bala Hissar.



END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.



LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.