The Project Gutenberg eBook of Miss Cheyne of Essilmont, Volume III (of 3)
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Title: Miss Cheyne of Essilmont, Volume III (of 3)
Author: James Grant
Release date: January 18, 2024 [eBook #72745]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Hurst and Blackett, Publishers, 1883
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISS CHEYNE OF ESSILMONT, VOLUME III (OF 3) ***
MISS CHEYNE OF ESSILMONT
BY
JAMES GRANT
AUTHOR OF
"THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "THE CAMERONIANS,"
"THE SCOTTISH CAVALIER,"
ETC., ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1883.
_All rights reserved._
Contents
Chap.
I. The Battle of Amoaful
II. The Scarabœus
III. The Lost One
IV. A Year of Joy
V. In Hampshire Again
VI. Thoughts that often lie too deep for tears
VII. 'Oh, for a Horse with Wings!'
VIII. A Birthday Gift
IX. Cadbury Redivivus
X. At Cape Coast
XI. The Old Warning
XII. 'Ashes to Ashes'
XIII. Events Progress
XIV. Bella's Dot
XV. In Bayswater
XVI. The Four-in-Hand Club
XVII. Humiliation
XVIII. Miss De Jobbyns' Admirer
XIX. The Foreclosure Effected
XX. Homeless
XXI. Conclusion
MISS CHEYNE OF ESSILMONT.
CHAPTER I.
THE BATTLE OF AMOAFUL.
The firing proved a mistake--the result of a false alarm--so the
night passed without any other _alerte_ or disturbance, and all
remained quiet during the temporary halt at Prahsu; but the troops
heard of many strange things as occurring at Coomassie, all deemed by
the natives portentous of its coming fate.
In its market-place--that scene of daily blood and murder--where the
predecessor of King Koffee devoted three thousand victims 'to water
the grave' of his mother--an aërolite fell, to the terror of the
people; but there came still a greater prodigy. A child was born
which instantly began to converse, and, to prevent it having
intercourse with supernatural visitors, it was placed alone in a room
under guards, who in the morning found that it had vanished, and that
nothing lay in its place but a bundle of withered bones; and on this
the fetish men argued 'that Coomassie itself would pass away, and
nothing remain thereof but dead leaves;' and on the same day and hour
that Lieutenant Grant of the 6th--the first white man--crossed the
Prah, there sprang up a mighty tornado, that levelled the great tree
under which the king used to sit, surrounded by his warriors. This
caused a profound sensation among the Ashantees, who gathered by
thousands around it in the market-place, which at that time was
described by one who saw it as 'a den of reeking corpses, shrieking
and tortured victims--men and women butchered by hundreds--where
skulls and human bones lay about as oyster-shells do at home!'
By order of the king's fetishmen two prisoners had knives run through
their cheeks, and were tied up in the woods to die, as a test of
whether our invasion would be successful. The idea of the fetishmen
was that, if the victims died soon, all would be well with Ashantee;
but they lived, one for four and the other for nine days--so the
nation gave itself over for lost.
On the 6th of January--the day the fetish-tree fell--we shed the
first blood in that land of horrors, when Lord Gifford, at the head
of fifty men, captured a village occupied by an Ashantee outpost, and
killed many of its defenders.
And so, till the forward movement began, the troops were impatient
during the halt at Prahsu, the soldiers making wry faces at their
daily doses of quinine, and still more so at their weak ration of
grog--only half a gill per man, or a gallon of rum to sixty-four
men--and the officers missing sorely the pleasures of the long,
glittering, flower-laden mess-table, and the charms of the girls they
had left behind them, and of whom they were reminded by Du Maurier in
some old stray numbers of our friend Mr. _Punch_.
After the troops advanced, the 25th of January saw our posts pushed
as far forward as the Bahrien river, and a slight brush which they
had there with the Ashantees showed that they were making vigorous
efforts to concentrate their forces for a fierce resistance; and on
the 31st was fought the battle of Amoaful, which took place in the
morning, and by eight o'clock the white smoke of the musketry and the
red flashes of the latter, were spouting in every direction, amid the
dark green and wondrous leafy luxuriance of the bushy jungles.
The Rifles were in the reserve, 580 strong, under Colonel Warren.
Thus Dalton, Jerry, and others were for a time almost spectators
while the fight went on, and the leading column--consisting of the
Black Watch, eighty of the Welsh Fusiliers, and two rifled guns, led
by Sir Archibald Alison (son of the historian), extending as it
advanced with loud cheers at a quick run--attacked, before the rest
of the troops came up, the village of Egginassie, upon the slope of
the hill that rises to Amoaful.
Prominent amid the greenery could be seen the red tufts on their
tropical helmets, then the representation of their famous historical
scarlet plumes.
The firing here was tremendous, so much so that all sound of
individual reports was lost, and the din of the conflict became one
hoarse roar. The enemy used slugs, not bullets. Had it been
otherwise, not a man of the Black Watch--many of whom were severely
hit--would have remained to tell the tale. Major Macpherson (young
Cluny) was wounded in several places, but remained under fire,
propped upon a stick.
In five minutes a hundred and five Highlanders, nine being officers,
had blood pouring from their wounds; but 'Onward' was the cry, and as
the Rifles came up in support, amid the ceaseless clatter of the
breechloaders, 'for three hours after the Scottish and Welsh infantry
had carried the village,' says the _Daily Telegraph_, 'the contest
was obstinately maintained in the jungle, where it was difficult to
see or reach the enemy, and quite as hard for him to know how the
fight went upon other points. Assailed in their own wilderness,
followed up foot by foot, the Ashantees fought well, but never gave a
fair opportunity for the shock of a real charge.'
As the Rifles advanced through the jungle in extended order, over
ground which the fire of the 42nd had strewed with killed and wounded
Ashantees, one of the latter, a colossal black savage, clad only with
a middle cloth and string of beads, propping himself upon his elbow,
shot Jerry's servant O'Farrel, in the back and killed him on the
spot, as the ball passed through his heart.
It was, perhaps, the last effort of expiring nature; but Jerry
responded promptly with his revolver, and sent a bullet whistling
through the brain of the Ashantee, who, as he was a man of fine
proportions, was soon after eaten by the Kossos or wild cannibals of
Colonel Wood's regiment, who, as Jerry said, 'felt peckish' after the
fight.
A Highlander lost himself in the bush, and came suddenly upon a
cluster of retiring Ashantees, who shot him down by a volley and
instantly cut off his head, which they carried away, as no trophy is
more prized by this people than human heads, which formed the chief
ornaments of the king's palace, and even of his bed-chamber in
Coomassie.
In the first days of February the passage of the Ordah followed, and
on the night the troops bivouacked by its shore they were without
tents, and the rain fell in merciless torrents, as if the windows of
the sky had opened again, while thunder bellowed in the echoing
woods, and green forked lightning lit up incessantly the bosom of the
foaming river; yet more than ever were our troops anxious when day
broke to begin the weary march--to reach Coomassie and grapple with
the dusky enemy.
The first human blood Jerry Wilmot had ever shed was when he
pistolled the Ashantee who murdered--for murder it was--poor
O'Farrel. He had handled his revolver then promptly, if
mechanically, and thought afterwards--strange to say--with a little
sense of disgust over the episode, and the aspect of the dead negro,
his yellow eye-balls turned back within their sockets, his fallen
jaw, and oozing brain, had actually haunted him.
But since then, in skirmishing, both in the bush and open, Jerry had,
as he phrased it, 'potted three or four more of the beggars,' as
coolly as if they had been black-cocks on a Highland moor.
While the Naval Brigade halted at Ordashu, the Black Watch, with half
a battalion of the Rifles, pushed on towards Coomassie.
Soon tidings came from Sir Archibald Alison, saying briefly,
'We have taken all the villages, but the last, before entering
Coomassie; support me with the Rifles, and I hope to enter it
to-night.'
Fortunately he had been anticipated: the half battalion was close
upon his own, and with it were Dalton and Wilmot.
The slugs were coming out of the bush as thick as hail, and the
advance of the Highlanders and Rifles along the road that led to
Coomassie was in a form never before seen in war. Colonel M'Leod led
the former.
Along the well-ambushed road they proceeded quietly and steadily, as
if upon parade, but by two abreast in file, so narrow was the forest
path.
'Forty-Second, fire by successive companies--front rank to the right,
rear rank to the left,' shouted Colonel M'Leod.
'A company--front rank, present! rear rank, present!'
'So on,' says the correspondent of the _New York Herald_, 'and thus
vomiting bullets two score to the right and two score to the left,
the companies volleyed and thundered as they marched past the
ambuscades, the bag-pipes playing, the cheers rising from the throats
of the lusty Scots, till the forest rung again with the discordant
medley of musketry, bag-pipe music, and vocal sounds. Rait's
artillery now and then gave tongue with an emphasis and result which
must have recalled to the Ashantees memories of the bloody field of
Amoaful, where Captain Rait and his subalterns, Knox and Saunders,
signalised themselves so conspicuously. But it was the audacious
spirit and true military bearing on the part of the Highlanders, as
they moved down the road to Coomassie, which challenged admiration
this day.'
So great was the roar of musketry in the echoing woods that, scared
by the terrible and unusual sound, the very birds of the air--and
brightly plumaged birds they were--grovelled in terror, with
outspread wings over the dying and the dead.
Many were borne rearward disfigured for life and frightfully wounded
by the missiles of their hidden antagonists; but the regiment never
halted--the Rifles following close--nor wavered, but moved steadily
on with its national music playing, until the Ashantees, conceiving
it to be useless to continue against men who advanced thus, heedless
of all ambuscades, rose from their coverts and fled in yelling hordes
towards Coomassie.
'The cool, calm commands of Colonel M'Leod,' says Mr. Stanley, whom
we cannot help quoting, 'had a marvellous effect on the Highland
battalion--so much so that the conduct of all other white regiments
pales before that of the 42nd.' Frequently during the hot and rapid
march to Coomassie the Highlanders saw emerging from the bushes
several scores of fugitives, who found their movements accelerated by
the volleys they received on such occasions. Village after village
along the road heard the disastrous tidings which the fugitives
conveyed, and long before the Highlanders approached the place where
the king remained during the battle, he had decamped because of these
reports.
King Koffee never for a moment anticipated a complete defeat, and
believed that he would only fall back in good order to give us battle
at the head of all his warriors in front of Coomassie itself, and
thus obtain a peace which would at least spare his palace--on which
he set a great store--from destruction.
When Sir Garnet Wolseley, with the main body, was drawing near that
place, he received another despatch from the front. Sir Archibald
Alison wrote to say that he had given some time to treat.
Thus a delay occurred in consequence, and of this delay the
circumstances are not very clear to the outer world. It does not
appear from some accounts to have been Sir Garnet's wish, yet it
undoubtedly took place, and put the troops to some inconvenience by
allowing night to fall before they entered the place.
'Coomassie at last!' exclaimed Dalton, as he threw himself, panting
with heat, among the luxuriant grass that bordered the now bloody and
corpse-strewn pathway. 'Let us but take it, lay it in ashes, and
then hey for home!' he added, hopefully. Yet he had had two narrow
escapes; one ball had knocked off his helmet, and another had scarred
his left cheek.
'Yes, hey for home,' said Jerry, proffering his cigar-case; but poor
Dalton little knew all that had to be dared and done before he saw
the last of Coomassie!
All knew that when the final attack was made there would be a fierce
resistance to encounter--a great slaughter pretty certain to
ensue--no quarter given or taken; and, like several others in the
corps, during the unexpected halt, Dalton and Jerry were writing what
might prove to each a last letter to those they loved at home; and as
the former wrote there came curiously and persistently to memory the
last verse of the song Laura was wont to sing to him of old:
'Then think of me! for withered lies
The dearest hope I nursed;
And I have seen, with bitter sighs,
My brightest dream dispersed.'
Is it strange that, after the peculiar manner of their parting,
Jerry's first and longest letter was not to his mother, but to Bella
Chevenix?
'Poor Bella!' said he, in a broken voice, almost to himself, as he
closed the epistle.
'You did not part on bad terms?' asked Dalton.
'No, thank God! What made you think so?'
'Something in your tone.'
'I am writing to her, though she gave me no hope.'
'No hope--_you_--why?'
'She quite misunderstands the real love I bear her, and evidently
suspects that I wish to secure her hand, not because I am the squire
of Wilmothurst, but because she is in reality the heiress of it.'
'She--what riddle is this?' asked Dalton, taking the cigar from his
lips, and eyeing his friend.
'Did I not make you understand all that before, old fellow?'
'Not quite.'
'Well, old Chevenix has no end of mortgages over my inheritance--it
is well nigh all his property now; I can't even pay the interest--the
mater cannot realise how heavily the old place is burdened, and what
a task my father had to keep it together--so times there are when I
don't care if I should be knocked on the head--bowled out here.'
'Don't talk that way, Jerry,' said the older man, reprehensively;
'death is too close to be lightly spoken of thus.'
Death was indeed closer than either perhaps thought.
'But there is your mother,' urged Dalton, after a pause.
'She! It wouldn't break her "noble" heart, even were it so with me,
and I were lying stiff, as hundreds are now, in yonder bush,' replied
Jerry, with an irrepressible gust of bitterness, as he snipped the
end off a cigar with his teeth, and, lighting it, proceeded to smoke,
silently and sorrowfully, while re-charging his revolver for the
coming attack; 'though, if we are to believe the newspapers, the
grief of the "upper ten," like that of royalty, is something
unfathomable as compared with that of any of the vulgar herd!'
CHAPTER II.
THE SCARABŒUS.
Before the troops, on the side of a large, rocky hill, and in the red
fiery light of the setting sun, setting in a sky where it flamed like
a vast crimson globe amid an orange and amber space that blended into
green and blue overhead, lay Coomassie, with all its long spacious
streets of wigwam-like houses, built of wattlework and mud, plastered
and washed with white clay, ornamented with rows of beautiful banyan
trees, and having before the door of each dwelling a special tree, at
the foot of which were placed idols, calabashes, and human bones, as
fetishes for protection against evil.
It was four miles in circumference, and its most important edifice
was the palace from which King Koffee had fled--a central stone
building of European architecture, in the chief thoroughfare, so
spacious that it included two or three small streets, besides piazzas
for the royal recreation, with arcades of bamboo, the bases of which
were ornamented with elegant trellis work of an Egyptian character.
The accommodation was most ample, as befitted a monarch whom the
State required to possess 3333 wives.
'There go the bugles at last, Dalton!' shouted Jerry, cheerfully, as
he sprang up and drew his sword, when the advance was sounded, just
as the sun went down, and the troops began to approach this terrible
place, through ground the atmosphere of which was made appalling by
the awful stench from exposed corpses which lay about in every
direction, and over which great vultures flapped their wings--the
dead of past days of local slaughter for various royal reasons; thus
it was dark when the 42d and the Rifles reached the edge of the swamp
which nearly surrounds the place--on three sides at least--that
horrible and pestilential swamp, with floating bones and the rotting
flesh of the victims.
The first man through it, and actually in Coomassie, was young Lord
Gifford, who led the way with his scouts till he was wounded, when
the enemy opened fire for a time; but as the king had fled with his
warriors, the resistance was merely nominal, and tremendously hearty
was the cheer of the 42d as they entered the place, and the pipes
sent up a skirl of triumph, which announced that fact to all the
troops who were coming on.
Excitement over now, Jerry Wilmot felt his soul sicken as he marched
at the head of his company up one of the principal streets, with the
awful odour of dead flesh everywhere around--victims never being
buried, but left where they were killed, or cast into the adjacent
swamp. Over all that town, as a writer has it, the odour of death
hung everywhere, and came on every sickly breath of hot wind--'a town
where here and there a vulture hops at one's very feet, too gorged to
join the filthy flock, preening itself on the gaunt dead trunks that
line the way; where blood is plastered like a pitch coating over
trees, floors and stools--blood of a thousand (fetish) victims yearly
renewed; where headless bodies make common sport; where murder pure
and simple--the monotonous massacre of bound men--is the one
employment of the king and the one spectacle of the populace.'
Amid such surroundings the troops piled arms in the market-place,
guards were posted, and the rest sat down to their rations, amid the
light from blazing houses, which the native levies began to loot and
then set aflame; while many Ashantee warriors, who had been but
recently fighting with our men, lingered near the groups quietly,
with their muskets in their hands, saying ever and anon, 'Tank you,
tank you'--an attempt at the only English they knew.
The Fantee prisoners the troops had come so far to release were found
chained to logs; and one European, an Englishman, who was found free,
displayed like them the most extravagant joy on finding himself saved
from death at the hands of King Koffee.
'Is there a drop in your flask, Dalton?' said an officer, propping
himself on his sword. 'The odour here is literally awful.'
'You are welcome to what remains, but a strong cigar is best, my
boy,' replied Dalton, as he wrenched open a tin of preserved meat
with the blade of his sword.
'Now that we are here,' said Jerry, 'what will the next move be?'
'Burn the whole place, no doubt, and then be off like birds,' was the
reply of more than one.
'And so end the most hideous and uninteresting war in which British
soldiers have been engaged.'
'What the devil is that? Trundle it out of sight,' cried Jerry to a
rifleman, who was dragging near them an object which he had found,
and which proved to be one of the king's war-drums, ornamented with
sixteen human skulls and thirty-two thigh bones, and in the cords of
which were stuck three war-trumpets, made each to imitate a throat,
with a tongue of red cloth, and jaws but too real to form the
mouthpiece. 'Take away the d----d thing! Who could sup with that
beside them?' exclaimed Jerry, in great disgust, as the soldier
laughed, saluted, and dragged away the ghastly trophy, on the
resounding head of which some of his comrades were ere long beating
while they sang some familiar music-hall ditty.
As it was expected that King Koffee might still come to terms, his
capital was not yet given to the flames. Indeed, he had sent
messengers to Sir Garnet Wolseley with missives to the effect that he
would be early with him next day and arrange for peace; but the
morning of the next day passed and noon without any sign of his
coming, though the general and staff were in readiness to receive
him, and all were restless and uneasy, as it was impossible to linger
long in such a vast charnel-house as Coomassie.
A dreadful tempest of rain made the adjacent country a swamp, giving
a hint that the fatal and pestilential wet season was at hand, and
the words, 'We must be off,' were in everyone's mouth.
When five o'clock on that day came, and there were no tidings from
King Koffee--now that he had betaken himself into the interior, thus
proving himself unworthy of trust--it was resolved to leave marks of
our power and vengeance that would never be forgotten.
The troops knew that the streams in their rear would be swollen, that
the mere runnels in the ravines would soon become brawling torrents,
so there was no time to be lost in getting back to the coast, where
the ships awaited the army, which had only five days' provisions, so
it was requisite that the campaign should end sharply, surely, and
sternly.
The royal state umbrella and various gold ornaments were taken as
presents for the Queen from the palace, in which the Highlanders were
much exercised in their minds to find, framed upon the wall of a
room, an engraving of 'Burns and Highland Mary' beside a bird organ,
and various old clocks, pots, and kettles; stools wet with the blood
of recent human victims, the royal couch garnished with human
skulls--and skulls, indeed, adorned most of the rooms, the floors of
which were full of graves. In fact, the whole palace, as Mr. Henty
wrote, appeared to be little better than a cemetery, though in its
cellars were found bottles of brandy, palm wine, and even champagne,
which the discoverers thereof were not slow to fully appreciate, and
drain off to 'The girls we've left behind us.'
At last orders were given that the palace was to be blown up, the
whole town reduced to ashes, and a start was to be made for the sea;
then the five past days of continued toil and incessant fighting were
forgotten, and every heart beat happily and every bronzed face grew
bright.
On the day the Engineers began to mine the palace, Dalton and Jerry
Wilmot paid it a visit, and the latter made very merry about the
three thousand three hundred and thirty-three wives of the fugitive
king.
Unluckily for them both, the former saw a gold _scarabœus_, about
the size of a goose-egg, among the many strange ornaments at the head
of the king's bed, and with some force contrived to wrench it off,
saying to Tony as he did so, 'An article of _bijoutric_ for Laura's
boudoir--a souvenir of Coomassie!'
The words were hardly out of his mouth when two tall and powerful
savages, who had been quietly--if sullenly and resentfully--watching
the 'looting' of much royal paraphernalia and rubbish by officers and
men, threw themselves upon him with yells, while brandishing long
straight daggers that were minus guards or proper hilts, and who wore
each at his neck a human jaw, polished clean and white, as a kind of
order of valour perhaps.
Gesticulating violently, they seemed to demand the surrender of the
_scarabœus_, which proved eventually to be a famous fetish--famous
even as the skull of the murdered Sir Charles MacCarthy, which the
king had carried off with him as the chief palladium of Ashantee.
Fortunately Dalton had his sword in his hand, and kept them at bay
till they were expelled at the bayonet point by some of the Royal
Engineers, but when he and Jerry came forth they were conscious that
these two Ashantees with the jaw-bones were watching them and dogging
their footsteps, and were menacing them; but anon they slunk away
when Dalton put his hand to his revolver case.
Then they re-appeared again and again to his great annoyance and
irritation.
'This looks ill,' said Jerry; 'it is some state fetish. Throw the
confounded thing away. Chuck it at their woolly heads ere worse
comes of it.'
'What can come of it?' asked Dalton.
'Your assassination or mine before we reach the coast, perhaps.'
'As for their menaces,' said Dalton, laughing, 'I value them as
little as an old troop horse might a pistol-shot.'
But not long after he had cause to regret not taking Jerry's advice.
In a wattle-built house, of which they had taken possession merely as
a shelter from the heat of the sun by day and the baleful dew by
night, the two friends were partaking of a kind of 'tiffin' of tinned
beef and biscuits, with a glass of grog, before the march, when, at
an opening which served as a window, they became suddenly conscious
of two woolly heads and two dark faces, the gleaming eyes of which
were stealthily watching them, but vanished the moment Dalton started
up.
'Look here, Dalton,' said Jerry, 'I don't like this business at all.
I am not a timid fellow, nor a very thoughtful one perhaps, but I
have an unpleasant presentiment that there is more in this matter
than you think.'
'More in what?' asked Dalton, testily.
'This confounded gold beetle that you've bagged. Perhaps it is
brass.'
'Not at all. Well?'
'It is said to be some great fetish, and you may be followed, tracked
to the bitter end--to Cape Coast, for all I know--till it is
recaptured, or you, perhaps, made away with. You remember the story
of the "Moonstone," published about ten years ago, and how the
possessor of it was followed about till it was re-won?'
'Pshaw!--that was in a novel.'
'And this is reality. Novels are supposed to represent real life.'
'There go the bugles; the advance guard is falling in,' said Dalton,
as he put the gold _scarabœus_ in his haversack, and they hurried
forth.
At six o'clock in the evening the advanced guard moved off, and the
main body followed in the dusk, about an hour after. The Black Watch
remained as a rear-guard to cover the Engineers and burning party,
which consisted of about a hundred men of the latter corps.
Furnished with palm-leaf torches, they began the work of stern and
deliberate destruction, and, although grave fears were expressed that
the late tempests of rain would prevent the streets of thatch and
wood from burning, ere long the retiring troops saw, with cheers,
mighty volumes of smoke rolling from end to end of Coomassie, and
there was but one regret expressed, that the flames did not consume
the Bantama (or burial-place of the kings), with the temples of their
hideous and atrocious paganism, made terrible by the gore of a myriad
human victims.
The pipers struck up, and merrily the Highlanders began their
homeward march, after the officer commanding the Engineers had
reported the total destruction of the palace, which he mined at four
corners, and brought down like a house of cards.
Around it all was in flames, and, owing to the dampness of the
materials of which the town was built, astounding were the columns,
vast and dense, of black smoke that rolled, not only over the whole
site of Coomassie, but the adjacent country, while ever and anon
clear, bright pyramids of flames shot skyward as the retiring troops
toiled round the margin of the corpse-strewn swamp on their homeward
way, with their arms at 'the slope,' as all were loaded.
And so the dire portents of the fetishmen, that Coomassie--the City
of the Tree--would pass away, and nothing remain of it but dead
leaves, were being realised to the fullest extent.
From the nature of the narrow path, the country through which it lay,
and the obscurity caused by the smoke enveloping the scenery, the
march of the troops was of a somewhat straggling nature, and proved a
terrible one. They had barely proceeded a hundred yards before they
had every reason to rejoice that the rains so greatly dreaded had not
set in three days earlier than they did.
In some parts through which the line of march lay, the district had
become an entire morass, and in one place, through which--in
advancing--they had passed nearly dry-shod there was a sheet of water
nearly five hundred yards broad, and in another, over which a narrow
wooden bridge had been thrown, there was a depth of six feet. 'So
King Koffee had calculated on these spring rains, as the Emperor
Nicholas did on the winter snows, to destroy our troops; but,
happily, both calculated in vain.'
It was during the straggling march, caused by some of these
obstructions, that the catastrophe we have to narrate took place.
Again the troops were at times marching almost in file, and in rear
of the last company of Rifles were the two friends, Jerry and Dalton,
and, leaving their men to be led by their senior subalterns, they
paced on together, laughing from time to time, and talking of home
and those who awaited them there, now that the brief campaign was
over, for homeward now went the thoughts of all; but these two were
unaware that their steps were dogged and watched surely and
stealthily.
As they made a little detour to avoid a more than usually deep pool
surrounded by some straggling palm-trees, they suddenly found
themselves face to face with at least a dozen of Ashantees--notably
two of them the fellows with the jawbones. They seemed to have
sprung out of the earth, so suddenly did they appear amid the eddying
smoke and misty vapour; and they at once struck Dalton down before he
could utter a word.
Jerry instantly shot three in quick succession with his revolver,
and, knowing the reports would at once summon succour, he shouted
cheerily, and dragged Dalton to his feet, but at the same moment was
struck down senseless by a tremendous blow on the head, and
falling--falling, he knew not where--remembered no more...
In short, he had tumbled into a species of nullah or hollow,
completely fringed round with enormous boughs and luxuriant greenery,
where he lay hidden and undiscovered by the riflemen whom his
pistol-shots summoned, and who searched the whole vicinity in vain,
till they could delay no longer, as the waters were rising fast.
They carried off with them Dalton, who was severely wounded by
dagger-blades, and whose haversack had been cut away, and taken, and
with it, of course, the unlucky _scarabœus_.
And so, while poor Jerry lay where we have described, the army pushed
on its homeward way, and ere long found the obstructions increase as
the night advanced. Where there had been a small stream at one place
the water was three hundred yards wide and five feet deep. With
great toil the Engineers bridged this by felling a huge tree, over
which the white troops defiled slowly, while the carriers and others
had to splash their way through as best they could, and many of the
shorter men disappeared under the surface more than once.
A worse obstruction still was encountered at Ordah, where the water
had risen two feet above the bridge built by the Engineers, and was
more than five feet deep in the mid-channel, and there the shorter
men had all to be assisted by their comrades who could swim. Another
day crept on, and by five o'clock in the afternoon the whole of the
white troops had succeeded in crossing the half-hidden bridge; but
darkness was coming on, the river was rising fast, and for all they
knew the Ashantees, infuriated by the destruction of Coomassie, might
be pouring in wild hordes upon their rear!
Dalton's wounds had been dressed, but ere that was done he had lost
so much blood that his chances of recovery seemed very precarious;
and meanwhile how fared Jerry Wilmot?
When he struggled back to consciousness, and half raised himself out
of the place in which he lay by grasping the branch of a bush, he
found himself alone, and surrounded by dead silence. Not a sound
fell on his ear, and at a little distance he could see the red
smouldering flames of Coomassie. But where were the troops?
'Oh, God, help me!' he wailed out. 'Gone--gone, and I am left alone
and helpless behind them!'
There was a gleam of moonlight now, and after several futile efforts,
for his senses reeled like those of one intoxicated, he made out the
hour on his watch.
'Midnight--and they have been six hours on the march!'
He had been in a state of semi-unconsciousness for some two hours.
The sense--the conviction that he must instantly do
something--attempt to overtake them, made him struggle up
desperately, feebly, and half blinded in his own blood.
'Oh, Lord,' thought Jerry, 'I shall lose the little reason I have
left! Why did Dalton covet that infernal beetle!'
Alone--alone at Coomassie. Was not this some horrible nightmare, and
not a reality, crushing and bewildering? for but two fates seemed to
await him. If he did not die of hunger in the wilderness, he would
be sure to be tracked and taken; and then, if not killed at once, he
would be doomed to a lingering death by torture in Coomassie, or what
remained of it--tortures such as devils alone could devise.
He made an attempt to stand, but all power of volition seemed to have
left him; he fell again into the leafy hollow, and for a time
remembered no more.
CHAPTER III.
THE LOST ONE.
And where all this time was Alison Cheyne, after whom--as the chief
of our _dramatis personæ_--we must needs look now?
When consciousness returned to her, after wildly grasping the bell in
the porte-cochère of a large house on that night of snow and terror,
and when, fluttering, her white eyelids unclosed, after what seemed a
long sleep, she looked round her like a little scared bird, in utter
bewilderment, and, believing that she was dreaming, closed them again.
A bell ringing at a distance roused her, and she looked again, and
became convinced that what she looked on was no dream, and her eyes
wandered about with a dazed expression.
She was in a little room, with whitewashed walls, and a floor of
plain polished wood, on which lay a tiny patch of faded carpet. The
sunbeams were creeping through the closed blinds, and a fire burned
cheerfully in a little black iron stove. She lay in a pretty bed,
with the softest of pillows and sheets; it was of plain iron, and
without curtains.
Above the mantelpiece, in a simple frame, hung an engraving from
Rubens' picture of 'St. Theresa interceding for the Souls in
Purgatory,' the three principal souls being--in a spirit of
waggery--faithful portraits of the artist's three wives. On one side
of this was a little Madonna on a bracket, with a red crystal lamp
hung before it; on the other a crucifix, below which was a tiny font
of Antwerp china.
Other ornaments--save a few flowers in a vase--the apartment had
none, and its furniture--two cane-seated chairs and a deal table--was
of the simplest kind.
In one of the chairs sat a young woman dressed like a nun, with a
black robe and white hood, a large bronze crucifix and wooden beads
at her cord girdle; her down-cast face had a sweet, placid, and even
beautiful expression, and she was sedulously working, with the
whitest of hands, at a large piece of gold embroidery on cloth of
silver--a portion of a priest's vestments apparently, while glancing
attentively from time to time down on her patient or up at two pretty
little love-birds in a brass cage.
Alison took in all these details at one rapid glance, and great
terror seized her that something strange had befallen her, that she
was in the care of a nursing sister.
'Where am I?' she said, faintly.
'Thank heaven, you speak, and rationally at last,' said her
attendant, casting aside her embroidery and coming softly to her
side, laid her cool hand gently on Alison's forehead. 'Pauvre
enfant! pauvre enfant!' she repeated, caressingly.
'But _where_ am I, and _who_ are you?' asked Alison, in a weak but
impatient manner.
'I am Sister Lisette, and you are safe, safe with friends, and ere
long your own people will soon be here to inquire for you.'
'My friends,' she murmured, with a puzzled expression, as her
thoughts now went back to her father's sick-room in the Hôtel St.
Antoine; to Cadbury, at the thought of which she shivered; to the Bal
Masqué at the theatre; the Café au Progrès, and the insolence of
'Captain Smith;' her flight through the snowy streets; her fall at
the door of a house, the nature of which she knew not; all these
things floated dimly and dreamily before her now, though they seemed
to have happened but a few hours ago.
'How fortunate that you had the power to ring our bell before you
fainted, child,' said the nun, caressing her and kissing her cheek.
'You might have died in the snow otherwise.'
'Last night?'
'No--child--it was several nights ago.'
'Several?'
'Yes.'
'Oh, papa, papa! has he been here?' cried Alison, feebly, in great
anguish of mind, yet unable from weakness to raise her head from the
pillow.
'No, for doubtless he knew not where you were.'
'Oh, he will be dead--dead with terror!' wailed Alison. 'Am I in a
hospital?'
'No, child, in my house,' said the nun, sweetly.
'Your house?' queried Alison, with very open eyes.
'In the Beguinage, in the Rue Rouge.'
Thus it was that both Sir Ranald and Lord Cadbury had utterly failed
to trace her, and fortunate it was indeed for Alison that she had
fallen into such good hands as those of the Beguines, who are a
religious order, altogether peculiar to Belgium, each nun having a
private residence of her own within the general enclosure.
The clatter of the ponderous bell, as the pull left her hand, had
soon brought aid to her. She was denuded of her wet and sodden
attire, put to bed in the little mansion occupied by Sister Lisette,
and, before the angelus bell rang in the chapel next forenoon, she
was in a highly feverish state, and in a delirium which lasted
several nights and days, with intermissions of fretful sleep, during
all of which time nothing coherent could be gleaned from her as to
her name, or where she resided, whence she came, and how it was that
she was abroad in the streets alone and in such a night.
Her little ravings led them to know that she was English; her
costume, and the delicacy and beauty of her person, that she was
undoubtedly a lady; but, save a ring or two, she had no purse,
card-case, or aught to indicate who she was; but the name of 'Alison'
worked upon some of her clothing at once interested deeply Sister
Lisette, who was also an Alison, but adopted the French diminutive of
it.
The poor Beguines were quite uncertain what else they could do with
her, but keep her till she grew well enough to be questioned; so she
remained there in her little iron bed, tended by Lisette, unconscious
and fever-stricken, while the lengthening days passed slowly over her
aching head.
Nearly a fortnight passed before she began mentally to drift back to
consciousness, so terribly had all she had undergone of late--the
collision at sea with the _Black Hound_ of Ostend, the nursing of her
querulous father, her separation from Bevil Goring, and the worry
incident to Cadbury's wooing, culminating in that night of terror in
the streets--told upon her sensitive nature and delicate frame.
A sweet picture she made, in her little white bed in the plain bare
room of the kind Beguine, who never left her even for prayers, but
said them by her side on her knees when the angelus or elevation
bells rang. Among the huge, soft pillows the slight figure of Alison
was half buried, yet the soft tints of her face and hair came out in
a species of relief from them; the former was pale--very pale--and
there were dark circles under the eyes; and the gentle young Beguine
who watched her thought she had never looked on anyone so lovely, and
often sat on a tabourette at the side of the couch, keeping her hand
caressingly within her own, and counting the jewels in her rings one
by one as a child might have done.
'She has a gentle expression in her eyes, such as I have often seen
in those of a _Sœur de Charité_, and other nursing sisters,' was
the dictum of the reverend mother of the establishment, who came from
time to time to visit the fair waif who had been so suddenly cast
upon their tenderness; and, truth to tell, there was a great touch of
melancholy about the eyes and features of Alison Cheyne now, though
certainly melancholy was by no means one of her characteristics
naturally.
The Beguines, we have said, are a religious order peculiar to
Belgium, and totally unlike any other in so far that they are bound
by no vows; they may return to the world whenever they please; but it
is their boast that no sister has ever been known to quit the order
after having once entered it. They attend to the sick in the
Beguinage, and frequently go out as nurses in the hospitals.
They were among the few religious communities not suppressed by
Joseph II. or swept away by the furious torrent of the French
Revolution. Each Beguinage--more especially in Ghent, where the
sisterhood averages six hundred in number--is a species of little
town by itself, with streets and squares, having gates, and sometimes
surrounded by a moat as well as a wall, especially at Bruges.
The sisters live generally in separate houses, on the doors of which
are inscribed, not the name of the occupant, but of some saint
adopted as her patron or protectress; and many of them are persons of
rank and wealth; hence it was in the private house of Sister Lisette
that Alison found herself now.
Many writers ascribe the institution of the Beguines to St. Begga,
widow and abbess, daughter of Pepin of Landen, whose husband, mayor
of the palace, was killed while hunting, after which she dedicated
herself to a penetential state of retirement, and built seven chapels
on the Meuse, in imitation of the seven great churches of Rome; and,
according to the martyrology, she died so long ago as 698. Others
assert that the Beguines were founded by Lambert de Begue or Balbus,
a pious priest, of Liege, in 1170, and derive their name from him;
but all this lies apart from our story. Suffice it that, fortunately
for herself, it was in the spacious Beguinage of Antwerp that Alison
found succour, shelter, and protection.
Alison had often seen nuns, but never spoken to or been intimate with
one before, and, as all she knew of such recluses was derived through
the medium of novels and romances, when strength returned to her she
began to invest Sister Lisette with the halo of fiction, and to
suppose that she must have some story--that a lost lover or a broken
heart accounted for her sweet sadness of face and her present
vocation; and she was nearer the truth in her guess than she
imagined, for Sister Lisette had once been--for a brief time--a happy
wife, of which more anon; and when Alison grew stronger, and was
taken as far as the chapel, she was greatly impressed by all she saw
and heard there at vesper time, though the chanting of female voices
only--some of them from age far from melodious--was pleasing, and the
sight of such a large assemblage of recluses in black robes with
white veils--the ancient Flemish _faille_, which they yet
retain--dimly illuminated by a few votive lamps, had a strange,
weird, and, to her eyes, mysterious effect.
The novices are distinguished by a different costume, and those who
have just taken the veil wear a chaplet round their heads.
But in all this we are anticipating, for at present Alison was weak
as a child, and prostrate with the effect of the short, sharp fever
that had left her, though it was apparent to those who watched her
that the lines of her face were fine, and they could see that, when
well and happy, she must look very beautiful.
In Sister Lisette Alison found an able nurse, for she had served as
one in the German war under the Red Cross; her soft, white hand had
dressed many a ghastly wound and closed many a glazing eye, and often
amid the horrors of Sedan and elsewhere the heads of the dying had
rested on her bosom, and with low, loving words she had soothed their
moments of death and agony--words that were sometimes taken for those
of mother, or wife, or some young love that was far, far away.
Sister Lisette seemed about five-and-twenty years of age; her face
was delicately fair, but the rich tint of her lips and the peach-like
bloom of her cheeks relieved it of all paleness. Her features were
small and regular, but very soft in their lines, and, at times, a
singular sadness stole over them.
Her eyes were of the clearest and darkest hazel, and full of 'soul's
light,' imparted to her face a world of expression; but what the
colour of her hair (or what remained of it) was, it would be
impossible to say, as every vestige of it was closely hidden by her
tightly-fitting white wimple.
'And I have been here for days and nights ill,' said Alison, faintly,
as consciousness came fully back to her, and Lisette, while propping
her pretty head upon her own breast, gave her soothing drink. 'Oh,
what a trouble I must have been to you!'
'No trouble at all, ma sœur,' replied the other, letting her head
tenderly down on the pillow, and smoothing out the latter.
'So long, so long, and without papa being informed,' exclaimed
Alison, as tears of dismay started to her eyes.
'Child, we know not his name--his address--even of his existence.'
Alison sighed deeply. She was too prostrate in body and even mind to
regard anything as very extraordinary, even her unusual surroundings
in the convent; yet she longed for her father to come to her, or to
have tidings of him; of aught else she said nothing.
'Oh, if I should die without seeing papa again!' said she, wringing
her hands.
'One can die but once,' said Sister Lisette, placidly. 'You are too
strong and too young to die, though those who die are sometimes
better off than those who are left in the world. You, at least, have
all your life to look forward to.'
'And you?'
'Mine is ended.'
'Ended!'
'In the world at least, as I shall go back to it no more.'
Seeing that Alison was in a fever of impatience to hear tidings of
her father, Sister Lisette, on obtaining his name and address at the
Hôtel St. Antoine, at once sent a messenger with that letter which,
as we have described, so greatly startled and agitated the old man;
and Alison remained in a fever of impatience, awaiting the return of
that messenger who might perhaps bring her very crushing tidings.
'Dearest papa will not lose a moment in coming to me,' she murmured,
partly to her nurse and partly to herself; but how, if he were too
weak to come or in despair at her loss had left Antwerp, or
perhaps--oh Heavens!--have sunk under it, and--died! And to see him
again would be, of course, to see that odious Lord Cadbury; and so
she tormented herself till the messenger returned with tidings that
her father was well and had been out and about for days, despairingly
searching for her, and would be with her very soon.
'Oh, thank God for that!' said Alison, and a hot shower of joyful
tears relieved her; and now she started up at every sound, and
inquired again and again the exact distance between the Beguinage and
the Marche aux Souliers.
'Ma sœur Alison, you must not speak so much and be so impatient,'
said the Beguine, holding up a finger.
'What--you know my name?'
'Yes, it is mine also.'
'But how?'
Then the Beguine told her how she had become aware of it; and that
she too was an Alison, Lison or Lisette--it was all one--and as she
spoke her hearer's memory went back to that day with the buckhounds
on which our story opens, when Bevil Goring expressed some surprise
at her name, and she had explained that it was an old Scoto-French
one, and common to the Cheynes of Essilmont; and as she thought of
him she pressed his ring to her lips, as if it had been some sacred
relique.
'How well you speak English,' said Alison.
'Because I was educated in the English convent at Bruges,' replied
the sister; 'but hark, there is a voiture at the gate--monsieur has
come!'
'Papa,' murmured Alison, in a choking voice, as she felt herself
become a very child again, and another minute saw his arms around
her, and her face upon his breast, while she indulged in a passionate
fit of weeping, and he with difficulty restrained his tears.
Alison then, after a little time, looked earnestly in his face, and
was shocked to see how wan, and thin, and pinched it had become; for
indeed, during the mystery that enveloped her disappearance, he had
undergone terrible mental agony and much bodily fatigue, for with all
his selfishness he loved Alison as the only link that bound him to
earth.
Her narrative of how she missed Lord Cadbury in that crowded place,
the Théâtre des Variétés, to which she should never have gone,
tallied completely with that of the former; but it was not until next
day that she detailed fully the manner in which she had been lured by
'Captain Smith' to the Café au Progrès, and the terror with which she
had fled from that place into the snowy street.
'Captain Smith!' exclaimed Sir Ranald through his set teeth, while
his eyes sparkled with rage. 'Could I but meet that person, old as I
am, I would give him cause long to remember the weight of my cane,
the scoundrel. I must write to Cadbury on the subject and inquire.'
'Write!--is Lord Cadbury gone?' asked Alison, timidly and hopefully.
'Yes, back to London; he was telegraphed for.'
Alison gave a sigh of relief.
'Shall we go home now, papa--I mean when I am well enough to be
about?'
Sir Ranald paused before replying. Had she relented towards Cadbury
with a desire to see him, or was it a longing to be near 'that fellow
Goring' which prompted the question? One fact seemed pretty evident,
that she and the latter knew nothing of each other's movements, and
that she was utterly oblivious of his being or having been in Antwerp.
'Home--to where?' he asked.
'Chilcote, papa.'
Her reply was perfectly straightforward, though it again suggested
ideas of Bevil Goring, but Sir Ranald deemed that he must have
'effectually crushed that fellow's presumption by the rough tenor of
their last meeting.'
'Chilcote it shall be then, perhaps,' said he.
'Oh, yes, papa; it is so quiet there, even amid our little troubles,'
said she, as he left her, when the Beguinage gates were closed for
the evening; 'and all I want is peace and rest--peace and rest.'
'Shall you ever get them in this world?' asked Sister Lisette.
Alison regarded her wistfully, and said,
'Why not? Can you have led a stormy life?'
'Far from it. My life in the world was a happy one till one dire
calamity fell upon me, and drove me to find peace for ever here; but
how true it is "that it is vain to try to knit up the present with
the past; each part of our lives has its own pleasures and hopes."
But now my pleasure is to do good--my only hope to die soon and well.'
'And the calamity to which you refer?' asked Alison, softly, while
greatly interested by the singularly sweet and subdued manner of the
young Beguine.
'Was the death of my dear, dear husband,' replied the sister; and so,
while she sat stitching away at the shining garment, resplendent with
gold--a priest's vestment--for old Père Leopold of the Church of St.
André, she told Alison some of her experiences in life, and amid
them, curious to relate, there occurred repeatedly a name with which
the reader is already familiar.
Alison had a sweetly sympathetic way with her, and her namesake was
seized by one of the unaccountable fits of confidence that, come to
most of us at times to speak about herself, and tell the story of her
own sorrows.
CHAPTER IV.
A YEAR OF JOY.
A very simple circumstance--an occasion of every-day life--a railway
journey, brought about the awful tragedy in her life, by which she
was left a widow at twenty, after being wedded a year--which she
called a year of joy, left without a near relation in the world but
her brother, Victor Gabion, a captain of Artillery, who, strange to
say, was the source of all her sorrow.
'After leaving the English convent at Bruges, I returned to the house
of my guardian, M. Hoboken, a merchant in the Avenue du Commerce
here. My parents were dead; I had but one brother, Victor Gabion, to
whose brother officer Lucien I had been betrothed by them, and whom I
had known from his early boyhood, when we had been playmates
together, and before we came to those restrictions in intercourse
peculiar to French and Belgian society in later years.
'We had learned to love each other very much, Lucien and I, though
now we could only see each other at given times, and always in
presence of a third party; and each time I seemed to discover some
fresh trait in his disposition which rendered him more worthy of love
and more worthy of the tenderest affection.
'He was so handsome, my Lucien, so kind, so tender; and so good, so
religious and true! He had that dark southern beauty which makes a
man so attractive to a fair woman, and, moreover, he possessed that
charm which is more attractive and dangerous still--he was
interesting.'
Alison thought of her own _fiancée_, Bevil Goring, and believed she
could understand all this to the fullest extent.
'His means were ample and his position good, for, apart from his rank
in the artillery, he was the representative of the Volcarts, one of
the seven _Families Patriciennes d'Anvers_, whose seven
coats-of-arms, all bearing a _fesse checky_ you may see at this hour
carved in the ancient Steyne of Antwerp. But why think of or boast
of such things, when life, we are told, is but a dream, and often a
very painful and feverish one!
'I have told you that I was educated in the convent at Bruges with
English girls and English ladies. Hence I picked up among them some
of that genuine and honest freedom of action which they understood
and enjoyed; so when my betrothal to Lucien was fully known, and even
the time of our marriage stated, we contrived to have more than one
pleasant meeting unknown to my grim guardian, M. Hoboken, whose
absorption in business, and often long absence at the Bassin du
Kattendyk, and even at Flushing, afforded us facilities we could not
otherwise have had.
'But in all this there was a dire fatality, and I shall never forget
the day that brought it about.
'M. Hoboken was to be absent at Flushing for two days, and madame was
an invalid--unable to go abroad. I met Lucien by appointment in one
of the solitary walks, in the quiet park near the Avenue du Commerce,
with a gift I had procured for him, when within a week of our
marriage.
'"Look what I have brought for you!" said I, as I opened a morocco
case containing an armlet of silver, like an Indian bangle--you know
what I mean--flat and broad, and closed by a spring lock. In raised
letters on the outside was my name, Alison, with the date of our
coming marriage.
'"You are my prisoner already," said I, laughingly, as I fitted the
band round his wrist, and the spring closed with a snap, thus it
could neither fall off nor pass over his hand.
'"My dear love!" he exclaimed, and pressed me passionately to his
breast.
'"Now, you are most completely mine," I whispered; "fettered for
life--as without my aid you can never get it off."
'"Why?"
'"Because I shall keep the key," said I, and coquettishly dropped it
into my bosom.
'"Even as you have the key to my heart," he added,
'After a pause he said,
'"M. Hoboken is still at Flushing?"
'"Yes--and does not return till to-morrow."
'"Très bien!" said Lucien, "by what hour, at the utmost, may Madame
Hoboken miss you--or require you?"
'"By seven certainly, and she supposes me to be at the Beguinage--and
so will ask no questions, to put me in a false position."
'"Seven--it wants eight hours of that time. See, Lisette, how lovely
the day is-- how bright the sun, and how beautiful the white and pink
hawthorn that load the air with fragrance."
'"Well, what of that?"
'"Does not such a day make you long to leave dusty Antwerp behind
you, and to roam in the country?"
'"It does indeed; but I dare not think of such a thing--till--till
next week," I replied, coyly.
'"Lisette," said he, "were you ever at the village of Elewyt, where
the old château of Rubens stands, between Malines and Vilvorde? It
is a lovely place, and wild as lovely; not a soul would see us there.
Come with me, darling, and let us spend one happy day together."
'"I dare not--I dare not," as a vision of Madame Hoboken, grim, prim,
and full of proprieties, oppressed me, though I was secretly
overwhelmed with delight at the suggestion of this stolen and, to me,
new kind of pleasure--a whole beautiful summer afternoon to be spent
hand in hand with Lucien--hand in hand, as we were wont to be when
children in the Place Verte or on the Boulevards.
'"Come with me, sweet one," he whispered, "it will never--can never
be known. It is less than an hour by railway, and, amid the bosky
thickets and gardens of the old château we shall seem to leave the
world behind us."
'So strong was the temptation to spend an untrammelled afternoon with
my betrothed--he who within a week was to be my husband--that I
yielded. I knew that I ran a dreadful risk in being seen alone with
him, for Antwerp is one of the most scandalous and gossipy towns in
Belgium. In this country the rules are very strict as regards the
daily intercourse of ladies and gentlemen, in the mere matters of
meeting or conversing, as compared with you in England, where the
perfect freedom of the innocent is so great; and hence, I doubt not,
your happier marriages; for in Belgium, as in France, we are forced
to espouse those to whose inner lives we are strangers, and to whose
hearts, before marriage, we can have no key, if it is ever found at
all.
'A voiture took us to the train, and we took seats in separate
carriages. Already the simple, child-like expedition had an air of
guilt, and a tremulous fear possessed me as the train glided out of
the station, through a cutting in the fortifications at the Rue du
Rempart--the wet fosse was left behind, and we sped through the open
country.
'Glorious was the summer day; exhaled by heat, the silvery mist was
curling up from the rich pastures, amid which the drowsy cattle stood
knee-deep, and from the fertile arable lands, over which the giant
sails of the windmills cast their shadows; but my heart--now that I
was alone, though separated from Lucien by only a carriage or
two--sank lower and lower with vague apprehension, and I restrained
my tears with difficulty. I was full of terrors, scruples, and fears
an English girl, circumstanced as I was, would fail to comprehend,
and after traversing miles of dairy farms, where the summer breeze
played so sweetly on the long ripples of verdant grass, we reached
the little roadside station, where a path diverged to Elewyt. I
gathered courage when Lucien Volcarts joined me, and we found
ourselves indeed alone, for we were the only persons who quitted the
train, which steamed slowly--as all Belgian trains do--on its way to
Vilvorde, and our short but delicious day of rambling and planning,
scheming and dreaming out our future, hand clasped in hand, began.
'We saw the old château of Rubens, now falling fast to decay, amid
its trees, on the land of which he was seigneur, but we did not go
near it, and contented ourselves with wandering amid the sylvan
scenery, all of which had the charm of extreme novelty to me. The
birds that flew overhead or sung in the hedgerows; the thickets of
beech and oak, casting shadows over pools where the trout rose to
catch the floating fly; the white, waxen-like lilies floating also on
their surface; a little stream pouring slowly between gravel banks
and sandstone rocks; deep water-cuts in which the Cuyp-like cattle
stood midleg for coolness; the quaint cottages, few and far apart;
the carillons playing in a distant spire, were all sources of delight
to me--delight all the more that I could turn from them ever and anon
to look into the tender and loving eyes of Lucien.
'At one of the cottages, which quite approached the dignity of a
small farm, we got some refreshment--bread, milk, and cheese--just as
we had been wont to do when children in charge of the same _bonne_,
and the recollection of that made us laugh and all the more enjoy
such simple fare; and truth to tell, though so near our marriage day,
in the freedom of the hour we felt very much as if we were happy
children again; and long we lingered in one spot, I remember, on a
grassy bank under a bower of hawthorn, where the flies buzzed and the
bees hummed, and the village bells rang softly out, but now it was
their evening chime.
'Evening--that suggested thoughts of home and the necessity for
returning, and we had some miles to walk to the railway-station at
Elewyt.
'"It is only five, dearest Lisette," urged Lucien, looking at his
watch; "and the train, which deposits us at Antwerp, is not due for
an hour yet. In a little time we shall go, _petite_."
'The die was cast, for a day of pleasure but marred by secret fears.
I was content to remain a little longer, and then we set out for the
station. More than once did my apprehensive heart, full of undefined
forebodings, suggest the sound of a coming train upon the air, and
once, perhaps, it was real, for, on reaching the hamlet of Elewyt, we
found the station-gate shut and the platform untenanted.
'Lucien looked at his watch and grew pale. The hands still stood at
five o'clock--it was now past seven, the hour at which I should have
been at Madame Hoboken's, and the _last_ train had gone some minutes
before.
'"Gone!" replied Lucien, in a bewildered tone, to his informant; "and
the next?"
"'Not till seven to-morrow morning--from Brussels _viâ_ Vilvorde."
'Both of us were filled with dire dismay as we heard this. Could a
voiture, a vehicle of any kind, be procured? Alas! there was not
such a thing at Elewyt.
'We turned away with sickening hearts, and I must own that mine died
within me. How was I ever to face grim and grave Madame Hoboken? I
felt as if I had committed a terrible crime; I shed the bitterest
tears, and I cannot tell you, here at least, how sweetly Lucien
strove to console and soothe me.
'"I must find you shelter for the night at yonder cottage, where we
got the milk, till train time to-morrow," said Lucien; "for myself, I
must find it where I may. Come, _petite_, take courage; a little
time, and we shall be blessedly independent of everyone."
'On seeing Lucien's well-filled purse, the woman at the cottage was
willing enough to accommodate us, especially on learning that we had
lost the train; but she filled me with fresh dismay on informing me,
with a cunning and penetrating glance there was no mistaking, that
she had "but one _chambre à coucher_, which she sometimes let to
passing English people and others who wished to avoid strangers; and
you, monsieur----"
'"Oh! I will sleep in the stable, or anywhere, madame, provided you
can accommodate _mademoiselle ma sœur_," interrupted Lucien,
colouring at the necessary falsehood which he told for the first time
in all his blameless life, but it was one to protect me.
'Whether the landlady believed him or not I cannot say; but there was
a strange and saucy twinkle in her eyes, and while in attendance upon
us she provoked me by an air of discretion she adopted; from past
experience apparently she was far too discreet to make sudden
irruptions on our _tête-à-tête_ evening, however innocent it was, in
outward seeming as she no doubt thought, and Lucien twisted his dark
moustache angrily, as he muttered,
'"_Sapristi!_ this hag does not live mid-way between Brussels and
Antwerp for nothing."
'"Darkness must be closing over Antwerp now, and all the lamps in the
Avenue du Commerce will be lighted throughout its spacious length and
breadth," was then my thought; "what would Madame Hoboken be thinking
and saying of my non-appearance? Had Monsieur Hoboken returned by
train from Flushing? Doubtless he had. Where would they be
anxiously and angrily suspecting I was?" If they supposed me to be
remaining--as I had more than once done if a night proved wet--when
visiting here at the Beguinage all would be well; but the morning
might ere long produce untoward revelations, and I wept as if my
heart would break when once again I was left alone, as my poor Lucien
betook him to sleep in a loft above the stables, deploring the
_malheur_ in which he had involved us both; but he had no one to
scold him save his colonel if he missed a parade, while my life and
whole future might be made a burden to me.
'Anyway, I was, from a Belgian point of view especially, in a
dreadfully false position. 'There could have been no mistake as to
the hour of the fatal train, though all public clocks in Belgium
strike the hour half an hour beforehand, thus at half-past eleven the
clock announced twelve; and luckily for me Lucien was in plain
clothes, not _en grande tenue_ as he usually was, with sword and
epaulettes on; consequently he would be less remarked, and
fortunately the rain fell heavily that night, which might account for
my remaining for shelter at the Beguinage.
'When morning came my spirits rose a little, and I was up betimes to
meet the early train. How lovely looked the opening summer day. The
grass in the fields, the herbs and flowers in the gardens all
glittered in the rays of the sun, as if the dew that moistened them
had been diamonds, and the tops of the firs seemed edged with silver.
A golden and purple glow filled all the eastern sky, and between it
and earth the vapours of night were floating. The birds were awake,
and the bees hummed and the butterflies flitted about.
'To me the country seemed new and charming, and its continuity of
horizontal lines, each rising beyond the other to the level horizon,
where in the distance rose the spires of Antwerp, gave a sense of
vastness and novelty.
'In different carriages Lucien and I returned to the city. We parted
with but a glance at the station, and with a palpitating heart I
sought my temporary home in the Avenue du Commerce--my mind a prey to
dire misgivings, full of the stolen summer day at Elewyt, the lost
train, the cottage amid the pastures, and Madame Hoboken to be
confronted!
'My innocent secret made a very coward of me. Never had I told a
falsehood, and I felt as if I would rather die than tell one now. I
had done nothing to be ashamed of, and yet the inferences were
terrible, especially in society constituted as it is in Belgium.
'"You were, of course, at the Beguinage?" said madame,
interrogatively, as she came in from early mass.
'"Yes; I went there in the forenoon," I replied, with a sinking
heart, though such was precisely the case.
'"And doubtless the rain detained you all night?"
'"The rain," said I, assentingly.
'"Yet it did not begin to fall till after you should have been at
home."
'I hurried to my own room to avoid further questioning, happy in the
conviction that in six days now I should be the wife of Lucien, and a
free woman.
'Let me hasten over all that followed.
'How my brother Victor--cold, proud, and stern--discovered our
escapade I never exactly knew, nor ever shall know probably till that
day when all things shall be revealed, but he became, fatally for us,
aware of it all.
'"You were not at the Beguinage on the night you said you were?" said
he, in a low concentrated voice, two days after, while grasping my
wrist like a vice, and eyeing me with eyes that sparkled with fury.
'"How do you dare to say so?" I exclaimed, but in a low and agitated
voice.
'"Sapristi!" said he. "You shall learn in time."
'My heart died within me, for there was the blackness of a
thundercloud in Victor's face as he flung me from him, and matters
progressed quickly after that. I was confined to my own room, but
Madame Hoboken informed me that several officers came to and fro
after Lucien--that there were long and grave conferences--that Lucien
seemed terribly disturbed, and she feared there was to be a duel on
the subject, and a duel there was, but not with swords or pistols.
Oh, mon Dieu! In the agony of my heart I am anticipating.
'I grew nearly mad with terror till my marriage morning came, and I
found that no catastrophe had taken place, for Victor came to conduct
me to church, and I wept tears of thankfulness, joy, and gratitude,
as one who had escaped the shipwreck of a whole life (through no
fault of my own), when I was united by Père Leopold to Lucien in the
Church of St. André--the church in which we had both been baptised,
where we had made our first communion together--that church with its
wonderfully carved pulpit, representing Andrew and Peter called from
their nets and boats by the Saviour, all as large as life; and the
altar of St Anthony, with his little pig; and the black devil, with a
long, red tongue, that used to frighten me in childhood.
'The moment the ceremony was over Victor quitted the church without a
word, and I never saw him again. He never visited or came near us,
but remained sullenly aloof, as the months of the first, and alas,
last, year of our married life--my year of joy--rolled swiftly on.
His mood would change, I hoped, in time. Meanwhile, Lucien, my
husband, was all the world to me; and how proud and pleased I used to
be to see our names united, Volcarts-Gabion, as is the custom in
Antwerp.
'Looking back to that time I fear that, in our excessive love for
each other, Lucien and I were a little selfish. We seemed to have so
much to do in our new home--a pleasant house in the Avenue Van Dyck,
overlooking the wooded mounds and beautiful lakes of the park--we had
ever so much to say to each other, that we seemed to have no leisure
for making friends, or even acquaintances, and we forgot to return,
or did so grudgingly, the visits of our hospitable neighbours.
'If I am to speak from personal experience no woman was ever more
superlatively happy than I, or more blessed in her husband, and every
hour that Lucien could spare from his military duties at the Caserne
de Predicateurs was devoted me; and so my year of joy stole swiftly
away, and the first anniversary of our marriage drew near.
'At last I became painfully conscious of a new and unusual gloom,
restlessness, and depression of manner in Lucien, even when he was
caressing me, which he began to do more tenderly and frequently than
ever. There was something unfathomable in the expression of his
eyes, and unaccountable in the sadness of his voice, and in vain I
pressed him to tell me what grieved him.
'"Every human heart has some secret which it longs to keep hidden
from all," said he one day at last.
'"But you, dearest Lucien, should have none from me," I urged, with
my face on his breast, which was heaving painfully under my cheek.
'"That to which I refer you will learn in time--most terribly--my
darling Lisette," said he.
'"Oh, why not now?" I urged; "how cruel this is of you, Lucien!"
'"In old tales," said he, kissing away my tears, "you have read of
persons who sold themselves to the devil?"
'"Yes," said I, breathless with wonder and apprehension at his manner.
'"And whose time on earth was hence allotted?"
'"Yes."
'"Do you think that after such a bond was signed--perhaps in
blood--life would be pleasant?"
'"No, Lucien; but what _do_ you mean?"
'"That I seem to have so sold myself," he replied, wildly, with his
eyes closed.
'"Oh, explain--what do you--what can you mean?" I asked him,
imploringly, as a dreadful fear came over me that his brain was
affected.
'"I have sold myself to an evil spirit, and now come remorse and
misery--remorse for what you will suffer, misery for my own future."
'"Oh, Lucien--my husband!" I exclaimed, folding him in my arms, a
what do these dreadful words mean?"
'"I have so sold myself in a manner, Lisette," said he, passionately,
"and I shall have to pay the bitter, bitter penalty in losing you and
life, and even more, perhaps, and all for what is called honour."
'"What awful riddle is this?" I moaned.
'His words seemed to me like some dead language, the import of which
I failed to understand.
'"Do not, oh, Lisette, when the fatal time comes, deem me a madman,"
said he, covering my face with kisses--yea, and tears too.
'"What end--oh, what can all this mean?" I cried, repressing with
difficulty a desire to shriek aloud, while holding him in my embrace,
for he seemed almost to faint; his lips were a violet tint, and his
face was deathly pale.
'"I cannot tell you all that is before me, or what I have to do and
to suffer, beyond even what I suffer now, lest you should loathe me,
scorn me; but oh, pity me, Lisette, pity me when all is over."
'"Oh, God, he is mad!" I whispered in my heart.
'"I dare not tell you," he resumed; "I have an enemy who is
merciless, and I have blighted your life and my own by an act of
folly, almost baseness, over which I had no control."
'Unutterable, indescribable was my longing, my anxious and
affectionate curiosity to know what this secret was, but next day--on
the anniversary of our marriage--I knew all.
'By an arrangement of which all the officers of their corps were
cognizant, Lucien and my brother, Victor Gabion, who had challenged
him, fought what was called an American duel two days before our
marriage. Two little balls, a black and a white one, had been placed
in a hat, and each of the two principals drew out one, with the
understanding "that he who drew the black one must be numbered with
the dead within twelve months."
'The year--my year of joy--had expired, and in the evening Lucien
shot himself! Two days before, he had written a touching letter to
Victor, praying him for my sake to release him from the penalty he
had incurred, but the letter miscarried, it was never delivered, and
no answer came.
'Lucien had died on the instant, and he was found with my bracelet
clasped upon his arm. It is buried with him, and my heart is buried
too,' added the Beguine, sweetly and simply.
Hence it was, doubtless, that Captain Victor Gabion had such a horror
of duels, as he told Bevil Goring, and that the memory of one haunted
him; and hence it was also that Sister Lisette, after being a Red
Cross nurse in the war, finally entered the Beguinage, that she might
the better dedicate herself to the service of God and to prayer for
the dead.
Alison Cheyne had endured many bitternesses, humiliations, and
mortifications during her short experience of life; but, save the
loss of her mother and brothers, no such keen and unmerited misery as
her poor Belgian namesake, whose strange story gave her some food for
reflection, when the world of waters rolled between them.
The sojourn of Alison in the Beguinage of the Rue Rouge was an epoch
in the history of that ancient institution, an era in the peacefully
monotonous and uneventful lives of the Sisterhood.
Before this sudden illness fell upon her, Alison's health had been at
a very low ebb, 'down many pegs too low,' as her father had said.
She had lived in a series of excitements, joys, and sorrows of a
feverish nature, the joy of meetings with Bevil, the sorrows of their
separation; fears for her father's health, his debts and duns; she
had to exert herself all day, yet lay all night awake; then came the
rough voyage and the catastrophe which formed a part of it. Her
delicate frame was being worn out, without the necessary supports of
proper rest or proper food, and yet latterly she had been an inmate
of one of the largest and most magnificent hotels in Antwerp.
But she had great vitality about her, and now recovered fast.
'We must meet again--we shall meet again!' exclaimed Alison, as she
kissed her namesake many times while bidding her adieu.
'How are we ever to meet,' said the Sister, smiling, 'unless you come
to the Beguinage, as I never leave it?'
'Time will show,' said Alison.
'Yes,' replied the other, 'time and God will show.'
Alison remembered these apparently prophetic words after she was at
home, and Antwerp was far away, and her visit there seemed but as a
dream; for three days after saw her and Sir Ranald in England. 'Ours
is a nation of travellers,' says a writer, 'and no wonder, when the
elements, air, water, fire, attend our bidding to transport us from
shore to shore; when the ship rushes into the deep, her track the
foam as of some mighty torrent, and in three hours or less we stand
gazing or gazed at among a foreign people. None want an excuse. If
rich they go to enjoy; if poor to retrench; if sick to recover; if
studious to learn; if learned to relax from their studies.'
None of these objects had brought Alison--the creature of
circumstances, and of the plans formed by others--to Antwerp, and now
that she was home again--or once again on British soil--the reader
may imagine how anxiously she longed for some tidings of Bevil Goring
(all unwitting that he had been so long near her, in the land of the
stranger), whether he had gone to face the perils of war on the Gold
Coast, or been detached at home; and the only one who could have
speedily enlightened her thereon was the person to whom she dared not
utter his name--Sir Ranald.
So poor Alison could but sigh and think with L.E.L. that
'Earth were too like Heaven
If length of life to love were given.'
CHAPTER V.
IN HAMPSHIRE AGAIN.
'I wish Jerry were here to help me,' sighed Lady Julia, as she
lounged in a luxurious fauteuil in the beautiful drawing-room of
Wilmothurst, with 'Cousin' Emily, on a dull afternoon of February,
when the trees in the stately chase were dripping with moisture, and
the reedy fens and lonesome marshes, where the bittern boomed and the
heron waded, looked dreary, and the edges of the water-flags were
stiff and white with frost. 'I would Jerry were here to help me with
his advice. Not that his advice would help us much perhaps, Emily,'
she added, querulously.
'Advice, Aunt Julia? When poor dear Jerry was here, he did nothing,'
replied that young lady.
'And that was all he ever cared to do, Emily; but I have seen so
little of Jerry since he joined the Rifles that I seem to be quite
alone in the world.'
And she sighed a little conventional sigh, while spreading her
feather fan, though a large crystal screen was placed between her and
the brilliant fire that burned in a grate of steel polished like
silver.
'But matters have come to a crisis with us; through me, I fear,' she
added.
'Through you, aunt?'
'Yes, unfortunately.'
'How--in what way?'
'Did you not see how I turned my back upon that minx, Miss Chevenix,
at the Charity Bazaar last week; cut her dead indeed, and this is the
result!' exclaimed Lady Julia, tossing from her contemptuously a
letter she had recently received.
'What result?' asked Emily Wilmot, too languid to open the missive in
question.
'Her father will wait for the interest on the mortgages no longer,
and we are ruined! Even this house of Wilmothurst may have to pass
to him, and we shall have to go--to go--'
'Where, aunt?' asked Emily, becoming roused now, her light blue eyes
dilated with wonder, and her nose seeming more _retroussé_ than ever.
'God alone knows where; to some obscure watering-place probably. If
this insolent fellow, who certainly has not been paid for some years,
would only wait till Jerry returns from the Gold Coast, and some
arrangements could be made,' continued Lady Julia, in her plaintive
and bleating kind of voice. 'House, lands, and all will go to
Chevenix, and only a few acres will be left us. We are beggars,' she
continued, with angry querulousness, but without altering a line of
her smooth, handsome, and passionless face. 'We have nothing of our
own--all will become his.'
'But surely, aunt, you have friends. There is Lord Twiseldown--there
is Sir Jasper Dehorsey.'
'I cannot stoop to ask, and who would lend me thousands--not even
money-lenders now, for there is nothing left in the shape of land to
borrow on. Wilmothurst will become the property of this upstart
farmer's son out and out. Jerry will have to give up everything but
his commission, and go to India no doubt. Fortunately he has that
resource left him; but I--I shall no longer be able to maintain even
you, Emily.'
Lady Wilmot's emotions of annoyance and anger at Mr. Chevenix and the
whole situation took the form of making her niece smart, while in
reality she had no very genuine fear of such an awful crisis coming
about, thinking that heaven or fate, or something or other, would
never permit a person of her position to be so heavily visited.
'And _what_ shall I do, auntie?' asked the young lady, plaintively,
but with surprise.
'You may have to go out into the world as a governess or companion.'
'Governess or companion! while Bella Chevenix----'
'Will reign here as heiress of Wilmothurst,' said Lady Julia, with
the first approach to expression on her lineless face--a bitter and
scornful smile.
'Oh, it is hard--very hard!'
'Very hard for _me_,' added Lady Julia, who like most of her class
thought chiefly of 'number one.'
'She will make some good marriage,' said Emily, after a pause.
'She is decidedly very handsome, and has, my maid Florine tells me,
magnificent hair.'
'Handsome,' queried the fair Emily; 'yes, but aunt, this is an age of
belladonna, pearl powder, rouge, and heaven knows what more.'
'I hope the Gold Coast will have cured Jerry of his foolish fancy for
that artful girl.'
'Her tastes are decidedly rural. I have been told that she often
assists the vicar in visiting the poor, and actually teaches in his
school at times.'
'Well, she is more in her place there, and acting the village
Samaritan, than riding with the buckhounds, dancing at county and
garrison balls, and giving herself the airs of the _habituée du
monde_.'
Lady Julia had in her arms a Maltese spaniel, a wheezy, fat, and
petted cur that often reposed in a mother-of-pearl basket lined with
blue satin, and she was fondling it as she had never fondled Jerry
when an infant--a cur that snapped viciously at every one who
approached within ten yards of it or her, but which she always
apostrophised and talked to as if it had been a human being; and,
sooth to say, it was about as human in feeling as this earl's
daughter, so far as tenderness and a capacity for loving went--loving
any one at least but herself.
'Come, my sweet one, Floss,' she now exclaimed, oblivious suddenly of
her approaching woes, and while it was leaping and yapping on her
knee she kissed it repeatedly, and said, in a cooing voice, 'Did it
want to go for a drive on this cold cold February afternoon? Then
its mamma will order the carriage and take it for one.'
If Jerry had never in his tender boyhood been fondled in this manner,
how often had he felt in after-life that much of the attention his
mother _did_ at any time bestow upon him was due less to any maternal
instinct or love than to his position and means as Squire of
Wilmothurst and to family pride and vanity.
'A letter, my lady,' said a tall footman, presenting one on a salver,
and withdrawing noiselessly.
'Another from this man Chevenix already. Again! really, really, what
can this person want now!'
She tore it impatiently open, the diamonds on her white fingers
sparkling as she did so, and her delicately pencilled eyebrows were
elevated as she read with aristocratic surprise and impatience:--
'"With reference to my letter of this morning about the mortgages,
dear Lady Julia, take all the delay you may wish. They shall not be
foreclosed till time has soothed the awful blow that has fallen upon
you."'
'Blow!' exclaimed Lady Julia. 'What blow?--what can the man mean?'
'Read on, auntie--there is something more.'
'"The fall of your son so gallantly in Western Africa is a
circumstance to be deplored indeed by all--but more than all by those
who knew him."
'Good heavens--good heavens--good heavens!' said Lady Julia thrice,
in a low yet fretful voice, as if she scarcely understood the
situation; 'it is all some dreadful mistake; Jerry--Jerry--a mistake,
Emily. I saw nothing of it in the _Post_ or _Times_ this morning.
She was trembling excessively now, and Emily's eyes were full of hot
welling tears. Neither of the ladies had seen the fatal intelligence
from the seat of war, for, as they all read only the fashionable
intelligence, they had heeded transactions on the Gold Coast as much
they did those that may be occurring in the mountains of the moon.
However, to do them justice, both were thunderstruck--impressed as
much as it was in their frozen nature to be--when Emily, after
rushing for the morning paper, found the brief telegram or paragraph
to which, no doubt, Mr. Chevenix referred:
'_Coomassie in flames. Army falling back on the Gold Coast; but the
rivers rising fast. Chief casualties--Captain Dalton, Rifles,
severely wounded; Captain J. Wilmot, do., killed and carried off by
the enemy._'
The fashionable aunt and niece, at whose pleasant doors grief and
sorrow seldom or never came, sat for a time as if stunned. Chevenix
and his mortgages were alike forgotten; they could but think of Jerry
and strive to realize the--to them--almost impossible situation,
while the dull and depressing afternoon stole on.
How could it be, or why was it, that Jerry, so jolly and manly--the
son of such a cold and feeble-minded woman of rank and fashion, who
had done her best, but failed, to spoil or pamper him--was reserved
for such a fate as this!
He had escaped the battle of Amoaful, the passage of the Prah, the
fighting prior to the capture of Coomassie, and all the perils of
death by fever and toil to perish thus, when the wretched end had
been achieved and the troops must have been on their homeward way.
Poor Jerry! The life of the mess and the life of Wilmothurst when at
home, where, in consideration of his five feet ten inches and
irreproachable moustache, he had been latterly permitted to be termed
a 'son,' and not, as his mother would have wished, a 'boy.'
Lady Julia Wilmot had never posed in society save as a beauty, and
the great consideration that was ever shown her was due to that
beauty and her birth and position as an earl's daughter; but not to
any brilliant qualities of head--still less of amiability of heart.
Thus in many ways she was a fair average example of 'the upper ten.'
So now it may be said of her and Cousin Emily on this disastrous
occasion,
'Some natural tears they shed, but wip'd them soon.'
And their first thoughts were of a suitable and handsome tablet to
Jerry's memory in the Vicarage Church, and of fashionable mourning
for themselves and the household. It would all cast a gloom over
their return to town after Easter in March, when a 'brief season'
would commence--if they went to town at all, for 'thank Heaven,'
added Lady Julia, 'no one shall accuse me of not doing my duty to my
son. I shall order my mourning at Jay's, and certainly will not wear
one of those frightful bonnets with long--what is it now, John?'
A tall footman, with a face of woe made up for the occasion, and a
manner adapted to it--for the news had spread like wildfire over all
the house and vicinity, and when many genuine tears were shed in the
servants' hall, where Jerry was a prime favourite with the women
folks--brought in a card, announcing
'Miss Chevenix.'
'Chevenix again--this is intolerable! Did you say not at home?'
'I said you were engaged--severially indispoged, my lady,' he
replied, shaking his cauliflower-looking head solemnly.
'Yet--she would come in.'
'Yes, my lady.'
'And at a time like this--when we are plunged in unutterable woe!
Such confident assurance!'
The door was thrown open, and Bella Chevenix came swiftly forward as
the servant withdrew.
But in this we are anticipating a little.
CHAPTER VI.
'THOUGHTS THAT OFTEN LIE TOO DEEP FOR TEARS.'
Like the again partially widowed Laura, Bella Chevenix had watched
with an aching heart the progressive news of the war among barbarians
on the burning Gold Coast, from the landing on New Year's Day to the
battle of Amoaful, the passage of the Prah, and the victorious
advance on Coomassie; and now came the sudden shock and horror by a
tantalisingly brief telegram, in the upper corner of a newspaper,
headed by a sensational title in large type, but three lines,
announcing that the two officers had fallen--Dalton severely wounded,
and Wilmot killed and carried off by the enemy!
Bella sat for a time as one turned to stone, incapable even of
tears--oppressed and crushed down by the one appalling and
apparently, unrealisable thought.
'Jerry dead--Jerry dead--and I shall never see him more!'
Jerry, so full of life and fun and jollity! It seemed incredible.
And yet, why so? He only ran the risks that many others were
running. But the mind of Bella went painfully back to their parting,
when mutual doubts of the purity and honesty of each other's
intentions--doubts born of the existence of those horrible
mortgages--had mutually fettered their tongues, especially so far as
she was concerned, and, when they separated, little dreaming that it
was for ever--separated with a simply repeated 'good-bye' and a
lingering pressure of the hand, while no kiss, no embrace, no promise
were exchanged, and he was going away to be done to death in that
savage land; and she remembered how she wept floods of unavailing
tears as the last sound of his footsteps died away. Poor fellow!
And now she should see him no more--never again!
To Bella Chevenix sorrow, repentance, and love were alike useless, so
far as Jerry Wilmot was concerned. To the girl, just then, it seemed
as if the dream of her life was over and done; in it no other could
replace Jerry; the light had gone for ever out of her world now. She
threw herself upon her knees, in the solitude of her chamber, in a
passionate burst of grief--the brilliant, beautiful, and once happy
Bella--and strove to say, 'Thy will be done,' but the genuine
submission thereto could only come by-and-by.
Under the circumstances of Jerry's profession and career, some peril,
some suffering were not altogether unlooked-for or undreaded; but
that he should be killed and carried off by the dreadful Ashantees,
of whom she had a very vague yet terrible idea indeed, had been
beyond her calculations--beyond her worst anticipations! She felt
dazed, miserable--intensely, and confused.
'I am now sure that he loved me well--well and dearly--and how coldly
I parted with him! Oh, Jerry my darling, can it be that I shall
never see you again!' Thus she said to herself over and over in sad
reiteration, though no sound but sighs left her lips.
Anon she rose and paced her room, with half uttered exclamations of
anguish and sorrow; and then she would throw herself on her bed,
burying her face in her hands, in mute and tearless agony. To think
that he was gone--in his grave, if he ever found one--gone without
the memory of a kind word from her that would make her future life
less bitter.
'Oh, Jerry--dead--dead!' she murmured, with ceaseless reiteration.
She had a craving for such sympathy as her father, who was to a great
extent ignorant of all that had passed between her and Jerry, could
not yield her, and she resolved to visit Laura.
She staggered from the bedside to her toilette-table, and when she
looked into the glass she was surprised by the frozen-like despair
she saw in her own beautiful face, which was as colourless as Carrara
marble now. She bathed her eyes, made a hasty toilette of the most
sable things she could select, tied a thick black veil over her face,
and, ordering her pony phaeton, set out to visit Laura, to whom the
dire tidings had come, of course, betimes, and she too was
overwhelmed by affliction that, however, was not without hope.
She was alone now, most terribly alone at Chilcote Grange. Little
Netty had been sent to a West End finishing school that she might
acquire all sorts of accomplishments and graces with which to delight
her father on his return; and now perhaps poor Tony Dalton might die
by the banks of the Prah and never see England again, for the heat of
the horrible climate there made all wounds more perilous.
'Wounded, severely wounded,' Laura had been repeating to herself: but
where wounded, she speculated--how, and with what, and in what part
of the poor mortal frame.
The telegram was horribly brief and vague! And now though Laura and
Bella Chevenix had few notes to compare, and could say nothing to
comfort each other, they gathered some from the communion of tears
and thoughts and sorrows.
Laura drew forth--as she had done a score of times before--Dalton's
letters to her from Madeira, the Gold Coast, and sent by more than
one homeward-bound ship; and the affection they breathed for her and
Netty filled her soul with great gratitude now, whatever might
happen. She had never received letters from him before--even in
their early lover days at St. Leonard's long ago, before their years
of separation came: and how strange it was to have received letters
from him, conceived in the tenor of these, and signed 'Your
affectionate husband, Tony Dalton.'
Now he and Laura were quite old enough to know their own minds, and
to deplore the separation a previous less knowledge of each other had
brought about between them; neither was likely to make any more false
steps, from rashness or impulse, and they had a fair promise of a
delicious companionship for the future if they were spared to meet
again, and the perils of the Gold Coast ever became a thing of the
past, but that fair promise hung by a thread now.
'Had we never met more--met as we did so singularly by the sudden
arrival of his regiment in Aldershot,' said Laura, 'and I loved or
compelled him, poor darling, to love me again, I might have gone on
to the end of my days nursing a sickly sentimental memory on one
hand, with a species of revengeful memory on the other; but, if we
never meet more on this side of the grave, I shall--till carried to
mine--remember with gratitude that he had learned to love me well,
and Netty too, before we lost him for ever.'
All her natural gaiety and much of her aplomb had left Laura on the
day Dalton sailed from Southampton, and now she was as crushed in
spirit as a poor woman well could be. 'We love because we have
loved,' says a novelist, 'and it is easier to go on in the old
routine, even when all the real life and beauty has died out of it,
than to break with the mere _memory_ of that time which made our life
holy and beautiful to us.'
In the time of this strange enforced separation--in the time of
Dalton's actual desertion of Laura, and when she knew not whether he
was dead or living till she met him at Aldershot--this had been
something of the sentiment that inspired her; but now that they had
both known and loved each other anew under better auspices, and been
so briefly re-united, a contemplation of the catastrophe that might
yet happen wrung Laura's heart to the core.
On leaving the latter, Bella, though still a prey to choking grief,
in the warm and generous impulse of her nature, conceived the idea
of, or thought she might find some comfort in, a visit to Lady
Wilmot. She was _his_ mother, whose grief at least could not be
inferior to her own.
She committed to oblivion all that lady's treatment of herself in the
past time, and even but lately at the Charity Bazaar; yet it was not
without some misgivings, and even pausing in her progress once or
twice, that she turned the heads of her pretty ponies in the
direction of Wilmothurst, her tears falling hotly under her thick
Shetland veil as she passed down the stately avenue and through the
Chase, where every foot of the way suggested some memory of Jerry and
his happy boyhood, when they were playmates till he went to Eton, and
Lady Julia--well, never permitted _her_ name to be on the ordinary
visitors' list. There was a tall elm up which he had clambered, at
the risk of his limbs, to get her a magpie's nest; here they had
gathered the early primroses in April, and the Lent lilies in May, or
hunted for butterflies. How often had they played croquet together
on the bowling-green, and rowed dreamily for hours on the tree-shaded
river; and at every turn the figure of the boy seemed to come before
her, mingled with that of the moustached and handsome young officer
to whom she so strangely bade farewell.
Full of these thoughts, Bella would not be repelled by the
conventional manner or replies of the footman, and begged so
earnestly to see Lady Julia that she was ushered into her presence by
the former, as we have described in the last chapter.
Poor Bella had but one thought--Lady Julia was _his_ mother, and
gladly in that hour of woe would she have thrown her arms around her
and embraced her tenderly; but Lady Julia was cold and calm in aspect
and bearing as a Greek marble statue, and received her visitor
without rising, and with a brief conventional pressure with one hand
while motioning her to be seated with the other.
Whatever hopes Cousin Emily once had of Jerry for a husband--hopes
often crushed by his indifference on the subject, and by a knowledge
of the necessity that he must marry 'money'--they were gone now; and,
besides, she could receive Bella Chevenix now with more equanimity
than hitherto.
But her reception was common-place--chilling also--and poor Bella,
feeling herself _de trop_, an utter intruder, felt confusion blend
with the grief that oppressed her.
'After the awful news of this morning, Lady Julia,' said she, with a
great effort, 'as an old friend of the family, whose ancestors have
been for years upon the estate, as a neighbour, too, in a lonely part
of the county--more than all--all--as--as--I conceived a great
craving to see you,' said the girl, brokenly, in a weak, yet
exquisitely sweet voice.
'Indeed--thanks.'
This was not an encouraging response, nevertheless Bella spoke again.
'Jerry--Wilmot, I mean--and I were such playmates in our childhood
long, long ago, that--that--you know----'
Bella's voice completely failed her under the cold, inquiring eyes of
Lady Julia and Emily Wilmot.
'Playmates!' said the former. 'Yes, your memory does you credit. I
thought you must have forgotten all that by this time, as I am sure
my poor dear boy did.'
'Forgotten!'
'Yes, I think I heard him say something like that to his friend,
Captain Goring.'
'If he spoke of those pleasant times, he would scarcely have
forgotten them,' was the natural response of Bella, to whom Lady
Julia, after a languid stare, said,
'Next mail must bring some distinct details of this calamity that has
fallen upon me and Miss Wilmot.'
Bella felt that she was excluded from the co-partnery of grief--she
who loved the dead as she loved her own soul, and more, and she was
almost, in spite of herself, tempted to daringly enter some little
protest when Lady Julia spoke again.
'I wish Captain Goring were at home; I should send for him. By the
way, does not rumour say he has succeeded to a fortune?'
'To £20,000 a year,' replied Bella, in a low voice.
'Say £10,000--that will be nearer the mark, perhaps £5,000.'
'Why?'
'I believe very little that I see, and always but the half of what I
hear,' she replied, fanning herself.
'How can this woman think of such matters just _now_,' thought Bella,
an emotion of resentful bitterness growing in her heart. 'Oh, how
little did she deserve to have such a son as my darling Jerry!'
The snapping and snarling of Floss, who always resented the advent of
visitors, now required all Lady Julia's kisses and blandishments to
soothe him into the recess of his mother-of-pearl basket; and to
Bella it seemed monstrous, incredible, her bearing. Only this
morning these women heard of the dire calamity, and they were to all
appearance as 'cool as cucumbers'--a little redness they exhibited
about the eyes certainly, and a certain subdued manner alone seemed
to show that they had in any way laid to heart the death of the poor
fellow whose obsequies might have been performed by the birds of the
wilderness.
Doubtless Bella failed to understand the highly born and long
descended; yet in many a gallant field, against both Scots and
French, long before even the days of the great Civil War, had her
ancestors done good and true yeoman service, with bow and bill, for
their acres at Langley Park, under the banner of the Wilmots, with
its three eagles' heads--_sable_ and _argent_.
At last she rose.
'It is well for you, Lady Julia,' said she, 'that you are able to
take this awful dispensation of Providence so calmly as you do.'
'When a thing is inevitable or irreparable, it is best to bow the
head and accept it with a good grace,' replied the bereaved mother,
closing her fan, but not rising from the fauteuil on which she was
reclining, looking gentle and soft, yet iron-bound and icily
conventional.
'The loss of an only son, and such a son?' exclaimed Bella,
indignation mingling with her grief, as she burst into a flood of
irrepressible tears, on which Lady Julia gave her a stare of
well-bred astonishment, and asked,
'What do you mean, Miss Chevenix, by this excessive emotion? Have
you lost any relation recently that you come almost in black, and
with these jet ornaments?'
'No--but I thought--I thought--' stammered Bella.
'You thought--what?'
'That for poor Jerry----'
'Do you mean Captain Wilmot--my son?' asked Lady Julia, icily.
'Yes,' replied Bella, boldly enough now; 'we were such old and good
friends that I thought--a little change of dress was but becoming
reverence to his memory; and I shall make it deeper still.'
'As you please,' said Lady Julia, bowing curtly, while Cousin Emily
rang the bell, and bowed the visitor out.
The two ladies then stared at each other.
There was a _deduction_ to be drawn from honest Bella's deep,
pathetic, and unconcealed interest and grief for the poor dead fellow
that proved somewhat offensive to Lady Julia, who, amid her own
sorrow--or what she considered such--had been considering the fashion
of her own mourning--of mourning for the entire household--and of a
handsomely quartered hatchment to 'hang upon the outward wall'; thus
she was rather astounded and indignant at the rash or adopted bearing
in one of Bella's rank and position; but they savoured, she thought,
somewhat of the servants' hall in demonstrativeness.
She was ashamed as yet to consult her _Dressmakers' Album_, even with
the aid of Emily and Mademoiselle Florine, anent the most becoming
fashion of mourning; but to-morrow she would certainly do so.
'_Assurement, oui!_' thought Florine.
Anger and no small degree of contempt were in the heart of Bella as
she quitted the park gates of Wilmothurst, with a kind of dull and
sodden despair mingling therein, as she drove her ponies home in the
February twilight to her father's house that overlooked the village
green, and she thought how true were the words of Wordsworth of
'Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'
CHAPTER VII.
'OH, FOR A HORSE WITH WINGS!'
Jerry lay long when we left him last in a state of
semi-unconsciousness, thoughts of his past life rather than of his
present most perilous and deplorable predicament hovering in his
mind. He sometimes imagined himself at the mess, and heard the
voices and saw the faces of Goring, Dalton, Frank Fleming, and
others; anon he was in the Long Valley at Aldershot skirmishing with
his company, or riding a hurdle-race by Twesildown Hill. Then came
dreams of the ball at Wilmothurst and of Bella Chevenix in all her
beauty, and his cold, pale, passionless mother. Again he was in the
playing-fields at Eton--again chosen stroke of the Oxford boat. All
these floated before him with an overwhelming sense of pain in his
head, as once again he struggled back to the world and a full sense
of the awful horror of his situation came upon him. Thankful we may
be that, as Pope has it,
'Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state.'
The prospect of Jerry's future made his heart seem to die within him.
The sun was shining brightly now, and save the loud hum of insect
life no sound was in the air or around him. A heavy odour of burnt
wood and of moist thatch came upon the passing wind from where the
fires of the past night were still smouldering in Coomassie, and once
more staggering up Jerry looked around him.
He was alone--left in the bush to perish; and his comrades, where
were they?
Miles on the happy homeward march to the coast, with the swollen
rivers all unbridged and impassable in their rear!
He saw it all--he felt it all, and knew that he was a lost man.
Feeble, defenceless, and single-handed he would fall a victim to the
first savage and infuriated Ashantee he met, and his skull would soon
be laid as an ornament--a royal trophy--at the foot of the king.
A heavy moan escaped poor Jerry; but the love of life, the instinct
of self-preservation is strong in human nature, and his first thought
was to endeavour to follow the army.
At a pool he bathed his head and face, washed away the plastered
blood that encrusted all the vicinity of the wound on his head, and
bound the latter up with his handkerchief. He luckily found his
light helmet in the hollow where he had lain unseen by his comrades,
and, after giving a glance to the chambers of his loaded revolver,
endeavoured to follow as closely as he could the track that led he
knew towards the army--the track the latter must have trodden.
But he frequently lost it, vast swamps and sheets of water were
formed now where none had been before, and he had to make harassing
detours; his powers and his steps were feeble, thus his progress was
slow and often doubtful, and ever and anon he had to pause and look
around him, fearing that in the dingles of the woody wilderness he
might see the dark and agile figure of a hostile savage.
Mid-day came when he was certain that he could have made but a very
few miles of progress, and gasping with heat, giddy and weary, he
crept under the shadow of a dense leafy bush to rest and conceal
himself.
Could he have been certain of the route, he knew that it would have
been safer to travel by night, but in the night he must fail to see
the traces of it, and now, with weariness and pain, a great horror of
the whole situation came upon him, and he could but mutter again and
again,
'Alone--alone in the bush--to die! God help me!'
Poor Jerry was a popular, light-hearted, prosperous, and happy young
fellow, whom every one liked and to whom pleasant things happened
every day. He was wont to own that he found every one kind and every
one nice, and in society, of course, he met many people. Wherever
Jerry had gone, at school, at college, or with the Rifles, he
converted strangers into acquaintances, and acquaintances soon became
his friends. Wherever he went invitations to dinners, balls, drums,
lawn-tennis, and other parties flowed upon him, for he was decidedly
a popular young fellow, with the girls especially.
All that seemed ended!
To Jerry, accustomed as he had been to the sunny side of life, and to
float without a thought upon its rippling and glittering current,
there was something worse than death in his present predicament. He
could understand being shot in action, and then being buried in a
hole or left unburied to the fowls of the air, but this struggle
against destruction--this living death--was utterly beyond all his
calculations!
He partook sparingly of the contents of his haversack, reflecting the
while on what must inevitably ensue when the last of that support for
exhausted nature was expended, for he could not escape a death by
starvation even if he escaped death by other means.
Without food, without comrades, without help or means to cross the
swollen rivers! The perspiration burst in beads upon his temples;
his pulsation caused the aching of his contused wound to become
agony; his muscles grew rigid, he set his teeth, and began to surmise
how long he would last--how long he could endure all that must be
before him now, while muttering again,
'Alone in the bush to die--God help me!'
He had in his haversack rations for three days; even if he could make
them last for seven, his resource would end then; and, even while
sheltered by the giant leaves which abounded there, the baleful night
dews might induce fever and ague, while the waters that barred his
progress were more likely to rise than to fall, as the rainy season,
which had made Sir Garnet Wolseley begin his sudden retreat, had now
commenced.
Tidings that he had perished would soon be telegraphed to England;
many there, he knew, would regret him; with something of a bitter
smile he remembered the farewell parting with his cold, aristocratic
mother, and then the thought of Bella perhaps becoming--for she was
known to be rich--the bride of the horsey Lord Twesildown.
The thought of that nerved him to exertion; the sun was verging
westward now, and once more, with feeble steps and slow he took to
the track again, half blinded at times by the crimson glare of light
that poured between the stems of the trees, for the track he had to
pursue was then straight in the wake of the setting sun.
He could form no idea of the distance he had gone, but the odour of
burned wood which reached him from time to time warned him that he
was still unpleasantly near Coomassie, and more than once sounds that
came upon the wind like a savage shout and the distant beating of a
war-drum, made him creep into the jungle for concealment, and thus
lose time, when, if he would hope to overtake the army, now many
miles on their homeward way, every moment was most precious.
At last, when night, with tropical swiftness, had descended he found
his progress hopelessly barred by that great sheet of water which we
have already referred to--a reach of five hundred yards in breadth
that rolled now at a place through which in advancing the army had
passed dry-shod.
'Out of the running!' exclaimed poor Jerry, using his home
phraseology; 'oh, heavens! how to bridge this sea that lies between
me and the troops? Oh, for a horse with wings!' he added,
unconsciously quoting the exclamation of Cymbeline.
When night fell no resource was left him but to remain there and gaze
with haggard eyes and a desponding heart at the cruel sheet of water
that lay between him and probable safety.
Brightly, as on the New Year's night that saw the troops landing on
that fatal shore, the moon was shining now--brighter even; never had
Jerry seen such brilliancy. In all the vast expanse of the firmament
overhead there was not a vestige of cloud. Millions of stars were
there, but their splendour was dimmed or obscured by the splendid
effulgence of the moon. The vast leaves of plants, whose names were
all unknown to the lost Jerry, were shining in dew as if diamonds had
rained from heaven; every giant cotton-tree and palm, every rock and
fissure were illuminated, and the birds flew to and fro as if a new
day had dawned, but a day of silver, icy-like splendour, and clear as
in a mirror were the shadows of the trees and graceful palms
reflected downward in the sheet of water that glittered in the sheen.
But that he was so weary and faint Jerry would have availed himself
of this wonderful moonlight and endeavoured to get round the flank of
the vast sheet of water that barred his progress, and which reflected
the radiance like a mighty sheet of crystal; but he was compelled to
wait till morning, and again sought shelter under some jungly bushes.
Near the place he saw several broken meat tins and empty bottles
scattered about, indicating where some of our troops had halted
before the final march was made into Coomassie; and he regarded with
interest and anxiety these vestiges which proved that he was in the
right track could he but cross the intervening flood.
With his very existence trembling in the balance with fate, what a
small matter now seemed the mortgages over Wilmothurst and every
consideration save the love of Bella Chevenix; and while he strove to
court sleep--oblivion in that savage wilderness, where no sound met
the ear save the plash of falling dew as some overcharged leaf bent
downward; his whole soul was full of her image--the image of her he
too probably should never, never see again.
With earliest dawn he was again afoot and seeking to get round the
reach of water, but it trended away through hollows far to the north
and south, yet with an aching heart he struggled manfully at his
task. On every hand towered up to the height of two hundred and
fifty feet or more, straight as stone columns, the cotton-trees, like
the giants of primeval vegetation, and round their bases flourished
the wondrous undergrowth of jungle, under which again grew white
lilies, pink flowers, and dog-roses; amid which could be heard sharp
trumpetings of enormous mosquitoes, with the monotonous too-too of
the wild doves, which alone broke the silence of the bush.
'This silence,' wrote one who served in the campaign, 'this
apparently never-ending forest, this monotony of rank vegetation,
this absence of a breath of wind to rustle a leaf, becomes
oppressive, and the feeling is not lessened by the dampness and
heaviness of the air, and by the malarious exhalation and odour of
decaying vegetation which rise from the swamps.'
The report of a musket at no great distance, followed by the noise
made by some wounded animal crashing through the forest. compelled
Jerry, with a heart that beat wildly with agitation and alarm, to
conceal himself instantly; and he had hardly done so, when four armed
Ashantees, with muscular mahogany-coloured forms, gleaming eyes, and
shining teeth, passed near him and continued to hover about, as if
scouting or in pursuit of game.
This compelled him to lie for hours _en perdu_, and evening began to
close again without his having got round the reach of water that lay
between him and the way to Prah, and even if he ever did reach the
banks of that stream how was he to cross it? for he was not a swimmer.
On this night there was no moon, for the clouds were densely massed
in the heavens; the rain fell in torrents, and though sheltered
therefrom in the hollow of a rock Jerry listened to the crashing
sound of the vast drops falling in a ceaseless shower, with a species
of dull despair, for higher than ever would the waters rise now; his
food was failing him, and he gave himself up for utterly lost.
With dawn the rain departed, and the sun exhaled a dense steamy mist
from the drenched forest; but Jerry dared not leave his lair, for
more than once in the distance he heard distinctly cries, strange
sounds, and the explosion of firearms, showing evidently that
scouting parties of Ashantees were hovering about, if it were not
their whole army following up ours, which must be, he knew, at a vast
distance then.
He had now come to his last biscuit, and finding all still when night
fell he again addressed himself to the task of attempting to ford the
water at a place where it seemed shallow. The sky was again cloudy,
veiling most of the stars, and the moon had not yet risen.
At that point the forest was open for a great space, and luxuriant
grass and reed-like rushes covered all the soil. Weak and weary,
stiff and sore, though he had lurked in concealment all day, he
staggered like a drunken man as he approached the water, but ere he
could enter it some uncertain sounds made him look behind. He saw
the gleam of arms, the flash of steel in the starlight; and then,
coming upon him at a rush, apparently were some twenty men, emerging
swiftly from the forest he had left; and though he drew his sword and
grasped his revolver, resolved to sell his life bitterly and dearly,
so enfeebled was his frame, and so great was the shock--the
horror--he experienced at the prospect of the terrible death which so
surely awaited him, after all he had endured and undergone, that he
fell prone on his face and scarcely remembered more, as they closed
in wild tumult around him.
CHAPTER VIII.
A BIRTHDAY GIFT.
'Twa heads are better than ane, though they are but sheep's anes,'
remarked Archie Auchindoir, with a smirk on his wrinkled face, to old
Mrs. Prune, as he gave her a lesson in the art of cooking mutton to
imitate venison, with minced onions and ham, parsley and port wine,
to please the fastidious palate of his ailing master Sir Ranald, who
dearly doted on many things he could not procure now, and of course
longed for venison. So these two old servitors were again to their
joy installed with the little household once more at Chilcote.
And most welcome again to Alison was old silver-haired Archie, with
his genuine ancient Scottish fidelity 'to the auld family'--a species
of fidelity as beautiful and unselfish as it is rare now-a-days.
Mr. Solomon Slagg had failed to let Chilcote; the ruse under which
Sir Ranald and Cadbury had lured Alison to accompany them in a sudden
departure from England in the _Firefly_ had failed, so there was no
reason why they should not return; thus Sir Ranald and his daughter
had returned accordingly.
Daisy Prune's mother had soon restocked the hen-house, and her old
occupations came pleasantly back to Alison. At present she was full
of one thing and another; home was home again; her plants, her
greenhouse, her flowers occasioned many a deep consultation with the
factotum of the establishment, old Archie, anent slips, bulbs, and
seedlings, for her love of flowers amid all her cares and anxieties
had never deserted her.
So father and daughter were back again to homelier fare than that of
the Hôtel St. Antoine, for their dessert after dinner, if served upon
the scanty remains of ancient plate, often consisted of only two bald
dishes of oranges and a few little biscuits.
In her singleness and simplicity of heart, Alison rejoiced to be
again amid her familiar surroundings, as she was destitute of her
father's spirit of futile repining and regrets for the unattainable;
thus every bit of furniture looked an old friend, more particularly
those relics of Essilmont, the family portraits, some of
which--especially those of two handsome cavalier brothers who fell in
battle for King Charles--seemed to the girl's fancy to relax their
haughty features, and smile a welcome home to her--the last of the
Cheynes--as she nestled with one of Mudie's last novels in her
favourite window-seat and strove to read, while her thoughts wandered
to Bevil Goring, wherever he might be, and she pined for him, but in
vain.
Lord Cadbury was in town just then. Her father had not seen fit to
enlighten her as to the circumstance of Goring having followed them
to Antwerp, a fact which would have enhanced his interest in the eyes
of Alison. Of the Cadbury episode, and the meeting which never came
off at the Lunette St. Laurent, he knew nothing; but he was
old-fashioned enough and high-spirited enough to have revolted at
such cowardice, if he had been aware of it.
Alison speculated deeply. If Bevil Goring was in England, how was it
that he made no effort to trace her? Could it be that stung by her
father's imperious manner, and hopeless of ever being rich enough to
please him, he had relinquished her and her love, and perhaps given
himself up to the adoration of another? She had heard and read of
such things, and these surmises saddened and agitated her.
Laura had left Chilcote Grange, none knew for where, thus Alison
could not learn from her any knowledge of Goring's movements, or
whether he was at the camp, or in Africa. She was, in her isolation,
without the means of knowing if he were in the land of the living.
So she was back again to Chilcote and monotony, but a monotony that
was not without an infusion of hope that she might ere long hear
something of her lover; for Chilcote and its vicinity were full of
associations connected with him, particularly their trysting-place,
the old beeches that were leafless still, and looked so lonely when
she lingered there, and watched the brown rabbits scudding among the
last year's ferns; back again to old Mrs. Prune's frugal repasts, and
watching for letters that never came, or those that were not
wanted--letters in blue envelopes, at the sight of which Sir Ranald
shivered. He hated all letters; of what use were they to anyone--all
he wanted was his morning paper.
Severely ailing now, the old man had become more querulous than ever,
and more than ever was Alison sweet in temper, gentle and patient
with him, for she had more than an intuition that she would not have
him long with her, and when he passed away what was to become of her
_then_?
And she would look up beseechingly at the portraits of the two
brothers--the Ranald and Ellon of other times--as if seeking succour
or counsel from them.
'I wish I had been born, papa, when these two kinsmen lived, and when
the world was younger,' she said one day.
'A strange thought for a young girl,' he replied; 'if you had been
born then you would have lived in stormy times, and, instead of
living now, be lying in St. Mary's Kirk at Ellon. But why this wish?'
'Because I think people were truer and more single-hearted then than
they are now--more simple, honest, and less inclined to make shams of
themselves for appearance sake.'
'Hum,' said Sir Ranald, after a pause, during which he had been
eyeing her suspiciously through his gold _pince-nez_; 'have you met
anyone during your protracted walk this afternoon?'
'Whom have I to meet in this lonely place, papa?' she asked, with a
little pang of annoyance in her breast.
'No one you think worth your attention now, perhaps; but you were
most anxious to return here, anyway.'
Alison did not reply, but a sigh escaped her. She had indeed on that
afternoon wandered pretty far on the road that led to the distant
camp at Aldershot, in the slight hope of meeting him of whom her
thoughts were full, and to whom--in ignorance of where he was--she
feared to write announcing that she was again at Chilcote.
Winter had come and gone while she was at Antwerp; the snowdrops had
faded from white to yellow and passed away. The loose petals of the
late crocuses, golden and purple, had also disappeared under the
increasing heat of the sunshine; the garden was fragrant with
wall-flower and scented jonquils, and as the days began to lengthen
the pale primroses came to spot the turf under the old beech-trees,
and within the green whorls of leaves. Ere long the hedge-banks were
gay with them among the litter of dead foliage, and Alison thought of
the days when she was wont to linger and make posies of them as she
went to school.
The sum that was to have been settled on Alison in case Bevil fell in
the intended duel with Lord Cadbury had not taken any tangible form,
as the duel never came off, in the first place, and, in the second,
Messrs. Taype, Shawrpe, & Scrawly at that precise time had been
unable to discover the actual whereabouts of the young lady; so she
was in ignorance of his kind consideration and lover-like generosity,
while they waited for fresh instructions.
But, aware that to one so impecunious as Sir Ranald Cheyne money
could never come amiss, Bevil Goring contrived, through the Scottish
legal agents of the former, to transmit to his bankers for the use of
Alison a sum anonymously, or in such a fashion that they could never
discover, save from himself, from whom or whence it came.
And the news thereof arrived one morning when the holders of some
overdue accounts had been more than usually clamorous for settlement,
and Alison had begun to feel once again some of the old emotions of
shame and desperation in her heart as in the past, and her eyes were
full of unshed tears.
'What a world it is!' groaned Sir Ranald.
'True, papa; yet it is but little we require or wish for.'
'We can neither have what we require or may wish for,
unless--unless----'
'What, papa?'
'We have money,' said he, gloomily.
'True. Oh, that weary money!' sighed the girl. 'However, we have
still five pounds in the bank, and in my purse are a sovereign and
some silver.'
'My poor, obstinate pet! How easily all this might be amended! A
dun, of course,' he added, as the postman's rat-tat was heard at the
door, and Archie brought in a letter. 'Ah! I thought so,' muttered
the poor baronet, as he saw that the envelope was a blue one. 'Throw
it in the fire; they are all alike.'
However, with a snort of impatience, he opened the missive, and as he
read it Alison, who was watching his thin face with affectionate
anxiety, saw an expression of blank wonder, of utter amazement, steal
over it. He started, and, as if he could not believe his eyes, wiped
his _pince-nez_ with his handkerchief and read the letter again,
while Alison, whose birthday it was, and who sighed a little because
there was no one to remember it, stole to his side and peeped over
his shoulder. It was from the secretary of Sir Ranald's bank, to
announce that, by some friend unknown, £1,000 had been paid in the
name of Miss Alison Cheyne for her use and behoof, and as a
_birthday_ gift.
Surprise profound and great joy were the first emotions of father and
daughter, and the latter thought of all the little debts it would
clear and the comforts it would procure for the former; but neither
had the slightest suspicion of the real donor, for Goring was
supposed to have little more than his pay, and both were inclined to
accredit Lord Cadbury with it; thus for a time a perilous emotion of
deep gratitude began really to fill the affectionate heart of
Alison--we say perilous, for it enhanced the prospects of the peer,
and might eventually blight those of Goring, if aught occurred to
make Alison question his truth or loyalty to herself, and yet her
heart shrank with shame at taking a money gift from her rejected
lover.
A birthday gift, she thought; Lord Cadbury did not know her birthday.
Bevil did; but of course this princely and certainly opportune
present could never come from poor Bevil, who was thankful to add to
his income by slaving as a musketry instructor.
Beyond Cadbury conjecture was endless.
'Can it be from Captain Llanyard?' she suggested.
'Absurd!' said her father, almost angrily.
Tom Llanyard, she knew with all a pretty girl's sharp intuition, had
admired her greatly and secretly during the brief voyage in the
_Firefly_, and Tom, we are glad to record, had, singular to say, in
one day realised a handsome fortune.
Alison knew of that circumstance, and she knew too that Cadbury was
too innately vulgar not to be ostentatious with his wealth and
disinclined to hide his candle under a bushel.
Tom Llanyard, with the _Firefly_, when taking her to Cowes by Lord
Cadbury's orders, had been blown by a foul wind, and in a heavy gale
thereof, down the Channel till he was off the coast of Devonshire,
where he fell in with a large derelict Indiaman, which had been
abandoned by her captain and crew during the gale, and of which he
took possession.
He brought her into Dartmouth safely, and she proved to be laden with
teakwood, rum, and a cargo valued generally at nearly £100,000,
consequently the salvage alone proved a handsome fortune to worthy
Tom Llanyard, who immediately resigned 'the honour' of commanding
Lord Cadbury's yacht.
The proud spirit of Alison revolted, on consideration, at the idea of
accepting or using this money; but her father only asked her how they
were to 'rub on' without it, now it had come?
But whence came it? Was it sent in charity, or was it the conscience
money of some false friend, who in the spendthrift past time had
wronged her father on the turf or elsewhere?
To soothe her, he was not disinclined to adopt this view of the
matter; but to suit his own views he again fell back upon the
conviction that the donor could be no other than Lord Cadbury, to
return it to whom would be an insult, and whom it would be but proper
to thank in some fashion.
Thus, great was the surprise of the peer to receive one day at his
club a rather effusive letter from Alison, dictated by Sir Ranald to
thank him for the birthday gift--as they could not doubt--a gift that
nothing but her father's failing health, and the many necessities
that it involved, compelled her to accept. Her little hands trembled
as she closed this--to her--obnoxious epistle; while her eyes were
dim with tears, and her heart wrung with shame and pride, all the
more so as she painfully recalled the episode of Mr. Slagg and the
acceptances.
Cadbury was puzzled sorely; he knew not what to think, and tugged
away at his long white moustache, while thinking 'who the devil can
have sent this money--a thousand pounds too!'
He was not sorry that they should think the gift came from him.
'Hang it all!' he muttered, 'have I not spent ever so much more on
and about her--Slagg's devilish bills too--and all for nothing!'
So he wrote a very artful answer, expressing his surprise that he
should be thanked for such a trifle, thus fully permitting her to
infer that the gift was a kindness of his own; and more than ever did
Alison feel a humiliation, in which her father--selfish with all his
pride--had no share, especially when sipping some very choice dry
cliquot 'veuve,' a case of which he had ordered on the head of it,
and thought that for a little time at least he had bidden good-bye to
_mouton à la Russe_, cold beef, and apple-dumpling--ugh!
At his club and elsewhere in London, Cadbury had a nervous fear of
the Antwerp affair, and the cause of his sudden departure from that
city, oozing out. It might find its way from the _Rag_, of which he
doubted not Goring was a member, but Cadbury forgot that the former
was too much of a gentleman to tell any anecdote that would involve
the name of a lady--more than all, that of Alison Cheyne.
But no one can tell how stories get about in these days, and thus,
when there was any low-voiced talk or laughter in a corner of the
club-room, he grew hot and cold with the terrible suspicion that he
was the subject of both. His hatred of Goring grew deeper, and he
resolved that he would work him some fatal mischief, if he could.
Through Sir Jasper Dehorsey and Mr. Tom Hawksleigh, a rumour
certainly was spread abroad that he had been on the Continent 'with
such a stunning girl;' and old Cad (as he was often called) was
rather inclined to adopt the soft impeachment, and the idea that 'he
was a dog--a gay spark yet--and all that sort of thing, don't you
know.'
But when Dehorsey spoke of the affair, he little knew the rank,
position, or character of the girl he referred to, and the risks she
had run through the brutal selfishness and mischievous spirit of
himself and Hawksleigh, when by falsehoods, and in her confusion,
they had lured her to the Café au Progrès.
At Chilcote, Archie Auchindoir speedily became master of the news
concerning the birthday gift.
'A thousand pounds, my certie, is there as much money in a' the
warld!' he exclaimed. 'Troth, Sir Ranald, he that hath routh o'
butter may put it on baith sides o' his bannock.'
'I don't know,' said Sir Ranald, peevishly, to Alison, 'why I brought
that fellow back again. A Caleb Balderstone is an anachronism in
nineteenth century society.'
'He is so good and faithful, papa--dear old Archie.'
'Yes; but, like all such faithful old fellows, he is a shocking
tyrant--is too much _au fait_ at all one's private affairs, and deems
himself quite a family institution--as much a Cheyne as ourselves.'
But Alison had not the heart to resent Archie's gladness that the
gift--whoever it came from--'would keep the wolf from the door,' as
she thought it might keep the black hound too!
Archie had a profound dislike of Lord Cadbury, and once he ventured
to say to Alison,
'Wi' a' his wealth, I'd as soon see you in your coffin as the Leddy
o' Cadbury Court; but anent this,' he asked, abruptly, in a low
voice, 'where is Captain Goring?'
Alison coloured, but said, in a low, cooing voice,
'Could YOU find out for me, Archie, like an old dear, as you are?'
'I will--I'll ask at the Camp, if I tramp every yard o' the way and
back again.'
'Oh, thank you so much, Archie.'
'I would like to see you married to him, missie,' said the old man,
patting her shoulder.
'Ah, we are too poor yet, Archie,' said Alison, but the next remark,
while it made her laugh, brought a hot blush to her cheek.
'Owre puir! Hoot, fye! Think o' a Cheyne o' Essilmont saying
that--Essilmont where mony a time a hundred o' your name and mair
have had their horses in stall--ilk man boden in effeir o' war?'
exclaimed Archie, his old grey eyes flashing as he spoke. 'No--it is
feeding little mouths ye think o'; but, odds sake, Miss Alison,
they'd bring mair gowd in their yellow curls than they'd ever tak'
frae ye in bannocks and shoon. God never sends a little mouth into
this world without food for it; and, if it is a certain care, it is a
sure joy.'
So Archie soon discovered that Bevil Goring was not at Aldershot,
and, to Alison's joy, that he had not gone to Africa; that the spring
drills had not yet commenced, that the battalion was returning home,
and that Captain Goring was in London, where, she concluded, he must
be idling in ignorance of her movements, and that she was again at
Chilcote.
The year of their mutual promise was already passing away. But what
did that matter? Never would they love each other the less!
How she longed once again to see Laura Dalton, whose new name and
strange story had reached her through the vicar, and amazed her
greatly, for she had a sorrowful sense of isolation and helplessness,
and this darkened more around her, while heavy illness once more fell
upon Sir Ranald, and again the terror came over her that his life
would slowly ebb away.
The scathing bitterness of his tongue when he spoke of Goring often
made her heart wince, but could provoke no response from her lips,
though they often quivered with indignation at his querulous spite.
Though Alison was a woman in energy of purpose and power of
endeavour, in many ways she was still like the veriest
child--especially in so far as a spirit of reasonable obedience to
Sir Ranald went; and after all, as a writer has it, even in these our
days 'such monsters as parents indefinitely relentless will sometimes
outrage dramatic proprieties;' so Alison pondered much upon her
future, but failed to see a clue to it.
In her present small world she had but one little pleasure--her
letters from her namesake, Sister Lisette, the Beguine, full of
prayerful wishes, loving expressions, and pretty messages, and often
containing little religious pictures, with gracefully worded
mementoes in Latin and French.
And thus the days stole away at Chilcote.
CHAPTER IX.
CADBURY REDIVIVUS.
Unabashed by Alison's steady rejection of his suit, encouraged by the
countenance given him by Sir Ranald, who had narrated to him in a
letter written in his now feeble and scrawly hand all that had
occurred subsequently to his missing Alison in Antwerp, and more than
ever encouraged by the latter's missive with reference to the
mysterious birthday gift, Lord Cadbury had the bad taste to resume
his old footing of more than visitor, and attended by Gaskins, who
had now completely recovered, he rode over almost daily from the
Court to Chilcote, and was wont to linger long, to the great
annoyance of Alison, though Sir Ranald, more ailing and querulous
than ever, lay frequently a-bed till nearly noon.
Aware of the trick it could be proved he had, in a spirit of
malevolence rather than to serve his master, played Bevil Goring in
Antwerp, and his confession thereof in a moment of agony, weakness,
and terror, when believing himself to be dying in the Belgian
hospital, the rascal Gaskins was very loth to venture within twenty
miles of Aldershot camp; but, while believing certainly that the
wronged officer of the Rifles would never be at Cadbury Court, he was
less sure that he might not fall upon him in the vicinity of
Chilcote; thus he was greatly relieved when, in reply to some casual
remarks, he elicited from Archie that Captain Goring was in London.
So Gaskins felt his shoulders safe as yet.
'Our fare is no gude enough nae doubt for a gentleman like you, Mr.
Gaskins,' said Archie, as he ushered the dandified groom (whose
surtout was girt by a waist-belt and garnished with a rosebud
button-hole) into the kitchen, his whole face wearing a contemptuous
smirk the while; 'but we can aye gi'e a bane o' cauld beef to pyke,
wi' a farl o' breid and a cogie o' gude yill, and they are better, ye
ken, than sowans, ill-soured, ill-sauted, and sodden.'
'What the dooce is he saying, Mrs. Prune?' asked Mr. Gaskins, in sore
perplexity, as he carefully wiped his cockaded hat with a white
handkerchief.
'Ye kenna what I am saying?' asked Archie, with contemptuous surprise.
'No, Mr. Hackindore, you must excuse me really.'
'Out of the world and into Kippen?' said Archie, with a toss of his
head.
'And how is Sir Ranald, Mrs. Prune?' asked Gaskins.
'The laird is a wee thing dwining again,' said Archie, ere she could
reply. 'They say aye ailin' ne'er fills the kirk-yard; but I'm
fearsome at times this is the last blaze o' the candle in the
socket,' he added, with a little break in his voice.
On the day of this visit Sir Ranald was not visible at all, and Lord
Cadbury had Alison all to himself in the little drawing-room, where
he was fast resuming his old airs of property and protection, and
almost venturing to make what he deemed love in dull and emotionless
tones; and Alison, had she not been grieved by her father's
condition, and worried by the whole situation, might have laughed at
Cadbury's Don Juanesque posing as too absurd.
'I shall never be able to describe to you,' said he, for the tenth
time, 'my profound alarm and grief when I lost you so mysteriously at
Antwerp.'
'In a place to which I should never have gone.'
'Not even with me?' he asked, softly.
'Not even with you; but I was weary, triste--glad to do anything to
forget my own thoughts; but as for your friend Captain Smith----'
'Alison--my dear Miss Cheyne--how often am I to assure you that I
know of no such man? If he was a Captain, in presuming to call
himself a friend of mine, and acting as he did, he deserved the most
severe punishment; and let me assure you that as we were in Belgium I
should have lost no time in inviting him to breathe the morning air
on the ramparts, or anywhere else,' added Cadbury, in a valiant tone,
even while wincing at the recollection of the invitation he had
received for a similar 'breather' in the Lunette St. Laurent.
'I thought duels were as much out of fashion as hoops, patches, and
hair powder,' said Alison, with a little mockery in her tone.
'So did I, by Jove,' responded Cadbury, with some fervour in his
tone. Then he added--'And so Sir Ranald will not appear to-day?'
'No--he is too unwell, and it is only when I think of his condition,'
said Alison, with a quiver of her sweet lip and downcast eyelashes,
'I feel such gratitude to the donor of my birthday gift--it has given
me so many things for papa that, I am not ashamed to say, I could
never have procured.'
'And you have got no certainty of who sent it to you?' asked Cadbury,
with a curious and very artful modulation of voice, as he slightly
patted her hand.
'No--though I may strongly suspect,' replied Alison, while a painful
kind of blush suffused her pale cheek.
'Suspect! can't you guess, rather?'
'Unless--it was you--or the kindest of friends.'
'I do not admit quite that it was; but--'
'Admission or not, it _was_ you,' said Alison, with emotions of
gratitude and humiliation struggling in her proud heart, while her
beautiful eyes looked shrinkingly upward to his; 'but, oh, my heart
tells me, with fear, that it may have come too late--too late.'
'Do not say so,' replied Cadbury, in his kindest tone. 'If I have
not graces of the person to recommend me,' he added, in a low voice,
'I have--it is admitted--great wealth; if that will make you happy,
it is yours--and _his_.'
'I cannot love you for what you may have, and you cannot love me for
what I have only got--a loveless heart.'
'But I may love you for what you are. There is a writer who tells
that "it is finer to be loved for what you are than for what you have
got," because the looks and money often run away, but _you_
remain--unless you die, that is to say.'
'Again this detestable subject!' thought Alison.
'I pity the loneliness of the life you lead here,' said he, 'with
your birds, fowls, and flowers only as your companions.'
'And better to me as such, than some people can ever be.'
Cadbury was silent. There was the old dangerous glitter in his
ferret-like eyes, and he tugged at his long white moustachios, but
ere he could resume, Alison said,
'Excuse me, I must go to papa; I am sure I heard his bell.'
So the peer withdrew, only to come next day in 'his anxiety about the
health of his old friend.'
With poor Alison it was too often a case of 'out of Scylla and into
Charybdis,' as her father generally resumed precisely where Cadbury
left off.
'Is he gone?' asked Sir Ranald, taking her hand in his thin, wasted,
diaphanous fingers, and patting it tenderly on the coverlet of his
bed.
'Who, papa?'
'Cadbury. I would speak to you about him again.'
She made a little impatient and disdainful _moue_ at the name, but
her father, heedless of it, resumed--
'In the winter of my days I have been compelled to bury myself, and
you too, darling, in this dead-alive, man-forgotten place--Chilcote;
but I shall soon be out of it, and you--my poor child--you--you----'
His voice failed him, and Alison's heart failed her too as he spoke
in this pitiful strain.
'As for loving Lord Cadbury,' said Alison, with a voice that seemed
full of tears, 'do not talk to me of that when you are so ill and
feeble, as it wrings my very soul to oppose you. I may--nay, I
must--be grateful for the service his money gift----'
'Say gifts, Alison.'
'Well, gifts have done for you; but I can do no more, my dislike of
him is so intense and rooted.'
'Dislike! The proverb has it that a woman's dislike is only love
turned inside out; and he loves you so! Think of his coronet.'
'A new one--the gilt not even worn by time--a parvenu coronet.'
'Well,' said her father, impatiently, 'it will be old in time; and
does not the land teem with parvenu baronets? They are thick as
blackberries now!'
And Alison was thankful when he dropped asleep, and she was left to
her own aching thoughts, and released from the hateful subject for a
time.
When a man of Cadbury's age and proclivities conceives a fancy for a
girl, he is usually terribly in earnest about it; but 'of that
delicious agony--that glorious fear which makes pallid the face of
the lover--the void in life which must be filled up by a beloved
woman--what did he know?'
Nothing--or what had he ever known, old _vaurien_ as he was?
In short, he came now, not to watch or hope for recovery, but to
learn how _ill_ Sir Ranald was becoming--the sooner the latter was
gone the better for his schemes. The baronet had altered greatly for
the worse in his mysterious and complicated ailment, and the doctors
who came--and, thanks to the birthday gift of Alison, she had secured
the best medical attendance--shook their heads gravely when they saw
him; but not in her presence, as, with professional humanity, they
wished to spare the poor girl any unnecessary pain.
Cadbury often reflected with genuine anger on how his plans for
separating Alison from her father on the Continent, that he might
both compromise and have her at his mercy, had failed; and that he
had barely won, by any pretence, even her gratitude. He had spent 'a
devil of a lot of money--even thousands one way or other,' and was no
nearer his end than before--fair means or foul.
He had, moreover, been dreadfully insulted at the Hôtel St. Antoine,
'by that cad Goring,' and even put in terror of his precious life!
And were all these to go for nothing?
Never, perhaps, since Time was born did a coward forgive the man who
unmasked, affronted him, or did him dishonour in every way; thus more
than ever was Cadbury rancorous at Bevil Goring, and resolved to
revenge himself, through the means of Alison Cheyne, if he could.
'As for Goring,' said he, on one occasion to Sir Ranald, 'we know
nothing of him save that he bears a commission, which any fellow who
can pass the necessary exams, can get now; but as to who he is, or
where he comes from, I don't suppose he could very clearly tell
himself.'
Sir Ranald, though somewhat rancorous in regard to his friend's
rival, was patrician enough to think such remarks unnecessary, and
only answered by a kind of sniff. He knew, on one hand, that Goring
used the arms of the Sussex Gorings, a chevron between two annulets,
dating from the first Edward, while Lord Cadbury was what the Scots
call a 'gutter blood,' whose father, the alderman, had, as recorded
by Debrett, been the first esquire of his race 'by Act of Parliament.'
As for Alison, while undemonstrative, she was passionate as Juliet,
soft and tender as Cordelia, yet none of the bloom had been taken off
her young heart by that playing at love which is known as flirtation,
'ere life-time and love-time were one.' Alison, perhaps, never knew
what it was, and thus the full harvest of her heart and soul had gone
forth to Bevil Goring, and she felt that, if he failed her, life
would 'have no more to bring but mockeries of the past.'
She knew--with terror and foreboding of woe--that the great and
coming crisis in that life would be her father's death. She had
learned now to look that matter in the face, and pondered thereon.
Then the winning ways and sweetly placid features of Sister Lisette
Gabion--features that Fra Angelica might have painted with joy--would
come back vividly to memory; and with them she recalled the peaceful
calm of existence in the Beguinage of Antwerp, where no sound came
from the world without but the bells that called to prayer and the
sweet carillons of the great cathedral tower; and many times there
were when she wondered, if Bevil failed her, could she find a shelter
there?
For already somehow he seemed to have passed out of her life, though
daily she kissed the engagement ring he had placed upon her mystic
finger.
'Papa dead, I shall have no present and no future,' wailed the girl
in her heart, 'and what will become of me?'
What if she had to go down into the ranks of that great army which
toils for daily bread? And with whom and in what fashion would she
earn it? Thoughts like these were corrodingly bitter for a girl so
young and beautiful, so delicate and tenderly nurtured, as Alison
Cheyne of Essilmont!
CHAPTER X.
AT CAPE COAST.
'What is he--who is he?' asked the voice of one in authority, of one
evidently used to command, and who was on horseback.
'An officer of the Rifle Brigade, sir,' replied another.
'Dead, of course?'
'No, sir, but half dead of famine apparently. He looks pale enough,
and his haversack is empty.'
'How comes he to be here, and alone? Poor fellow, he must have
fallen out on Sir Garnet's line of march, and been left in the rear.'
Such were the welcome utterances in English which Jerry Wilmot heard
with joy and astonishment, as, weakly and voiceless, he struggled up
on his hands and arms, and looked around him again, to find a mounted
officer stooping from his saddle, regarding him with interest and
curiosity, while twenty armed natives of a savage and foreign race
jabbered and gesticulated violently as they lifted him from the
ground, and the other European who had spoken applied a flask of
brandy to his lips--a requisite stimulant, of which Jerry partook
gratefully, while joy gushed up in his heart to find that he was, so
far as he could see, saved.
And now to account for this mystery.
It is well known that four days after the destruction of Coomassie,
that city of wigwams in a woody wilderness, a single British officer,
attended by only twenty African soldiers, rode through the still
smouldering ruins, and found no inhabitants remaining.
This officer was Captain Reginald Sartorius, of the 6th Bengal
Cavalry, who had been sent by Captain Glover, R.N., to report to Sir
Garnet Wolseley that he was advancing, and was now within eighteen
miles of the city with his subordinate column, the operations of
which lie somewhat apart from our story, though we may briefly state
that 'the original scheme, and the elaborate attempt of a campaign
starting from the Volta river, with from ten thousand to fifteen
thousand warriors of several nations, had not indeed been carried
out. The native kings had willingly accepted British money, and
flint-lock muskets for their men; but their idea of invading Ashantee
was to go away in another direction, and make war on people out of
the Gold Coast Protectorate, and beyond the range of its policy.
Neither at Addah nor at Accra could we get a real hold of the allies,
upon whom Captain Glover had reckoned. He had, therefore, been
instructed by Sir Garnet to conduct his own reliable force of Houssas
and Yorabas by a given route across the Prah, and join our main body
at Coomassie.'
In obedience to orders, and to report the approach of this force, at
mid-day on the 10th of February Captain Sartorius, starting from a
point which he believed to be only seven miles distant from that
place, began one of the most daring rides recorded in the annals of
war, and for which he won deservedly the Victoria Cross.
Certain of meeting Sir Garnet at Coomassie, he departed without
provisions, and, after a rough ride of eleven miles through a wild
and terrible country, he found himself when night fell at a village
seven miles distant from it. There strange and startling rumours
prevailed among the women, for the men had all gone elsewhere.
Coomassie, they told him, was no more, and its destroyers had
departed.
Captain Sartorius sent messengers to Captain Glover, stating that Sir
Garnet would only be a day's march off, and could easily be
overtaken; but these messengers were fired on in the bush, and no
tidings reached the naval officer.
Moving on with caution, next day Sartorius approached Coomassie,
which was still shrouded in clouds of dark smoke, amid which the red
flames were smouldering, and was met by a woman, who informed him
that 'the king and all his young warriors were in the town raging
over its destruction, and vowing vengeance for it.' Three houses
alone had escaped the conflagration.
Aware that scant mercy would be shown to him and his twenty brave
followers if taken, he quickly left that place of horrors behind him.
Believing that he was now equi-distant between Captain Glover and Sir
Garnet, he bravely resolved to follow up the latter, a fortunate
circumstance for the luckless Jerry Wilmot, who was found in the very
track his party was pursuing.
'Come, my good friend,' said he, after he had heard Jerry's story in
a few words, 'you must pull yourself together and make an effort, as
we must push on without a moment's delay.'
An effort--yes, thought Jerry gleefully, though he was weak, faint,
and feverish, for his adventures in the moist and pestiferous bush
were telling on him now. But for the advent of Captain Sartorius,
what must his fate inevitably have been? He was mounted on the horse
of a messenger, who had been shot in the bush, and now rode on with
his rescuers. The sheet of water which had barred his way so long
they forded, the water rising to their saddle-girths, and then they
pushed on, hoping to reach the bridge constructed by our engineers
across the Ordah. It had been swept away! But the waters which
destroyed it had subsided, and where that waste of water, so
troublesome to our troops, once rolled, the ground was dry and even
hard, but the odours that loaded the air from the bodies of the slain
Ashantees lying in the bush, left Captain Sartorius and his
companions in no doubt of their being on the line of march followed
by Sir Garnet Wolseley.
Poor Jerry had felt himself like one in an evil dream when he found
his limbs so powerless that he was incapable of resistance and
sinking on the earth. Now he felt also in a dream, and could
scarcely realise that he was mounted, with friends and on the
homeward way, for he was half dead with weakness, and, if not rescued
when he was, he must have succumbed very soon after. Keenly had he
realised the fact that
'Past and to come seem best, things present worst.'
Some one proffered him a cigar--a luxury, to a smoker a
necessity--which he had been without for days, and he took it
thankfully, gratefully, and never did he forget the pleasure that
cigar afforded him; but the toil of the journey, after all the blood
he had lost and all the mental and bodily suffering he had undergone,
told sorely upon the nerves and system of Jerry, though a hardy and
active young Englishman, who had never figured second in the hunting
or cricket fields, had been stroke oar of the Oxford boat, and up to
everything in the way of sport that was manly and stirring. But he
dug his knees into his saddle, and even when his head, through very
weakness, was almost bowed on his horse's mane, he thought of Bella
Chevenix, and bravely, as he phrased it, 'strove to keep up his
pecker.'
So onward the party progressed amid scenery clothed with strange
trees, strange flowers, and gigantic plants, with long spiky
blade-like leaves, such as we only see in a botanical garden at home.
There was a lurid sunset, and the hills were as those of heaven, as
described by Dante, 'like sun-illumined gold,' when the party of
Sartorius drew near Amoaful, scaring away all Ashantees who
approached him, and then when night fell he came upon a wounded
Houssa who had fought against us, but gave him the pleasant
intelligence that the British troops were at no great distance--at
Fomannah--where Sir Garnet halted four days, and messengers came from
the King of Ashantee with 1,000 ounces of gold, and the latter
received a treaty of peace in return.
The lonely march was resumed in the morning, and at Fomannah Jerry
Wilmot and Sartorius, with his twenty men, after having marched, each
with arms and forty rounds of ammunition, for fifty-five miles,
overtook the retiring troops of Sir Garnet Wolseley.
Jerry now had 'that ugly knock on his sconce,' as he called it,
properly dressed and attended to by the medical staff, in whose hands
he found poor Dalton done nigh unto death by wounds, and borne among
the sick in a hammock, and ere long Jerry was the occupant of
another, prostrated by fever, and unconscious of most that followed.
Oblivious of the struggle of the night march to the village of
Akanquassie, through a moonless, starless, and pitchy blackness never
equalled; through a swamp, over a precipitous hill, and anon through
a forest, where every moment one ran against a tree, had the helmet
knocked off by a bough, the face scratched by twigs and spiky shrubs,
or the foot stumbled over a great gnarled root; yet the voices of the
officers and men rang cheerily out as they encouraged each other.
'Close up--close up. Now then, my lads!'
'This way--this way. Look out!'
'For what?'
'A deep pool of water.'
'Mind that root! mind that branch!'
'Hurrah, lads! Forward!'
And as the dawn stole in the men of the 1st West Indian Regiment, who
escorted the party of sick in hammocks, seemed to Jerry's eyes most
ghastly in their light grey clothing and white helmets; and it was
said that 'the negro so dressed looked like a convict who had been
hung until black in the face and cut down.'
And often as he tossed in his hammock, which was slung on a pole
dhooley-wise, he would mutter,
'Oh, if Dalton had only let that ---- beetle alone!'
Cape Coast Castle was reached by the entire force in pretty good
condition; but, as an idea of the extent to which fever had raged
among them, we may mention that of the Naval Brigade, which,
including marines, landed two hundred and seventy-eight strong, there
came back only one hundred and nineteen men.
All the rest had found their last homes in the awful solitude of the
untrodden bush.
Apart from sorrow lest he should never more see Laura and his little
daughter so lately found and known, Dalton had a great horror of
finding such a tomb, and being left so far away; and the funeral of a
brother officer, Captain H----, who had died at Essiman of fever,
haunted him like a dream.
He remembered how the forest re-echoed to the three death volleys
over the lonely grave, which lay in a beautiful spot, certainly so
far as tropical flowers and foliage went, and had as a headstone a
stately cotton-tree; but ages may elapse ere the foot of a white man
treads near it again.
All the fire of the soldier seemed to have gone out of Tony Dalton;
and for a time only the ailing and pitiful invalid remained; and he
longed intensely for the presence and the ministering tenderness of
the brilliant Laura--more perhaps to feel in his the little white
hand of Netty--the _enfant terrible_ of the past time at Chilcote
Grange.
Genuine hope first expanded the hearts of Dalton and Jerry, and in
the hearts of many more, when they heard the pipes of the Black Watch
strike up--
'Oh, why left I my hame?
Why did I cross the deep?'
announcing that the white walls of Cape Coast Castle were in sight,
rising apparently sheer out of the jungle, and that beyond them lay
our stately ships of war, and the free rolling waves of the blue
highway that led to home and 'Old England.'
'Rescued, safe, spared to see the white cliffs again--home and
Bella!' murmured Jerry.
Of his mother, though a warm-hearted fellow, he scarcely thought, or
if so, it was in this fashion:
'By nature icy, with all her beauty and pride of place, she is my
mother, true; but what has she done for me? As a child, she never
caressed me, as other fellows' mothers did--no, by Jove, nor tucked
me in my little bed, nor gave me toys or sweets. Did I ever see her
read her Bible in church, or teach me to say a prayer at her knee?
She only cared to see me prettily dressed, that I might outshine
other women's children, but left me otherwise to hang as I grew; and,
by Jove, it is a wonder I didn't grow up a worse fellow than I have
done!'
With half a world of waters between them, these were hard thoughts
for a son to have of his mother; but Lady Wilmot had inspired them
herself.
Both Dalton and Jerry were in such a bad plight from their wounds,
and the latter especially from exposure in the bush, that the doctors
doubted much if they would 'pull through' after the embarkation, as
they were ever and anon tossing on the troubled tide of a
jungle-fever that threatened to bear them both away to the shores of
'the Promised Land,' with a grave in the tropical sea.
CHAPTER XI.
THE OLD WARNING.
Fondly had Alison Cheyne looked forward to her return to Chilcote, as
a chance of reunion with Bevil Goring, as the means to a probable end
of taking up the link of their love where it had last been dropped;
and now she had to content herself with the scanty intelligence
gathered by Archie among the soldiers of his regiment, that he was
not in the camp--was in London, but none knew in what part thereof.
In London, thought Alison, and making apparently no effort to write,
or to discover her; but she forgot that he must be utterly ignorant
of her movements; whether she was at home or abroad; and that she
could now receive letters freely and unquestioned, as her father was
all but bed-ridden again.
Her bubble seemed to be bursting; and this state of
affairs--nothing--was the end of it, after all!
Thus they were both in painful ignorance of each other's movements
amid all the ready appliances of post and telegraph, while Laura
Dalton, who would have been a certain means of communication between
them, was gone from Chilcote Grange, Alison knew not where, but, as
it eventually proved, to Portsmouth to await the returning expedition
from the Gold Coast.
So Alison's days were passed in nursing and monotony now, and often
she and Mrs. Rebecca Prune had their heads together over a
cookery-book, studying the decoction or preparation of something 'for
papa'--to tempt his appetite; for often _he_ had one dish and Alison
another of a more homely kind, or next to none, and though he might
have a dainty spring chicken she dared not kill her hens, they were
laying so well just then.
Sir Ranald had become, as Lord Cadbury remarked rather unfeelingly to
Alison, 'deuced stupid and snoozy now.'
On an evening early in March he sat--as Alison long remembered--for
the _last_ time in his old arm-chair listening to the rooks cawing in
the lofty beeches, the sparrows twittering under the eaves, and the
setting sun was throwing a golden glory over the eastern uplands and
a ruddy gleam on the square, ivyed tower of Chilcote Church in the
distance; and then, without moving his head, which lay back on a
pillow, his eyes, clear and keen though sunken, through the
_pince-nez_ balanced on his long thin nose, regarded lovingly and
affectionately, the downcast face of Alison, whose pretty hands were
adjusting in a vase some fragrant March violets that Archie had
brought her--violets which, as Shakespeare says, are 'sweeter than
the lids of Juno's eyes.'
Once upon a time Sir Ranald had found it a burden--a bore to sign a
cheque, to read a letter, or see his lawyer when he had a land
steward; now there were no cheques to sign, no letters to read save
those of duns, and no lawyer to see, or land steward either; and now,
for the last time he began to harp upon the old string, when she
kissed him, and asked him of what he was thinking.
'Of what can I think save your future, Alison? who cares what becomes
of mine--little as there is left of it, and tired as I am of a life
that is too intolerable to be endured for one's-self alone!' was the
querulous response.
Alison with difficulty restrained her tears, and in a mechanical way
re-adjusted the bouquet of violets.
'Girls--especially poor ones--have only a certain number of chances,
Alison, however handsome and attractive they may be,' he resumed.
'You, under great monetary disadvantages, have had one that is every
way unexceptionable. What more do you want--what more can you want?'
he added, rocking his bald head from side to side, and closing his
eyes wearily.
Alison thought she had had two chances, and the most prized of them
was now a richer offer than she ever deemed it could be; but this was
the one her father chose to ignore as no chance at all.
'I have read, papa,' said she, 'that those "who have neither
character nor conscience may drift, or let others shape the course
for them; but the great thing is to be true to yourself."'
'Yourself--and some penniless cur, like that at Aldershot! Go--I am
disgusted!' exclaimed Sir Ranald, with a sudden gush of querulous
anger.
Alison remained silent. She knew not that the fatal end was drawing
so near now, otherwise she must have temporised with him more; and
she thought--
'But for my love for Bevil, to please papa I might have yielded--so
many girls are drawn or thrust into hateful or grotesque marriages by
want of money, friends, or a home.'
But when she thought this, Alison was ignorant of what so many knew,
and her father should have known--the private character of Lord
Cadbury, or rather his want of it, as he was simply an old _vaurien_.
'Novels have turned your head, Alison,' said Sir Ranald, in a low
voice. 'You expect to be over head and ears--of a necessity--in love
with a hero; well,' he added, through his set teeth, 'this fellow
Goring is not one--didn't he shirk the Ashanti affair?'
'Oh, papa, how cruel and unjust of you! He won three medals, and was
twice wounded in India.'
'Ah! you know all that?'
'He was "detailed" for the depôt, as it is called--so Archie told
me--and had to remain at home.'
'Ah! you know all that too!' exclaimed her father, weakly, but in a
sneering tone.
Why did not Bevil attempt to seek her out? she thought. Had a change
come over his mind and his plans? and was she left in loneliness to
dream over the unattainable?
'It is not medals I would have you to set store upon, but money.'
'I care little about it, papa, and shiver at the name of it.'
'Perhaps so; but we ought to care for what money gets us.'
'Should I accept Lord Cadbury with your permission if he were a poor
man?'
'Certainly not,' he replied, snappishly; 'even a poor Lord would be
no mate for Miss Cheyne of Essilmont--for my daughter!'
'But if she is poor too?'
'Then the greater madness to think of it. But I am weary of this
subject.'
'So indeed am I, papa.'
'And I am weary of life too--oh, so weary--but for you, bird Ailie!
Ring for Archie--and--and let me to bed--to bed.'
So he went to his bed that night, and never rose from it, for he was
dying--dying partly of a general decay of the whole vital system; for
he was a man who had lived high, and with whom life, if easy in one
way, had been a species of feverish chase in another.
In anxious monotony passed the nights and days. Dr. Kneebone, the
Esculapius of Chilcote village, could do nothing for him now; indeed,
there seemed nothing to be done but to watch for the end; and as
Alison watched, with a heart torn by anxiety, passionate filial
regard, and terror of what must inevitably come, again her sweet
face, the softness and delicacy of which the pencil of a Greuze alone
could have pourtrayed, became sad and pale and livid.
Her eyes grew heavy and inflamed by much sleeplessness, and over all
her bearing there spread a soft air of patient suffering with equal
evidence of great resolution and fortitude; and yet--yet, withal,
with a shudder in her heart, times there were when she began to think
of sacrificing herself, if doing so could save her father and prolong
his days.
And old Archie Auchindoir moaned to himself as he pottered about his
daily work, and often he muttered anxiously:
'It's no for nocht the gleds whustle at nicht!'
Dying--Dr. Kneebone assured Lord Cadbury that the old man was
certainly dying, and fully stronger than ever grew the hopes of the
peer to possess Alison, the poor and forlorn, beautiful and hunted
creature, in the midst of her coming desolation and loneliness.
Genuine pity or commiseration he had none.
'Save the puir lassie, he is the last o' the Cheynes o' Essilmont, my
lord,' said Archie, in a very broken voice, as he ushered the peer
out one day; 'the last leaf o' a lang, lane: ancestral tree!'
'What the devil is the use of a family tree unless one could sell it
for timber,' replied the peer, as he took his horse's reins from
Gaskins; 'and as for ancestors' (this was rather a sore subject with
him), 'if one could raise the wind on them, there is many a fellow
who wouldn't even leave himself a father just now!'
And so his lordship cantered off, sitting in his saddle, as Archie
said, 'for a' the warld like a pock o' peats.'
Alison was watching her father sleeping, while this would-be lover
rode pleasantly home to his luxurious dinner, and, as she watched
him, she thought how fearfully wan and gray his face looked; and yet
how noble it was in its manly beauty. What a handsome youth he must
have been, when he won her mother's heart as a girl.
'How dark it has become!' she murmured in a low voice, as Archie
brought noiselessly in a carefully shaded lamp, 'and the sunset was
so unnaturally bright,' she added, in a kind of whisper, with a
convulsive trembling of her lips and a strange pitifulness and
foreboding in heart as she resumed her seat by the bedside, in shadow.
Dr. Kneebone had looked at the sinking patient for the last time, and
departed with a very grave face--grave, for his kindly heart was full
of pity for the young girl, who now knew that the great change would
come before long.
The vicar of Chilcote had read the prayers for the dying, and not
without deep emotion, for he was a warm-hearted old man; and after
placing the book in Alison's hand, with certain pages marked for her
perusal, had departed also; and she--declining all offers of feminine
assistance from the vicarage--remained alone, and choked with emotion
by the bedside, with one of her father's passive hands clasped in
hers, to wait and to watch.
A storm was rising without, but great was the hush of silence in the
half-darkened chamber as the hours of the night stole solemnly on;
and Archie and Mrs. Rebecca Prune, approaching the door on tip-toe,
peeped in from time to time, but were always warned away by a wave of
Alison's hand.
On the mantelpiece ticked a handsome little carriage clock, one of
the few remaining relics of former wealth and luxury; but the sound
it made was soon lost amid the din of the elemental war without.
Once or twice Alison mechanically turned her pale and hopeless face
to the window; the bare black branches of the great beeches were
tossing on the gale, and dark clouds were hurrying past the white,
weird disc of the moon; eerily wailed the blast around the old house,
rustling the rain-soaked creepers on its walls, and the great drops
swept in gusts upon the rattling window panes.
The patient stirred restlessly; the din of the rising storm--oh,
could she but muffle it, shut it out--disturbed him.
Higher it rose, and with each successive gust of the increasing wind
the ivy and creepers rattled on the window panes, whilst the great
beeches seemed to shiver in anticipation of a fiercer blast.
For many a year to come would a storm be associated with sorrow,
gloom, and death in the mind of Alison Cheyne!
The thunder growled, and more than once a gleam of lightning
overspread the northern quarter of the sky, showing the tall trees in
black outline tossing their branches wildly.
The sound thoroughly roused Sir Ranald, and recalled his dying
energies.
'Kiss me, bird Ailie--kiss me,' said he, in a voice like a husky
whisper; 'the light has surely gone out, I cannot see you, child.'
Alas, it was the light of life that had left his eyes for ever!
Alison saw how fixed they were in expression as she kissed him
softly, most tenderly, again and again, and wiped his forehead with
her handkerchief. Then, with hands that were tremulous but firm in
intent, he drew down the lids of his eyes--as James VI. of Scotland
did, with wonderful presence of mind, when dying, and no other man on
record--and they never opened again!
Alison thought he was asleep, and listened to his stertorous
breathing, while restraining her own; it grew fainter and fainter,
but there was a sound in it that is indescribable, though more
significant than any other, that a human soul is on the wing; while
his shrivelled hand groped feebly and fatuously about the coverlet as
if seeking for another; and, taking it between her own, Alison bent
her lips over it.
It trembled in her grasp, and when she looked up he had passed away,
and an awful placidity lay upon the livid face. At that moment the
thunder was grumbling, and the wind bellowing; so it might be fancy,
or it might not, but amid the tumult of sound Alison seemed to
hear--what was it?--the wild baying of a hound dying hollowly away in
the distance.
'Oh, my God,' she exclaimed, and fell prone, face downward, with arms
outspread, upon the floor.
The hound--the hound again! Was it fevered fancy? Could she but
think she was warring with shadows--but alas, she could not, then at
least.
CHAPTER XII.
'ASHES TO ASHES.'
When she opened her eyes with a sob and a gasp, she found herself in
the arms of Archie and Rebecca Prune, and while her little white hand
wandered in bewilderment across her brow, she moved her head from
side to side, and looked vacantly, wearily, and inquiringly around
her.
At last she realised it all, and rushed to the bedside.
'He has left ye, my bairn,' said Archie, in a broken voice, 'but God
bides wi' ye yet.'
'Oh, papa, come back to me--I cannot live without you, papa! Do not
leave me thus, all alone, all alone!' she wailed out, as she buried
her face in the bedclothes, and threw her arms across the stiffening
form, till the old man, by an exertion of strength that was great for
his years, bore her bodily away to her own room, and left her there
with Mrs. Prune.
Fast as the storm drops without, the tears rolled over her pale
cheeks, while she sobbed as though her heart would break; nor did the
kind old woman who hung over her, and caressed her poor aching head
by pressing it against her maternal breast, attempt to check Alison's
passionate weeping, which proved alike a safety valve to her brain
and heart, till, worn out with all she had undergone for days and
nights past, a heavy sleep came upon her.
Old Archie hung over her for a minute ere he left her, and thought
what a lovely face hers was to look upon, pale and exhausted though
it was in expression. The forehead low and broad, the eyebrows dark,
yet delicately marked; the waxen-like eyelid fringed by long lashes
that lay lightly on the cheek; the rosebud mouth so full of sweetness
and decision.
We must hasten over this gloomy portion of our story, and get, with
Alison, into the busy world once more, for her father's death led to
many changes.
In connection with that event, the real or fancied sound she had
heard preyed deeply on her mind, and the only person to whom she
could speak, brokenly and with quivering lips, on the subject--Archie
Auchindoir--believed in the existence of the supernatural so
thoroughly that he left nothing unsaid to confirm her in the belief.
All people are now incredulous of everything, and to none other but
Bevil Goring would she have spoken on the subject--and yet with her
it had much of the superstition of the heart in it. Men of science
assert that there is no evidence that the ordinary course of nature
is ever interrupted. According to their theories, 'there never have
been, there are not now, and there never will be, either miracles or
opposition. Between the orthodox, who doubt modern supernaturalism,
and the men of science, who are sceptics all round, the strange thing
is that anyone should arise to express a belief which is so contrary
to the spirit of our time, though we have by analysis and
investigation laid our hands on many things hitherto sealed'--to wit,
gas, electricity, the telephone, and so forth.
Be all this as it may, we tell the tale as it was told to us, and
hope the hound of Essilmont, if it bayed at all, did so for the last
time.
At Chilcote the first day of death stole quietly on. Prostrate with
grief, Alison remained in her own room, leaving all that was to be
done with the vicar, the doctor, and Archie, who, plunged in sorrow
great as any could feel who shared not the blood of the dead man,
hovered about her in a helpless kind of way, as if he would have
striven to console--yea, almost to caress her. Was she not the child
he had carried often in his arms? but, as he phrased it, 'he wistna
what to do.'
And as the girl sat in her room, careless of who came to the house or
left it, with the one awful conviction upon her that he had passed
away 'to that unutterable mystery and greeting which mortal eye hath
not seen, nor ear heard.' Her beautiful face grew all lined and
haggard, and her dark-rimmed eyes, in their peculiar glitter, told of
many a sleepless night and of much mental anguish.
Lord Cadbury, as we have elsewhere said, hated sick-rooms, 'and all
that sort of thing;' still more did he hate death-beds, funerals, and
all connected therewith. And when last at Chilcote, seeing that the
end was not far off--indeed, the doctors had said so--he went back to
town to await the final catastrophe, 'the double event,' that would
rid him of a querulous friend, and place that friend's daughter more
completely at his mercy--yea, and the mercy of Fate!
In reply to the posted announcements of the death, his card came to
Alison in a black-edged envelope, sealed with his coronet in black
wax. He did not attempt--even with all his pretences and past
protestations--to indite a sham letter of condolence, nor did she
miss it.
'Dead--dead at last!' muttered Cadbury, as he sat in the sunny
bow-window of the club looking out on busy Pall Mall, his ferret-like
eyes glittering cunningly and leeringly as he tugged his white,
horseshoe-shaped moustachios. 'Well, he's a loss to no one but the
girl herself--not even to his creditors now--the vain old Scotch
pump, with his pedigree and his ancestry, his heraldry and his
beggarly bosh! But I would like to know who the devil sent that
mysterious thousand pounds! It may be a trump-card for me yet.'
Cadbury began to consider his plans anew. He would get Alison up to
London and give her a letter of introduction--as companion or
something of that kind--to a now somewhat _passé_ 'lady friend' of
his, who occupied a tiny villa at St. John's Wood, and drove a
brougham, of course, who would 'soon contrive to make it all straight
for him;' and he chuckled as he thought of the success that, through
her, would eventually be his. Anyway, the proud Alison would find
some difficulty in 'cresting up' her haughty little head after her
residence at St. John's Wood.
Lord Cadbury could not come to the quiet and hasty funeral at
Chilcote; he was 'too indisposed.' Certainly Alison did not want him.
She had had quite enough of the peer, and hoped never to see his face
again.
'Better awa', Miss Alison, better awa'; his absence is guid
companie,' said Archie, who could not endure Cadbury, and loathed his
dandified groom Gaskins. ''Od, missie, he's worth nae weal that
canna bide wae. May he dee like a trooper's horse, wi' his shoon
on!' added Archie, through his set teeth.
So as a hateful dream the details of death passed on. 'Ashes to
ashes, dust to dust.' The vicar's voice fell clearly in the calm
spring air on the ear of Alison as she leant on the doctor's arm, for
very few were present at the funeral, and these few, save Archie,
were strangers; but her soul seemed to shrink within her as she heard
the shovelfuls of gravel pattering down on the polished coffin-lid
and the large metal plate, which bore the name and age of
'SIR RANALD CHEYNE, BART., OF THAT ILK
AND ESSILMONT.'
The last of her race, save _herself_!
'Surely, surely, if he is in England, Bevil will come to me now when
he hears of this calamity!' she whispered in her heart, as she sat in
the solitude of her own room when all was over.
But Bevil Goring came not. He had never had explained to him the
cause of her abrupt and mysterious flight or departure from Chilcote,
and the subsequent trip in Cadbury's yacht, and why, or how, she had
neither time nor opportunity to write to him the briefest note of
farewell or enlightenment on the subject; but all that had nothing to
do with his absence on the present occasion, as we shall relate anon.
But she was brooding sadly over it, while--declining the proffered
hospitality of the vicarage--she sat in her loneliness, watching the
stars as they came out one by one, thinking of the bitterness and
brevity of human life, and marvelling how many millions of the human
race these orbs had looked down upon, and would yet look down upon,
in the ages to come.
Her father's spendthrift errors in youth, and his petulance and
selfishness in old age, were all forgotten by Alison now. She
remembered only his love for herself, and even repented that she
could not gratify him by sacrificing herself to Cadbury.
Would she have prolonged his life by doing so? That was a problem on
which she could not--dared not dwell.
His tenants--or rather those who had been his tenants--far away among
the Braes of Aberdeenshire, longer than they might have been, but for
the merciful consideration of his creditors--men who, even in this
advanced age, deemed themselves born vassals of the house of Cheyne,
as their fathers did when the Red Harlaw was fought, or the Brig o'
Dee was bravely manned in the days of Montrose--were stirred with
much genuine grief when they heard of his death. For, though proud
to his equals, he had ever been a friendly and kindly landlord to
them, and thinking of them ever, in the good spirit of the olden
time, as 'my father's people,' he would shake warmly the hand of old
Donald Gordon, the gudeman of a little farm-town, while asking after
his wife and daughters by name; though he would barely nod his
aristocratic head to some 'earth-hungry' commercial man, who had
acquired a fine estate--all won by honest industry.
'Oh, why does not Bevil come to me; if in England, he must have heard
of papa's death?' was her ever recurring thought.
And he did hear it; but, by a strange contingency, a little too late.
Meanwhile, not much time was given Alison to linger in desolate
Chilcote, and she found that, a day or two after the funeral, she
would have to face the cold and bitter world--yea, and to face it
alone, tender, young, and inexperienced as she was!
Sir Ranald's death brought the last of his creditors swooping down
upon the dregs and lees of his possessions, and, with a heart that
seemed broken afresh, Alison surrendered to them everything, even to
that heirloom which her father deemed the palladium of the
Cheynes--the great silver tankard that had been the gift of
Elizabeth, Queen Dowager of Scotland, to Sir Ranald Cheyne of
Essilmont and Inverugie, the master of her household. And she wept
with the knowledge that to have parted with that would well-nigh have
broken her father's heart.
The mysterious thousand pounds were spent--all save a little sum; but
the last of her father's smaller debts had been paid, and his last
days soothed by many a comfort. So Alison preferred to leave
Chilcote--for ever, and Archie pressed her sorely to accept, in whole
or in part, his carefully treasured 'three hunner pounds,' but
pressed her in vain.
Memories of the Beguinage and of sweet Sister Lisette came over her
now; but no--no--even if they would take her there for what her hands
might do, it would seem like a relinquishment of Bevil Goring and
life too.
'I am sure, Archie, I could teach little children--give lessons in
music or something in London,' said she.
'And I'll gang to London too, missie.'
'For what purpose?'
'Odd's sake, missie, to tak' care o' ye.'
'Poor, dear Archie!' said the girl, softly, with a sob in her slender
white throat.
Accompanied by this retainer, she paid a farewell visit to the
churchyard of Chilcote Vicarage, where, amid the bright sunshine of
spring, the earth seemed at its fairest, and the quaint, old,
picturesque fane of the Norman days, moss-green, ivy-grown, and
tree-shaded, was casting its shadows across 'God's Acre.'
She laid a chaplet of flowers, woven by her own loving hands and
watered by her tears, on her father's grave--that spot which to her
no sunshine could brighten--the spot where he lay, without a stone as
yet, the last of an old, old warlike and historic race; and then she
prayed for the dead--a prayer, it is said, never offered up in vain;
for though the petition may be refused, still the petitioner may be
rewarded in some fashion for the generous and unselfish prompting,
and we are told it is good to pray for them, that they may be loosed
from their sins. So Alison prayed by her father's grave, while her
faithful follower, who stood thereby hat in hand, had his mind full
of prayerful thoughts that could take no form of utterance, for
Archie was a true-blue Presbyterian, and knew not how to pray for
those who could no longer do so for themselves; and then the pair
crossed the churchyard stile in silence and passed away.
Old, wrinkled, sour-visaged Archie Auchindoir, with keen grey eyes,
white hair, and saturnine cast of features, was a strange 'Squire o'
the Dames,' or _Escudero_ (as the Spaniards would have it), for a
handsome young girl, albeit that she was in the deepest mourning; but
no one could be more kind, loving, and reverential, for poor Archie
loved the very ground his young mistress trod, and watched over her
as a father would have done.
And so, with this peculiar attendant, Alison bade adieu to old
Rebecca Prune, quitted Chilcote, and, furnished with a letter of
introduction from the vicar, set out by second class for London by an
early train on her melancholy pilgrimage; and many a poor girl has
thus set forth to earn her bread without the honest consolation and
support of a vassal so tender and true.
Piqued as she was now beginning to be by the knowledge that Bevil
Goring was in London, when he might have been seeking her, especially
amid her sorrow, in the country, she was not without hopes--but oh,
how slender they were!--of perhaps hearing something of him in that
vast human wilderness towards which she was being hurried.
CHAPTER XIII.
EVENTS PROGRESS.
The whole expedition was now returning from the Gold Coast, save
those who had found their graves in the wilderness on the advance to
Coomassie, and in the fighting incident thereto. Among those
returning were the two hundred and sixty-eight wounded officers and
men. The number of deaths in proportion was small as compared with
those in recent European conflicts--a fact explainable by the arms
and ammunition used by the Ashantees; first, their old-fashioned
firelocks and use--not of bullets, but slugs, projectiles which soon
lost their velocity after discharge, and were easily stopped after
penetrating the body, the stronger bones of which they were incapable
of breaking; and lastly, by the total absence of artillery.
The telegraphic wire made people at home aware that many of the Rifle
Brigade had died on the voyage homeward between the Gold Coast and
Madeira; that the Welsh Fusiliers had only twenty men on their
sick-list; and the hardy Highlanders very few, though they had to
regret the death by wounds of their major, William Baird, who had
served with them for twenty years, and been at the siege and fall of
Sebastopol.
It was known in England that many of the sick and wounded were to
remain in the hospital ships, _Victor Emmanuel_ and _Simoom_, or were
landed at Ascension and the Cape de Verde Isles for medical
treatment; but, as no officer of the Rifles was recorded as among
these, Laura with her daughter, escorted by Goring, had betaken
herself to the port which is the great headquarters of the British
navy, to behold the arrival of the victorious troops from Ashantee,
and for whom a great ovation was prepared.
People from London and elsewhere crowded in thousands to witness
their landing. In the hotel where Laura and Bevil Goring were, there
were more than one old Scottish veteran officer of the Crimea, and
even of the Peninsular war, who had come from the land beyond the
Tweed to see, as they said, 'their dear old Black Watch again;' and
more than one lady in widow's weeds, some young, some elderly, with
their little brood, come to look again upon the ranks of the Welsh
Fusiliers and the Rifles, though there a beloved face would be seen
no more.
How gladly would poor Bella Chevenix have gone too; but she had no
valid excuse--no friend or chaperon going save Laura, of whose
movements she was ignorant; so she had but to wait, in the secluded
village, the tidings given by the newspapers, but with more
impatience and certainly less equanimity than Lady Julia at splendid
Wilmothurst.
Greater was her love for Jerry than the latter could actually
realise; for, with all her past coquetry, Bella was one of those
ardent and impulsive girls that a man only comes across once in a
lifetime, or, it maybe, thinks so. She knew that Jerry was
comparatively safe when the fleet sailed, but she had heard with
dismay of deaths among the Rifles ere it reached Madeira; so it may
be imagined how eagerly and anxiously she watched the public prints,
and learned that on the 19th of March the English people had the joy
of welcoming home, first the 23rd Welsh Fusiliers, as they landed
from the _Tamar_ at Portsmouth, where, among many other graceful
gifts, a regimental goat was presented to them in lieu of their
famous Indian one, which had died on the coast of Africa; and anon of
the more brilliant ovation which was reserved for the heroic Black
Watch when the soldiers of the latter came in the _Sarmatian_, and,
prior to landing, had gleefully discarded their grey tunics and white
helmets to resume their national uniform, the kilt and bonnet, so
known to martial glory. And then came the Rifle Brigade and the
Royal Engineers on board the mighty _Himalaya_.
How Laura's heart beat while she clung to Goring's arm and clasped
little Netty's tiny hand, when the signals announced that the ship
was about to enter that great harbour which is the most spacious and
secure in the British Isles, though less than a quarter of a mile in
breadth at the narrowest part of the entrance.
'There she is,' exclaimed Goring, 'just rounding South Sea Castle!'
Laura's bright hazel eyes grew dim as she watched the approaching
ship. It seemed to her as if it was but yesterday, in one sense,
since she had seen the transport depart with the Rifles after her
reconciliation and reunion with Dalton; and yet, so strong are the
impressions of the human mind, that it also seemed as if it were ages
ago; and now--now he was coming home, though but perhaps the wreck of
himself, to her and their little Netty--the husband and the father
from whom they had been so long and unnaturally separated!
'By Jove, she has her ensign half hoisted!' exclaimed a voice among
the thousands of whom she formed a unit.
Goring had remarked this through his double field-glass, yet said
nothing of it to his fair companion, lest she might be unnecessarily
alarmed.
'What does it mean?' she asked him more than once, ere he replied,
unwillingly,
'It means that there has been a death on board.'
'A death!' she said faintly, as she recalled the loving tenor of
Dalton's last farewell letter to her, written like Jerry's to Bella
on the night before Coomassie was entered, and of the fatal telegram
that told of his serious wounds. 'A death, Goring?' she repeated,
with a wild expression in her beautiful eyes, while her cheek grew
snowy white as she watched the slowly approaching ship, which was
under half steam now.
'Yes, marm,' said an officious old sailor, who was regarding the
stately vessel through an old, battered telescope tied round with
spunyarn; 'some poor fellow has lost the number of his mess, for
there is a coffin covered by a Union Jack in one of the quarter
boats, as you may see for yourself, marm.'
He proffered his telescope civilly enough, but Laura shrank closer to
the side of Goring, who remained silent, for he too had his own
thoughts. She could not look; her eyes felt sightless, and her poor
heart seemed to die within her with the most fearful forebodings.
The bands of several regiments stationed at Portsmouth were now
filling the sunny air with music, and the cheers of the Riflemen,
clustering like bees along the sides of the mighty ship, were
responding to the united voices of thousands on the shore, giving
those hearty and joyous shouts that come from British throats and
British lungs alone; and Laura, under all the pressure of the
occasion and her own terrible thoughts, was on the point of fainting,
as the transport came slowly abreast of the sea-wall, when Goring
threw an arm round her, and exclaimed,
'Thank God, there is Dalton--there is dear old Tony at last!'
'Where--oh, where?' asked Laura, in a breathless voice.
'At the back of the poop,' he replied, lifting Netty aloft on his
shoulder, as they now saw an officer--Dalton, indeed--with a face
white as his tropical helmet, with the pallor that comes of suffering
and much loss of blood--waving his handkerchief to them in
recognition, for the ship was very close inshore, and Laura was soon
to learn that the melancholy freight in the quarter-boat was the body
of a poor sergeant who died off the Lizard, and whose
widow--believing herself yet a wife--was awaiting him on the pier
with a babe at her breast--the babe his eyes would never look upon.
In a few minutes more the steam was blowing off, and Goring with
those in his care joined the stream of the privileged few, who poured
along the gangways on board.
'God is very merciful,' murmured Laura, as she laid her face on
Dalton's breast, heedless of spectators. 'He has given you back to
me----'
'From the very gates of death, dearest Laura.'
'Oh, what should I have done if you had perished, my darling?--oh, my
darling,' she said, in a low voice of exquisite tenderness as he
embraced Netty--Antoinette so named after himself, and grown up to
girlhood without his knowledge of her existence.
'Bravo,' cried a hearty voice familiar to them all; 'as Albert Smith
used to say, "_C'est l'amour, l'amour, l'amour, qui fait le monde go
round, O._" Thank God I see you and Old England again, Laura,' and
Jerry Wilmot kissed her with hearty goodwill.
Like Dalton, Jerry was very pale and wan; but not so feeble as the
former--and from the effects of his wounds and fever could scarcely
stand, even yet.
The ovation that followed the landing of the Rifles may be fresh in
the recollection of many. Balls, banquets, and addresses were amply
accorded to all the returned troops, and decorations and crosses for
valour were fully bestowed; but of all the joyous entertainments
Bevil Goring saw nothing, as a notice which he read by chance in a
paper led him to leave Portsmouth on the evening of the very day the
regiment landed.
It was simply a paragraph in a Southampton paper, on which his eye
fell casually, that rooted him for a few minutes to the spot, and ran
thus:
'We understand that the late Sir Ranald Cheyne, Bart., of Essilmont
and that ilk, whose demise at Chilcote we recorded some days ago, has
died without heirs male, and his baronetcy, one of the oldest in
Scotland, has thus become extinct.'
'Who died some days ago at Chilcote,' thought Goring, who felt a
species of shock; 'and Alison is thus alone--alone in the world--poor
girl! At Cadbury's mercy perhaps--while I--oh, what must she think
of me? Why do I only hear of this calamity now?'
So next noon betimes saw him arrive at Chilcote with his horse at a
rasping gallop, and his heart beating high with mingled hope, love,
and great commiseration, as he knew how Alison idolised the querulous
old man she had lost; and again, as before, his spirit sank on
finding only silence and desolation--the house abandoned and all its
windows shuttered.
'Desolation, as before,' he muttered, as he leaped from his horse;
'desolation, and perhaps mystery too. Where can she have gone, and
with whom?'
He passed the gate, and mechanically handled the door-knocker, and
the sound thereof echoed hollowly through the silent house. He drew
close to the shuttered windows, and peeped in through a fissure in
one. He saw the almost entirely darkened dining-room, from the walls
of which the portraits of the two cavalier brothers were still
looking grimly and stonily down; on the table was a vase, with a few
flowers still in it; and near stood a chair and a work-basket, in
which some coloured wools were lying.
Very recently must Alison have been there, as the flowers seemed
still somewhat fresh; in fact, she had only set out on her pilgrimage
the day before, when he had been at Portsmouth.
How full the place seemed of her presence! Yet he had to turn sadly
away.
The buds in the giant beeches were bursting already into tender green
leaves; the birds were twittering and singing in the hedgerows, and
the kine lowed amid the deep spring grass of yonder meadows; 'the
deep bell' swung in the distant tower of Chilcote Church; the dogs
barked sharply in an adjacent farm-yard; and close and nigh was the
hum of the bee, as it thrust its golden head into the cups of the
spring flowers in the now neglected garden.
To his senses all seemed unchanged as when he last saw Alison there;
and where was she now--his love--his promised wife?
Where again was she gone? Into the hard and chilly world--all the
colder and more perilous now that her father was dead, and that she
must stand alone in it?
Alone!
Bevil Goring felt his heart wrung by irrepressible anxiety, and he
bethought him at once of appealing to the vicar of the parish, who
could not fail to possess some information on the subject.
The latter received him with considerable suavity, for he was a
kind-hearted old gentleman, but eyed him keenly under his bushy white
eyebrows. He had heard--but how, he knew not, for gossip spreads
fast in a secluded country parish; yet he had heard that there was a
young officer from the camp, who was wont to hover near Chilcote
Beeches, and who was eminently distasteful to the late Sir Ranald,
for reasons best known to the latter; so the worthy vicar fashioned
his answers accordingly.
Bevil, however, learned that Alison had been resident for many weeks
at Chilcote after her return from the Continent, and prior to the
demise of her father.
Many weeks! thought he, and yet she had never written, as she might
have done, to his address at the camp, whence letters were forwarded
to his address in London. Poor Alison had not written because she
knew he was absent, and, moreover, she was sorely pre-occupied at
home.
Was she under the influence of Cadbury? thought Bevil. Oh, that was
impossible! Yet Goring began to feel, as Alison often felt, that
their engagement--that its many trammels--was a very peculiar one,
and would be so while her father lived. Now he was gone, and wealth
had accrued to Goring, yet they were as much apart as ever!
'Sir Ranald was dead, yes,' he heard the vicar saying, 'and buried
near the ancient yew in the churchyard, where Miss Cheyne meant in
time to erect a marble cross.'
'That shall be my duty,' observed Goring.
'Yours?' said the vicar, inquiringly, and again the bushy brows were
knitted. 'Poor man! he is sleeping where I know he did not want to
lie, in my churchyard; yet he will sleep as soundly there in English
earth, let us hope, as if he lay among his ancestors in Ellon Kirk,
among mailed knights, mediæval bones, and the _Hic jacets_ of other
days,' he added, smiling.
'Where has Miss Cheyne gone to?'
'London,' replied the vicar, curtly.
'Can you give me her address?' asked Goring, eagerly.
'May I ask who inquires?' said the vicar.
'I sent in my card--Captain Goring, of the Rifle Brigade.'
'Just returned from Ashantee?'
'Nay,' replied Bevil, colouring with honest mortification, 'I was
detailed for home service.'
'And now stationed at Aldershot?'
'Yes.'
'Ah! a bad place Aldershot--a very centre of dissipation, I fear.
May I ask if you are a relation?'
'I am not.'
'A friend?' queried the vicar.
'Of course--one most deeply interested in Miss Cheyne.'
'I thought so,' rejoined the vicar, eyeing him keenly and with a
curiously provoking smile while playing with his gold eyeglass; 'may
I ask how and why?'
'Certainly--I am engaged to her.'
'Her _fiancé_? asked the vicar; 'is that what you mean?'
'Yes; and now _where_ is she?'
'I regret--regret to say--that--that I have not yet her present
address. She only left this for London yesterday.'
'In other words, by your tone,' said Goring, haughtily, as he rose
and took his hat, 'you know it, but decline to give it to me?'
'I do not say so,' replied the vicar, also rising, as if the
interview was ended; 'but for the present you will excuse me saying
more.'
'Sir!' exclaimed Bevil, with some heat.
'Goring--Goring,' muttered the vicar, eyeing Bevil's card; 'it is
strange that the young lady never spoke to me of you, though in her
grief she several times mentioned another friend.'
'Ah!--who?'
'Lord Cadbury.'
'Cadbury!' exclaimed Goring, with a contemptuous inflection of voice
that did not escape the listener.
'Yes; who, by a very ample remittance--a thousand pounds, I
believe--did much to ease and soothe her poor father's last days on
earth.'
'Indeed!'
Whew! here was intelligence. His birthday gift had been attributed
to, and evidently adopted by, that reptile Cadbury! And, finding
that there was nothing to be made of the suspicious and over-wary
vicar, he withdrew.
Scarcely had Goring, disappointed and dispirited, taken his
departure, when Lord Cadbury, accompanied by Gaskins, having found
Chilcote deserted, arrived at the vicarage to make the same
inquiries, but with very different intentions. Impressed by the
years and rank of his second visitor, the vicar admitted that he was
cognisant of Miss Cheyne's movements, and, on consideration, promised
to send her correct address to Cadbury Court when she wrote to him
from London; for, knowing the helplessness of the young girl, even
with Cadbury was the vicar wary.
Dalton remained at Chilcote Grange to be nursed by Laura; Jerry
departed on sick leave to Wilmothurst, while Bevil Goring remained
with the battalion at Aldershot to undergo the drudgery of the spring
drills in the Long Valley, and await in a kind of silent desperation
with hope to hear something of Alison.
How terrible to endure was this period of an inaction that was
enforced by circumstances over which he had no control, and many a
hearty malediction he bestowed upon the close old vicar of Chilcote.
Often he opened the clasp of her ring--Ellon's ring--and gazed upon
her tiny lock of hair, now faded and withered by the heat it had
undergone when 'up country' in the Land of the Sun, and on her
pictured face he gazed till his eyes ached and burned with the
intensity of his longing to see the features smile, the lips unclose,
in fancy.
We are told that if a man, 'overborne by any grief or pain--not the
more endurable because no outward sign can be discerned--should go
forth into a crowd to seek for solace, the chances are that he will
return in a more discontented frame of mind than that in which he set
out, simply from realising the fact how infinitely little his own
sufferings affect the most of the world at its work or play.'
Amid the bustle, gaiety, and business of the crowded camp at
Aldershot, Bevil Goring realised all this to the fullest extent.
Day after day went by and brought no news of Alison, either to Goring
or to Laura Dalton, whom he saw frequently, and hope deferred was
making the heart of the young officer very 'sick' indeed; but, though
he wrote a very important letter to his solicitors at Gray's Inn
Square concerning certain properties at Chilcote, he went there no
more.
In the words of L.E.L., he could no more
'To the loved haunt return,
Love's happy home; and touch the tender chord,
And softly whisper there the little word,
The name whereat fond memories shall burn,
That parting vows record.'
CHAPTER XIV.
BELLA'S DOT.
Lady Julia Wilmot had been in hope that when the Ashantee 'affair'
was over, Jerry would settle down, 'marry money,' free his ancestral
seat from encumbrance, and take a proper pride in it; but for a time
after the capture of Coomassie it had seemed that she was to be
afflicted by a double calamity--that the estate was lost, and Jerry
might never return.
It was not in her aristocratic nature to be very much moved about
anything. Excitement or enthusiasm of any kind was 'bad form,' she
deemed. Thus, if she was not plunged in profound grief when she
heard of the poor fellow's supposed death, neither was she greatly
excited with joy when she heard that he was safe and coming home
again. To this noble daughter of twenty earls, an only son more or
less in the world really seemed of no great consequence, unless it
were, if he 'married money,' to serve her own ends.
When tidings of Jerry's death came, she had attired herself most
becomingly in fashionable mourning of the requisite depth of wear, as
understood by the drapers in Regent Street. Round her white throat
were narrow tuckers of yellowish-white lace, and a rustling train,
spread over a crinolette, floated behind her. Now that he was safe,
her mourning was relinquished, almost with a sigh, we fear, it was so
becoming; and Floss's mother-of-pearl basket, which had been duly
lined with black silk, was now refitted with blue satin.
She received Jerry in her usual stately fashion; gave him her cool,
slim hand to press, which he did heartily, while his eyes moistened;
and accorded her smooth and unlined cheek for his salute, and then
his welcome ended. So ere long Jerry began to think, as Mrs.
Gaskell's novel has it, that John Thornton's mamma might be wrong
when she says, 'Mothers' love is given by God, John. It holds fast
for ever and for ever. A girl's love is like a puff of smoke, it
changes with every wind.' But then there was nothing aristocratic
about stalwart John Thornton's mother.
Mr. Chevenix had always loved Jerry for his father's sake, and for
the sake of the 'Wilmots of Wilmothurst,' who had been of
Wilmothurst, 'and that ilk,' as the Scots would say, for time out of
mind; but there his regard ended; he had small care for Lady Julia,
and, when tidings came of Jerry's death, after a moderate time had
elapsed he resolved to take the mortgages in hand and assert his
rights--in short, to make the property, what it now almost virtually
was, his own, and to request Lady Julia to leave the place, to crush
her false and insensate pride in a heart that seemed without any
other human sentiment.
'He has formally announced the foreclosure of the mortgages, this man
Chevenix, Emily,' said Lady Julia, with some consternation--at least
for her--as she opened her letters one morning. 'The crash has come
at last!'
'What does that mean, aunt?' asked the young lady.
'My lawyer tells me it means the act of foreclosing--cutting off the
equity of redemption, and that the money would not be taken in
payment, even were poor Jerry alive and had it to pay.'
And Mr. Chevenix had chuckled as he gave these instructions, for he
had endured enough of Lady Julia's aristocratic caprice, and knew how
she had often treated his Bella, a girl certainly second to none, 'as
if she were the dirt of the earth,' as he said, bitterly.
But Bella had deplored these sharp measures, for she felt that a
strange but tender and undefinable tie bound her to Jerry Wilmot,
dead or alive.
As children she and Jerry had been permitted to be playmates, and she
had been somewhat of a pet with his father, the old Squire; but it
was not until they had grown up, till he had been at college and then
joined the Rifles, that Lady Julia felt that the intimacy was--well,
unfortunate, and to be finally snubbed.
The shock given to the sensitive Bella by the perils encountered by
Jerry--first the report of his death, and subsequently the account of
the precarious condition in which he had embarked at Cape Coast,
caused her many terrible nights and days, and nearly threw the poor
girl into a fever, as she had none in whom to confide her sorrow, or
her secret love; but sorrow rarely kills, and though at first fretful
and resentful, with the memory of Lady Julia's want of proper
affection, she was very gentle, quiet, and patient, and besought her
father not to foreclose the mortgages yet a while; but he, out of all
patience with non-payment of interest on one hand, Lady Julia's
hauteur and insolence on the other, with the great doubt entertained
of Jerry ever coming home to keep the fragment of Wilmothurst that
yet accrued to him, had put the matter in the hands of his legal
agents, who, curiously enough, were Messrs. Taype, Shawrpe, and
Scrawly, of Gray's Inn; and things were at a serious crisis when
Jerry returned home to find a deadlier enmity than ever in his
mother's heart at 'that creature Chevenix and the forward minx his
daughter.'
The latter knew of Jerry's arrival; her heart had beat responsive to
the clangour of the village bells, the music of the volunteer band
which preceded the carriage in which he came, and the cheers of the
warm-hearted rustics, who unharnessed the horses and drew it along;
and ere long she heard with pity and anxiety from Mademoiselle
Florine, whom she chanced to meet, that he was confined to his
room--even to his bed--by a return of the treacherous jungle-fever,
which is apt to recur at times unexpectedly for months after recovery
is thought certain; and while in this condition, helpless and
incapable of action, he was galled and tormented, and his jealousy
was roused by his mother and cousin Emily with the real information
of how the matter of the mortgages stood; that Lord Twesildown had
heard of them, and with an eye to possessing Wilmothurst and Langley
Park intended to degrade himself by proposing for Bella Chevenix, now
that she would be a Hampshire heiress, as his mother, Lady Ashcombe,
had the very bad taste to inform them.
And Jerry writhed in his bed when he heard of these things, and times
there were when he wished that after all he had found his grave, like
many more, on the wooded banks of the Prah.
Twesildown had an estate, though a rather encumbered one; but he had
also a title and undeniable good looks. Jerry was now well-nigh a
landless man. Bella had suspected, he feared, the purity and
disinterestedness of his love, and thus circumstances, he thought,
were all against her viewing him with favour.
If the worst came to the worst, and he were sold up, he would effect
an exchange for India, and think of her no more.
No more--how hard it was!
Just then, in his soreness of heart, Jerry was not sorry that a
legitimate fit of illness detained him in the house at Wilmothurst,
and separate from Bella; for he was hourly stung by
tidings--exaggerated in some instances--that Lord Twesildown was
daily giving her drives with his mother, and mounts of his best
horses; and, as he was known to be rather impecunious, and quite _au
fait_ of the fact that Bella Chevenix was her father's heiress, Jerry
felt jealous, mortified, and bitter. He even sorely regretted the
'gushing' farewell letter he had written to her before entering
Coomassie; and could little conceive that even now, in a silken case,
she wore that letter in her bosom!
It was quite evident how hotly jealous he was of Twesildown, and this
sentiment Cousin Emily left nothing undone or unsaid to fan.
'How you chatter, cousin,' said he, impatiently.
'I am like the brook, you think, on this subject,' said Emily, with
one of her sweetest smiles.
'What brook?'
'I go on for ever.'
'By Jove, you do--and with a will, too!' said Jerry, who was now
stretched at full length in a hammock netting between two trees on
the lawn, lazily enjoying one of the last box of cigars he might open
in Wilmothurst, as his family were contemplating a removal therefrom,
and for where was quite undecided.
Mr. Chevenix had courteously left his card for Jerry, so Bella knew
that, come what might, the latter in common civility would call ere
long; and to that event she was looking forward now; but days passed,
and Jerry came not.
And so while Bella, remembering the tenor of her last farewell
meeting with Jerry, and that of the treasured letter, which amounted
to a declaration, was eating her heart out with disappointment that
he made no effort to see her, he was daily being 'primed up' by
Cousin Emily with jealousy of Twesildown; and _this_ was the time to
which he and she had both looked forward so eagerly!
The bitterness of this situation was enhanced to Jerry by the
knowledge that his ancient inheritance of Wilmothurst was Bella's
_dot_ and known to be such by Twesildown, to whom it was a lure quite
as much as her undoubted brilliance and beauty.
'There is the devil to pay and pitch-hot here about the mortgages,'
he wrote to Bevil Goring; 'and moreover, old fellow, I am sorely
disappointed in my love affair. I have read that what "drives one
man to drink drives another to the _demi-monde_." Whether of the two
is worse, the immortal gods can tell. Either remedy is worse than
the disease, I fancy! But anyway a few months more will see me again
broiling up country, and going in for iced drinks and Chinsurah
cheroots.'
CHAPTER XV.
IN BAYSWATER.
'Twenty years old to-day--twenty years!' murmured Alison, as she
glanced at herself in the little mirror, and thought how pale and how
much older than her age she looked in her plain black mourning dress,
which was destitute of other ornament than smooth white cuffs and a
ruche or frill of lace, or some such soft material, round her slender
throat.
Vividly came back to the girl's memory her other birthdays, ere
poverty fell upon her father, and ere she was--as now--alone in the
world, and when each recurring anniversary found her loaded with
caresses, congratulations, and pretty presents. And she could recall
her fourth birthday at Essilmont, when she was a little child in a
white embroidered frock, with a broad sash matching the colour of her
dark blue eyes, with her brothers, Ranald and Ellon, eating
strawberries off a huge salver held for them by Archie Auchindoir,
who seemed an old Archie even then.
Never more would the kisses or caresses of father or mother touch her
brow or cheek; and now she was in the ranks of those who have to earn
their daily bread as a governess on thirty pounds per annum, teach
French, English, and music to two little girls of the ages of nine
and ten respectively.
And sadly on this day she thought of all that had befallen her, and
how completely Bevil Goring had passed out of her life, apparently
for ever! Wearily too her eye went round the bare school-room in
that stately house in Pembridge Square, Bayswater--a long, low-ceiled
apartment, with two windows that overlooked Westbourne Grove, a grove
only in name now.
The vicar of Chilcote procured her this situation, and, beyond her
name and his recommendation, her employer, Mrs. S. De Jobbyns, knew
nothing of Alison Cheyne and cared not to inquire. The vicar had
written lately to state that a handsome marble cross--a Celtic one he
believed it was called--had lately been placed by a friend above her
father's grave, and Alison's heart swelled with gratitude as she read
of it.
It must have been done by Lord Cadbury, she thought. Who else could
have done so?
She had now been two months in Pembridge Square--two whole
months--and despite the unwonted drudgery of teaching, and the
dreariness of routine--despite slights, almost insults, that were
offered, perhaps unconsciously, by the cold-hearted and the
underbred, the time had slipped quickly away.
Thus condemned to the dull drudgery of daily teaching a couple of
troublesome, peevish, and ill-tempered brats in that bare and
comfortless school-room, was Alison, a loving and passionate girl,
made more passionate, loving, and tender by the sore griefs she had
known, but all unsoured by these and the doubtful prospect--yea, the
utter blank of her future.
Though the change of condition was not much to Alison, the change of
_position_ and that vacuity of the future were frightful to the poor
girl; and in taking the situation for the sake of her father's name
and his old family pride, though he was now in his grave, she had
besought the vicar of Chilcote, in recommending her to Mrs. S. De
Jobbyns, to conceal what she had ever been--nay, was still--the
daughter of a baronet of Nova Scotia, whose diploma dated from 1625.
The family of Mrs. Slumpkin De Jobbyns consisted of three daughters,
the eldest Miss Victoria, of whom more anon, was in her nineteenth
year, and Alison's two pupils, Irene and Iseulte. Like the rest of
the snobocracy of the metropolis she believed in double names, thus
she figured in the royal Blue-Book as Mrs. Slumpkin De Jobbyns, a
style of address which would have astonished her late husband, worthy
old David or D. Jobbyns, as he called himself, when for many a year
he was acquiring wealth as an industrious soap-boiler in Bow East,
and when he married pretty little Sally Slumpkins, the barmaid at the
'Black Swan' in Mile-End Road, and when she little foresaw how
wealthy a 'relict' she would be left.
Pretty Sally, who had, of course, preferred the worthy soap-boiler to
his rival the potman, had now, amid ease and much good living,
expanded into a stout, blousy, and coarsely-featured matron, greatly
puffed up by wealth, success, pride, and vanity.
She always wore the richest materials and the most massive jewellery,
and never omitted to figure in her open carriage in the Row, when
weather permitted, and strove hard in everything to ape all the
manners of the 'upper ten,' in which she was fully seconded by her
eldest born, Miss Victoria S. De Jobbyns, a rather pretty, but very
insipid girl, who wore her hair frizzed into her eyes, and had a nose
more than retroussé, for though she was pretty, as we have said, her
features were nevertheless of the genuine Cockney type.
Alison took all her meals in the schoolroom with the children, and at
the early hours which were directed for them. She was never in the
drawing-room--'the British drawing-room,' that sanctum sacred to Mrs.
De Jobbyns and her 'swell' visitors, as she called them, and when she
thought it was 'rather the thing' to have afternoon tea in dragon
blue and white crockery on a beautiful Chippendale table.
And so, for thirty pounds per annum, Alison underwent this life of
mortification.
'Thirty pound a-year, and her laundry work, my dear,' as Mrs. De
Jobbyns informed her friend, Mrs. Popkins-Robbynson.
'That is very cheap for one evidently so accomplished,' said the
latter.
'Very cheap, indeed; but she is such a good style for the children,
you know; and really I think she must have been some one
of--of--well, means once.'
'Why?'
'The richly laced under-garments she sends to the laundry would quite
surprise you, my dear.'
'But won't her Scotch haccent spile the young 'uns?' observed Mr.
Popkins-Robbynson.
'Not at all; and she seems to get on so nicely with the servants.
They all adore her.'
'Indeed!'
'My last governess, Miss Smythe-Smythe was always at war with them.'
'How?'
'They never paid her sufficient deference. Oh, what a nuisance that
woman was; yet we paid her forty pounds a year--actually what we pays
the cook, my dear.'
To be near his young mistress, to watch over her, as he thought, and
to be able to see her from time to time, old Archie had located
himself in a humble lodging in Moscow Road, not far from the square,
where he lived with the strictest frugality, fearing that a time
might come when his 'three hunner pounds,' or what remained of them,
might be of service to _her_, 'as hained gear helps weel,' and often,
with more patience than even a lover might have had, he promenaded
the square for hours, watching for a sight of her at the school-room
windows, or till she came forth with her pupils to walk in Kensington
Gardens--watching for her till he in turn was watched, as one bent on
something nefarious, by the policeman at the corner.
And ere long the two little girls began to wonder who the funny old
man was that so often hovered near them in their walks, who treated
their governess with such profound deference and devotion, and was
never unprovided with chocolate creams and so forth for
them--'sweeties for the bairns,' as he called them.
But often Alison sat up in her little white bed, in her bare and
rather comfortless room, in the darkness of the silent night, and,
looking at the stars, would ask why she was so lonely in the world
now--she who was born with the prospect of a very different state of
existence! Then would come all her dream-memories of the past, with
those other dreams of what _might be_, did fortune prove more kind.
How long it seemed ago since she had her father to nurse and Cadbury
to shun--longer still since she had known the joy of Bevil's love,
and the stolen meetings under the solemn and whispering beeches of
Chilcote.
Chilcote was lonely; but how lovely it seemed to her in memory now!
She even found herself at times now indulging in the two
conundrums--the modern pessimist's speculations--Is civilisation a
failure, and is life worth living?
The monotony of the school-room was now occasionally broken by
visits--few and far between, certainly--of the eldest daughter of the
house, Miss De Jobbyns, who had returned from a sojourn with some
friends at Hastings--a young lady rather loud in tone and fast in
manner. She had early discovered that Alison was dexterous in the
way of embroidering, and thus kept her little hands busy, when not
otherwise occupied, in tracing out her monogram and crest--for she
had that, of course--in the corners of handkerchiefs, interspersed
with forget-me-nots, rose-sprays, and fern-leaves.
Miss Victoria De Jobbyns (she had originally been christened Sarah,
but that name was dropped now as vulgar) had from the first felt an
emotion of pique that her little sisters' governess should be so
lady-like, so perfectly patrician in air and bearing, and, more than
all, so uselessly handsome; for, of course, she thought, of what use
is beauty to a governess?
Her mother's first idea had been, what a perilous inmate in a house
if there had been a grown-up son; but, apart from her being a paid
dependant, her very loveliness was an all-sufficient reason for
secluding her in the school-room, and never permitting her to be seen
by guests or visitors, especially of the male sex.
'You are Scotch?' said the young lady, abruptly and interrogatively,
on the occasion of her first visit.
'Yes.'
'And yet you don't look a bit Scotch, or talk like them either.'
Alison smiled as she wondered what the young lady thought the natives
of the North were like.
'Where do your people live--in the Highlands?'
'My family are--all dead.'
'I see you are in mourning--all dead--everyone?'
'Yes,' replied Alison, curtly.
'How funny!'
Alison stared at this peculiar remark.
'What was that you were playing when I came in?' asked her visitor.
'A mazurka of Chopin's.'
'_Shopang_--who is he? And how well you sing, too.'
'I am glad you think so,' replied Alison, who sometimes accompanied
herself on the old, ill-tuned, and twangling school-room piano.
'Ma will be having you to play at her weekly receptions.'
Alison shivered at the bare idea of figuring thus among such people
as were there.
'Were you trained for the stage, or was your father a professional?
of course he was.'
'He was not' said Alison, sharply, and at this blunt remark her soft
violet eyes seemed to become hard and blue as a steel sword-blade;
the little colour she had died out of her face, and she looked ten
years older; but her blunt visitor--she of the frizzed, sandy hair,
and snub nose--mistook the cause of her emotion, and said,
'You have had private trouble, I suppose?'
Alison was silent.
'Tell me,' continued the irrepressible Miss De Jobbyns, 'have you
ever been in love?'
'In truth--I have been.'
'And your young man--he is dead, too, I suppose?'
'He I refer to is dead, at least, to me,' replied Alison, wearily;
'but here come my pupils, so please to let me resume their tasks.'
CHAPTER XVI.
THE FOUR-IN-HAND CLUB.
One of the chief, if not the only, pleasure of Alison's life of
routine was, on sunny days, to take her little charges into
Kensington Gardens, and set them by the margin of the blue Round
Pond, and watch its tiny fleet of toy ships skimming to and fro, with
the hideous, Dutch-looking palace of Kensington as a background--a
palace, the rooms of which are only remarkable for memories of
William of Orange (and, let us add, of Glencoe) and Elizabeth
Villiers, the hideous, one-eyed Countess of Orkney; but stately, even
grand, are the avenues of old trees that grow thereby. 'How many
secrets have been overheard by these ancient elms since Heneage Finch
built the boundary-fence of his pleasance! Could their experience be
set forth for the behoof of modern lovers, would they be apt,' asks a
writer, 'to encourage or to warn?'
The old palace is still there as it was when the home of the Finches,
with its three irregular quadrangles, built of red brick, ornamented
with columns, quoins, and cornices of indifferent stone, unchanged as
when Solmes Blues mounted guard and the early Georges swore and
blustered in broken English and guttural German; but how changed are
all its surroundings, for miles upon miles of streets stretch far to
the westward, southward, and northward of it now.
When James VI., accustomed to old Edinburgh within its 'Flodden
Wall,' was so startled with the size of the petty London of his time
that, in his famous speech in the Star Chamber, in 1616, he declared
that its size made it a nuisance to the nation, that he would have
all new edifices pulled down, and the builders committed to prison,
he could little foresee the London of the days of steam!
And, often as she sat there under the stately trees, Alison loved to
ponder over the days when the old Court suburb was remote from
London, for in 1750, where now we find busy Westbourne Grove, stood a
solitary house, called Western Green, three miles distant from Hyde
Park; and so lately as 1830, on the Bayswater side of the Gardens,
were Kensington Gravel Pits, facing the Broad Walk, stretching away
to what is now called Bayswater, which was formerly renowned for the
springs and conduits for which the city was then indebted for pure
water. It was famous then for its tea gardens, there called the
Flora, extending the whole length of Lancaster Gate.
So, book in hand, while the children played near her on the grass,
Alison would sit in Kensington Gardens for hours lost in reverie,
while the bees hummed in the hot air at the flower-beds near the
Serpentine, and the sun blazed without mercy on the sheet of shining
water that stretched away towards the Albert Gate; but, when certain
thoughts of the past occurred to her, there would seem no beauty in
that summer scene, nor warmth even in the sunshine, for there was a
dull, weary, and aching crave at her heart, with the ever-recurring
question--Where was Bevil, and why did he not make an effort to seek
her out?
She knew not that the only person who could enlighten him as to her
movements--the vicar of Chilcote--had steadily refused to do so.
On such occasions old Archie was generally hovering about for a sight
of her; and, if he could exchange a word with her, would steal away
to his dingy lodgings 'as happy as a king,' to use his own phrase;
and muttering--'The Lord will watch owre her--the Lord will watch
owre her--like ilka blade o' grass that keps its ain drap o' dew.'
One day she extended her walk beyond the boundary of the Gardens,
and, crossing the bridge near the powder magazine, watched with
feverish eagerness the crowds of fashionables who were gathering in
their thousands there; for it was the 17th of May, when there was to
be a muster of the Four-in-Hand Club, and she had a strange
presentiment that she should see Bevil Goring--one of those
presentiments which come unbidden to the mind, perhaps more often to
the Scottish mind than any other--why or how, we know not--but which
seem to speak of that which is to come as powerfully as ever did
those oracles of old that whispered through the mist of Delphi, or by
the black doves of Dodona; and she was not doomed to be--in one sense
at least--disappointed.
Amid the fast gathering crowds and the general excitement of the
scene she was careful not to lose sight of her little charges, whose
tiny hands she clasped in her own, and kept them close by her side.
She saw Cadbury ride past, accompanied by Gaskins his groom; and,
while the sight gave her a kind of shock, she shrank behind a tree
lest he should perceive her, and some minutes elapsed ere she
ventured from her hiding place.
Natheless his peerage, aware of his plebeian descent and certainly
not distinguished appearance, instead of appearing fashionably
attired like a London park rider, Cadbury affected the style of a
country gentleman; and on this day--though a most indifferent
horseman--he wore Bedford cord breeches, and black polished boots, an
ordinary cut-away coat buttoned over the chest, a hat rather low in
the crown, and carried a light hunting whip, affecting the air of one
who flew over his fences 'like a bird' though not unfrequently he was
landed on one side, while his horse remained on the other; and he
rode over the hounds and committed many similar unpardonable faults
in the field.
At this narrowly escaped rencontre she felt her colour come and
go--come and go--quickly. The man's appearance brought brought back
with a rush, and vividly, a host of painful and annoying memories;
and then there was the thousand pounds cheque sent anonymously and
the marble cross so mysteriously erected at her father's grave.
Oh, was she right or was she wrong in avoiding him?
Nowhere in Europe can such a sight be seen as that presented on such
a day beside the Serpentine when the meet of the Four-in-Hand Club
takes place. All London seemed to be looking its brightest and best,
and all London--at least, the fashionable world thereof--seemed to
have found some excuse for being in the vicinity of the Serpentine
Bridge and the powder magazine which stands thereby.
It was May, and the young green trees were in full foliage, and the
parterres of rhododendrons and azaleas were in bloom; and gathering
there were the beauty and fashion of the greatest city in the world,
with the best horse flesh, the most accomplished drivers, and the
most perfect drags, with shining panels and plated harness.
On either side of the drive all the hawthorns, pink and white, were
in bloom, loading the morning air with the perfume of the almond; and
the waters of the Serpentine were seen at intervals between the
flowery shrubs and long avenues of leafy trees in all the fresh
greenery of May; but as Alison looked around her she thought of
Essilmont in May--Essilmont, which too probably she would never see
again, with the pool in the Ythan where the Black Hound appeared when
one of her race was drowned in it; where the grey-clad angler loved
to linger by the stream in the silvery morning mist; where the black
gled crowed overhead as he winged his way across the purple heather,
or the cushet doo cooed with bell-like note in the pine coppice, and
the high antlers of the stag were seen as he couched amid the cool
and fan-leaved bracken.
But the acclamations of the little girls who clung to her hands or
skirts roused Alison from her reverie, for the procession had
started, and above thirty drags, horsed magnificently, with splendid
silver harness blazing in the sunshine, were getting into motion,
their drivers--when not clad in the club uniform, blue, with gilded
buttons--wearing accurate morning costume, while the dresses of the
many ladies who crowded the lofty seats on the roof, were such as
only Regent Street can furnish--and for beauty, no other city on
earth could have produced such women as were seen there, in carriages
or on foot.
Team after team went past, the German Ambassador with his bays, the
Guards' drag, with four glossy blacks, the Hussars from Hounslow,
chestnuts, greys, and roans, all criticised and critically examined
by the onlookers, and surrounded by Hyde Park in all its glory, the
route being taken from the magazine to Hyde Park corner, thence by
Knightsbridge Barracks, passing the Albert Memorial, and out by the
Queen's Gate, where the whole passed away like a phantasmagoria from
the eyes of Alison, whose gaze followed the line of drags like one
lost in a painful dream, after her heart had given the first bound of
bewilderment, on seeing that the leading coach was driven by Bevil
Goring!
She had seen a dashing drag drawn by a team of beautiful roans, and
certainly her heart beat painfully with joy, amazement, and then with
something of mortification, when she recognised in the driver
thereof, 'tooling along in a most workmanlike manner,' as a bystander
remarked, her _fiancé_, Bevil Goring, while on the top seats were
Jerry Wilmot, Tony Dalton, young Fleming, and others of the Rifles,
with Laura, and several ladies, some of whom were seated close behind
Goring, and in animated conversation with him, one of them apparently
a rather flirty party, who insisted on shading his eyes sometimes
with her scarlet silk parasol.
She again shrank behind a tree, as she had done when Cadbury came in
sight. Her gaze, and her heart too, followed the gay drag with its
roans and brilliant party going away to luncheon, no doubt at Muswell
Hill, and she watched it until it disappeared.
How she got through the remainder of the day in the dull school-room
on the attic floor in Pembridge Square, she scarcely knew; but the
next was considerably advanced before she saw an account of the
coaching meet in a fashionable paper, and read that 'Captain Goring
of the Rifles' drag and team were considered by eminent connoisseurs
as the most perfect in the park.' A little further on she saw that
at his rooms in Piccadilly he had, after the meet, entertained a
number of the club at dinner, with many persons of distinction,
including H.R.H. the F.M. commanding, and one or two foreign
ambassadors.
His drag and team! What a change was here! Poor Alison was indeed
sorely bewildered; but on reflection the change failed to give her
joy. Here were evidences of great and sudden wealth, and yet he made
no effort to discover her. And those ladies on the drag, who were
they; and who was she who seemed so familiar with him, and to whose
playful remarks he stooped to listen from time to time?
Alas! it seemed as if his neglect of her was quite accounted for now.
She suppressed a great desire to sob aloud, and half drew her
engagement ring from her finger. Then, with true superstition of the
heart, she carefully replaced it, as she did a locket which contained
his likeness, and which she wore in the breast of her dress; but the
episode of that day and all it vaguely suggested added sorely to the
already sufficient bitterness of the poor girl's governess life.
She knew not that though, in accordance with his recently-acquired
wealth and position, his own tastes, and the wishes of friends, Bevil
had started a drag and joined the Four-in-Hand Club, he had been
baffled resolutely more than once in his efforts to trace her by the
well-meaning vicar of Chilcote, and that he was in perpetual anxiety
to discover her, and was trusting to hope that her father's death on
one hand and his own ample means had removed the barrier that the
former had raised between them.
It is the fate of true love apparently never to run like a railway.
'But why that proverbial asperity should be confined to what is true
we are unable to say,' writes a novelist, adding, 'For our own part,
that eternal smoothness has but little charm; and the ripple which
reflects sunshine and shade, bright gleams and darkening clouds in
love as in Nature, gives brightness and variety to the prosiest
poetry in the world.'
But doubtless Goring and Alison Cheyne were beginning to think that
they had endured enough of the darkening clouds that seemed as yet
without a silver lining.
CHAPTER XVII.
HUMILIATION.
Had Goring indeed forgotten or ceased to love her? This was the
ever-recurring question in the mind of Alison now, and she recalled
the lines of the Spanish song, _Vanse mis amores_, as applicable to
herself:
'How could I bear--how bear disdain,
Who not the slightest favour ever
Received without a blush of pain;
How could I bear disdain? O, never!
One hour of absence, swift and brief,
I could not bear--how should I bear
A long and tedious age of grief,
An age of grief, of gloom and fear?
O! I shall die without relief,
For I am young, and--O, sincere.'
If Goring was, as she thought bitterly and repiningly, remiss in
attempting to trace her or not caring to do so, as her heart at times
began to forebode, she certainly would not and could not throw
herself in his way; she could but wait and hope, suffer and endure.
But one day she had an unexpected annoyance to encounter.
While the two little girls with the fantastic names, Irene and
Iseulte, played on the grass near her in Kensington Gardens, seated
under the shadow of the trees, she was reading--or trying to read,
for her mind was ever preoccupied--a railway volume, she became
conscious that a man was hovering near, indeed, hanging over her.
She looked up and instantly recognized Sir Jasper Dehorsey--or
Captain Smith, as she supposed him to be--regarding her with his calm
and insolent though admiring and insoucient smile. He lifted his
hat, and said, with a bow,
'I knew I was not mistaken; there could not be another like my little
runaway of Antwerp.'
Alison blushed scarlet with intense annoyance and then grew pale with
alarm, she felt herself so friendless and alone. Finding her silent
he spoke again.
'We have met before--you remember me, I hope?'
'Sir--I have no wish to remember you, and still less to renew the
acquaintance,' said Alison, quitting her seat.
'Now, that's too bad,' said Dehorsey, deliberately barring her way;
'too bad indeed. If my admiration of you----'
'Please to remember that I cannot listen to your insolence. These
children to whom I am governess----'
'Governess--you--here is a game!' said he, mockingly. 'Ahoi,
girls--run after this, find it and keep it?'
Taking a crown piece from his purse he spun it along the grass to
some distance, and the girls rushed after it to search for and find
it, a task of some difficulty.
'Sir, sir,' said Alison, tremulous with indignation, 'you ought not
to have done that.'
'Why?'
'I am the governess of these girls, and responsible for them.'
'Absurd--a governess, you! One might as well expect to see a queen
or a professional beauty filling the post. Clever this governess
dodge of yours,' he continued, with a kind of insolence peculiar to
himself. 'I suppose these girls are your nieces--little decoy
ducklings to play propriety? And how is our mutual friend, old
Cad--I mean Lord Cadbury? Seen him lately? No answer? Quarrelled,
I suppose--these things never last long; but you are as charming as
ever. How bad of you to leave me as you did that night in the Café
au Progrès!'
Alison called the children to her side and walked away. There was in
her whole air and manner a conscious dignity that might have quieted
the presumptuous coxcomb and _roué_ who dared to address her, while
affliction had touched her features with something in expression that
was beyond even beauty; but Dehorsey was one of those men who had a
total disbelief in any feminine purity.
'Where do you live, little one?' he asked, while deliberately
following her.
Alison made no reply, but looked round to see if Archie was near. He
was in sight, but an appeal to him just then would have been unwise,
for, old though he was, Dehorsey would have felt the full weight of
his walking staff.
'How dare you, coward that you are, to molest me thus!' exclaimed
Alison.
'A rough word from such lips as yours,' he said, mockingly, but
changing colour nevertheless; 'but as an old friend----'
'Friend!'
'Votre pardon, mademoiselle--acquaintance then.'
Alison quitted the Gardens in haste, and hurried home with her two
charges; and she was afterwards compelled to relinquish promenading
there, one of her chief pleasures, as Dehorsey was always on the
watch for her, and more than once had followed her at a little
distance to the door of the house in Pembridge Square.
She was thus obliged to remain more indoors than she was wont to do;
and, to add to her annoyance there, she was considerably afflicted by
much more than she relished of the society of the loud and fast Miss
De Jobbyns; for that young lady had recently found an admirer, or--as
she confidently alleged--a lover, and in her vanity and exultation
was never weary of expatiating to Alison on his merits and wealth,
his looks, his phrases, his dress, the 'button-holes' she made for
him, and how she and her mamma contrived to waylay him in the park or
the Row and elsewhere, to all of which Alison's listened wearily and
without interest, not even caring to inquire his name.
She had her own sad thoughts of love, and they were enough for her.
'I should like you to see him when he comes to mamma's weekly
reception,' continued the young lady, as she frizzed up her hair and
practised _œillades_ at herself in Alison's little mirror, 'but as
a rule mamma never intrudes a governess on friends--excuse me saying
so.'
'I am aware of that,' replied Alison, softly, and heedless of the
cutting rudeness of the speech.
'Since Miss Smythe-Smythe was here, she fancies that governesses
require to be snubbed.'
'Why?'
'As a matter of principle, I suppose; but, upon my soul, I think it
is rather hard upon you,' continued this slangy young person. 'We
met him at Mr. Taype the lawyer's house, in Sussex Gardens, and, as
he is rich, mamma fastened on him at once for me, don't you know; oh,
isn't it fun?'
'Are you engaged then?' asked Alison, when Miss De Jobbyns had
expatiated on the subject for more than half an hour.
'Engaged--oh, no--not exactly yet--but it is only a matter of time.
He showed a great desire to cultivate our family; or rather mamma
determined to cultivate him. But, hang it all! He is very shy for
an officer, and leaves me to do the spooning actually.'
'He is in the army then?'
'Yes; and hangs out at Aldershot.'
Alison felt her colour change at the name of that locality; but she
only said,
'Miss De Jobbyns, you should not use the fast phrases you do.'
'Well, ma uses them; ma always does.'
She did not add, that which perhaps she did not know, that her 'ma'
had whilom been most accomplished in 'sherry-glass flirtations' while
behind the bar at the 'Black Swan.'
'Isn't spoon English?' she asked.
'It is slang.'
'Is it? Well, if the verb "to spoon" is slang, I like it--that is
all! But I wish I could flirt.'
'For what purpose?'
'To draw him on. But simply I can't do it, he is so stand-off in his
manner.'
'Why?'
'It is not my _forte_; I wish it was. There is Miss Le Robbynson,
she can flirt with a dozen of men at once, and even make them quarrel
about her.'
'But men as a rule dislike flirts, and don't marry them; and flirting
is pretending to care for a person when you don't.'
'Ah; but I care a great deal for this fellow.'
'Fellow?' queried Alison, on whose delicate ear this girl's
phraseology jarred sorely.
'Well, my military beau?'
'You should not adopt this style.'
'You are not my governess!' retorted Miss De Jobbyns, with some
asperity.
'Some day, no doubt, I shall see your intended.'
The daughter of the house blushed with pleasure at the phrase; but
thought that, with a governess so undeniably handsome, it might be
better that no meeting took place as yet. Suddenly she said,
'You have some fellow's photo that you wear at your neck; you have it
on now,' she added, making a clutch at a ribbon which encircled the
slender throat of Alison, who instinctively drew back and placed a
hand upon her bosom.
'Some fellow's photo!--how _can_ you use such a style of language?'
she asked, haughtily.
'I have told you before that you are not my governess, and I won't be
lectured by you; but as for the photo----'
'It is not a photo I wear to-day.'
'What then?'
'An ornament which I wear because--because----'
'What?' asked Miss De Jobbyns, impatiently.
'It is the anniversary of papa's birth.'
'And you won't show it to me?'
'I have not said so,' replied Alison, gently, as she drew up the
object from her bosom. It was her father's badge, and the badge of
his father before him, as a baronet of Nova Scotia--a gold oval
species of medal, bearing in a scutcheon, _argent_, a St. Andrew's
cross, _azure_, with thereon an inscutcheon of the royal arms of
Scotland, with an Imperial crown, and the motto of Henry, Duke of
Rothesay, '_Fax mentis honestœ gloria_.'
Miss De Jobbyns, who had never seen anything of the kind before,
surveyed it with equal wonder and admiration.
'What a funny thing! I would so like to wear it at a ball to-night,'
she exclaimed.
'Excuse me,' replied Alison, as she replaced it in her bosom, 'but I
cannot lend it.'
'How greedy of you! Then you will sell it, perhaps?'
'_Sell it!_' repeated Alison, with an inflection of voice that struck
even the dull ear of the soap-boiler's daughter. 'Not for worlds!'
'I thought you said that your father was dead.'
'He is dead.'
'Then who is that queer-looking old Scotsman whom Irene and Iseulte
see speaking to you sometimes?'
'He was my father's faithful valet, and is now my faithful friend,'
replied Alison, with mingled hauteur and emotion.
'Dear me! how romantic--how funny! But I suppose you will have no
place now to spend your holidays in?'
'None,' sighed Alison, who had never thought of them till then, and
she looked round the bare, bleak school-room, the scene of her daily
toil, and where nearly all her time was passed now; but just then the
carriage was announced, and she was relieved of the oppressive
society of the somewhat irrepressible Miss Victoria De Jobbyns.
If the children talked thus of poor old Archie Auchindoir, they might
speak of the insolent 'Captain Smith.' Thus she might lose her
situation and be again cast on the world. Oh, how tempest-tossed was
her poor little heart!
The perfect, self-posed, and ladylike manner of Alison was to a
certain extent lost upon the rather rough, pampered, and hoydenish
damsel who had just driven off to the Row to meet her admirer, no
doubt, and who saw in her only a paid dependant, whom her mother
might discard like one of the housemaids at an hour's notice or less.
Her sweet nature, her natural lightness and cheerfulness, her
readiness and wish to oblige, yet never intrusively in any way, were
all lost on the coarse natures of those among whom her evil fortune
had cast her.
She was glad that on this particular day, inspired by filial
reverence, she had substituted the relic of her father for the locket
which contained the photo of Bevil Goring, whose face she would have
shrunk from subjecting to the off-hand criticism of the young lady
who had just left her; and she was not without a stronger fear that
the military lover of Miss De Jobbyns--if lover he was--was the
_roué_ Dehorsey, who now haunted Kensington Gardens and Pembridge
Square, though 'Captain Smith' seemed scarcely the kind of man to be
captivated by the soap-boiler's daughter.
CHAPTER XVIII.
MISS DE JOBBYNS' ADMIRER.
'You will be good enough to keep the children quiet and amused this
evening, Miss Cheyne,' said Mrs. De Jobbyns, 'as we have company
coming to dinner. Also have them nicely dressed, as they may be sent
for to dessert or to the drawing-room.'
Being now used to be spoken to in this style, Alison merely bowed, on
which Mrs. De Jobbyns said, sharply,
'You heard me, I presume?'
'Yes; you certainly spoke loud enough.'
Mrs. De Jobbyns frowned. She would have liked her to add 'ma'am,'
like any other paid dependant; but Alison, of course, never thought
of such a thing.
'You may withdraw now, Miss Cheyne,' said the lady, with an
assumption of would-be dignity that sat rather absurdly on the
whilome dispenser of glasses of gin and bitters and pints of stout at
the bar of the 'Black Swan.'
'Oh, Miss Cheyne, I wonder when the wedding is to be!' exclaimed
little Irene when Alison returned to the school-room.
'Whose wedding, dear?' she asked.
'Why, Vic.'s--don't you know she is going to be married to that rich
military swell?'
'Oh, fie, Irene--you must not use such terms!'
'Why not? I heard cook call him so when she told the tablemaid, and
said we two girls would be bridesmaids.'
Intent on a book she had procured--by the way, save photographic
albums in which the De Jobbyns family were reproduced endlessly,
there were no books in the house--Alison thought no more of the
matter; but when evening was drawing on she heard the soft rustle of
a long silken skirt, as Miss De Jobbyns, arrayed for conquest, swept
in, wearing a really beautiful costume of dark blue velvet and light
blue silk, smothered with cream-tinted lace.
'He is coming--he is coming to dinner--mamma got him to promise that
he would, at last!' exclaimed the young lady, pirouetting about in
the extravagance of her joy. 'Tell me how you like my dress?'
'It is indeed exquisite--in material,' replied Alison, who of course
had dined in the school-room with her pupils at one o'clock, and felt
little or no interest to learn that Miss Victoria's lover, or
admirer, was coming to a little dinner _en famille_ at seven p.m.
'He will soon be here--how do you think I look?' she asked for the
third or fourth time.
As Alison's delicate fingers were adjusting some parts of the lace,
the sharp eyes of Miss De Jobbyns observed--as they had often done
before--the ring, the engagement ring, which the former had received
from her lover, under the whispering beeches, one evening.
'It is very beautiful, and must be valuable,' said Miss De Jobbyns,
examining it closely.
'It is valuable.'
'Too much so, I think, for--for one teaching to wear.'
'When it was given to me, teaching was not thought of,' said Alison,
in a low, sad voice.
'I have no end of lovely rings; but,' urged the girl, who was by
nature covetous, 'you might lend it to me, just for to-night, though
you wouldn't lend that funny ornament for the Le Robbynson's ball.'
'Excuse me,' replied Alison, coldly, 'it never leaves my finger.'
'Not even when you wash your hands?'
'Not even then.'
'You will spoil these beautiful stones.'
'It shall never be seen on another hand while I live.'
'Indeed,' sneered Miss De Jobbyns; 'and thereby hangs a tale, I
suppose. Upon my Sam you are very romantic! Of course you got it
from the fellow whose photo you wear, but will let no one see?'
Alison made no reply, but her colour came and went with annoyance at
the girl's brusquerie; and the latter began to chant the praises of
her admirer, a subject of which her listener was utterly weary.
'He has we don't know how many thousands a year--think of that; oh
my! Talking of love, I heard him say laughingly to mamma, who was
chaffing him on the subject, that he would not be in love with anyone
again.'
'And what of that?'
'He meant, of course, with anyone again but me.'
'How do you construe his remark thus?'
'Because his eyes met mine as he said so; and I do hope I blushed--I
am sure I did.'
'And he is rich, you say?'
'Yes, rich enough to satisfy even mamma.'
'That is fortunate,' replied Alison, with a sigh, as she recalled her
father's bitter opposition to her own engagement, and all the wiles
and worry of Cadbury.
'Fortunate indeed; but there is about Bevil----'
'BEVIL!' exclaimed Alison, startled by the uncommon name.
'Don't snap me up so! Yes, Bevil is his name--sweetly pretty I think
it--Bevil Goring.'
'And he is rich, you say?'
'Yes; has twenty or thirty thousand a year at least.'
It cannot be the same, though the conjunction of name is very
singular, said Alison in her agitated heart.
'Is he a merchant,' she asked, 'a city man?'
'City be hanged!' responded this impulsive young woman. 'He is an
officer--a Captain in the Rifle Brigade, and, when not in town, hangs
out at Aldershot. But there is a carriage; the people are arriving,
and I must be off.'
She quickly withdrew, leaving Alison pale as a corpse, trembling in
every limb, and rooted to the spot, propping herself by a hand on the
table, till she sank into a chair, oblivious of the wonder with which
the two little girls regarded her sudden, and, to them, unaccountable
emotion.
For some time her thoughts were terrible. She recalled the drag
alleged by the public prints to be Goring's--the entertainment, given
even to royalty, at 'his rooms in Piccadilly,' all evidences of
wealth that must have come to him since the time she was decoyed to
the Continent, and in the fact of that wealth--the absence of which
was the cause of her father's hostility to the last hour of his
life--this girl's remarks now confirmed her!
That Bevil Goring could love or even admire such a girl--a man so
refined and delicate in taste and ideas--she never for a moment
imagined; but what did the whole situation and that girl's boastful
allegations mean? How came he to know such people, despite their
great wealth, and permit them to cultivate his acquaintance? Yet
matters seemed to have progressed so far that even the servants were
canvassing the prospects of a _wedding_!
More than all, why, oh why had he never attempted to discover her, to
trace her out, in these her days of poverty and sore trial!
The magnitude and the multitude of her thoughts overwhelmed her;
among these were emotions of sharp but just pride, keen
disappointment, bitterest doubt, and agonising mortification; but her
tears--usually so ready to flow--came not to relieve her now, and she
was only roused from a kind of feverish stupefaction by the entrance
of a servant to light the candles, and conduct 'the young ladies
downstairs to dessert,' an invitation to which they responded with
instant alacrity.
Stooping over the stair-bannister, she heard his voice once or twice
as the male guests filed off to the drawing-room after the ladies,
and it thrilled through her heart. A choking lump rose in her
throat, but still not a tear would come.
After a time she was roused by some one addressing her. It was a
servant, by nature saucy, under-bred, illiterate, and disposed to be
impertinent in general when she could be so with impunity.
'Were you addressing me?' asked Alison.
'Yes; the missus says as you are to tittivate yourself a bit and come
down to the drawing-room.'
'I am to--_what_?' asked Alison, sharply--for her at least.
'Tittivate yourself--it is Henglish; but, bein' Scotch, perhaps you
don't know what it means.'
'I am not going to the--drawing-room to-night.'
'You won't obey the missus?' exclaimed the servant, aghast.
'Certainly not in this instance.'
'Don't you know your place? You are honly a guv'ness, and guv'nesses
ain't ladies, whatever they may think.'
'What are they?'
'Mock ones.'
'Leave the room instantly--or----'
'Or what?' asked the girl, sharply.
'I'll get you turned out of the house.'
The girl withdrew uttering as Parthian shots some remarks about
'hupstarts hordering their betters about.'
In a few minutes Miss De Jobbyns, with some irritation of manner,
appeared to prefer the same request, adding that she was wanted for a
hand at whist.
'To come down to play whist? Is not this an unusual condescension?'
asked Alison.
'Yes,' was the cool response; 'ma thinks it part of your duty to make
yourself generally useful; and, I suppose, you can play whist?'
The girl was too underbred to be aware how heartless was the _sang
froid_, in which she suggested, or commanded, that Alison should make
herself useful.
'I would rather be excused.'
'But ma says you must!'
'Must--why?'
'A hand is wanted at the whist table, and I want Bevil at the piano,
all to myself.'
'It is utterly impossible. I have a headache,' replied Alison,
goaded to desperation.
'Bother your headache!' was the elegant response; 'try sal volatile,
Rimmel's vinegar, anything, but come.'
However, Alison remained inflexible, and so far from making herself
'useful' to either Mrs. De Jobbyns and her daughter, by appearing in
their circle downstairs, she retired to bed--to think and weep--but
not to sleep.
The vicar of Chilcote was, she knew, in town, and to him she would
appeal to procure her another home, where she would hear the name of
Bevil Goring no more!
CHAPTER XIX.
THE FORECLOSURE EFFECTED.
While Dalton, under Laura's care and nursing, had been fast
recovering health and strength, on leave of absence, at Chilcote
Grange; and Jerry Wilmot, though less tenderly cared for at
Wilmothurst, surrounded as he was then by every luxury and comfort
still, was also fast learning to forget all he had endured in
Ashanti, and all the natural buoyancy of his spirits was returning,
Lady Julia was as full of unspeakable animosity at Mr. Chevenix as
the languid character of her aristocratic nature would permit her to
be.
A regular breach had replaced the cool indifference with which she
had viewed that personage. In the profundity of his plebeian
insolence he had at last taken full measures to obtain the interest
on his mortgages, and more, he had foreclosed them, and ruin now
awaited the house of Wilmot!
And again and again, while tenderly carressing Flossie, or having her
long tresses brushed out by Mademoiselle Florine, she languidly
bewailed to Cousin Emily, or to Jerry, who lingered near her with the
cigar in hand he dared not light in her presence, that 'the artful
pillager of the Wilmot estates would drive her to a beggar's grave in
a foreign land.'
Though Jerry thought life was too short 'for all this sort of thing,'
and was making up his mind to 'cut the whole thing' and go to India,
he was still on friendly terms with old Mr. Chevenix, but
nevertheless was greatly ruffled by stories that reached him of Lord
Twiseldown's attention to Bella, and was once, as he phrased it,
'awfully cut up,' when coming upon them riding together without even
a groom in attendance, and nearly overtook them in a green lane--yea,
would have done so, had he not timely drawn the bridle of his own
horse.
They had been laughing and talking amicably--certainly more like
friends, it would seem, than lovers, as gossip averred them to be;
and with aching heart, and eager and admiring eyes, poor Jerry
Wilmot--poor in more ways than one, for he was a ruined man
now--observed the air and bearing of the handsome girl, in her dark
blue riding habit--a costume so fitted for the display of every
womanly grace--while from her slender waist she moved with every
movement of her horse, the very action of which seemed to assert that
he was proud of having such a rider.
Still more was Jerry 'cut up' and then perplexed when, soon after, he
met Mr. Chevenix, who, with a twinkle in his eye--whether of pride or
mischief the said Jerry failed to detect--informed him, somewhat
unnecessarily as he thought, that Lord Twiseldown had proposed to
Bella.
'Proposed!' repeated Jerry, in a rather breathless voice.
'Yes.'
'And when does the--the marriage come off?'
'It won't come off at all.'
'Why?'
'She has refused him.'
'Refused him!'
'Yes; odd, isn't it? Can't make Bella out at all,' replied Mr.
Chevenix, as he nodded, smiled, and trotted away on his cob.
Jerry was, we say, perplexed on hearing of this. Bella's refusal of
Twiseldown's hand delighted him greatly, but was it born of regard
for himself or regard for someone else? He had not gone near her for
some time past, and knew not how many might have been hovering about
her, now that, with all her beauty and brilliance apart, she was
known as the virtual heiress of Wilmothurst.
It filled him with many thoughts that were difficult of arrangement
and of analysis. He resolved to pay her a farewell visit anyway, and
told his lady mother that he would do so.
'That girl again!' said Lady Julia, as he rode off. 'I did not think
that he had actually involved himself with her.'
'Nor has he, perhaps, auntie,' sighed Cousin Emily, though her heart
made her suspect otherwise.
'I believe Jerry to be, like many young men of the present day,'
resumed Lady Julia, still obtuse as to the new situation, 'one of
those who think they can--especially with a girl of her position in
society--go to the utmost confines of love-making--can look, say, and
do what they please, and yet do and say nothing that will quite
compromise them, or involve their honour; and girls such as the
Chevenix quite understand the matter. But that there should be more
in it passes my comprehension, and yours too, darling Flossie,' she
added, taking the cur out of its mother-of-pearl basket and kissing
its nose tenderly.
She spoke, as usual, languidly and softly, for she was ever one of
those who deem that 'feeling, or any betrayal of it, is a sure sign
of an ill-bred person'--bad form, in short.
Meanwhile Jerry was _tête-à-tête_ with Bella Chevenix in her pretty
little drawing-room overlooking the ivy-clad church and the village
green.
Jerry was rather grave, for Bella had been piqued by his absence, and
received him, he thought, rather coldly, which led him to fear there
'was some other fellow in the field;' but anon Bella began to rally
him, for she could not but remember that the letter he had written on
the night before Coomassie was entered, amounted quite to a
declaration.
'I begin to sicken of the world and all its bitterness, Bella,' said
he, a little irrelevantly, on which she sang, softly,
'Oh, what shall I be at fifty,
If I am then alive,
If I find the world so bitter
When I am barely twenty-five?'
'I wonder if you will be so merry when we meet again, years hence, if
ever,' said Jerry, almost angrily.
'Years hence--what do you mean, Jerry--for I must call you Jerry as
of old, if you adopt this tone?' said she, regarding his now grave
face attentively.
'I go to the Horse Guards to-morrow to arrange about an exchange for
India.'
'Why?'
'Can you ask--when you know that I am a ruined and beggared man?'
He was looking doggedly out of the window, and did not see how her
sensitive lips quivered, and how her shapely bodice was heaving with
the painful pulsations of her warm and affectionate heart; for
Bella--impulsive Bella--felt that if she said only a little more she
must break down altogether; and the muscles of her slender throat
ached with the efforts she made to keep back her desire to weep.
'Ruined--Jerry--you?' she said, after a pause.
'You know how, and why; the past is over--at an end, and for ever;
but do think of me kindly, Bella, when I am far away from you--for my
own kindred are few and cold--yea, seem to have little heart for me.'
'Jerry, dear Jerry,' said the girl, in a low voice, 'ere this, I
thought you would have asked me to marry--to--to marry you.'
'I dared not, Bella.'
'Why?'
'Lest you might misunderstand me.'
'But you--you love me?'
'God alone knows how well!'
'Then, Jerry, will _you_ marry me?' she said, while her sweet voice
sank into a pleading whisper; 'I have always loved you.'
Jerry caught her wildly in his arms.
'Bella--my wife--my own little wife at last!' exclaimed Jerry, in a
rather broken voice, as they kissed each other solemnly and
passionately, for all doubts between them were ended now.
'Oh, Bella darling,' said Jerry, after sundry incoherences had been
indulged in, 'though far, far away from you, I often dreamed of such
an hour as this--for I was always with you in the spirit.'
'I would rather have had you, as I have you now, you dear, provoking
old Jerry, in the flesh,' replied Bella, with one of her arch and
waggish smiles. 'It is much more satisfactory.'
So Wilmothurst would return to the old line again, in all its vast
extent of fertile acreage, and with the latter would come a bride
second to none in brilliance and beauty that had ever come there
before, though not--like haughty Lady Julia, the daughter of ever so
many earls--but of a hale, stout, and warm-hearted old fellow, who
loved Jerry as his own son--though, sooth to say, we fear he will
never be able to abide his mother, who eventually took up her abode,
in sullen and stately grandeur, with Cousin Emily, at the restored
Dower House in Langley Park.
So Jerry did not go up to the Horse Guards after all, but quietly and
rapidly set about the arrangements for his marriage, which was very
soon to come about; and, meanwhile, as may be supposed, he spent
every spare hour--and he had a good many of them--with Bella.
'The joy of my life is a _tête-à-tête_ with you, dearest Bella,' said
Jerry, as he lay on the grass at her feet one evening smoking his
brier-root. 'My lady mother's manner is so cold and stately that she
quite thrusts all a poor fellow's heart back upon himself. By Jove,
you should have seen her mode of welcoming me home after our shindy
in Ashanti! I would have preferred less etiquette and more love;
some of the kissing and clinging some of our poor fellows, like Tony
Dalton, received on the day we landed at Portsmouth.'
'Poor Jerry! you will never want for kisses now,' said Bella,
laughingly.
'By-the-by, I have a letter from Goring, who is again in town, and
cutting quite a figure, I hear, in the world of fashion.'
'Has he heard aught yet of Miss Cheyne, poor girl?' asked Bella, who
naturally took a deep interest in all love affairs, especially just
then.
'He says that he has not. Here is his epistle; but that he is bored
to death by a soap-boiler's widow and her daughter, an absurd couple,
whom, for his sins, he met at the house of Taype, his solicitor, and
who have made a dead set at him--waylay him in the park with their
carriage, haunt the vicinity of his club, and pester him with
invitations.
'"They are shameless in their mode of teasing me, these devilish
women," he continues, "and seem to possess the power of ubiquity, and
bid fair to run me to earth. I must either cut them or hook it, and
come back to the camp." Only fancy, Bella, what odd creatures they
must be.'
'But everyone has not the wealth and handsome person of Captain
Goring.'
'Yes; and Bevil is one of the right good sort.'
So there were two sides to the picture drawn by the fervid fancy or
vanity of Miss Victoria De Jobbyns; and Alison Cheyne, had she known
all, need not have wept so bitterly far into the hours of the night,
as related.
CHAPTER XX.
HOMELESS.
With Alison events were fated to follow each other fast now.
On the day subsequent to the dinner-party at Pembridge Square she
felt too ill to leave her bed till the afternoon was well advanced.
She was, however, visited by Miss De Jobbyns, who gave her a very
inflated account of Goring's attentions to herself, how she
completely 'snuffed out the three Le Robbynson girls,' and gave him
credit for many flattering, and certainly peculiar, utterances that
Alison thought very unlike the Goring that she knew. Still she was
painfully uncertain what to think, and was very glad when her
garrulous visitor, after readjusting her frizzled hair in the mirror
and inspecting the few trifles that lay on the toilet-table, took her
departure.
Alison, we have said, could not throw herself in Goring's way; her
pride and delicacy, all love apart, revolted at the idea and she now
actually trembled lest the chance mention of her not very common name
by any of the De Jobbyns' family might lead to the discovery of her
identity in her present humble position.
And now a letter, on the envelope of which a coronet figured, was,
after being long inspected, and the cause of much surmise by Mrs. and
Miss De Jobbyns, handed to her by a servant. She opened it and read.
It would seem that, though Bevil Goring had failed to obtain from the
vicar of Chilcote the London address of Alison and a clue to her
circumstances, the 'Right Honourable Lord Cadbury' had succeeded in
obtaining both, in virtue of his rank, we presume; and the result was
this letter, most subtily and cunningly worded, and dated not from
his club or from Cadbury Court, but from the villa of his 'lady
friend' at St. John's Wood, offering her a home there, and containing
what she conceived at first to be another offer of marriage; but, on
re-reading it, the real meaning of and nature of the document came
before her, in all its insulting form and truth, as it fell from her
hand ere she tore it into minute fragments with trembling fingers.
She grew deadly pale, but her lips became firm and set; her bosom
heaved, and all the purity of her nature, her pride of old position
and race, _l'esprit de famille_ which her father had inculcated rose
within her, she covered her face with her hands as if to thrust back
her tears, and exclaimed, in a low voice,
'Oh, papa, papa! It wanted but this insult to complete the
humiliation of my life!'
So the parvenu peer sought--but in vain--to put a keystone to the
edifice of his own innate rascality.
At last she rose from her bed and proceeded to dress herself with the
intention of visiting the vicar without delay to beseech him to find
her another home; but--on looking about her toilet-table, where she
had certainly left it over night--she missed her locket--the locket
with the likeness of Bevil in it!
She instituted a strict if hurried search over all her little room,
but no trace of it could be found.
The servant who had brought breakfast to her on a covered salver had
never approached the toilet-table she was certain; but Miss De
Jobbyns had, as she remembered, lingered before the mirror, and
trifled with the little etceteras that lay thereby.
Could she be the abstractor, the delinquent, the thief?
Impossible! Yet Alison had barely completed attiring herself for the
street, with the intention of asking permission to go out for a
little time, when a maid appeared, sent by Mrs. De Jobbyns, to
request her presence in the drawing-room.
'In the drawing-room,' thought Alison; 'what does that import?'
On entering, the first object that caught her eye was her locket in
that lady's hand, and she had a perfect conviction that the latter
and her daughter were inflamed with keen resentment.
'Jealousy,' we are told, 'smacks of low life and the drama.' Be that
as it may, Alison was now fated to a sample thereof.
'Is this your property, Miss Cheyne?' asked Mrs. Slumpkin De Jobbyns,
frigidly, yet tremulous with passion.
'It is; and how came it in your possession, I demand?' exclaimed
Alison.
'You demand?'
'Yes.'
'That matters little.'
'It matters very much indeed,' said Alison, her spirit rising to the
occasion; 'a theft has been committed, else my locket would have been
where I left it, on my toilet-table.'
'Do not attempt to bandy words with me,' said the lady of the
mansion, assuming a bullying tone. 'But how is it that the likeness
of a friend of this family--of a gentleman visitor--a stranger to a
person in your position, of course--is in your possession?'
'And how do you dare to wear it?' added Miss De Jobbyns, in a shrill
voice of passion, as her mother tossed the locket to the feet of
Alison, who regained it, and deliberately placed it in the bosom of
her dress.
'What would he--what must we--think of you?' asked Mrs. De Jobbyns,
in a louder key.
Alison disdained to make any reply.
'You are unfit to teach my darlings--if you have not corrupted their
angel minds already--and I request you to quit Pembridge Square at
once. The housekeeper will give you what is due in lieu of a month's
notice.'
Alison had not been unprepared for this dictum. She had heard it
without a shock, and, though certainly dismayed by the sudden turn
her affairs had taken, at once prepared for and took her departure.
She kissed and bade adieu to her two little pupils, Irene and
Iseulte, whose names had no doubt been suggested by the _London
Journal_--a periodical much affected by Mrs. Slumpkin De Jobbyns in
her youth, and then drove away.
The daughter of the house, enraged and bewildered, knew not precisely
_what_ to think of the affair, but she had a gloomy fear that so far
as Bevil Goring was concerned her hopes were vanishing into thin air,
or on the eve of being shattered like the crystal in the basket of
Alnaschar, of whom no doubt she never heard.
As the cab quitted the square, Alison shrank back on perceiving Sir
Jasper Dehorsey (or 'Captain Smith,' as she supposed him to be)
ambling his horse slowly along, and watching--as she had before known
him to do--the windows of the house she had just quitted for ever;
and this incident, with the memory of Cadbury's cruel and cowardly
letter, filled her heart with horror, bitterness, and dismay. She
felt so well-nigh penniless and helpless, too.
The summer sunshine was in all its brightness and glory, but Alison
felt as if a mist surrounded her, and as if the surging of great
waters was in her ears, and she feared that she might faint.
Almost at the same moment she quitted Pembridge Square, Bevil Goring
entered it to leave his card, like a well-bred man, on the De Jobbyns
family, whom he devoutly hoped to find 'not at home.' Indeed, he
selected the time when he knew that the mother and daughter were
generally 'hairing' themselves, as they called it, in the Row, and as
he drew near the house he came suddenly upon a well-known form and
figure.
'What, Archie! faithful old Archie Auchindoir--you here!' he
exclaimed, as he shook the old man's hand with ardour. 'Can it be
you?'
'By my certie it is, sir,' replied Archie, 'and pleased I am to see a
kent face in this unco human wilderness o' brick wa's.'
'And what are you doing here now that poor Sir Ranald is dead?'
'Just what he wad hae dune--watching owre missie, sir.'
'And where is she, Archie--where is she?'
'Where her forbears wad little like to see her.'
'How--where--what?' asked Goring, impetuously.
'Governess to some brats in the square up bye.'
'What square?'
'Paimbrig Square,' replied Archie, adapting the name to his own
vernacular.
'And whose children?'
'A Mrs. De Jobbyns she ca's hersel',' replied Archie, with a
contemptuous smirk on his wrinkled visage.
'My God!' exclaimed Goring, growing red and pale alternately; 'my
darling reduced to this, and all unknown to me! When came this
about?'
'A week or two after the master gaed to his lang hame, sir. Puir Sir
Ranald!' said Archie, with a break in his voice; 'after a' he had
possest and tint, a kist and a sheet was a' he needed in the lang
rin.'
'And you have been watching over her, you say?' asked Goring, again
taking the old man's hand in his own.
'I had a wee pickle siller saved, and I thought--I thought--but never
mind; a' the men in the Mearns can do nae mair than they may.'
'And she is in Pembridge Square now?'
'Yes, sir.'
He slipped a card with his address into Archie's hand, and hurried to
the house, where the startling ring he gave the bell brought an
indignant housemaid to the door speedily as a genii of the Lamp.
'Mrs. and Miss De Jobbyns,' she answered, 'was not at home, having
just driven off to the park.'
'Thank heaven!--and Miss Cheyne!'
'The governess?'
'Yes--yes--is she at home?'
He was rather curtly informed that she had been dismissed from her
'sitivation,' and with her trunk had left the house a short time ago.
'Dismissed and gone--where?'
'No one in the house knew.'
He turned away in great agony of mind; and he had in his haste
forgotten to ask Archie where he lived. He looked about him in every
direction, but the old man was nowhere to be seen.
And so she would be utterly homeless now.
_Homeless_, and in London--and she so young, so tender, and beautiful!
Alas! more evils than ever the fatal Black Hound of Essilmont
forebode might be in store for his Alison now.
CHAPTER XXI.
CONCLUSION.
So she was out in the world once more, with apparently no earthly tie
to bind her to it.
'Could I but see Bevil's face once more and then die!' was her
thought, as, blinded with the hot tears that flowed under her veil,
she was driven through the sunny and crowded streets of pleasant
Bayswater.
We have said that the vicar of Chilcote was now in town; he had
brought his family with him, and was residing in private apartments
not far from Pembridge Square, and overlooking Kensington Gardens.
Thus Alison's first thoughts--indeed her only resource--was to throw
herself upon him as she had before intended; but now she was
terrified that, if he naturally made inquiries of Mrs. De Jobbyns, in
the spirit of sourness or malevolence she might give a very distorted
account of the late episode; and, indeed, the worthy old man was
greatly disturbed when she told him her simple tale, as the same
ideas occurred to himself, and he saw all the peril of giving the
name of that irate matron as a reference to anyone else; and thus for
two entire days he remained in sore perplexity what to do.
On the third he began again to question Alison, whom he kept with his
family.
'And the portrait which caused this grotesque disturbance--the
portrait of this gentleman is that of your _fiancé_?' he asked.
'Yes.'
'Were you engaged to him with your father's consent?' asked he,
suspiciously, while he regarded her keenly, but not unkindly, under
his shaggy, white eyebrows.
'No--to my sorrow be it said,' replied Alison, with a little
hesitation.
'That seems wrong--why?'
'He was not rich enough then to suit papa's views, having little more
than his pay.'
'_Then_--is he rich now?'
'Yes--more than rich--even wealthy.'
'And has he since sought you out?'
'No,' sobbed Alison.
The vicar shook his white head and groaned.
'What is his name?' he asked, and Alison told him.
'Goring--Goring,' said he, pulling his nether lip thoughtfully; 'I
have heard the name. He called on me more than once to ask your
London address, as also did Lord Cadbury of Cadbury Court; but
suspecting his object, I declined to give it.'
'Oh, why?'
'He is an officer--and officers are often wild and unscrupulous
fellows. You are young, more than most attractive, and are without a
protector--you understand?'
'Oh, sir, how you have wronged him!'
'I am sorry you think so, but----'
'Good heavens, you may have parted me and Bevil for ever!' she
exclaimed, in a voice of intense pathos and sorrow.
'Not so, my darling--I am here!' said Bevil Goring, who had entered
unannounced by the boarding-house servant, and in a moment his arms
were round her and her head upon his breast.
The darkest hour is always that before the dawn, it is said, even as
clouds are a prelude to sunshine.
It is chiefly in novels and on the stage, but seldom in real life,
that people start and scream, or faint and fall; so Alison, on
finding herself suddenly face to face with the object of all her
dearest and tenderest thoughts, felt only her colour change and her
heart give a kind of leap within her breast; while power so
completely seemed to leave her limbs for some moments that she would
have slid on the carpet but for the support of Bevil's caressing
arms, and for more than a minute neither spoke, for great emotion
induces silence.
So she remained folded in his close embrace--content, safe in the
shelter of his arms, with her white face nestling on his breast,
while he showered kisses upon it and her hair.
'Captain Goring,' said the vicar, 'how did you discover that she was
here--with me?'
'She wrote to her old servant whither she had gone, and he informed
me without delay at my club. He did not distrust me, as you, sir,
did.'
'I trust, Captain Goring, you will pardon that now, "as all is well
that ends well," replied the vicar, with a smile, and thinking,
wisely, that he might be rather _de trop_ just then, he withdrew to
another apartment.
Goring now then held her at arm's length to survey her face, it was
so long since he had last looked upon it, and then drew her close
again to his breast. After a time, he asked,
'What is all this that I have been told about your being a
governess--Alison, love, tell me?'
'I am one now--at least, I was one, in a house in Pembridge Square.'
'With a family called De Jobbyns--absurd name!'
'Yes.'
'Is this a riddle--a joke, or what?' said he, giving his moustache an
almost angry twitch.
'No riddle or joke,' replied Alison, sweetly. 'I seemed to have no
friend in the world to aid me, and I had my bread to earn.'
'My poor darling!'
'Yes--poor indeed.'
'And you have left that woman?'
'No.'
'How?'
'She dismissed me bluntly and coarsely.'
'Why?' asked Goring, striking the floor with his spurred heel.
'I was dismissed with a month's salary, because I had been detected
wearing your likeness--here, in my locket.'
A smile that rippled into a laugh spread over the face of Goring,
who, recalling the mode in which he had been hunted by mother and
daughter, took in the whole situation.
Calm speech and connected utterance came now to both, and many mutual
explanations were made, and mutual tender assurances given more than
once; for both had much to relate and to hear; nor with both--Alison
especially--without false impressions that required removal.
'And _you_ were actually in Antwerp too!' exclaimed Alison, when she
heard his story.
'I traced you there, only to lose you again--though many times I must
have passed the door of the very place where you lay ill. Oh, my
darling, what you must have endured!'
Her transitory emotions of gratitude to Cadbury for his supposed
birthday gift made Goring laugh again when he saw her wonder and joy
that it had come from himself, and that she learned the erector of
the marble cross was himself also. Thus, when Bevil felt her tears
and kisses on his cheek, he thought that never were gifts so
pleasantly repaid. With Alison, it would all be rest hereafter.
'Trials and troubles might come,' as a writer has it; though further
trials and troubles seemed at a low computation just then; 'but
nothing would tear her great tree up by the roots again.'
Alison felt just a little emotion of shame, and that she kept to
herself. He had never, even for an instant, doubted her love (though
he had feared her father's influence), but she had not been without
twinges of doubt, especially after the day of the Four-in-Hand
meeting by the Serpentine.
'How trivial, at first, seem the events that rule our lives--that
shape our destinies--our future,' said Goring. 'Had I not, by the
merest chance, met poor old Archie, heaven alone knows when I might
have traced you.'
Hour after hour passed by, and she forgot all about the vicar, and
even of where they were.
She would recal the past time at Chilcote, when the first vague
emotion of happiness in his presence and his society--pleasure that
was almost, strange to say, a kind of sweet pain--stole over her;
when she was half-afraid to meet his eye, and when each stolen glance
at the other led to much secret perturbation of spirit, and when a
touch of the hand seemed to reveal something that was new, as the
glamour of a first love stole into the hearts of both.
How long, long ago, seemed that day on which they rode with the
buckhounds, and took their fences together side by side.
We have not much more to relate, as in a little time they were to
glide pleasantly away into the unnoticed mass of married folks; yet
to Alison it would be always delightful to think that she had, at her
will and bidding, a fine manly fellow like Bevil Goring--one whom
brave men had been proud to follow--for she had a keen appreciation
of soldierly renown; and he had more than a paragraph to his name in
the Annual Army List.
We have said, we think, in a preceding chapter that he wrote to his
solicitors at Gray's Inn an important letter concerning the
acquisition of certain property at Chilcote; thus when he took Archie
Auchindoir into his service as a personal valet (which he did
forthwith), great was the astonishment of the old man on first
entering his master's rooms in Piccadilly at what he saw there, and a
cry of joy escaped him and he almost wept.
There hung all the old family pictures, and there were many a relic
and chattel dearly prized by Sir Ranald and Alison too, in that
superstition of the heart, which few sensitive or affectionate
natures are without.
There on the sideboard was the great silver tankard, the gift of
Queen Elizabeth--the Bride of the Bruce--filled with red wine and
emptied on hundreds of occasions by many successions of Cheynes, even
after the 24th of June, 1314, was nigh forgotten, and above it hung
the portraits of the two pale, haughty, yet dashing and noble-looking
cavalier brothers, with their love-locks and long rapiers, who fell
in battle for the King of Scotland, and Archie, greeting them as old
friends, passed his shrivelled hands tenderly and caressingly over
the unconscious canvas, as if he could scarcely believe his eyes.
'A' for her, a' for her--God bless him!' he muttered, knowing well
why Goring had rescued these objects from Sir Ranald's creditors.
In Piccadilly, Archie, though rather a puzzle to Goring's other
servants--his grooms, coachman, and so forth--found himself 'in
clover;' and, till the marriage came off, Alison was to remain with
the family of the vicar, who was to perform the ceremony, at which
little Netty Dalton figured as a bridesmaid.
After all she had undergone, and had feared she might yet have to
undergo, she was again with Goring--his strong arms round her, his
lips upon her cheek and brow!
She was at times confused, bewildered--unable to comprehend it all.
She could but lay her head upon his breast and resign herself to the
rapture of the occasion, and close her eyes as if it would be
happiness even if she opened them no more.
How joyous was that mute embrace--that love-making without words--the
spell that neither knew how--or wished--to break! All her past woes,
and all her future hopes, seemed merged in the joy of the present
time; while the pressure of Bevil's hand, his impassioned murmur, his
fond gaze and studious tenderness, his attention to every wish and
want, caused a sense of joy in her soul of which it had never been
conscious before.
As Jerry said, in his off-hand way, when he visited them, like Bella
and himself, 'they were in a high state of sentimental gush.'
Now she knew that she belonged to Goring, and he to her, and that the
life and love of each belonged to each other, that they would be
always together till death--a distant event, let us hope--parted
them; that his handsome face would never smile on another woman as it
smiled on her; and that no other woman's lips would be touched by him
as hers had been on the day she ceased to be Alison Cheyne of
Essilmont and that ilk.
THE END.
LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD BLENHEIM HOUSE
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