SCUTARI.
Alas! poor Charles. While they were all dividing the spoil at home,
thinking him dead, where was he?
At Scutari. What happened to him before he got there, no one knows or
ever will know. He does not remember, and there is no one else to tell.
He was passed from hand to hand and put on board ship. Here fever set
in, and he passed from a state of stupid agony into a state of delirium.
He may have lain on the pier in the pouring rain, moistening his parched
lips in the chilling shower; he may have been jolted from hospital to
hospital, and laid in draughty passages, till a bed was found for him;
as others were. But he happily knew nothing of it. Things were so bad
with him now that it did not much matter how he was treated. Read Lord
Sidney Osborne's "Scutari and its Hospitals," and see how he _might_
have been, and probably was. It is no part of our duty to dig up and
exhibit all that miserable mismanagement. I think we have learnt our
lesson. I think I will go bail it don't happen again. Before Charles
knew where he was, there was a great change for the better. The hospital
nurses arrived early in November.
He thinks that there were faint gleams of consciousness in his delirium.
In the first, he says he was lying on his back, and above him were the
masts and spars of a ship, and a sailor-boy was sitting out on a yard
in the clear blue, mending a rope or doing something. It may have been a
dream or not. Afterwards there were periods, distinctly remembered, when
he seemed conscious--conscious of pain and space, and time--to a certain
extent. At these times he began to understand, in a way, that he was
dead, and in hell. The delirium was better than this at ordinary times,
in spite of its headlong incongruities. It was not so unbearable, save
at times, when there came the feeling, too horrible for human brain to
bear, of being millions and millions of miles, or of centuries, away,
with no road back; at such times there was nothing to be done but to
leap out of bed, and cry aloud for help in God's name.
Then there came a time when he began, at intervals, to see a great
vaulted arch overhead, and to wonder whether or no it was the roof of
the pit. He began, after studying the matter many times, to find that
pain had ceased, and that the great vaulted arch was real. And he heard
low voices once at this time--blessed voices of his fellow-men. He was
content to wait.
At last, his soul and consciousness seemed to return to him in a strange
way. He seemed to pass out of some abnormal state into a natural one.
For he became aware that he was alive; nay, more, that he was asleep,
and dreaming a silly, pleasant dream, and that he could wake himself at
any time. He awoke, expecting to awake in his old room at Ravenshoe. But
he was not there, and looked round him in wonder.
The arch he remembered was overhead. That was real enough. Three people
were round his bed--a doctor in undress, a grey-haired gentleman who
peered into his face, and a lady.
"God bless me!" said the doctor. "We have fetched him through. Look at
his eyes, just look at his eyes. As sane an eye as yours or mine, and
the pulse as round as a button."
"Do you know us, my man?" said the gentleman.
It was possible enough that he did not, for he had never set eyes on him
before. The gentleman meant only, "Are you sane enough to know your
fellow-creatures when you see one?" Charles thought he must be some one
he had met in society in old times and ought to recognise. He framed a
polite reply, to the effect that he hoped he had been well since he met
him last, and that, if he found himself in the west, he would not pass
Ravenshoe without coming to see him.
The doctor laughed. "A little abroad, still, I daresay; I have pulled
you through. You have had a narrow escape."
Charles was recovered enough to take his hand and thank him fervently,
and whispered, "Would you tell me one thing, sir? How did Lady Hainault
come here?"
"Lady Hainault, my man?"
"Yes; she was standing at the foot of the bed."
"That is no Lady Hainault, my man; that is Miss Nightingale. Do you ever
say your prayers?"
"No."
"Say them to-night before you go to sleep, and remember her name in
them. Possibly they may get to heaven the quicker for it. Good-night."
Prayers forgotten, eh! How much of all this misery lay in that, I
wonder? How much of this dull, stupid, careless despair--earth a
hopeless, sunless wilderness, and heaven not thought of? Read on.
But, while you read, remember that poor Charles had had no domestic
religious education whatever. The vicar had taught him his catechism and
"his prayers." After that, Shrewsbury and Oxford. Read on, but don't
condemn; at least not yet.
That he thanked God with all the earnestness of his warm heart that
night, and remembered that name the doctor told him, you may be sure.
But, when the prayer was finished, he began to think whether or no it
was sincere, whether it would not be better that he should die, and that
it should be all over and done. His creed was, that, if he died in the
faith of Christ, bearing no ill will to any one, having repented of his
sins, it would not go ill with him. Would it not be better to die now
that he could fulfil those conditions, and not tempt the horrible black
future? Certainly.
In time he left watching the great arch overhead, and the creeping
shadows, and the patch of light on the wall, which shaped itself into a
faint rhomboid at noon, and crept on till it defined itself into a
perfect square at sundown, and then grew golden and died out. He began
to notice other things. But till the last there was one effect of light
and shadow which he always lay awake to see--a faint flickering on the
walls and roof, which came slowly nearer, till a light was in his eyes.
We all know what that was. It has been described twenty times. I can
believe that story of the dying man kissing the shadow on the wall. When
Miss Nightingale and her lamp are forgotten, it will be time to consider
whether one would prefer to turn Turk or Mormon.
He began to take notice that there were men in the beds beside him. One,
as we know, had been carried out dead; but there was another in his
place now. And one day there was a great event; when Charles woke, both
of them were up, sitting at the side of their beds, ghastly shadows, and
talking across him.
The maddest musician never listened to the "vox humana" stop at Haarlem,
with such delight as Charles did to these two voices. He lay for a time
hearing them make acquaintance, and then he tried to sit up and join. He
was on his left side, and tried to rise. His left arm would not support
him, and he fell back, but they crept to him and set him up, and sat on
his bed.
"Right again, eh, comrade?" said one. "I thought you was gone, my lad.
But I heard the doctor say you'd get through. You look bravely. Time was
when you used to jump out of bed, and cry on God A'mighty. Many a time
I've strove to help ye. The man in _his_ bed died while you was like
that: a Fusilier Guards man. What regiment?"
"I am of the 140th," said Charles. "We had a bit of a brush with the
enemy on the twenty-fifth. I was wounded there. It was a pretty little
rattle, I think, for a time, but not of very much importance, I fancy."
The man who had first spoken laughed; the other man, a lad who had a
round face once, perhaps, but which now was a pale death's head, with
two great staring eyes, speaking with a voice which Charles knew at once
to be a gentleman's, said, "Don't you know then that that charge of
yours is the talk of Europe? That charge will never be forgotten while
the world is round. Six hundred men against ten battalions. Good God!
And you might have died there, and not known it."
"Ah, is it so?" said Charles. "If some could only know it!"
"That is the worst of it," said the young man. "I have enlisted under a
false name, and will never go home any more. Never more. And she will
never know that I did my duty."
And after a time he got strong again in a way. A bullet, it appears, had
struck the bone of his arm, and driven the splinters into the flesh.
Fever had come on, and his splendid constitution, as yet untried, save
by severe training, had pulled him through. But his left arm was
useless. The doctor looked at it again and again, and shook his head.
The two men who were in the beds on each side of him were moved before
him. They were only there a fortnight after his coming to himself. The
oldest of the two went first, and two or three days after the younger.
The three made all sorts of plans for meeting in England. Alas, what
chance is there for three soldiers to meet again, unless by accident?
At home it would have taken three years to have made these three men
such hearty friends as they had become in a fortnight. Friendships are
made in the camp, in the bush, or on board ship, at a wonderful rate.
And, moreover, they last for an indefinite time. For ever, I fancy: for
these reasons. Time does not destroy friendship. Time has nothing
whatever to do with it. I have heard an old man of seventy-eight talking
of a man he had not seen for twelve years, and before that for
twenty-five, as if they were young men together. Craving for his
company, as if once more they were together on the deck of the
white-sailed yacht, flying before the easterly wind between Hurstcastle
and Sconce Point. Mere continual familiarity, again, does not hurt
friendship, unless interests clash. Diversity of interests is the
death-blow of friendship. One great sacrifice may be made--two, or even
three; but after the first, two men are not to one another as they were
before. Where men are thrown intimately together for a short time, and
part have only seen the best side of one another, or where men see one
another frequently, and have not very many causes of difference,
friendship will flourish for ever. In the case of love it is very
different, and for this obvious reason, which I will explain in a few
pages if----
I entered into my own recognisances, in an early chapter of this story,
not to preach. I fear they are escheated after this short essay on
friendship, coming, as it does, exactly in the wrong place. I must only
throw myself on the court, and purge myself of my contempt by promising
amendment.
Poor Charles after a time was sent home to Fort Pitt. But that mighty
left arm, which had done such noble work when it belonged to No. 3 in
the Oxford University eight, was useless, and Charles Simpson, trooper
in the 140th, was discharged from the army, and found himself on
Christmas Eve in the street in front of the Waterloo Station, with
eighteen shillings and ninepence in his pocket, wondering blindly what
the end of it all would be, but no more dreaming of begging from those
who had known him formerly than of leaping off Waterloo Bridge. Perhaps
not half so much.