THE PURSUIT.
The same evening of this event saw the Union Jack floating on the
summit of the Bala Hissar, and our troops in or around Cabul, in the
narrow and once-crowded thoroughfares of which--even in the spacious
and once-brilliant bazaar--the most desolate silence prevailed. The
houses of Sir Alexander Burnes, of Sir William Macnaghten, and all
other British residents were now mere heaps of ashes, and their
once-beautiful gardens were waste. Human bones lay in some; whose
they were none knew, but they remained among the parterres of flowers
as terrible mementos of the past.
Having, among many other trophies, the magnificent and ancient gates
of Hindoo Somnath with them, the victorious troops of General Nott
were encamped around the stately marble tomb of the Emperor Baber,
where the British were watering their horses at the Holy Well,
quietly cooking their rations of fat-tailed dhoombas or of beef,
newly shot, flayed, and cut up, after a long route; and the natives
were gravely boiling their rice and otta; while the staff officers,
Generals Pollock, Sale, Nott, Macaskill, and others, some on foot and
some on horseback, were in deep conference about a map of Western
India, and Bokhara, and as to where the hostages were, and what was
to be done for their relief, if they still lived.
Waller, who in his energy and anxiety had come on with the advanced
guard of cavalry, looked around him with peculiar sadness. Save
Doctor Brydone and one or two others, he alone seemed to survive of
all the original Cabul force; and every feature of the place before
him was full of melancholy memories and suggestions of those he could
never see again, and of the past that could come no more.
To Sir Richmond Shakespere, his new friend, he could not resist the
temptation of speaking affectionately and regretfully of the dead,
and the places associated with them. He found a relief to his mind
in doing so.
"A time may come," said he, as they sat in their saddles twisting up
cigarettes, and passing a flask of Cabul wine between them, while the
syces gave each of their unbitted nags a tobrah of fresh corn, "when
these Passes of the Khyber Mountains may be as familiar to the
English tourist as those of Glencoe and Killycrankie are now--for
there was a day when even the land beyond them was a terra incognita
to us; and a time may come when the lines of railway shall extend
from Lahore even to Peshawar--ay, and further--perhaps to the gates
of Herat--though it may not be our luck to see it; but I can scarcely
realise that in our age of the world, an age usually so prosaic and
deemed matter-of-fact, men should see and undergo all that we have
undergone and seen, and in a space of time so short too!"
Would a quiet home, a peaceful life, after a happy marriage, ever be
the lot of him and Mabel? Loving her fondly and tenderly, with all
the strength that separation, dread, and doubt and sorrow, could add
to the secret tie between them, he had almost ceased to have visions
of her associated with admonitions and prayer from a lawn-sleeved
ecclesiastic; a merry marriage-breakfast; a bride in her white bonnet
and delicate laces, and smiling bridesmaids in tulle. Such
day-dreams had been his at one time; but amid rapine and slaughter,
battle and suffering, they had become dim and indistinct, if not
forgotten!
"Yes, Waller," replied his companion, after a pause, "a British
army--we have actually seen a British army, with all its accessories
and appurtenances, exterminated at one fell swoop!"
"All this place is full of peculiarly sad memories to me, Sir
Richmond."
"Doubtless; and, like me, you won't be sorry when we all turn our
backs on it for ever, as we shall do soon."
"True. See! yonder lie our cantonments, ruined walls and blackened
ashes now; beyond them are the hills where, with my company--not one
man of which is now surviving, myself excepted--I scoured the
fanatical Ghazees from rock to rock, and far over the Cabul river, so
victoriously! Here, by that old tomb and ruined musjid, we once had
a jolly picnic: half the fellows in the garrison, and all the ladies
were there--the band of the poor 44th too. By Jove! I can still see
the scattered fragments of broken bottles and chicken bones lying
among the grass."
"I have felt something of this regret when coming on the remembered
scene of an old pig-sticking party or bivouac," replied Sir Richmond,
with a half-smile at the unwonted earnestness of Waller, who had
seemed to him always a remarkably cool and self-possessed man of the
world; but he knew not the deeper cause he had for feeling in these
matters. "You may say, as an old poem has it--
'Now the long tubes no longer wisdom quaff,
Or jolly soldiers raise the jocund laugh;
The scene is changed, but scattered fragments tell
Where Bacchanalian joys were wont to dwell.'
Is it not so, Waller?"
"By this road I smoked a last cigar with Jack Polwhele, of ours, and
Harry Burgoyne, of the 37th," resumed Waller. He remembered, but he
did not care to add, how broadly they had bantered him about Mabel
Trecarrel on the evening in question. "And all round here," he
resumed, pursuing his own thoughts aloud, "are the scenes of many a
pleasant ride and happy drive. Here I betted and lost a box of
gloves with the Trecarrels."
"You seem to have always been betting on something with those ladies,
and with a gentleman's privilege of losing."
"It was on the Envoy's blood mare against Jack Polwhele's bay filly,
in the race when Daly, of the 4th Dragoons, won the sword given by
Shah Sujah," said Waller, colouring a little. "There, by those
cypresses, I once met the sisters half fainting, one day, with heat,
their palanquin placed in the shade by the gasping dhooley-wallahs;
so, at the risk of a brain fever, I galloped to the Char-chowk for a
flask of Persian rose-water, fans, and so forth."
"The Trecarrels again! By the way, it seems to me," said the other,
"that of all the friends you have lost, those two young ladies--one
especially----"
What the military secretary of General Pollock was about to say, with
a somewhat meaning smile, we know not, save that he was heightening
the colour of Waller's face by his pause; but a change was given to
the conversation by the opportune arrival of Shireen Khan, of the
Kuzzilbashes, mounted, as usual, on his tall camel, and accompanied
by a few well-appointed horsemen. He had ascertained that
"Shakespere Sahib" was the _katib_, or secretary, to the victorious
Feringhee general, and had come to tender, through him, his services
to the family of the fallen Shah, to the conquerors, to the Queen
they served, and, generally, to the powers that were uppermost.
Many of the Afghan chiefs, who, with their people, had acted most
savagely against us, were now extremely anxious to make their peace
with General Pollock; and though it can scarcely be said that towards
the end (after his own jealousy of Ackbar's influence, fear of his
growing power that curbed all private ambition, caused a coolness in
the Sirdir's cause) Shireen and his Kuzzilbashes had been our most
bitter enemies, yet he and they were among the first now to meet and
welcome the conquerors of Ackbar, against whom they had turned, not
as we have seen Saleh Mohammed meanly do, in the time of his
undoubted humiliation and defeat, but when in the zenith of his
power; and now this wary old fellow, who played the game of life as
carefully and coolly as ever he played that of chess, knew that the
protection he had afforded to Rose Trecarrel and to Denzil--the
supposed Nawab--must prove his best moves on the board--his trump
cards, in fact; and as a conclusive offer of friendship, he now
offered six hundred chosen Kuzzilbash horsemen to follow on the track
of Saleh Mohammed, and rescue the whole of the prisoners, a duty on
which Shakespere and Waller at once joyfully volunteered to accompany
them.
"Shabash!" he exclaimed, stroking his beard in token of faith and
promise, "punah-be-Kodah!--it is as good as done; and the head of the
Dooranee dog shall replace that of the Envoy in the Char-chowk!"
Waller soon divined that the lady now residing in Shireen's fort must
be no other than the younger daughter of "the Sirdir Trecarrel," who
was spirited away on the retreat through the Passes, on that night
when the Shah's 6th Regiment deserted; but of who "the Nawab" could
be he had not the faintest idea, until he and Shakespere galloped
there, saw the living and the dead, and heard all their sad story
unravelled.
With her head, sick and aching, nestling on the broad shoulder of Bob
Waller, as if he was her only and dearest brother, Rose told all her
story without reserve, and it moved Waller and his companion deeply,
to see a handsome and once-bright English girl so crushed and reduced
by grief and long-suffering; yet her case was only one of many in the
history of that disastrous war. She ended by imploring them to lose
no time in following the track of those who had borne off her sister
and the other hostages.
No words or entreaties of hers were necessary to urge either Waller
or Shakespere on this exciting path; and instant action became all
the more imperative when Shireen announced that he had sure tidings
from Taj Mohammed Khan, and also from Nouradeen Lal, the farmer, who
had been purchasing horses on the frontier, that all the lawless
Hazarees were in arms to cut off the entire convoy; and that if a
junction were once effected between them and the Toorkomans of
Zoolficar Khan, all hope of rescue would be at an end.
The permission of the general was, of course, at once asked and
accorded, and it was arranged, that, immediately upon their
departure, a body of cavalry and light infantry should follow with
all speed to second and support them.
Kind-hearted Bob Waller waited only to attend the obsequies of his
young comrade (while the Kuzzilbashes were preparing); and over these
we shall hasten, though of all the Cabul army he was, perhaps, the
only one interred with the honours of war; the battle-smoke had been
the pall, the wolf and the raven the sextons, of all the rest!
The spot chosen was a little way outside the Kuzzilbashes' fort, on
the sunny and green grassy slope of a hill, where a grove of wild
cherry-trees rendered the place pleasant to the eye. From her window
Rose could alike see and hear the rapid ceremony; for by the stern
pressure of circumstances it was both brief and rapid. No prayer was
said; no service performed; no solemn dropping of dust upon dust; no
requiem was there, but the drums as they beat the "Point of War,"
after the last notes of the Dead March had died away.
The quick, formal commands of the officer came distinctly to her
overstrained ear, as the hurriedly constructed coffin of unblackened
deal, covered by the colour of the 44th Regiment, was being lowered,
as she knew, for ever, into its narrow bed; the steel ramrods rang in
the distance like silver bells, and flashed in the sunshine; then a
volley rang sharply in the air, finding a terrible echo in her heart,
while the thin blue smoke eddied upward in the sunshine; another and
another succeeded, and Rose--the widowed in spirit--as she crouched
on her knees, knew then that all was over, and the smoke of the last
farewell volley would be curling amid the damp mould that was now to
cover her lost one.
Anon the drums beat merrily as the firing party, after closing their
ranks, wheeled off by sections, with bayonets fixed, and Denzil
Devereaux was left alone in his solitary and unmarked grave, just as
the sun set in all his evening beauty; and a double gloom sank over
the soul of Rose Trecarrel.