"Take care lest you are the dupe of your own fortune," said he haughtily.
"Covet not the goods of another, aga," responded Saleh, who had now resumed his Oriental amplitude of costume.
"Are we to understand that you have abandoned the cause of Ackbar?"
"Fate has done so—wallah billah—why should not I?"
"How now about Khedar Khan and his riches, O Saleh Mohammed the Incorruptible?" laughed the Toorkoman.
"Dare you mock me?" asked the Dooranee, scowling, with his hand on a pistol.
"No; but what means all this change since yesterday?"
"It means that what is good for me may be bad for you? Who can read the book of destiny? The same flower which gives a sweet to the bee gives poison to reptiles?"
"Does all this mean that you will neither sell nor barter?" asked Zoolficar, shaking haughtily his huge turban and white heron's plume.
"Exactly—that I will do neither," replied the Dooranee, with a mocking laugh.
"Then, by the hand of the Prophet, there perhaps come those who may deprive you of all you possess!" exclaimed the young Toorkoman, with fierce triumph, as he pointed suddenly along the road that led towards the Akrobat Pass.
The sun, now in the west, was shedding a lovely golden light along the brilliantly green slopes of the mighty mountains, whose snow-capped peaks stood up sharply defined, cold and white, against the deep, pure blue of the sky. The barren and desolate Akrobat Pass, overhung by rocks of slate and limestone, yawned like a dark fissure between the masses of the impending hills, and out of it a cloud of white dust was now seen to roll, spreading like mist, and increasing in magnitude like the vapour released by the fisherman in the Arabian story from the vase of yellow copper on the seashore.
On and on it came—onward and downward into the plain where the Bameean river winds, and where the silent city of the Colossi towers upon its rock-hewn hill.
Bright points began to flash and gleam ever and and anon out of this coming cloud of dust—points that could not be mistaken by a soldier's eye,—and speedily the whole advancing mass assumed the undoubted aspect of a great body of armed horsemen, whose tall spears shone like stars, as they came on at full speed from the mountains!
"Hazarees—wild Hazarees or Eimauks—by Allah!" exclaimed the Toorkoman, gathering his reins in his hands; "a chupao—an attack on you, Saleh Mohammed! Now look to your damsels and spoil, for you will be looted of every kusira!"*
* An Afghan coin, worth about .083 of a penny, English.
With a shout of exultation and defiance, he wheeled round his horse, and galloped away towards the wood and river.
The Arab Hadji, Osman, declared these newcomers to be some Usbec cavalry, whom he had seen but yesterday encamped by the side of the river Balkh.
"Kosh gelding! Usbecs, Toorkomans, or Hazarees,—let them come and welcome; they shall not find us unprepared!" exclaimed Saleh Mohammed through his clenched teeth, while his black eyes shot fire, and he rushed away for his weapons, and, by all the horrible din that his Hindostanee drummers and buglers could make, summoned his quaint-looking followers to arms; for, in that lawless land, he knew not whose swords might be uplifted against them now, as the downfall of Ackbar would encourage all to make spoil of his adherents. Even in the kingdom of Afghanistan there were bitter quarrels, and the tribes were all divided against each other now.
In a moment the fort became a scene of the most unwonted bustle. The Dooranees are one of the bravest of the Afghan clans, and this party of them prepared to make a resolute defence, and, if necessary, to sell their lives as dearly as possible. Muskets, matchlocks, and jingalls were loaded on every hand. The gate of the fort was hastily closed and barricaded behind with earth, and an old brass 9-pounder gun, covered with Indian characters—a perilous and too probably honeycombed piece of ordnance, which was found in the place—was propped on a heap of stones, just inside the entrance, where it was loaded with bottles, nails, and other missiles, to sweep a storming party.
Meanwhile all the European male prisoners, under Major Pottinger, were now armed to make common cause with their late guards; and among them many a pale cheek flushed, and many a hollow eye lighted up once more, at the prospect of a conflict, though the weapons with which our poor fellows were armed were only quaint matchlocks, rusty tulwars, and old notched Afghan sabres.
And now in front of the column of advancing horse, two cavaliers came galloping on at headlong speed, far before all their comrades, whose ranks were loose and confused, and all unlike Europeans; so Saleh Mohammed, his face darkened by a scowl, his eyes glistening like those of a rattlesnake, and his white beard floating on the wind, crouched behind the old and mouldering wall, adjusting with his own hands a clumsy jingall, or swivel wall-piece, with the iron one-pound shot of which he was prepared to empty the saddle of one of those two adventurous riders—he cared not a jot which.
Thus far we have followed Anglo-Indian history; and now to resume more particularly our own narrative.
When Doctor C——, though the anxious and watchful eyes of Rose Trecarrel were bent upon him, had shaken his head so despondingly, and thereby gratified the professional spleen of the long-bearded Abu Malec, he had done so involuntarily, and from sincere medical misgivings that his aid had been summoned when too late; and with tears in her eyes, did Rose needlessly assure him that, until she had seen him enter the sick room, she knew not of his existence, or that he had been permitted to survive.
To this he replied by taking both her hands kindly within his own, for he was a warm-hearted Scottish Highlander, and in turn assuring her that, "until brought to the fort of Shireen Khan by the Hakeem, he also had been ignorant of the vicinity of her and her companion; but without proper medicines," he added, "little could be done—now especially."
Yet she hoped much. He gave her valuable advice, and the Khanum, too, and promised to return without delay, and with certain prescriptions, made up from his little store kept in Cabul for the few wounded soldiers who were hostages there. He rode off, and Rose's blessings and gratitude went with him. No curiosity as to the relations of the nurse and patient—peculiar though their circumstances—prompted a question from the doctor. That Rose should attend the sick officer seemed only humane and natural. Who other so suitable was nigh? And to find one more European—a friend especially—surviving, was source of pleasure enough!
The doctor retired; but, instead of hours, days went by, and he returned no more; for on the very evening of his visit he was seized and despatched, with all the rest, under Saleh Mohammed, to Toorkistan. In another place the doctor was thus enabled to be of much value to Mabel Trecarrel, anden routetowards the desert did much to alleviate her sufferings, and restore her health; but the assurance he gave her that he had seen her sister and Denzil Devereaux too, and that they were safe—perfectly safe—in the powerful protection of Shireen Khan, did more to this end than all his prescriptions.
But his advice ultimately availed but little the patient he left behind, for Denzil grew worse—sank more and more daily; he had but the superstition and follies or quackery of Abu Malec to interpose between him and eternity.
Terribly was Rose sensible of all this, as she sat and watched by the young man's bedside in that desolate room of the fort; for it was intensely desolate and comfortless, an Afghan noble's ideas of luxury and splendour being inferior to those possessed by an English groom. Save the bed on which he lay, two European chairs and a trunk brought from the plunder of the cantonments, it was as destitute of furniture as the cell of a prison; and, as if in such a cell, daily the square outline of the window was seen to fall with the yellow sunshine on the same part of the wall, and thence pass upward obliquely as the sun went round, till it faded away at the corner, and then next day it appeared again, without change.
And there sat the once-gay, bright, and heedless Rose Trecarrel, the belle of the ball, of the hunting-meet, of the race-course, and the garrison, with a choking sensation in her throat, and a clamorous fear in her heart, Denzil's hot, throbbing hand often clasped in one of hers, while the other strayed caressingly over his once-thick hair, or what remained of it, for by order of Doctor C——, she had shorn it short—shorter even than the regimental pattern; and so would she sit, watching the winning young fellow, who loved her so well—he, whose figure might have served a sculptor for an Antinous in its perfection of form, wasting away before her, with a terrible certainty that God's hand could alone stay the event; and whom she had but lately seen in all the full roundness of youth and health, with a face animated by a very different expression from that now shown by the hollow, wan, and hectic-like mask which lay listlessly on the pillow—listlessly save when his eyes met hers, and then they filled or grew moist with tenderness and gratitude, emotions that were not unmixed by a fear that the pest, if such it was, that preyed on him might fasten next on her. Thenwhoshould watch over Rose, as she had watched over him, like a sister or a mother?
His head, in consequence of the blow he had received from the pistol-butt of the fallen Afghan—the wretch he had sought to succour in the Khyber Pass—was doubtless the seat of some secret injury; for not unfrequently he placed his hand thereon and sighed heavily, while a dimness would overspread his sight, and there came over him a faintness from which Rose, by the use of a fan and some cooling essences—the Khanum had plenty of them—would seek to revive him, and again his loving eyes would look into hers.
"Ah, you know me again," she would say, in a low soft voice, and with a smile of affected cheerfulness; "you are to be spared to me, after all, Denzil—we shall live and die together."
"Nay—not die together, Rose: don't say die together, darling."
"Why?"
"That would be too early—for you, at least."
"You deem me less prepared than yourself, Denzil. Perhaps I am; yet what have I to live for now?"
"Do not talk so, Rose."
"God will take pity on us, Denzil, and will make you well and whole yet," she would reply, and kiss the aching head that rested on her kind and tender bosom; and with all the young girl's love, something of the emotion almost of maternal care and protection stole into her heart, as she watched him thus; he clung to her so, and was so gentle and so helpless.
"If—if—after this" (he did not say, "after I am gone," lest he should pain her even by words)—"if, Rose, after all this, you should ever meet my sister—my dear little Sybil—you will tell her of me—talk to her about me, talk of all I endured, and be a sister to her, for my sake—won't you, Rose?"
"I will, Denzil—I shall, please God."
"Oh yes—yes; one who has been so good to me, could not fail to be good to her, and to love her for her own sake—for mine perhaps."
And then Denzil would look half vacantly, half wildly up to the ceiling, and marvel hopefully yet apprehensively in his heart where was now that homeless sister, so loved and petted at Porthellick, and whom we last saw crouching by the old cottage door near the stone avenue, on that morning when her mother died, and when the cold grey mist was rolling from the purple moorland along the green slopes of the Row Tor and Bron Welli.
Alas! her story Denzil knew not, and might never, never, know it.
But he was beginning now to know and to feel that "the God who was but a dim and awful abstraction before" seemed very close and nigh. No fear was in his heart, however: he was very calm and courageous, save when he thought of Rose's future, and how lonely and lost she should be when he was gone. This reflection alone brought tears from him; it wrung his heart, and made him the more keenly desire to live.
No Bible or Book of Common Prayer had Rose wherewith to console either the sufferer or herself; all such had gone at the plunder of the cantonments and the baggage, and had likely figured as cartridge paper at Jugdulluck and Tizeen; but no printed or hackneyed formulæ could equal in depth or earnestness the silent yet heartfelt prayers she put up for Denzil and herself.
"My poor Denzil—poor boy! I never deserved that you should love me so much: I have thought so a thousand times!" Rose would whisper fervently, and, heedless of any danger from fever, and perhaps courting it, place his brow caressingly in her neck, and kiss his temples, as if he were a child, telling him to "take courage, and have no fear."
"Fear! why should I fear death, Rose?" he would respond, speaking quickly, yet with difficulty—speaking thus perhaps to accustom himself to the topic, or to accustom her, we know not which; "why should I fear death, since I know not what it is? Why fear that which no human being can avert or avoid, and which so many better, braver, and nobler than I have so lately proved and tested in yonder Passes?—aye, Rose, my mother too, at home—my father on the sea—Sybil perhaps—all!"
Then his utterance became incoherent, his voice broken, and Rose felt as if her heart were broken too; for when he spoke thus, there spread over his young face a wondrous brightness, a great calm; and the girl held her breath, in fear, if not awe, for she read there an expression of peace that denoted the end was near.
All was very still in the great square Afghan fort and in the Khan's garden without.
The summer sun shone brightly, and the birds, but chiefly the melodious pagoda-thrush—the king of the Indian feathered choristers—was there; and the flowers, the wondrous roses of Cabul, were exhaling their sweetest perfume. There the world, nature at least, looked gay and bright and beautiful; but here, a young life, that no human skill, prayer, or affection could detain, was ebbing away so surely as the sea ebbs from its shore, but not like the sea to return.
If Denzil died, what had she to live for? So thought the heedless belle, the half coquette, the whole flirt, of a few months past; but such were "the uses" or the results of adversity. Was not the end of all things nigh? Without Denzil Devereaux and his love, so tender, passionate, and true, what would the world be? and her world, of late, had been so small and sad! This love had been all in all to her; and now all seemed nearly over, and nothing could be left to her but forlorn exile and the gloom of despair.
As there is in memory "a species of mental long-sightedness, which, though blind to the object close beside you, can reach the blue mountains and the starry skies which lie full many a league away," so it was with Denzil; and now far from that bare and desolate vaulted room in the Afghan fort, from the mountains of black rock that overshadowed it, and all their harassing associations, even from the presence of the bright-haired and pale-faced girl who so lovingly watched and soothed his pillow, the mind of the young officer flashed back, as if touched by an electric wire, to his once-happy home. Again his manly father's smile approved of some task or feat of skill performed by bridle, gun, or rod; again his mother's dark eyes seemed to look softly into his; the willowed valley (that opened between steep and ruin-crowned cliffs towards the billowy Cornish sea), the little world of all his childhood's cares and joys, was with him now, and with that world he was mingling over again in fancy, though death and distress had been there as elsewhere; the hearth was desolate, or strangers sat around it; their household gods were scattered, and home was home no longer, save in the heart, the memory, of the dying exile.
And so, for a time, his thoughts were far away even from Rose and the present scene. Far from the images that were full of the warlike and perilous present, he was revelling in the past, and talked fluently, confidently, and smilingly with the absent, the lost, and the dead. Often he said—
"Lift my head, dearest mother; place your kind arm round my neck and kiss me once again."
And Rose obeyed him, and he seemed to smile upward into her face; and yet he knew her not, or saw another there.
Then he talked deliriously of his father's rights, of his mother's wrongs, and of his cousin, Audley Trevelyan, till his voice sank into whispers and anon ceased.
This was what Shakspeare describes as the
"Vanity of sickness! fierce extremes,In their continuance, will not feel themselves.Death having preyed upon the outward parts,Leaves them invisible; and his siege is nowAgainst the mind, which he pricks and woundsWith many legions of strange fantasies,Which, in their throng and press to that last hold,Confound themselves."
He fell asleep; and, without prolonging our description further, suffice it that poor Denzil never woke again, but passed peacefully away...
Rose sat for a time in a stupor, like one in a dream. Summoned by her first wild cry, the Khanum was by her side now.
Denzil, so long her care, her soul, her all, lay there, it would seem, as usual—lay there as she had seen him for many days; yet why was it that his presence, and that rigid angularity and stillness of outline, so appalled her now?
As the crisis so evidently had drawn near, strongly and wildly in the girl's heart came the crave for medical, for religious, for any Christian aid or advice; but there none could be had, any more than if she had stood by the savage shores of the Albert Nyanza; and now the dread crisis was past!
So, from time to time the pale girl found herself gazing on the paler face of the dead—of him who had so loved her—gazing with that mingled emotion of incredulity, wonder, and terror, awe and sorrow, which passeth all experience or description.
There was no change in the air; there was no change in the light: one was still and calm, and laden with perfume; the other as bright and clear as ever: and the blaze of yellow sunshine poured into the room precisely as it did an hour ago; but now it fell on the face of the dead!
And the clear voice of the pagoda-thrush sang on; but how monotonously now!
Rose was stunned, and sat crouching on the floor, with her face covered by her hands, her head between her knees, and her bright dishevelled hair falling forward in silky volume well nigh to her feet. Ignorant of what to say, or how to soothe grief so passionate, the Khanum, unveiled, hung over her in kindness of heart, but with one prevailing idea—that the death of an idolater must be very terrible; that already the fiends must be contesting for the possession of his soul; that the prescribed portion of the Koran had not been read to him; and even if it had been, what would it avail now, till that day when the solid mountains and the soft white clouds should be rolled away together by the blast of the trumpet of Azrael?
So his last thoughts had been of his dead mother, as Rose remembered, and not of her. Her father was dead; Mabel was gone to Toorkistan, too surely beyond ransom or redemption: oh, why wassheleft to live?
If thesense of exileis so strong in the heart of the Anglo-Indian, even amid all the luxuries and splendours of Calcutta, the city of palaces—amid the gaieties and frivolities of Chowringhee,—what must that sense have been to the heart of this lonely English girl, far away beyond Peshawur, the gate of Western India, beyond the Indus, fifteen hundred English miles, as the crow flies, "up-country," from the mouth of the Hooghley and the shore of Bengal—where the railway whistle will long be unheard, and where Murray, Cook, and Bradshaw may never yet be known!
Notwithstanding all that Rose had undergone of late, and all that she had schooled herself to anticipate as but too probable, she was still unable fully to realise the actual extent of the misfortunes that threatened her. Much of that deep misery which Sybil had endured elsewhere, when crouching in the damp and mist outside her mother's door, came over Rose's spirit now. Henceforward, she felt that life must be objectless; that safety or pursuit, freedom or captivity, sea or land, must be all alike to her; and for a time her poor brain, so long oppressed by successive sorrows and excitements, became almost unconscious of external impressions, and she sat as one in a dream, hearing only the buzz of the summer flies and the voice of the pagoda-thrush.
Suddenly another sound seemed to mingle with the notes of the birds; it came on the air from a great distance. She started and looked wildly up—her once-clear hazel eyes all bloodshot and tearless now.
What was it? whatisit? for the sound was there, and she seemed to hear it still, and the Khanum heard it too!
Nearer it came, and nearer.
It was the sound of drums—drums beaten in regular marching cadence, coming on the wind of evening down from the rocky pass in the hills of Siah Sung.
Oh, there could be no mistake in the measure—British troops were coming on; and how welcome once would that sound have been to the young soldier who lay on his pallet there, and whose ear could hear the English drum no more!
She started to the window, and looked forth to the black mountains, which, though distant from it, towered high above the Kuzzilbashes' fort. The dark Pass lay there, its shadows seeming blue rather than any other tint, as the receding rays of the setting sun left it behind; but her eyes were dim with weeping and with watching now, so Rose, with all her pulseless eagerness, failed to see the serried bayonets, the shot-riven colours tossing in the breeze, or the moving ranks in scarlet, that showed where the victorious brigades of Pollock, Sale, and Nott were once more defiling down into the plain that led to humbled Cabul.
Welcome though their sound, they had come, alas,too late!
The drums were still ringing in her ears; and this familiar sound, like the voices of old friends, caused her now to weep plentifully. Once again she turned to the bed where Denzil lay so pale and still, his sharpened features acutely defined in the last light of the sun; and she felt in her heart as she pressed her interlaced hands on her lips, seeking to crush down emotion—
"So the dream it is fled, and the day it is done,And my lips still murmur the name of oneWho will never come back to me!"
The same evening of this event saw the Union Jack floating on the summit of the Bala Hissar, and our troops in or around Cabul, in the narrow and once-crowded thoroughfares of which—even in the spacious and once-brilliant bazaar—the most desolate silence prevailed. The houses of Sir Alexander Burnes, of Sir William Macnaghten, and all other British residents were now mere heaps of ashes, and their once-beautiful gardens were waste. Human bones lay in some; whose they were none knew, but they remained among the parterres of flowers as terrible mementos of the past.
Having, among many other trophies, the magnificent and ancient gates of Hindoo Somnath with them, the victorious troops of General Nott were encamped around the stately marble tomb of the Emperor Baber, where the British were watering their horses at the Holy Well, quietly cooking their rations of fat-tailed dhoombas or of beef, newly shot, flayed, and cut up, after a long route; and the natives were gravely boiling their rice and otta; while the staff officers, Generals Pollock, Sale, Nott, Macaskill, and others, some on foot and some on horseback, were in deep conference about a map of Western India, and Bokhara, and as to where the hostages were, and what was to be done for their relief, if they still lived.
Waller, who in his energy and anxiety had come on with the advanced guard of cavalry, looked around him with peculiar sadness. Save Doctor Brydone and one or two others, he alone seemed to survive of all the original Cabul force; and every feature of the place before him was full of melancholy memories and suggestions of those he could never see again, and of the past that could come no more.
To Sir Richmond Shakespere, his new friend, he could not resist the temptation of speaking affectionately and regretfully of the dead, and the places associated with them. He found a relief to his mind in doing so.
"A time may come," said he, as they sat in their saddles twisting up cigarettes, and passing a flask of Cabul wine between them, while the syces gave each of their unbitted nags a tobrah of fresh corn, "when these Passes of the Khyber Mountains may be as familiar to the English tourist as those of Glencoe and Killycrankie are now—for there was a day when even the land beyond them was a terra incognita to us; and a time may come when the lines of railway shall extend from Lahore even to Peshawar—ay, and further—perhaps to the gates of Herat—though it may not be our luck to see it; but I can scarcely realise that in our age of the world, an age usually so prosaic and deemed matter-of-fact, men should see and undergo all that we have undergone and seen, and in a space of time so short too!"
Would a quiet home, a peaceful life, after a happy marriage, ever be the lot of him and Mabel? Loving her fondly and tenderly, with all the strength that separation, dread, and doubt and sorrow, could add to the secret tie between them, he had almost ceased to have visions of her associated with admonitions and prayer from a lawn-sleeved ecclesiastic; a merry marriage-breakfast; a bride in her white bonnet and delicate laces, and smiling bridesmaids in tulle. Such day-dreams had been his at one time; but amid rapine and slaughter, battle and suffering, they had become dim and indistinct, if not forgotten!
"Yes, Waller," replied his companion, after a pause, "a British army—we have actually seen a British army, with all its accessories and appurtenances, exterminated at one fell swoop!"
"All this place is full of peculiarly sad memories to me, Sir Richmond."
"Doubtless; and, like me, you won't be sorry when we all turn our backs on it for ever, as we shall do soon."
"True. See! yonder lie our cantonments, ruined walls and blackened ashes now; beyond them are the hills where, with my company—not one man of which is now surviving, myself excepted—I scoured the fanatical Ghazees from rock to rock, and far over the Cabul river, so victoriously! Here, by that old tomb and ruined musjid, we once had a jolly picnic: half the fellows in the garrison, and all the ladies were there—the band of the poor 44th too. By Jove! I can still see the scattered fragments of broken bottles and chicken bones lying among the grass."
"I have felt something of this regret when coming on the remembered scene of an old pig-sticking party or bivouac," replied Sir Richmond, with a half-smile at the unwonted earnestness of Waller, who had seemed to him always a remarkably cool and self-possessed man of the world; but he knew not the deeper cause he had for feeling in these matters. "You may say, as an old poem has it—
'Now the long tubes no longer wisdom quaff,Or jolly soldiers raise the jocund laugh;The scene is changed, but scattered fragments tellWhere Bacchanalian joys were wont to dwell.'
Is it not so, Waller?"
"By this road I smoked a last cigar with Jack Polwhele, of ours, and Harry Burgoyne, of the 37th," resumed Waller. He remembered, but he did not care to add, how broadly they had bantered him about Mabel Trecarrel on the evening in question. "And all round here," he resumed, pursuing his own thoughts aloud, "are the scenes of many a pleasant ride and happy drive. Here I betted and lost a box of gloves with the Trecarrels."
"You seem to have always been betting on something with those ladies, and with a gentleman's privilege of losing."
"It was on the Envoy's blood mare against Jack Polwhele's bay filly, in the race when Daly, of the 4th Dragoons, won the sword given by Shah Sujah," said Waller, colouring a little. "There, by those cypresses, I once met the sisters half fainting, one day, with heat, their palanquin placed in the shade by the gasping dhooley-wallahs; so, at the risk of a brain fever, I galloped to the Char-chowk for a flask of Persian rose-water, fans, and so forth."
"The Trecarrels again! By the way, it seems to me," said the other, "that of all the friends you have lost, those two young ladies—one especially——"
What the military secretary of General Pollock was about to say, with a somewhat meaning smile, we know not, save that he was heightening the colour of Waller's face by his pause; but a change was given to the conversation by the opportune arrival of Shireen Khan, of the Kuzzilbashes, mounted, as usual, on his tall camel, and accompanied by a few well-appointed horsemen. He had ascertained that "Shakespere Sahib" was thekatib, or secretary, to the victorious Feringhee general, and had come to tender, through him, his services to the family of the fallen Shah, to the conquerors, to the Queen they served, and, generally, to the powers that were uppermost.
Many of the Afghan chiefs, who, with their people, had acted most savagely against us, were now extremely anxious to make their peace with General Pollock; and though it can scarcely be said that towards the end (after his own jealousy of Ackbar's influence, fear of his growing power that curbed all private ambition, caused a coolness in the Sirdir's cause) Shireen and his Kuzzilbashes had been our most bitter enemies, yet he and they were among the first now to meet and welcome the conquerors of Ackbar, against whom they had turned, not as we have seen Saleh Mohammed meanly do, in the time of his undoubted humiliation and defeat, but when in the zenith of his power; and now this wary old fellow, who played the game of life as carefully and coolly as ever he played that of chess, knew that the protection he had afforded to Rose Trecarrel and to Denzil—the supposed Nawab—must prove his best moves on the board—his trump cards, in fact; and as a conclusive offer of friendship, he now offered six hundred chosen Kuzzilbash horsemen to follow on the track of Saleh Mohammed, and rescue the whole of the prisoners, a duty on which Shakespere and Waller at once joyfully volunteered to accompany them.
"Shabash!" he exclaimed, stroking his beard in token of faith and promise, "punah-be-Kodah!—it is as good as done; and the head of the Dooranee dog shall replace that of the Envoy in the Char-chowk!"
Waller soon divined that the lady now residing in Shireen's fort must be no other than the younger daughter of "the Sirdir Trecarrel," who was spirited away on the retreat through the Passes, on that night when the Shah's 6th Regiment deserted; but of who "the Nawab" could be he had not the faintest idea, until he and Shakespere galloped there, saw the living and the dead, and heard all their sad story unravelled.
With her head, sick and aching, nestling on the broad shoulder of Bob Waller, as if he was her only and dearest brother, Rose told all her story without reserve, and it moved Waller and his companion deeply, to see a handsome and once-bright English girl so crushed and reduced by grief and long-suffering; yet her case was only one of many in the history of that disastrous war. She ended by imploring them to lose no time in following the track of those who had borne off her sister and the other hostages.
No words or entreaties of hers were necessary to urge either Waller or Shakespere on this exciting path; and instant action became all the more imperative when Shireen announced that he had sure tidings from Taj Mohammed Khan, and also from Nouradeen Lal, the farmer, who had been purchasing horses on the frontier, that all the lawless Hazarees were in arms to cut off the entire convoy; and that if a junction were once effected between them and the Toorkomans of Zoolficar Khan, all hope of rescue would be at an end.
The permission of the general was, of course, at once asked and accorded, and it was arranged, that, immediately upon their departure, a body of cavalry and light infantry should follow with all speed to second and support them.
Kind-hearted Bob Waller waited only to attend the obsequies of his young comrade (while the Kuzzilbashes were preparing); and over these we shall hasten, though of all the Cabul army he was, perhaps, the only one interred with the honours of war; the battle-smoke had been the pall, the wolf and the raven the sextons, of all the rest!
The spot chosen was a little way outside the Kuzzilbashes' fort, on the sunny and green grassy slope of a hill, where a grove of wild cherry-trees rendered the place pleasant to the eye. From her window Rose could alike see and hear the rapid ceremony; for by the stern pressure of circumstances it was both brief and rapid. No prayer was said; no service performed; no solemn dropping of dust upon dust; no requiem was there, but the drums as they beat the "Point of War," after the last notes of the Dead March had died away.
The quick, formal commands of the officer came distinctly to her overstrained ear, as the hurriedly constructed coffin of unblackened deal, covered by the colour of the 44th Regiment, was being lowered, as she knew, for ever, into its narrow bed; the steel ramrods rang in the distance like silver bells, and flashed in the sunshine; then a volley rang sharply in the air, finding a terrible echo in her heart, while the thin blue smoke eddied upward in the sunshine; another and another succeeded, and Rose—the widowed in spirit—as she crouched on her knees, knew then that all was over, and the smoke of the last farewell volley would be curling amid the damp mould that was now to cover her lost one.
Anon the drums beat merrily as the firing party, after closing their ranks, wheeled off by sections, with bayonets fixed, and Denzil Devereaux was left alone in his solitary and unmarked grave, just as the sun set in all his evening beauty; and a double gloom sank over the soul of Rose Trecarrel.
Swiftly rode Shakespere, Waller, and their six hundred Kuzzilbashes on their errand of mercy, and midnight saw them far from the mountains that look down on Cabul. Of all his five thousand horse, old Shireen had certainly chosen the flower. All these men rode their own chargers, and all were armed with lance and sword, matchlock and pistols; all had their persons bristling with the usual number of daggers, knives, powder-flasks, and bullet-bags, in which the Afghan warrior delights to invest himself; and all wore the peculiar cap from which they take their name—a low squat busby, of black lambs'-wool, not unlike those now worn by our Hussars, and having, like them, a bag of scarlet cloth hanging from the crown thereof.
To avoid all suspicion or attentionen route, Waller and Shakespere had cast their uniforms aside, and rode at their headà la Kussilbashe, dressed in poshteen and chogah, and armed with lance and sabre.
The discovery of Rose Trecarrel—an event so unexpected and unlooked for after all that had occurred—seemed to Waller as an omen of future good fortune, and his naturally buoyant spirits rose as he rode on. The expedition was full of excitement, especially for a time: it was an act of courage, mercy, and chivalry, that all Britain should eventually hear of; and Mabel was at the bourne, for which they were all bound. Even poor Denzil, so recently interred, was partially forgotten: soldiers cannot brood long over the casualties of war, especially while amid them; and Denzil's death was only one item in a strife that had now seen nearly fifty thousand perish on both sides.
However, let it not for a moment be thought that Waller was careless of his friend's untimely end, his memory, or his strange story; for, ere he left Rose, he had promised that as soon as he could write, or get "down country" again, one of his first acts should be to seek out and succour "this only sister" of whom poor Devereaux had always spoken so much and so affectionately.
When he parted from Rose, leaving her in the safe and more congenial protection afforded by the European camp, she had not been without one predominant fear. As friends had come too late to save or succour Denzil, they might now, perhaps, be too late to rescue Mabel and her companions from this new conjunction of enemies against them, even in Toorkistan. Besides, Ackbar the Terrible, with the ruins of his infuriated army, was to fall back on the deserts by the way of Bameean, and thus, to avoid him, the two British officers, with their Kuzzilbashes, at one time made a judicious detour among the hills.
At Killi-Hadji, they found traces of the first halt made by the caravan outside the old fort, where a shepherd had, as he told them, seen the captives; thence by the mountain pass and the fair valley of Maidan, where a Hadji bound afoot for the shrine of Ahmed Shah at Candahar, the scene of many a pilgrimage, told them that the risk they ran was great, as the Hazarees were undoubtedly drawing to a head in the Balkh; and this was far from reassuring, as they were conscious of having far outridden their promised supports.
"Let us push on, for God's sake!" was ever Waller's impatient exclamation at every halt, however brief; and even Sir Richmond Shakespere, with all his activity and energy, was at times amused by the restlessness of one who seemed by nature to be a rather quiet and easy-going Englishman.
"These are tough rations, certainly," said he, as they halted for the last time near the Kaloo Mountain, and masticated a piece of kid broiled on a ramrod at a hasty fire (broiled ere the flesh of the shot animal had time to cool), and washed it down by a draught from the nearest stream.
"Tough, certainly; but we get all that is good for us."
"If not more," added Shakespere, pithily; "for this is feeding like savages—or Toorkomans, who drink the blood of their horses."
"At a halt, when marching up country, I always used, if possible, like a knowing bachelor, to tiff with a married man."
"Why?"
"You will be sure to find that he has some daintily made sandwiches, cold fowl, or so forth, in his haversack: the women, God bless them, always look after these little things. But that is all over now; we are no longer in Hindostan. A little time must solve all this—the safety of our friends——" added Waller, looking thoughtfully to the distant landscape; and as if repenting of a momentary lightness of heart, "I would give all I have in the world——"
"Say all you owe," suggested Shakespere, smiling.
"Well, Sir Richmond, that would be a round sum perhaps—to see them all within musket shot of us. As for ransom, I have but my sword at their service. I can't do even a bill on a Hindoo schroff, or raise money on a whisker, as John de Castro did at Goa; but I can polish off a few of those savages, as they deserve to be."
The dawn of a second day saw them descending the mighty ridges of the Indian Caucasus, and a picturesque body they were, with their bright particoloured garments floating backward on the wind; their black fur caps with scarlet bags, their dark, keen visages and sable beards, their polished weapons and tall tasselled lances flashing in the uprisen sun, as they galloped, without much order certainly, at an easy but swinging pace, over green waste and grey rocky plateau, up one hill-side and down another, now splashing merrily, and more than girth deep, through the clear, sparkling current of some brawling mountain nullah whose waters had been imbridged since Time was born—their horses light in body, with high withers, fine and muscular limbs, square foreheads, small ears, and brilliant eyes, and to all appearance fall of speed, spirit, and a strength that seemed never to flag.
And sooth to say, the gallant Kuzzilbashes took every care to preserve those qualities so desirable alike for pursuit or flight.
At every brief halt, they were carefully unbitted, unsaddled, groomed, and lightly fed, and picketed in the old Indian fashion, with the V-ended heel-rope fastened round both hind fetlocks and secured to a single pin; near cuts over the hills were taken, but rivers were never forded or swum, unless the horses were perfectly cool; once or twice, pieces of goat's flesh were rolled round their bridle-bits; and hence by all this care, the cattle of the whole troop, unblown and ungalled, were in excellent order, when, on the fourth day—for their progress had been swifter than that of Saleh Mohammed, as they were unincumbered by women, children, camels, and ponies—they left the Kaloo Mountain behind, and ere long, without seeing aught of Hazarees or Toorkomans, though always prepared for them, they came in sight of Bameean, towering on its green mountain, its elaborate but silent temples and great solemn giants of stone reddened by the bright flood of light shed far across the plain by the sun, which was setting amid a sea of clouds that were all of crimson flame.
In deepest purple the shadows fell far eastward; the gleam of arms appeared on the walls of the old fort in the foreground, when Waller and Sir Richmond Shakespere darted forward, by a vigorous use of the spur, far outstripping their less enthusiastic followers. After they had carefully reconnoitred the fort through their field-glasses, Shakespere began to rein in his horse, and check its pace.
"Waller," said he, "a red flag has replaced Ackbar's invariable green, one on the fort. We had better parley."
"But we have neither trumpet nor drum."
"Nor would those fellows understand the sound of either, if we had; but look out—pull up, or, by Heaven, we shall be fired upon! You are rash, Waller, and in action seem quite to lose your head."
"But my hand is ever steady—ay, as if this sword were but a cricket bat," retorted Waller, whose blue eyes were sparkling with light.
"True, my dear fellow; but to be potted now, when within arm's length of those we have risked so much to save, would be a sad mistake."
"Egad, yes; and that old devil with his jingall—for a jingall it is—may speedily send one of us into that place so vaguely known as the next world," responded Waller, as he tied a white handkerchief to the point of his sword, and then Saleh Mohammed Khan was seen to unwind and wave the cloth of his turban in response.
By this action they knew that all idea of resistance was at an end, and that they should be received as friends. The gates of the fort were unbarricaded and thrown open, and many of the ladies now began to appear, timidly but curiously and expectantly, thronging forward to meet those whom they had been told were come "to meet and to save them."
Waller, who had manifested an air of blunt and soldierly resolution and energy up to this period, now felt his emotions somewhat overpowering, or perhaps he wished to see and hear something of Mabel, before making himself known; so checking his horse, he permitted Sir Richmond Shakespere, as his leader, to ride forward.
Lifting his Kuzzilbash cap, his frank English face, though sunburned and lined, beaming with pleasure and joy the while,
"Rejoice," he cried, enthusiastically, "rejoice, ladies! Your delivery is accomplished. Dear ladies and comrades, all your fears and your sufferings are at an end!"
There was no loud or noisy response; the emotions of all were too deep and heartfelt for such utterances; and, with feelings which no description can convey to the imagination, Waller and Shakespere found themselves surrounded by the captives, male and female, exactly one hundred and six in number, of all ranks—captives whom by their energy, activity, and rapid expedition they had saved from a fate that might never have been known; for the news of their arrival caused Hazarees and Toorkomans alike to disperse, and even Zoolficar Khan abandoned all idea of attempting to carry them off.
The happiest moments of existence are perhaps the most difficult to delineate on paper; but Bob Waller, as he folded Mabel Trecarrel sobbing hysterically to his breast, laughing and weeping at the same moment, despite and heedless of all the eyes that looked thereon—he a thorough-bred Englishman, and as such innately abhorrent of "a scene"—forgot the crowd, the Kuzzilbashes, the Dooranees, the grinning grooms and dhooley-wallahs—he forgot all in the joy of the moment, or by a chain of thought remembered only a passage of "Othello," when, in garrison theatricals, he had once figured as the Moor, with Harry Burgoyne for a Desdemona—
"If it were now to die,'Twere now to be most happy; for I fearMy soul hath her content so absoluteThat not another comfort like to thisSucceeds in unknown fate."
And Sir Richmond Shakespere, as he stood smiling by the centre and blissful-looking group (now beginning clamorously to pour questions upon him), ladies and officers, hollow-eyed, haggard, and pale, began to perceive what had made Captain Robert Waller, of the Cornish Light Infantry, take so deep an interest in the Trecarrels, and why he had been the most active, energetic, and, so far as danger went, the most reckless staff officer during our perilous advance up the Passes and in the subsequent pursuit.
Waller did not find Mabel quite so much changed as he had feared she might be; yet she was the wreck of what she had been in happier times—the tall, full-bosomed, and statuesque-looking English girl, with clear, calm, bright, and confident eyes. The latter were still bright, but their lustre was unnatural; their expression was a wild and hunted one; her colour was gone, and her cheeks were deathly pale. But all in the group of hostages were alike in those respects. For many months, had they not been daily, sometimes hourly, face to face with death?
But Waller, as she hung on his breast and looked with eyes upturned upon him, had never seemed so handsome in her sight: his form and face were to her as the beau-ideal of Saxon manliness and beauty; but his complexion, once nearly as fair as her own, was burned red now, by the exposure consequent to the two last campaigns; his forehead clear and open, his nose straight, his mouth large perhaps, but well-shaped and laughing; and then he had in greater luxuriance than ever his long, fair, fly-away whiskers; and, save his Afghan dress, he looked every inch the jolly, frank, and burly Bob Waller of other times, especially when, as if he thought "the scene" had lasted long enough, he drew Mabel's arm through his, led her a little way apart, and proceeded leisurely to prepare a cigar for smoking.
"So Bob, dear, dear Bob, my presentiment has come true after all," she exclaimed; "and this horrid Bameean has seen the end of all our sorrows!"
"But it was not such an end as this your foreboding heart had anticipated, Mabel," replied Waller, caressing her hand in his, and pressing it against his heart.
Major Pottinger, who had now the command, ordered that all must prepare at once to quit Bameean, and avoid further risks by falling back on their supports, lest Ackbar Khan might come on them after all.
To lessen the chance of that, however, the wily Saleh Mohammed, who knew by sure intelligence from his scouts that Ackbar was to proceed, with the relics of his army, through the Akrobat Pass into the Balkh, advised that all should take a circuitous route towards Cabul; and this suggestion was at once adopted by the now-happy hostages and the escort.
Two days afterwards, as they were traversing the summit of a little mountain pass, their long and winding train of horse and foot guarded by Kuzzilbash Lancers and the wilder-looking Dooranees, they came suddenly in sight of those whom General Pollock had sent to meet and, if necessary, to succour them.
These were Her Majesty's 3rd Light Dragoons, the 1st Bengal Cavalry, and Captain Backhouse's train of mountain guns, all led by Sir Robert Sale in person; and who might describe the joy of that meeting, when the rescued hostages cast their eager eyes and hands towards them in joy, and when they saw the old familiar uniforms covering all the green slope, while the cavalry came galloping and the infantry rushing tumultuously towards them!
The dragoons sprang from their horses, the infantry broke their ranks, and the men of the 13th Light Infantry crowded round the wife of their colonel and the other rescued ladies, holding out their hard brown hands in welcome; eyes were glistening, lips quivering, and many a hurrah was, for a time, half choked by emotion and sympathy, while officers and soldiers again and again shook hands like brothers that had been long parted.
Friends now met friends from whom they had been so long and painfully separated; wives threw themselves exultingly and passionately into the arms of their husbands; daughters leaned upon their fathers' breasts and wept. Many there were whose widowed hearts had none to meet them there; and many an orphan child stretched forth its little hands to the ranks wherein its father marched no more, though some might give a kiss or a caress to "Tom Brown's little 'un—Tom that was killed at Ghuznee," or to the "little lass of Corporal Smith—poor Jack that was killed with his missus at Khoord Cabul;" but these sad episodes were soon forgotten amid the general joy.
Wheeled round on the mountain slope, the artillery thundered forth a royal salute; muskets and swords were brandished in the sunshine; caps tossed up, to be caught and tossed up again; reiterated English cheers woke the echoes of the hills of Jubeaiz, which seemed to repeat the sounds of joy to the winds again and again.
"Coincidence," saith Ouida, "is a god that greatly influences human affairs;" and the sequel to our story will prove the truth of this trite aphorism, when we now change the scene from Cabul to our cantonment, in the territory between the Sutledge and the Jumna—to the Court Sanatorium of Bengal—the country mansion of the Governor-General at Simla, a beautiful little town of some five hundred houses, built on the slope of the mighty Himalayas, where, amid a veritable forest of oak, evergreens, and rhododendron, and the loveliest flora a temperate zone can produce, surrounded by that wondrous assemblage of snow-covered peaks that rise in every imaginable shape (a portion of those bulwarks of the world, that slope from the left bank of the Indus away to the steppes of Tartary and the marshes of Siberia), the representative of the Queen retires periodically to refresh exhausted nature, and mature the plans of government in those cool and pleasant recesses, where the punkah is no longer requisite; where one may sleep without dread of mosquitos and green bugs, nor welcome cold tea at noon as preferable to iced champagne.
By the time that Audley Trevelyan had reached this occasional seat of government—the Balmoral of India—Lord Auckland, whose vacillation and mismanagement of the Cabul campaign gave great umbrage, had returned to Britain, and another Governor-General had arrived—one who boldly stigmatised the Afghan project of his predecessor (now created an earl) "as a folly, and that it yet remained to be seen whether it might not prove a crime;" and so Audley presented, of necessity, the reports and Jellalabad despatches of Sir Robert Sale to this new Viceroy, whose firmness of character and past promise as a statesman gave a guerdon that we should yet retrieve all that we had lost of prestige beyond the Indus; to which end he took the executive power from the weak hands of those secretaries to whom it had been previously committed, and resolved to wield it himself, though he found in India a treasury well-nigh empty, an army exasperated, and the hearts of men depressed by fears for the future.
But tidings of the storming of Ghuznee by General Nott, of the advance upon Cabul, the recapture of it after our victory at Tizeen, and the rescue of the hostages, followed so quickly upon each other to Simla, that soon after the arrival of Audley, he was informed that as there would be no necessity for his return to Jellalabad, he was to remain provisionally attached to the staff, either till he could rejoin his regiment, or our troops re-entered the Punjaub—a little slice of India, having a population equal to all that of England. So by this arrangement he found himself a mere idler, a dangler attached to the Viceregal court, where now the glorious war that Napier was to inaugurate against the treacherous Ameers of Scinde was schemed out, and where a series of reviews, dinners, balls, and a durbar, or assembly of the native princes, was proposed to welcome Pollock's troops when they came down country, and were once again, as the Viceroy expressed it, in "our native territories;" and the programme of all those gayeties was to be fully arranged when his lady and other ladies of the mimic court arrived, after the rainy season, which continues there from June till the middle of September, was nearly over.
On the first day of October, when her ladyship and the suite were to arrive, the durbar of native princes was to be held, and the final proclamation of the Governor-General concerning the affairs of Afghanistan was to be read aloud and issued. As this was but an instance of Anglo-Indian pageantry, though Audley Trevelyan rode amid the brilliant staff of his Excellency, and it all led to something of more interest, we shall only notice it briefly.
The durbar was, indeed, a magnificent spectacle! On a great plateau of brilliant green, smooth as English turf, that lies near the ridge which is crowned by the white plastered mansions of Simla, dotted here and there and finally bordered by dark clumps of heavily foliaged oaks, towering rhododendrons, and over all by mighty, spire-like Himalayan pines; it took place under a clear and lovely sky, and the locality was indeed picturesque and impressive; for in the distance, as a background, towered that wonderful sea of snow-clad peaks, covered with eternal whiteness—peaks between which lie the deep paths and passes that lead to Chinese Tartary, the wilderness of Lop, and the deserts of Gobi. Here and there amid the green clumps and gardens full of rare trees and lovely flowers, a white marble dome, or a tall and needle-like minaret, each stone thereof a miracle of carving, broke the line of the clear blue cloudless sky.
On this auspicious occasion all the Rajahs, Maharajahs, chiefs, Maliks, Sirdirs, and other men of rank, from the protected Sikh territory that lies between the Sutledge and the Jumna, and even from beyond it, were present with their trains of followers, in all the gorgeous richness of oriental costume, bright with plumage, silks, and satins, brilliant with arms and the jewels of a land where sapphires and diamonds, rubies and opals, seem to be plentiful as pebbles are by the wayside in Europe.
At the extreme end of the plateau stood the lofty, parti-coloured tent of the Viceroy, with its cords of silk and cotton; within it was placed a dais that was spread with cloth of gold, and covered by a crimson canopy. On each side of his throne, ranged in the form of an ellipse, were divans or seats for six hundred Indians of the highest rank, while all the officers of the garrison, the guards, and the staff, in their full uniform, with all their medals and orders, added to the splendour of the spectacle, when chief after chief was introduced, duly presented, and marshalled to his seat in succession, amid the sound of many trumpets.
Opposite this ellipse were ranged their followers, on foot or horseback; and immediately in the centre of all, were drawn up in line more than fifty elephants, stolid, and well-nigh motionless, trapped in velvet and gold from the saddle to their huge, unwieldy feet, bearing lofty and gilded howdahs, some like castles of silver, wherein were the wives and families of some of the princes present. All around glittered spears and arms; scores of dancing-girls were there too, richly dressed, singing the soft monotonous airs of the land in Persic or Hindoo-Persic; and a mighty throng of copper-coloured natives, turbaned and scantily clad in a cummerbund or the dhottie at most, made up minor accessories of the general picture.
Over all this, Audley, on foot and leaning on his sword, was looking, glass in eye, with somewhat of the listlessness of theblaséEnglishman; for he had been amid scenes so stirring of late, that mere pageantry failed alike to impress or interest him. Neither cared he, assuredly, for the address of the Governor-General, who was announcing in the Oordoo language that, the disasters in Afghanistan having been fully avenged, the army of the Queen would be withdrawn for ever to the eastern bank of the Sutledge; then his glances began to wander over the bright group of English ladies, so brilliantly dressed, so exquisitely fair, to the eye accustomed so long to Indian dusk, and who now attended the recently arrived wife of the representative of British royalty.
Among them was one whose face and figure woke a strong interest in his heart. Her dress was very plain, even to simplicity—too much so for such a place; her ornaments were very few, all of jet, and rather meagre. All this his practised eye could take in at a glance; but there was something about her that fascinated and riveted his attention.
Not much over nineteen, apparently, and rather petite in stature, she looked consequently younger—more girlish than her years; but her figure was graceful, her air indescribably high-bred, and having in it a hauteur that, being quite unconscious, was becoming. Her eyes were dark, her lashes long and black, her complexion colourless and pure, and her thick hair was in waves and masses, dressed Audley scarcely knew in what fashion, but in a somewhat negligent mode that was sorely bewitching.
Her face was always half turned away from where he stood; for she, utterly oblivious of the Oordoo harangue of his Excellency, was toying with her fan or the white silk tassels of her gloves, while chatting gaily, confidently, and with a downcast smile to a young officer of the Anglo-Indian Staff, and clad in the gorgeous uniform of the Bengal Irregular Cavalry.
That she was a beautiful girl, a little proud, perhaps, of thesang-azurein her veins, was pretty evident; that she might be impulsive, too, and quick to ire, was also evident, from the little impatient glances she gave about her, by a quivering of the white eyelid, and an occasional short respiration; that she might be a little passionate too, if thwarted, was suggested by the curve of her lips and chin. For the critical eye of Master Audley Trevelyan saw all this; but his spirit was seriously perplexed: he had certainly seen this attractive little fair one before—but where?
He was about to turn and ask some one near concerning her, when a hand was laid on his shoulder, and a young officer, whose new scarlet coat, untarnished epaulettes, and fair ruddy face announced him fresh from Europe, said smilingly,
"Ah, Trevelyan, how d'ye do?—remember me, don't you?"
"I think so: surely we met at Maidstone, when I first joined."
"Maidstone! why, you griff, I should think so. Don't you remember leaving us at Allahabad, after Jack Delamere died?"
"By Jove, Stapylton—Stapylton, of the 14th! How are you, old fellow?"
"The same;" and they shook hands, as he now recognised a brother subaltern of his old Hussar corps.
"And you are here on the staff?" said Stapylton.
"Like yourself; butpro tem.till sent off to headquarters. You came up country with her ladyship?"
"Ah—yes."
"Who is that lovely girl near her?"
"Which?"
"She in the white silk, and lace trimmed with black—a kind of second mourning I take it to be."
"Oh, you needn't ask with any interested views. A proud, reserved minx is that little party; but she has been going the pace with that fellow of the Irregular Horse, to whom she is talking and smiling now, and did so all the way out overland. It was an awful case of spoon in the Red Sea, just where Pharaoh was swallowed up; and the Viceroy's wife is very anxious to make a match of it, as a plea for an extra ball."
"But who is she?"
"Oh, some interesting orphan."
"But her name?"
"A Miss Devereaux—Sybil Devereaux. I made an acrostic on it off the Point de Galle," added the ex-Hussar, as the object of their mutual interest turned at that moment casually towards them, and for the first time looked fully in their direction; and then Audley, while he almost held his breath, recognised the dark eyes, the minute little face, the firm lips, and even now could hear the once-familiar voice of Sybil; but she was talking smilingly to another; and as the words of the heedless Stapylton began to rankle in his heart, something of anger, jealousy and pique mingled with his astonishment.
Another was now playing with Sybil the very part that he had done at Cabul with Rose, to the exasperation of poor Denzil, whom, for months before he really died, Sybil had schooled herself to number as among the slain in Afghanistan; hence her little jet ornaments and black trimmings, the only tribute she could pay his memory now.
And this fellow of the Irregular Horse—this fellow who was so insufferably good-looking, and seemed to know it too—this interloper, for so Audley Trevelyan chose to consider him—what manner of advances had he already made, and how had she received them, on that overland route, so perilous from the propinquity and the hourly chances it affords of acquaintance ripening into friendship, and of friendship into love?
Was he only to meet her unexpectedly, and, by that strange influence of coincidence already referred to, to find himself supplemented, it might be, and on the verge of losing, if he had not already—deservedly as he felt—lost her?
Did it never occur to the Honourable Mr. Audley Trevelyan that, separating as they did, there were a thousand chances to one against their ever meeting again in this world, and, more than all, the world of India?
He watched long and anxiously; there was no sign of her seeing or recognising him, and, placed where they were, apart, he had neither excuse nor opportunity for drawing nearer her. The durbar closed at last; a banquet, solemn and magnificent, followed; then, on lumbering elephants and beautiful horses, the various dignitaries withdrew, each followed by his noisy and half-nudesuwarri. A small but select evening party of Europeans was invited that night to the house of the Viceroy; thither went Audley; and there, as he had quite anticipated, they met, not in the suite of rooms, however, but in the magnificent gardens, where there was a display of those wonderful rockets, stars, wooden shells that burst in mid air, displaying a thousand prismatic hues, and many others of those pyrotechnic efforts, in which the Indians so peculiarly excel.
In a walk of the garden, while actually seeking for her, he met Sybil face to face, but leaning on the arm of the same brilliantly dressed officer; for no uniform is more gorgeous or lavish than that of the Irregular Horse, for fancy, vanity, and the army-tailor "run riot" together. He was carrying his cap under his other arm, and seemed entirely satisfied with himself and his companion, in whose pretty ear he was whispering, while smiling, with all the provoking air of a privileged man.
"Ah, Miss Devereaux—you surely remember me?" said Audley, bowing low, with a flush on his brow, and, despite all his efforts, an unmistakable sickly smile in his face.
Sybil grew a trifle paler, as she presented her hand, with a far from startled expression; for she had been quite aware that he was somewhere about the Viceregal Court, and therefore, to her, the meeting was not quite so unexpected.
"You do not seem surprised?" said he.
"Why should I, Mr. Trevelyan, when I knew that you were here?" she replied with perfect candour; "but I am so—so delighted—indeed I am, Audley;" then perceiving that there was an undoubted awkwardness in all this, she coloured, while her eyes sparkled with vexation, and she introduced the two gentlemen rather nervously by name, and then added, in an explanatory tone, to the cavalry officer, "He is quite an old friend, believe me—the same who saved my life. Surely I told you?"
"I am not aware—oh yes—perhaps," drawled the other: "at Cairo, was it not?"
"No, no—in Cornwall."
"But it was in Cairo you told me, when we visited the citadel by moonlight——"
"And we are, as I said, such old friends," she added hastily.
"That, doubtless, you will have much to say to each other. Permit me; for I am perhapsde trop," interrupted the other, twirling a moustache, and looking somewhat cloudy; "but I shall hope to see you ere the trumpets announce supper;" and with a smiling bow he resigned Sybil to Audley's proffered arm, and retired with a good grace to join another group.
"Sybil," said Audley, after a half-minute's pause, during which he had been surveying her with fond and loving eyes, "by what singular incidence of the stars are we blessed by meeting thus!"
"You may well ask, if such you feel it to be," she replied calmly, and her voice made his heart vibrate as she spoke; "yet it is simple and prosaic enough. I am here solely by the influence of misfortune."
"Misfortune?"
"Yes."
"Oh, explain."
"When poor mamma died, what was left for me but to eat the bread of dependence?—and I am a dependent now."
"Sybil!"
"I came to India as that which you find me."
"And that is——"
"The humble friend—the companion, for it is nothing more in plain English—of the Governor-General's lady. Mamma gone—Denzil, too, in Afghanistan—was I not fortunate in finding such a home?"
"My poor Sybil," exclaimed Audley, gnawing his moustache and pressing her soft hand and arm against his side. Then he became silent, as the past and present, for a little, held his soul in thrall; and far from the brilliant fête of the Anglo-Indian Court his mind flashed back to other days, and he saw again only Sybil Devereaux and the purple moorland, the solemn rock-pillar, the lonely tarn, with its osier isles, the long-legged heron and the blue kingfisher amid its green reedy sedges, and in the soft sunlight the grey granite earns cast their shadows on the lee, as when he had seen her on that day when first they met; and much of shame for himself and for his father mingled with the memory and his emotion.
But there was a change here!
The poor, pale girl, who had so anxiously and wearily sought to sell her pencilled sketches and water-coloured drawings in the shops of the little market town, who so often with an aching heart took them back, through the mist and the rain and the wind, to the humble cottage where her mother lay dying, was now in a very different sphere, richly though modestly dressed, easy in air and bearing, perfectly self-possessed, surrounded by wealth and rank, yet with all the secret pride of her little heart, nieek, gentle, and happy in aspect.
She, too, was silent for a time, during which she glanced at him covertly and timidly.
"Here again was Audley," was the thought of her heart; "did he love her still? Had he truly loved her, eventhen?" was the next thought, and her heart half answered, "Yes—he had loved her, but only as the worldly love;" and this fear, this half-conviction, dashed her present joy. Yet no woman wishes to believe, or cares to admit even to herself, that the power she once exerted over a man's heart can, under any circumstances, pass altogether away.
"Sybil," said he, "you, any more than I, cannot have forgotten all our past, and the scenes where we met—the wild shore, the precipices, the grey granite rocks of our own Cornwall; and that awful hour in the Pixies' Cave, too—can you have forgotten that?"
"Far from it, Audley,—I have forgotten nothing; and now I must remember the difference of rank that places us so far—so very far apart," she added with a strange flash in her eye and a quiver in her short upper lip.
"Come this way, dear Sybil. I have much to say—to talk with you about—but we must be alone;" and he led her down a less frequented walk, apart from the company, the strains of the military music, the coloured lights and lanterns that hung in garlands and festoons from tree to tree, and the soaring fireworks that ever and anon filled the soft dewy air with the splendour of many-lined brilliance.
"Will this not seem marked?" asked Sybil nervously and almost haughtily.
"How?"
"I must beware of attracting notice now—here especially; and you are no longer the mere Audley Trevelyan of other times."
"Then, dearest, who the deuce am I?" asked he, laughing.
Sybil had seen the Hindoo maidens—slender, graceful, and dark-eyed girls—launching their love-lamps from the ghauts upon the sacred waters of the Ganges—watching them with thrills of alternate joy and fear, as they floated away under the glorious silver radiance of the Indian moon. She had heard their wails of sorrow if the flame flickered out and died; or their merry shouts and songs of glee if they floated steadily and burned truly and bravely. Audley's affection had been to her as a light in her path that had vanished; but now her love-lamp seemed to be lit again; for Audley, with admirable tact, conversed with her as if on their old and former footing, expressing only what he felt—the purest and deepest joy at thus suddenly meeting her again, and he had too much good taste to make the slightest reference to the gossip of his friend Stapylton, the ex-Hussar, though certainly he had neither forgotten it, nor the unpleasantly offhand mode in which it had been communicated to him.
"But how strange—to come to India, my dear girl, of all places in the world! What led you to think of it?" he asked.
"Have I not already told you? I did not think of it: chance threw the offer in my way; and I had two sufficient reasons, at least, for accepting of it."