GOING TO THE FRONT.
So they were solemnly engaged at last, plighted to each other, these
cousins, and to be married; but when? For Colville had now to face
the perils of the war in Afghanistan ere that event could come to
pass.
He was going straight and almost immediately to the scene of strife
among the savage passes there, and for Mary to accompany him was
impossible just then, and as Ellinor could not be left alone she
would have to go too; so the idea was not considered for a moment.
They could but wait the future in trust and hope, and amid the brief
joy of the present time was a dread of that future, for he who was
departing might never--_return_.
'All is unchanged at Birkwoodbrae, and old Elspat is there in charge,
dearest Mary,' said Colville, 'so you and Ellinor may return if you
will, and live there till I come back from the East.'
The temptation to do so was strong--the crave to be at home again, to
see the faces of old friends, the dear familiar hills, the silver
birks, and the fast-flowing May. But though understanding each other
fully as the cousins did now, and though their positions as such were
changed and strengthened, Mary in her independence of spirit and
character thought she would prefer to struggle on as they were, till
he could take her there as his wife.
For her kindness to the sisters, Colville slipped quietly into Mrs.
Fubsby's hand a cheque for an ample sum, saying, after he had heard
her story, that it would help her in her plans to prove herself Lady
Sleath and punish her wrong-doer.
This was on the following day, when Mary told him the simple story of
all their recent troubles, while he gazed down upon her with eyes
full of truth and tenderness, and her heart was beating tumultuously
with its new-found joy. She knew that he loved her now, he whom she
felt inclined to adore.
Yet the future seemed to loom darkly before her. There was this
terrible campaign in Afghanistan, with its certain and far
separation, its remote and fearful contingencies to be faced,
endured, and undergone; so Fate seemed still to be cruel to her.
When, in broken accents and with mingled emotions of anger and shame,
while her head reclined upon his breast, Mary told Colville of Sir
Redmond Sleath's systematic attempts, though secretly married, to
lure away her unsuspecting sister Ellinor, great was the wrath and
fury of her lover.
Whip in hand, he would assuredly have taken condign vengeance on the
back and limbs of the parvenu baronet, but that the latter had to
quit London--even England--just about that time, in some haste and in
dire disgrace.
At his club he had gambled deeply with Lord Dunkeld and others, from
whom he had won great sums of money--more than the peer especially
could well afford--and before it was discovered that his wonderful
success was due to the use of _marked_ cards.
During a game of _quinze_ one of the players--a brother-Guardsman of
Colville's--noticed that several of the cards were in some way
indicated, and, after a careful examination, it was found that all
the fives and the court cards were marked by the prick of a needle at
the corners, and some in the centre, too.
These marks, though almost invisible to the eye, were recognisable by
the sense of touch. A storm of indignation burst over Sleath. He
was flung down the club stairs, had to eat very 'humble pie' indeed,
and was now gone to the Continent, none knew or cared precisely
where, with a congenial friend, Mr. Adolphus Dewsnap (of whom more
anon); so whatever legal plans Mrs. Fubsby meant to adopt to
relinquish her maiden name and insist upon the adoption of that of
Lady Sleath, were partially frustrated or delayed for a time by the
baronet's disappearance.
On the very day after the engagement, Mary and Ellinor bade her
farewell--it could scarcely be said with regret, though the good
woman shed abundance of tears on the occasion.
Colville, who resented as absurd and _infra dig._ Mary's desire of
maintaining herself and adding to the slender patrimony their father
had left them, brought an invitation from Mrs. Deroubigne, in whose
care they were to be left for the future--certainly for a time at
least; and she received them with open arms, and a welcome all the
more warm that she was just then alone, her two little daughters
being absent at a boarding establishment; and, amid the new comforts
and ease that surrounded her in Grosvenor Square, Mary forgot for a
time the old wish of her heart to go 'home,' as she ever considered
Birkwoodbrae her home.
At the commencement of the present century, Malcolm says 'that this
square is the very _focus_ of feudal grandeur, religion, fashion,
taste, and hospitality, and that the novel-reader must be intimately
acquainted with the description of residents within it, when the
words "Grosvenor Square" are to be found in almost every work of that
species written in the compass of fifty years past.'
Before the house of Mrs. Deroubigne were still to be seen iron
link-extinguishers, a remnant of the past, when links were carried
before carriages at the West-End till 1807. Though old-fashioned,
the mansion was a lofty and stately one; and Mary, when she gazed
upon the tall windows on the spacious square and the landscape garden
in the centre, with its old trees planted by Kent, wondered if she
was the same Mary Wellwood who for so many weeks past had
contemplated the frowsy view from the windows of her late abode.
In her regard for Colville, and inspired no doubt by memories of the
past and the dead, Mrs. Deroubigne, to do her justice, was unwavering
in her kindness and hospitality to her new friends; and times there
were when she actually, amid her dream-thoughts, seemed to forget her
own married life, and her heart yearned, warmly and strangely, to the
two orphan girls of her old lover--the girls who might, she averred
laughingly, have been her own daughters, had fate so arranged it.
'Your face, Mary, always reminds me of your father,' she would say,
taking the girl's dimpled cheeks caressingly between her hands; 'but
yours, Ellinor, suggests to me more of your mamma--you have the same
dreamy hazel eyes. And you are romantic, no doubt?' she added, with
a fond smile.
'Perhaps; every girl has, it is said, at least one romance in the
course of her life,' said Ellinor, thinking of poor Robert Wodrow and
the wretched Sleath.
'And, certainly, I have had mine!' said Mrs. Deroubigne, kissing
Mary, while old memories floated through her mind, known and clear to
herself alone.
Mary thought that though it might be delightful in summer to visit
Birkwoodbrae, with Mrs. Deroubigne as a chaperone, she would never go
back to it as a home on sufferance--on that she was resolved; and
until she was a wedded wife she could but wait in hope, love, and
confidence; besides, Mrs. Deroubigne, at Colville's suggestion, had a
plan for a little tour on the Continent to occupy some of the time of
his absence, and to make the sisters forget some of the
mortifications they had recently undergone.
Though the temporary loss of Mary and the mystery involving her
movements--her very fate after leaving Perthshire--had so tortured
the heart of Colville that he had resolved to seek for change amid
the stirring scenes of Eastern war once more, he felt that he could
now leave England with emotions of comparative happiness and content.
He knew that she was in safety--surrounded by every comfort, even by
splendour--and had been saved from much he could not quite foresee,
by the slender but blessed chance of her meeting with Mrs. Deroubigne!
To him and Mary the few meetings before his departure seemed
heaven-sent--though a sorrowful separation was at hand--the happiest
of all their past existence.
Neither seemed to question, as yet, how they would feel or could
exist during the months--perhaps the more than year--of separation
that had to come.
Never, never would she forget the time when he placed the
engagement-ring upon her engaged finger, and when their eyes met in
one long and deep glance--a glance that, though no word was uttered,
proved the silent compact of his avowed and her accepted love.
So the fatal day came inexorably at last; after a farewell dinner to
him at the Guards' Club in Pall Mall.
'Good-bye, dear girls,' said he, cheerily; 'good-bye, love
Mary--another kiss and another. I'll bring you back such wonderful
things from India--tiger-skins, and tiger claws set in gold; Delhi
jewellery from Chandney Chowk; ivory carvings, and I know not what
more,' he added, and, in spite of himself, strove to be cheerful;
'and when I do come back, Mary, you will be my own darling little
wife till death parts us.'
So the hour, the supreme moment, had come at last, and Leslie
Colville was gone!
His letters were Mary's only solace after that; long letters full of
loving and passionate expression, to be read and re-read again; from
Suez, burning Aden, and beautiful Bombay; they came regularly, but
became fewer and further between as he proceeded up country by
railway, and his last, before they left London for the Continent,
informed her that he had been appointed to the staff at Jellalabad,
where Sir Samuel Browne was concentrating his forces prior to an
advance on Cabul. Thus he would soon be going to the Front.