'Likely enough--it is her style, no doubt. But can you, Hester, or

anyone, explain this cruel duplicity? To me it seems as if I were

still in the middle of a horrid dream--a dream from which I must

suddenly wake. That she, so winsome and artless apparently--so

gentle and loving, should become so cold, so calculating, so

mercilessly cruel now!'

'I always mistrusted her,' said Maude bitterly. 'People call her

eyes hazel--to me they always seemed a kind of vampire-green.'

Roland made no reply, but he was thinking with Whyte-Melville:

'Who shall account for the fascination exercised by some women upon

all who approach their sphere? The peculiar power of the

rattlesnake, whose eye is said to lure the conscious victim

unresistingly to its doom, and the attractive properties possessed by

certain bodies, and by them used with equal recklessness and cruelty,

are two arrangements of Nature which make me believe in mesmerism.'

'Well--to-morrow I quit this place without beat of drum!' exclaimed

Roland.

'For Edinburgh?'

'Yes--to the Club.'

'And then?'

'For Egypt. There I shall live every day of my life as if there were

no to-morrow.'

'Nonsense!' said Jack. 'You'll get over all this in time--a hit in

the wing, that is all!'

Old Johnnie Buckle, who had forebodings in the matter of Roland's

departure, had tears in his eyes as he drove him in the drag to the

railway station next morning, and as he wrung his hand at parting he

said--showing that he knew precisely of the double trouble that had

fallen on the young Laird:

'Better twa skaiths than ae sorrow, Maister Roland,' meaning that

losses can be repaired, but grief may break the heart; 'and mind ye,

sir,' he added, as the train started, 'a' the keys o' the country

dinna hang at ae man's belt, and ye'll wear your ain bannet yet!'

And on this _bouleversement_ we need scarcely refer to the emotions

of those who loved Roland best.

Jack Elliot, as he selected a cigar to smoke and think the situation

over, deemed that Roland was well out of the whole affair; Maude, who

was preparing for her departure from Earlshaugh, like Hester, was

furiously indignant; but, for reasons of her own, the thoughts of the

latter were of a somewhat mingled nature.

CHAPTER XL.

THE NEW POSITION.

Though, by her own admission, not entirely ignorant of Annot's secret

springs of action, that social buccaneer, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, was

exultantly defiant about his victory over, and revenge on, Roland

Lindsay, for such he deemed the new position to be; and in his pale

gray eyes, as he thought over it, there gleamed a savage light, such

as it is said 'men carry when the thirst for blood possesses them.'

Roland, whom latterly Mrs. Lindsay had learned to like better than

was her wont, was now gone, and would nevermore, she was assured,

repass the door of Earlshaugh, and she actually felt as much regret

for him as it was in her hard, cold nature to feel. He had been

kind, her heart said to herself, and his soft, gentle, and polished

manners contrasted most favourably with those of the few men she met

now, and especially with those of her brother Hawkey.

'The self-contained bearing, the habitual repose of one who mixes in

good society, invariably displays,' it is said, 'a striking

dissimilarity to those who, immersed in the business of life, have

not such opportunities. Women note these things keenly; especially

do they regard the carriage of those whom they believe to move in

circles above their own.'

With regard to Annot, as one connected by marriage with the Lindsay

family, she was not sorry at the turn affairs had taken with regard

to that enterprising young lady and her brother, Hawkey Sharpe.

Socially, Annot was far beyond, or above, the bride he could ever

have hoped to win, and she might be the means of raising him,

steadying and curing him of his horsy, low, and gambling

propensities, which had made him prove a great anxiety in many ways,

with all his usefulness to herself, since, on her husband's death,

she became mistress of Earlshaugh.

'Thanks, Deb, old girl,' said he, as he pocketed a cheque of hers for

fifty pounds, and thought gloomily over the two thousand that would

in time become inexorably due and must be paid, or see him

stigmatized as a _welsher_!

'Little does the outer world know of all I have to put up with from

you, Hawkey,' said she, with a sigh, as she locked away her

cheque-book, and he surveyed her with a cool and discriminating stare

through his eyeglass--the use of which be affected in imitation of

others--screwed into his right eye.

'It is too bad of you to talk to me in that way, Deb,' said he, 'when

I have cut out and relieved you of the presence of that impudent

beggar, Lindsay. Miss Drummond, as an only daughter, must, I

suppose, be the heiress to something or other.'

'I thought she would never look with favour on you--but treat you as

Maude did,' said Mrs. Lindsay, slowly fanning herself with a large

black lace fan.

Hawkey laughed maliciously; then he suddenly set his teeth together

and exclaimed:

'Maude! I'll pay _her_ out yet--she and I have not squared our

accounts--I shall be even with her before long. As for little Annot

not looking at me--by Jove, she has looked and said all I could have

wished. She is not so "stand-off" and unapproachable as you may

think all her set to be, when a fellow knows the way to go about

it--as I rather flatter myself I do,' he added, caressing his

straw-coloured and tenderly-fostered moustache, and pulling up his

shirt-collar.

'But where have you and she met, since you ceased to occupy your

rooms here?'

'Oh--with the hounds--in the park--wherever I wished, in fact. You

and she, Deb, will get on excellently together, if we all play our

cards well now--I marry one of the family, don't you see? Then, I

haven't a doubt that Annot has money.'

'Did she give you reason to suppose she has?'

'N--no--not exactly--well?'

'She will succeed to whatever her mother may have--little, probably.'

'Will have, or _may_ have--shady that! Well, unlike most heiresses,

she's a deuced pretty little girl, Deb, and suits my book exactly.

So, with your assistance, we shall be all right.'

'My assistance?'

'Of course.'

'Bright, soft, and girlish as she seems, I suspect there is not a

more artful damsel in London,' said Mrs. Lindsay shrewdly.

'Oh bosh, Deb! Well, if it be so, two can do the artful game; but

does not your own knowledge of human nature lead you to see,' he

added sententiously, 'that art and prudence too give place when love

comes on the scene?'

'Love--yes--are you quoting a play? Will this fancy of hers last--if

fancy it is?'

'Why not?'

'You are not a gentleman in her sense of the word.'

'You are deuced unpleasant, Deb!' said he, contemplating his spiky

nails.

'And her sudden quarrel with Roland Lindsay--if quarrel it was--I do

not understand.'

'I do. He is a poor beggar--dropped out of the hunt--and I--I am----'

'What?'

'Supposed to be your heir,' said he, putting the suggestion gently;

'long, long may it be only supposition, Deb; but a few thousands

yearly--say five--would make us all right, and then we have the run

of the house here--what more do we want? So all will be right, even

with the county, I say again, if we only play our cards well.'

She had played _her_ cards well in the past time, she thought, as

Hawkey, whom conversation always made thirsty, left her in quest of a

brandy and soda.

Seated in her luxurious boudoir, her memory went back to the days of

her early life, as an underpaid and hard-worked governess; and then

to those when she became the humble and useful companion to Roland's

mother, and, after her death, a kind of guardian to Maude on the

latter leaving school. Then came the accident that befel the old

Laird in the hunting-field at Macbeth's Stank--a wet ditch with a

'yarner' on each side, the terror of the Fife Hunt, but said to have

been leapt by the usurper's horse when he returned from Dunnimarle

after slaying the family of Macduff; and how necessary she made

herself to the suffering invalid; how (artfully) she seemed to

anticipate his thoughts, to understand all his wants, his favourite

dishes and so forth; and how grateful he became to her, and how she

clung to him like a barnacle or octopus, without seeming to do so.

How necessary he soon found it to have a clever, sensible, and loving

woman--one rather handsome, too--to look after him, when his two

sons--especially that spendthrift in the Scots Guards--seemed to

regard him as only a factor or banker to draw upon without mercy; and

so he married her one morning when the weather was very cold; when

the early snow was on the Ochil summits and powdering the Lomonds of

Fife, and _then_ she knew that she was the wife of a landed gentleman

of old and high descent--Colin Lindsay, Laird of Earlshaugh!

She was, of course, to be a second mother to Maude (who declined to

view her as such) and to his two sons if they became careful; and

meantime, ere dying, he handed over to her, by will, as stated,

beyond all hope of disputing it at law, every wood, acre, and tree he

possessed, causing much uplifting of hands and shaking of heads in

ominous wonder throughout the county, and more especially in the East

Neuk thereof.

But she bore herself well, dressed richly as became her age and new

station--kept a handsome carriage with her late husband's arms--the

fesse chequy argent and azure for Lindsay--thereon in a lozenge; but

was rarely seen in the company of Maude, who did not, would not, and

never could, approve of the position so ungenerously assigned to

herself and her only surviving brother Roland, who had been much less

to blame than his senior of the Household Brigade.

And Mrs. Lindsay was just then beginning to discover that she was

likely to have--in the person of her brother, as an intrusive, if

sometimes necessary factotum--something of a skeleton in her cupboard

at Earlshaugh.

Since the Laird's death, Hawkey Sharpe had loved well to pose as a

man of influence and importance--more than all, as the probable and

future proprietor of Earlshaugh; and liked to imagine how all would

look up to him then and seek his favourable notice.

His sister's secret and deadly ailment was to him a constant source

of anxiety that was _not_ borne of affection; he dreaded, also, her

'kirk proclivities,' and the influence possessed over her 'by that

old caterpillar, the minister.' 'I'll have to look sharp now after my

own interests--old Deb is getting rather long in the tooth for me,'

he would think at times.

Treated as she had been by Maude and others of the family since her

marriage, she could not have a very kindly feeling to the Lindsay

line. 'Blood is warmer than water,' says our Scottish proverb; and

Hawkey was the only kinsman she had in the world that she knew of;

but, a scapegrace, a spendthrift, and toady to herself, as she knew

him to be, some of her sympathies were just then rather more with the

disinherited Roland Lindsay than Mr. Hawkey Sharpe would have

relished, had he in the least suspected such a thing.

And Annot's thoughts on reviewing her new position were rather of a

mingled sort, and something of this kind:

'I am going to marry this man Hawkey Sharpe. Odious man! I cannot

pretend, even to myself, to be much in love with him--if at all; yet

I am going to marry him--and why? Because I love the splendid

patrimony that, in time, will become his; this beautiful estate, this

grand old house, the parure of family diamonds, and the settlements

that must be made upon me. I always meant to marry the first wealthy

man who asked me, and now I am only true to my creed--the creed mamma

taught me. Can anyone blame me for that? Of course I would rather a

thousand times have had poor Roland with Earlshaugh, because he is a

man that any woman might love and be proud of; but failing him, I

must put up with the person and name of--Hawkey Sharpe. Can anyone

think it very wicked that I--a penniless little creature--should

prefer such a well-feathered nest as this to that gloomy and small

poky house in South Belgravia, with its one drab of a servant, cold

meat, shabby clothes, and all its sordid concomitants? No; give me

the ease, the prosperity, the luxury, and the flesh-pots of

Earlshaugh, with its manor and lands, wood, hill, and field.'

But it was a considerable relief to her mind--shamelessly selfish

though she was--when within twenty-four hours after Roland's

departure her two cousins and Jack Elliot (whose faces she cared

never to see again) also left for the capital, and she remained

behind the guest of--Mrs. Lindsay.

'As for Roland,' Annot thought, '_he_ will get over our little affair

easily. He loved me, no doubt, but love we know to be only a

parenthesis in the lives of most men.'

CHAPTER XLI.

THE CAPTIVE.

We must now change the scene to the Soudan--_Beled-es-Soudan_, or

'The Land of the Blacks,' so called by ancient geographers--whither a

single flight of imagination will take us without undergoing a

fortnight's voyage by sea to Alexandria, _viâ_ the Bay of Biscay,

with its long, heavy swells, and the Mediterranean, which is not

always like a mill pond; and then a long and toilsome route across

the Lower and Upper Provinces to where the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil

was journeying towards his remote home, with the luckless Malcolm

Skene in his train--a place on the borders of the Nubian Desert, not

far from the Nile, in the neighbourhood of the third cataract, and

situated about midway between Assouan, the name of which had not, as

yet, become a 'household word' with us, and Khartoum, where then the

well-nigh despairing Gordon was still waging his desperate defence

against the Mahdi.

By this time how weary had the eye--yea, the very soul--of the

luckless captive become of the desert scenery, in a land visited only

by a few bold travellers, who in times past had accompanied the

caravans from one valley to another. There the desert sand is deep

and loose, with sharp flinty stones, in some places sprinkled with

glistening rock salt, and showing here and there a grove of dwindled

acacias or tufts of colocynth and senna, to relieve the awful

dreariness of its aspect.

The water in the pools, even in the rainy season, is there black and

putrid; hence the Arabs of the district remove with their flocks to

better regions, where the higher mountains run from Assouan to

Haimaur.

Steering, as it were, unerringly by landmarks known to themselves

alone, the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hazil and his followers made progress

towards his home--or zereba--in the quarter we have mentioned.

Malcolm Skene had now been conveyed so far inland by his captors that

escape seemed hopeless; yet, buoyed up by the secret chance that such

_might_ come, he struggled on with the party day by day, ignorant of

the fate that awaited him, though he could never forget that of

Palmer and his companions on the shore of the Red Sea.

More than once Hassan Abdullah mockingly held before him the pocket

compass, which, of course, he had contrived to abstract on some

occasion. Its loss did not matter much now, but it was eventually

appropriated by the Sheikh Moussa, whether it were _efrit_ or not;

and Hassan, who seemed inclined to resent this, received in reward a

blow from their leader's lance.

The latter, who, in some respects, was not unlike the published

portraits of his kinsman Zebehr, was at the head of a body of

Bedouins, not Soudanese. Each tribe of these wild horsemen is

considered to have an exclusive property in a district proportioned

to the strength and importance of the tribes, but affording room for

migration, which is indispensable among a people whose subsistence is

derived from cattle, and the spontaneous produce of the sterile

regions they inhabit. Thus they often join neighbouring tribes,

Emirs and Sheikhs, in the hope of an advantageous change. In this

manner were this Bedouin troop under the banner of Sheikh Moussa.

All were thin and hardy men, with the muscles of their limbs more

strongly developed than the rest of the body; their strength and

activity were great, and their power of abstinence such that, like

their own camels, they could travel four or five days without tasting

water. Their deep black eyes glared with an intensity never seen in

Northern regions, and gave full credence to the marvellous stories

Skene had heard of their extraordinary powers of discriminating

vision and the acuteness of their other senses.

Unlike the nearly nude warriors of the Mahdi, these Bedouins under

their floating burnous wore shirts of coarse cotton with wide and

loose sleeves--a garment rarely changed or washed. Over this some

had a Turkish gown of mingled cotton and silk, but most of them wore

a mantle, called an _abba_, like a square, loose sack, with slits for

the arms, woven of woollen thread and camel's hair, girt by a girdle,

and showing broad stripes of many colours; but trousers of all kinds

seemed superfluities unknown. Picturesque looking fellows they were,

and reminded Skene of the descriptive lines in Grant's 'Arabia':

'Freedom's fierce unconquered child,

The Bedouin robber, nursling of the wild,

With whirlwind speed he guides his vagrant band,

Fire-eyed and tawny as their subject sand:

On foam-flecked steeds, impetuous all advance,

Whirl the bright sabre, couch the quivering lance,

Or grasping, ruthless, in the savage chase,

The belt-slung carbine and spike-headed mace,

Ardent for plunder, emulate the wind,

Scorn the low level, spurn the world behind;

While the dense dust-cloud rears its giant form,

And, rolled in spires, revealed the threatening storm.'

Malcolm Skene found that he was rather a favourite with these wild

fellows from the facility with which he could converse with them in

Arabic; and though he knew not the _thousand_ names that language is

said to possess for a sword, he could repeat to them the _Fatihat_,

or short opening chapter of the Koran, called that of prayer and

thanksgiving; and they accorded him great praise accordingly. And,

sooth to say, any Christian may repeat it without evil, as it simply

runs thus in English:

'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures; the Most Merciful; the

King of the Day of Judgment! Thee do we worship, and of Thee do we

beg assistance. Direct us in the right way of those to whom Thou

hast been gracious; not of those against whom Thou art incensed, nor

of those who go astray.'

But he knew the hostility of the slimy and savage Greek, Pietro

Girolamo, and of the cowardly and false Egyptian, Hassan Abdullah,

was undying towards him, and that they only waited for the

opportunity to take his life, if possible unknown to the Sheikh, and

then achieve their own escape from the latter.

On every occasion that suited they reviled him, spat on him, and

hurled pebbles at him; but if their hands wandered instinctively to

pistol or poniard he had but to utter the magic words to the Sheikh

Moussa, 'Ana dakheilak!' (I am your protected), and the lowering of

the lance-head in threat sufficed to send them cowed to the rear.

Moussa now made Skene acquainted with a fact which, though

explanatory as to the reason why his life was spared, did not prove

very soothing or hopeful; that he meant to retain him at his zereba

as a hostage for his kinsman Zebehr Pasha, 'then under detention at

Cairo by those sons of dogs the English--_Allah bou rou Gehenna_!'

Hence, as yet, Malcolm knew that his life was deemed of some value to

his captors, who did not then foresee the future deportation of the

king of the slave dealers, by Lord Wolseley's orders, to Gibraltar.

To escape, on foot or horseback, or in any way elude the Bedouin

guard, seemed to him a greater difficulty than to achieve the same

thing from Soudanese, so well were the former mounted, so amply

armed, so fleet and active in movement, and every way so acute,

eagle-eyed, serpent-like in wile and wisdom and relentless as a tiger

in fury and bloodshed.

Even if he could successfully elude them, what lay before him--what

behind, the way he must pursue, if ever again he was to reach the

world he had been reft from! The desert--the awful, trackless desert

he had traversed in their obnoxious company, but could never hope to

traverse it alone--the desert, where water is more precious to the

traveller than would be the famous Emerald Mountain of Nubia itself!

It barred him out from civilization as completely as if it had been

the waves of a shoreless sea.

The Sheikh often rode by his side, and asked him many perplexing

questions about Europe and the land of the French, of which the

inquirer had not the most vague idea, or of how the red soldiers Of

the mysterious Queen reached Egypt, or where they came from; of

Stamboul, which he thought was in Arabia; of India, which he thought

was in Russia--of who were the English, and who the British that

always aided them; adding, as he stroked his great beard, that 'it

mattered little, as they must all perish--_Feh sebil Allah_!' (for

the cause of God).

He hated them with a bitterness beyond all language, as interferers

with the traffic in _djellabs_, as the slave-dealers term their human

wares; and for the losses he had sustained at their hands, like Osman

Digna, when some of his dhows were captured on their voyage to Jeddah

by British cruisers; and ultimately even Suakim became so closely

watched by the latter that his caravan leaders had to deposit their

captives by twos and threes at lonely places on the shore of the Red

Sea, to transmit them across it when occasion served. Then when he

came to speak of the Anglo-Egyptian slave convention, which was the

ruin of the traders in human flesh, he gnashed his teeth, his black

eye-balls shot fire, and he looked as if with difficulty he

restrained himself from pinning Skene to the sand with his lance.

It was the ruin of the Soudan, he declared, as the Christians only

wished to liberate all slaves that they might become their property.

He had struggled against this, he said, with voice and sword till the

summer of 1881, when the Mahdi, Mahommed Achmet Shemseddin, issuing

from his cave on the White Nile, proclaimed himself the New Prophet.

Then he cast his lot with the latter, and in two years after served

with him at the capture of El Obeid, and the slaughter of the armies

of Hicks and Baker, when they won together a holy influence and a

military reputation, which were greatly enhanced by subsequent

conflicts and events.

Such was the stern, unpleasant, and uncompromising individual in

whose hands Malcolm Skene found himself retained as a hostage, in a

trifling way it seemed, for Zebehr-Rahama-Gymme-Abel, better known as

Zebehr Pasha, whilom the friend of General Gordon, but in reality the

most slippery, savage, and bitter enemy of Britain in the present

time.

And full of the heavy thoughts his entire circumstances forced upon

him, somewhere about the first of November he found himself, with his

escort, approaching a zereba which had been one of the headquarters

of Zebehr, but latterly assigned to his kinsman, Sheikh Moussa, and

the very aspect of it made even the stout heart of Malcolm Skene sink

within him, as he had been prepared for a tented camp, or wigwam-like

village, but not for the place in which he found himself, and which

was one of those described by Dr. Schweinfurth, the great German

traveller, when he visited Zebehr Pasha a short time before.

CHAPTER XLII.

THE ZEREBA OF SHEIKH MOUSSA.

At some little distance from the Nile, but what distance, whether one

or ten _shoni_, Skene could not then discover, stood the zereba to

which the Sheikh had lately fallen possessor after Zebehr (who had

been lord of thirty exactly similar), in a strip of green, where a

few palms, lupins, and beans grew in an amphitheatre of small

mountains--rocky, jagged, volcanic in outline and aspect. A few

camels and donkeys grazed spectral-like in the vicinity amid a

silence that was intense, and in a district where there were no

flights of birds as in Egypt, and no wide reaches of valley covered

with green and golden plenty.

Through a gorge in the steep rocky mountains, whose sides were

blackened by the sun of unknown ages, and broken into fragments by

some great convulsion of nature, the zereba was entered.

It was a group of well-sized huts, enclosed by tall hedges, in the

centre of which stood the private residence of Sheikh Moussa, having

various apartments, wherein usually armed sentinels, black or

swarthy, half-nude, with glowing eyes and bright weapons--swords and

spears or Remington rifles--kept guard day and night.

Through these, as one who was to be treated, as yet, with hospitality

at least, Malcolm Skene was conducted by a couple of handsomely

attired slaves (for here the power of the Anglo-Egyptian Convention

was _nil_), who gave him coffee, sherbet, and a tchibouk, all most

welcome after the last day's toilsome march; and, throwing himself

upon a carpet and some soft skins, he strove to collect his thoughts,

to calculate the distance and the perils that lay between him and

freedom, and to think what was to be done now!

Meanwhile the Bedouins were grooming their horses outside, laughing,

chatting, smoking, and drinking long draughts of _bouza_ from stone

jars--a kind of Nubian beer made from dhurra.

'People always meet again,' said Pietro Girolamo with a savage grin,

showing all his sharp, white teeth beneath a long and coal-black

moustache. 'The world is round, you know, Signor, though the Sheikh

thinks it flat--flat as my roulette-table at Cairo. Ah, Christi! we

have not forgotten that; sooner or later people always meet again,

and so shall we.'

And with these words, which contained a menace, the Greek withdrew to

some other part of the zereba, where he seemed to be somewhat at

home, as he was--Skene afterwards discovered--father of the third and

favourite wife of Sheikh Moussa.

The chambers, or halls--for such they were--seemed silent--save a

strange growling and the rasping of iron fetters--and empty now,

though there sometimes, in the palmy days of the slave trade, as many

as two thousand dealers in _djellabs_ gathered with their chained and

wretched victims every year.

'The regal aspect of these halls of State,' says Dr. Schweinfurth,

'was increased by the introduction of some lions, secured, as may be

supposed, by sufficiently strong and massive chains.'

It was the rattle of the latter and the growling of the lions that

Malcolm Skene heard with more bewilderment than curiosity on the

subject.

Here in his favourite abode, Zebehr, says the doctor, was long 'a

picturesque figure, tall, spare, excitable, with lions guarding his

outer chamber, and his court filled with armed slaves--smart,

dapper-looking fellows, supple as antelopes, fierce, unsparing, and

the terror of Central Africa; while around him gathered in thousands

infernal raiders, whose razzias have depopulated vast territories.

Superstitious, too, was Zebehr, for in his campaign against Darfour,

he melted down two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into

bullets--for no charm can stay a silver bullet--and cruel as death

itself! A word from him here raised the Soudan in revolt against

Gordon in 1878; and it was only after some fierce righting that Gessi

Pasha succeeded in breaking the back of the revolt. After hunting

the slave raiders like wild beasts, he captured and shot eleven of

their chiefs, including Suleiman, the son of Zebehr. Hence the

blood-feud between Gordon and Zebehr which led the latter to refuse

to accompany the former to Khartoum. The slave-dealers were slain in

hundreds by natives whom they had plundered. Zebehr's letters were

found, proving that he had ordered the revolt; but no action was

taken against him, and he continued to live in luxurious detention at

Cairo.'

When Baker Pasha was organizing his forces to relieve Tokar, he asked

that Zebehr might go with him at the head of a Nubian division.

Zebehr and Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil raised the blacks, but the

Anti-Slavery Society protested against the employment of the former

as improper and in the highest degree perilous. Sir Evelyn Baring

pleaded for Zebehr and Moussa, but Lord Granville was inexorable. He

wrote: 'The employment of Zebehr Pasha appears to her Majesty's

Government inexpedient both politically and as regards the slave

trade.'

Thus far some of the history of yesterday, which, nevertheless, may

be new to the reader.

On his first entering the zereba Skene had returned the formal

welcome or greeting of Sheikh Moussa--touching his forehead, lips,

and breast--a symbolic action signifying that in thought, word, and

heart he was his.

Pietro Girolamo, the Greek Islesman from Cerigo, was--we have

said--the father-in-law (at least one of them) to Moussa Abu Hagil.

Malcolm Skene came to the knowledge of that connection through a

stray copy of the now pretty well-known Arabic newspaper, the

_Mubashir_, which he found in the zereba; and the columns of which

contained a memoir of that enterprising Sheikh, and in retailing some

startling incidents in his life gave a little light on certain habits

of the dwellers in the desert.

Girolamo had been the skipper of one of his slave dhows, or armed

brigs, in the Red Sea, during the palmy times, when as many as five

thousand head of slaves were exposed annually in the market place of

Shendy--a traffic in which Moussa, like his kinsmen, Zebehr Pasha,

had grown enormously rich; and, for a suitable sum, he bought a

daughter of Girolamo, a beautiful Greek girl. She became his third

wife, and died in giving birth to a daughter, the inheritor of her

pale and picturesque beauty, though shaded somewhat by the Arab

mixture in her blood; but in her fourteenth year--a ripe age in those

regions of the sun--her charms were said to surpass all that had seen

before and had become the exaggerated theme of story-tellers and

song-makers, even in the market places and the cafés of Damanhour and

Cairo.

The girl was named Isha (or Elizabeth) after her mother, and educated

in such accomplishments as were deemed necessary to the wife of a

powerful and wealthy Emir, for such Moussa destined her to be, if not

perhaps of his friend and leader the Mahdi Achmet when the time came;

but the old brigand--for the slave dealer was little better in spirit

or habit when not absent fighting, plundering, and raiding in search

of _djellabs_--seemed never happy save when in the society of this

daughter, his only one, his other children being sons, four of whom

had fallen in battle against Hicks on the field of Kashgate.

Notwithstanding all the care with which the women of the East are

secluded in the _Kah'ah_, or harem, Isha had a lover, a young Bedouin

warrior named Khasim Jelalodeen, who, though he had no more hope of

winning her to share his humble black tent than of obtaining the

moon, loved her with all the wild passion of which his lawless Arab

nature was capable.

To have whispered of this passion to the Sheikh Moussa, whom we have

described as resembling a mummy of the Pharaohs' time resuscitated,

would have ensured the destruction of Khasim, who had only his sword,

his rifle, and a horse with all its trappings.

Yet Isha was not ignorant of the love the Bedouin bore her, as he had

a sister named Emineh, who was a kind of companion and attendant of

the former, and went between the lovers as carefully and subtly as

any old _Khatbeh_, or betrother in the Abdin quarter in Cairo in the

present hour--thus freely bouquets, symbolically arranged--the simple

and beautiful love-letters of Oriental life, were exchanged between

them through the kind agency of Emineh.

Sheikh Moussa loved his brilliant little daughter, but he loved money

more; and when a caravan, under an old business friend of his named

Ebn al Ajuz (or 'the son of the old woman,' obtained by his mother's

prayers in the mosque of Hassan at Cairo) passed _en route_ from

Darfour for the capital and Assiout, laden with ivory, gum, and

slaves--chiefly women and girls, the dealer, having heard of the

beauty of Isha, applied to the Skeikh, and made him an offer which,

as both were in the trade, he found himself--filial regard and

affection apart--bound to consider.

Moussa, to do him justice, had no great inclination to sell his

daughter, the light of his household, though he had remorselessly

sold the daughters of others by the thousand; yet he was curious to

know her value, as prices had gone down even before the arrival of

Gordon at Khartoum, especially when Ebn al Ajuz spoke of the sum he

was prepared to give, and that the purse-holder was no other than

that generally supposed misogynist, the Khedive himself.

He introduced the merchant to her apartments in order to show her

merits and discover the price, of which he could judge, however, by

his own business experience.

Her rooms, covered with soft carpets, having luxurious divans,

decorated ceilings, and tiled floors, with beautiful brackets

supporting finely wrought vessels, and having large windows of

lattice work, others of stained glass, representing floral objects,

bouquets, and peacocks, Arabic inscriptions and maxims written in

letters of gold and green, received no attention from the turbaned

and bearded slave-dealer, whose attention was at once arrested by

Isha, who had been clad, she knew not why, in her richest apparel,

with her eyebrows needlessly blackened and her nails reddened by

henna.

Ebn al Ajuz, whom long custom had rendered a dispassionate judge of

beauty in all its stages, from the fairest Circassian with golden

hair to the dark and full-lipped woman of Nubia, was struck with

astonishment by the many attractions of the half-Greek girl.

'Allah Kerim!' he exclaimed. 'With her face, form, and entire

appearance I have not the slightest fault to find,' he frankly

acknowledged; 'every motion, every attitude, every feature display

the most beautiful grace, symmetry, and proportion. Allah! she

should be named Ayesha, after the perfect wife of the prophet!'

On hearing this a blush burned in the face of the girl, and she

pulled down her yashmac or veil.

The merchant pressed Moussa to name her price, as they sat over their

pipes and coffee; and so greatly did avarice exceed affection, that

Moussa, who--said the writer in the _Mubashir_--it was thought would

not have exchanged his daughter for the Emerald Mountain itself, was

so dazzled by the offer made that he agreed to sell her, and

preparations even were at once made for her departure, despite her

tears, her entreaties, and her despair.

Khasim Jelalodeen was filled with grief and consternation. Oh for

Jinn or Efrits, the spirits born of fire, to aid him!

He had his fleet horse corned, refreshed by a bitter draught of

_bouza_ (not water), saddled, and in constant readiness for any

emergency; and in the night, well armed, with his heart on fire and

his brain in a whirl, he made his way secretly and softly to that

part of the zereba in which the _Kah'ah_, or women's apartments, were

situated--an act involving his death if caught, and caught he was by

the guards of Moussa, who were about to slay him on the spot; but

immemorial usage has established a custom in the Desert that if a

person who is in actual danger from another can in anticipation claim

his protection, or touch him barehanded, his life is saved.

He passed himself as a _Karami_, or mere robber, and as such was made

a close prisoner, destined to await the pleasure of Moussa, who had

just then a good deal to occupy his mind.

Meanwhile Emineh, having ascertained exactly where her rash, bold

brother was in durance, contrived to introduce herself there next

night with a ball of thread, and tying an end thereof to his right

wrist she withdrew, winding it carefully off as she went, till she

penetrated to the sleeping apartment of Moussa, and applying the

other end to his bosom woke him, saying in Arab fashion:

'Look on me, by the love thou bearest to God and thy own self, for

_this_ is under thy protection!'

Then the startled and angry Sheikh arose, took his sword, and

followed the clue till it guided him to where Khasim, the supposed

_Karami_, was confined, and he was compelled to declare himself the

protector of the latter. His bonds were taken off; the thongs with

which his hair, in token of degradation, had been tied were cut with

a knife; he was entertained as a newly-arrived guest, and was then

set at liberty.

Emineh gave him his horse and arms, and he took his departure from

the vicinity of the zereba, but only to watch in the distance.

'In due time the caravan of Ebn al Ajuz came forth from the gates and

boundaries of thorny hedge, and the lynx-eyed Arab, Khasim, with his

heart beating high, watched it from the concealment of a mimosa

thicket, and knew the curtained camel litter which contained the

object of his adoration, as the flinty-hearted Moussa was seen to

ride beside it for a time.

The love of Khasim was not that of the educated, the cultivated, as

it is understood in other parts of the world--the cultivated in

music, art, and literature--but of its kind it was a pure, ardent,

and passionate one, and in its fiery nature unknown to 'the cold in

clime and cold in blood.'

He would bear her away, he thought; she would yet be his bride, won

by his spear and horse, like the bride of many an Arab song and

story; they would have a home among the fairy-like gardens of

Kordofan and beyond the mountains of Haraza. Was he not

invulnerable? Had he not an amulet bound to his sword-arm by the

Mahdi himself--an amulet before which even the bullets and bayonets

of the British had failed?

So the caravan with Isha wound on its way towards the Desert!

How dark the red round sun had suddenly become. Khasim looked up to

see if it still shone, and it was setting fast, amid clouds of

crimson and gold, throwing long, long purple shadows far across the

plain, and there in its sheen the Nile was running swiftly as

ever--swift as life runs in the Desert and elsewhere!

Out of the latter arose a cloud of dust, with many a glittering point

of steel! The caravan was suddenly attacked, its column broken and

pierced by a band of wild Kabbabish Arab horsemen, fifty in number at

least, and led by that slippery personage, the Mudir of Dongola, on

whom the British Government so grotesquely bestowed the Cross of St.

Michael and St. George--a gift ridiculed even by the _Karakush_, or

Egyptian _Punch_.

A conflict ensued; revolvers and Remington rifles were freely used;

saddles were emptied, and sabres flashed in the moonlight. General

plunder of everything was the real object of the Mudir and his

Kabbabishes; to rescue Isha was the sole object of Khasim, who

charged in among them.

Amid the wild hurly-burly of the conflict, the shrieks of the women,

their incessant cries of _walwalah!_ the grunting of the camels, the

yells of the Arabs, and amid the dense clouds of dust and sand raised

by hoofs and feet, Khasim Jelalodeen speedily found the litter in

which the daughter of Moussa was placed, and was in the act of

drawing forth her slight figure across his saddlebow--horror-stricken

though the girl was, albeit she had seen death in more than one form

before--when the merchant, Ebn al Ajuz, exasperated to lose her after

all the treasure he had spent, shot her dead with his long brass

pistol; but ere he could draw another Khasim clove him to the chin,

through every fold of the turban, by one stroke of his long and

trenchant Arab sword, and, with a wild cry of grief and despair,

spurred his horse into the desert and was seen no more, though rumour

said he joined the banner of Osman Digna before Suakim.

So this was a brief Arab romance of the nineteenth century as acted

out in a part of the world which changes not, though all the world

seems to change elsewhere.

Most wearily passed the time of Malcolm Skene's captivity in the

zereba of Moussa Abu Hagil. Weeks became months, and the closing

days of the year found him still there, and necessitated to be ever

watchful, for both Pietro Girolamo and Hassan Abdullah had, he knew,

sworn to kill him if an opportunity were given them; and nothing had

as yet stayed their hands but the influence of the Sheikh, who

protected him for purposes of his own.

Thus his life was in hourly peril; the bondage he endured was

maddening, and he could not perceive any end to it or escape from it

save death. As for escape, a successful one seemed so hopeless, so

difficult to achieve, that it gradually became useless to brood over

it--without arms, a horse, money, or a guide.

He knew that he must now be deemed as one of the dead by his

regiment, by the authorities, and, more than all, by his widowed

mother and dearest friends, and have been mourned by them as such.

Rumour had said ere he left Cairo that a relieving column was to

start for Khartoum. How that might affect his fate he knew not; it

might be too late to help him in any way, and to be _too late_ was

the order of our affairs in Egypt now.

So time passed on, and he was in darkness as to all that passed in

the outer world.

At last there came tidings which made the Sheikh Moussa eye him

darkly, dubiously, and with undisguised hostility--tidings which

Malcolm Skene heard with no small concern and alarm.

These were the close arrest of Zebehr Pacha as a traitor to the

Khedive Tewfik, and his sudden deportation from Cairo beyond the sea

to Gibraltar, by order of Lord Wolseley.

This event, thought Skene, must seal his own fate as an enforced and

most unwilling hostage now!

The golden grain, the full-eared wheat and bearded barley had been

gathered in every field and on every upland slope around his home;

the year had deepened into the last days of autumn; the woods and

orchards of ancient Dunnimarle were odorous of autumnal fruit and

dying leaves; the skies were gray by day and red and gloomy at eve.

White winter had come, and every burn and linn been frozen in its

rocky bed; the thundering blasts that swept the bosom of the Forth

had rumbled down the wide chimneys of Dunnimarle and swept leaves and

even spray against the window panes; while the aged trees in the glen

below had shrieked and moaned ominously in the icy winds till winter

passed away, and people began hopefully to speak of the coming

spring, but still a lone mother mourned for her lost son--her

handsome soldier son, ever so good, so tender, and so true to her,

now gone--could she doubt it?--to the Land of the Leal!

CHAPTER XLIII.

A MARRIAGE.

While Malcolm Skene was counting the days wearily and anxiously, and,

in common parlance, 'eating his heart out,' in that distant zereba,

near the Third Cataract of the Nile, time and events did not stand

still with some of his friends elsewhere; among these certainly were

Roland Lindsay and Hester Maule, and the latter did indeed mourn for

the hard and unknown fate of one whose love she never sought but

surely won.

Roland did not start immediately for Egypt after turning his back in

mortification and disgust on Earlshaugh, but for a brief time took up

his quarters at the United Service Club in Edinburgh with Jack

Elliot. The speedy marriage of the latter and Maude, who had gone to

Merlwood with Hester, was then on the tapis, and fully occupied the

attention of all concerned.

It was impossible for anything like love to exist long, after the

rude shock--the terrible awakening--Roland had received; yet ever and

anon he found himself rehearsing with intense bitterness of spirit

the memory of scenes and passages between himself and

Annot--drivelling scenes he deemed them now! How had he said to her

more than once:

'My darling--my darling! Be true to me; the day when I cease to

believe in you will kill me--you are such a child--you know so little

of the world, sweet one!'

'So little of the world--a child!' thought he. 'What an ass I was!

I am not killed by it, and she has been false as the devil. How came

I to say things that seemed so prophetic?'

Thus, as he thought over all the love and blind adoration he had

lavished on her, he felt only rage and sickness at his own folly. He

saw it all now, when it was too late--too late!

What human heart has not learned the bitterness of these two bitter

words, in many ways, through life?

Yet, tantalizingly, she would come before him in dreams, and thus

recall him to the words of an old sonnet--

'Half pleading and half petulant she stands;

Her golden hair falls rippling on my hands;

Her words are whispered in their old sweet tone.

But neither word nor smile can move me now--

There is an unseen shadow on her brow.

I cannot love, because all trust is gone!'

It was a very awkward subject for Hester to approach, yet, seeing him

so moody, so silent and trist, when first again he came to Merlwood,

she said to him timidly and softly:

'Forget the past, Roland. She made no real impression on your heart,

but affected your imagination only.'

And now he began to think that such was indeed the case; while to

Maude it seemed strange indeed that Annot Drummond should be at

Earlshaugh, posing as the future mistress thereof, while she and her

disinherited brother were a species of outcasts therefrom.

Earlshaugh--the old house of so many family traditions and

memories--was very dear to Maude in spite of all the dark and

mortifying hours she had lately spent under its roof. What races and

frolics and fun had gone on there in the past time, when she, her

brothers, and Hester Maule were all happy children, in the long

corridors and ghostly old attics, under the steep roofs and pointed

turrets where the antique vanes creaked in the wind; and how greater

seemed their fun when the rain storms of winter or spring came

rattling down on the old stone slates, and they all nestled together

under the slope, with a sense of protection and power unknown in

future years--so the girl's heart clung to the old roof-tree with a

love that nothing in the future could destroy.

There was no use thinking of all these and a thousand other things,

as her home was now to be wherever that of Jack Elliot was.

Some of her regrets at times were shared by Roland, for they were a

race peculiar to--but not alone in--Scotland, these Lindsays of

Earlshaugh.

They had ever been high in pride and strong in self-will, lording it

over their neighbours in the Howe and East Neuk of Fife, in the days

when many a barbed horse was in stall, and many an armed man, 'boden

in effeir of weir,' sat at the Laird's table; proud of their ancient

pedigree and many heroic deeds, all unstained by timidity in war, and

foreign gold in time of peace--a stain few Scottish noble families

are without; proud of the broad lands that had come to them not by

labour or talent certainly, but by the undoubted right to be lords of

the soil by inheritance, when the soil was not held by a mere

sheepskin, but by the sword and knight-service to the Scottish Crown.

And now to return to more prosaic times. We have said that there was

a chronic antagonism between Maude and her stepmother, Mrs. Lindsay;

then, when Roland hurried to quit Earlshaugh, she and Jack resolved

to get married, and married they were, quite quietly, as Roland was

in haste to be gone to Egypt, and they were to pass a brief honeymoon

ere Jack followed him--as he had inexorably to take his turn of

service there too.

Of the Earlshaugh will, and Maude's small inheritance under it, Jack

made light indeed.

'What matters it?' said he; 'I am Elliot of Braidielee, and there

will be our home-coming, when we have smashed up the Mahdi, and I can

return with honour!'

At this marriage Annot Drummond was not present--no invitation was

given to her, and Mrs. Lindsay excused herself through illness.

Maude laughed at her apology.

'Though we were grown up, and so beyond her reach in some respects,

she has been like the typical stepmother of the old fairy tales,'

said the girl, who, sunny-haired, blue-eyed, and bright, looked

wonderfully beautiful, apart from t lat strange halo which surrounds

every bride on her marriage day.

'All weddings are dull affairs, and we are well out of this

one--don't you think so?' said Annot coyly to her new lover.

'Perhaps, but ours won't be so,' replied Hawkey Sharpe with a knowing

wink. 'I expect it will be rather good fun.'

She shivered a little at his bad style. The visits that are usually

paid and received, the letters that are usually written, the choosing

of much useless millinery, furniture, plate, and equipages, and the

being 'trotted out' for the inspection of mutual friends were all

avoided or evaded by the quiet mode in which Jack Elliot and Maude

were made one, and their nuptials a fact accomplished; but there was

no time for 'doing' Paris, Berlin, the Riviera, or Rome, as Jack was

bound for Egypt within a tantalizingly short period, so he secured a

charming little villa for his bride in the southern and perhaps most

pleasing quarter of the Modern Athens till he could return--if he

ever did return--from that land of disease and death, where so many

of our young and brave have found their last home.

Mr. Hawkey Sharpe at Earlshaugh laughed viciously when he read the

announcement of the marriage in the newspapers. It was not a

pleasant laugh, even Annot thought, and boded ill to some one.

Maude seemed beyond his reach now, so far as he seemed concerned; but

there remained to him still hatred and revenge, as we may have to

show.

CHAPTER XLIV.

THE TROOPSHIP.

So while Jack and Maude were absent on their brief honeymoon Roland

bade adieu to Hester, his old uncle Sir Harry, and to pleasant

Merlwood ere turning his steps to the East.

As he looked on the refined face of the girl, with her long-lashed

gentle eyes, for the last time, something of the old tenderness that

Annot had clouded, warped, or won away, came into his heart again,

and he longed to take her kindly in his arms ere he went, but stifled

the desire, and simply held forth his hand when she proffered her

pale and half-averted cheek. He dared not kiss away the quiver he

saw upon her lips.

'Good-bye, dear Hester,' said he. 'Have you not a word or two that I

may take with me--such as a dear sister might give?'

But her still quivering lips were voiceless; the forced smile on them

was gone, and the soft light of her violet-blue eyes was quenched as

if by recent tears; sweet eyes they were, dreamy and languid, their

white lids fringed by lashes long and dark.

Roland noted this with a heavy heart, and thought his gentle cousin

never looked so beautiful or attractive as then, when her little

hand, which trembled, was clasped for the last time in his, and she

withdrew to the end of the room.

'Good-bye, nephew,' said Sir Harry, propping himself on a stout

Indian cane. 'God keep you from harm, and may every good attend you;

but,' he added, his keen eyes glistening angrily through the film

that spread over them, 'does your conscience quite absolve you?'

'In what, uncle?'

'What? Why, your conduct to my girl--your cousin Hester,' said Sir

Harry, in a low voice.

'Uncle?'

'Did you make no effort when last at Merlwood here to win her

admiration, her regard, her love? Did you not simply play with her

heart, and deem it perhaps flirting?--hateful word! In all her

anguish--and I have seen it--she has never had a word of reproach for

you, whatever her thoughts, poor child, may be; but please to think

another time, Roland, and not attempt your powers of fascination and

to act the lady-killer, lest you crush a heart that might be a happy

one.'

Roland felt himself grow pale as he listened wistfully, half

mournfully, to these merited but most unexpected remarks from the

abrupt old gentleman, to whom he was sincerely attached. Knowing

their truth, an emotion of shame, with much of reproach or

compunction, gathered in his heart, and he muttered something

apologetic--that he had no longer the position or prospects he once

had--that Earlshaugh was no longer his--and felt in some haste to be

gone, though he was shocked to see that the old man appeared to be

suddenly and sorely broken down in health. The Jhansi bullet had

worked its way out at last, but left a wound that would neither heal

nor close; and hence, perhaps, the irrepressible irritability that

led to these reproaches, some part of which reached the ear of

Hester, and covered her with the deepest confusion, and made her

welcome the moment of Roland's final departure; and then she said:

'Oh, papa, how could you speak as you did? Roland made me no

proposal, asked me for no regard, and I gave him--no promise. I have

known him, you are aware, all my life, and I do love him very

dearly--but as a brother--nothing more,' added poor Hester with a

very unmistakable sob in her slender throat. 'You do him

injustice--he has not wronged me; but you know well how others have

wronged him.'

But her father only resumed the amber mouthpiece of his. hookah, and

continued to smoke in uncomfortable silence.

So Roland was gone, and apparently out of her life more than ever now.

Notwithstanding that he certainly had not treated her well at

Merlwood, Hester was for a time quietly inconsolable for his

departure, which he had taken in a mood of mind rendered so stern and

reckless by the episode of Annot, that she pitied him.

He would, she knew, court danger and wounds; seek perhaps every

chance of being killed--dying far away from friends and

kindred--dying a soldier's death without getting, perchance, even a

grave in the hot sands of the desert.

He would, she feared, rush on his fate; 'but men often make their own

fate; they are weak who are blindly guided by circumstances,' she had

read. 'It is given us to distinguish right from wrong; and if men

persist in wrong when the right is before them, then be the

consequences on their own head.'

The necklet--the gift he had given her at Merlwood--was clasped

lovingly round her throat now, and its pendant nestled in her breast.

'The future is vague!' thought Hester; 'but one thing is sure, we

shall never be as we have been--what we were to each other at one

time--he and I. Shall we ever meet again--who can say? The sea is

treacherous with its storms and other perils--the war is too dreadful

to think of! We may never, never see each other more, and the last

hour he passed here may have been the last we shall have spent

together in this world.'

If he survived everything and came back again, could she be like the

Agnes of 'David Copperfield'? She feared not. Therein she had read

the story of a noble woman who had secretly loved a man all her

life--even as she had loved Roland, and who yet showed no sign of

sorrow when he married another woman. Agnes was David's counseller

and friend until he was nearing middle age, and it was only when he

asked her to be his wife that she made the simple confession of her

lifelong love.

She pondered over all these things as she wandered alone by the

wooded Esk, the placid murmur of whose flow as it lapped among the

pebbles was the only sound that broke the silence of the rocky glen,

while at the same hour Roland was amid a very different scene--one of

high excitement, noise, and bustle, almost uproar.

Alongside a great jetty in Portsmouth Harbour H.M. troopships

_Bannockburn_ and _Boyne_ were taking troops and stores on board for

Alexandria, and on the poop of the former, a floating castle of 6,300

tons, Roland stood amid a group of officers, whose numbers were

augmenting every few minutes, and the interest and excitement were

increasing fast, as it was known that when the great white-hulled

trooper cleared out the Queen had sent special orders that the ship

was to keep well to the westward, that she might meet her in her own

yacht and pay farewell to the troops on board, mustering about six

hundred men of various arms of the service, and a host of staff and

other officers, including some of Roland's regiment.

A handsome fellow the latter looked in his blue braided

patrol-jacket, and white tropical helmet, with his sword clattering

by his side.

'When shall I be again in mufti?' thought he with a laugh (using that

now familiar term that came back from Egypt of old with the soldiers

of Abercrombie), and hearty greetings met him on every hand.

'Lindsay--it is! I didn't know you were rejoining,' exclaimed a

brother officer, whose wounded arm was still in a sling. 'I thought

your leave was not up till March.'

'I have resigned more than two months of it, Wilton,' replied Roland.

'What an enthusiast, by Jove!'

'Not more than yourself, whose wound must be green yet.'

'Welcome--Roland,' cried another, a cheery young sub. with a hairless

chin like an apple; 'you are just the man we want for the work before

us.'

'That is right--jolly to see you again!' said a third.

'We missed you awfully, old fellow!' exclaimed a fourth.

Flattering were the greetings on every side as he stood amid the

circle of Hussars, Lancers, Artillery, and others, neither perhaps

the handsomest nor the tallest amid that merry and handsome group,

but looking a soldier every inch in his somewhat frayed and faded

fighting kit, which had seen service enough a short time before.

'Here comes Mostyn of ours,' said Wilton, as a very

devil-may-care-looking young fellow, in the new khakee uniform, with

a field-glass slung over his shoulder, came up. 'How goes it,

Dick?--heard you had committed matrimony.'

'Not such a fool, Wilton.'

'We heard you were rather gone with that elderly party at Dover--the

lass with all the rupees,' he added in a would-be _sotto voce_.

'On the War Office principle that an old girl makes a young widow?

No, Wilton, my boy,' said Mostyn as he lit a cigarette, 'I leave

these little lollies for such as you. Her rupees were all moonshine,

and her _poudre de riz_ was a little too plain; but I shouldn't like

to have a wife who pays her milliner's bills out of her winnings at

Ascot.'

'Ah, Lindsay,' said an officer of another corps who had just marched

his little detachment on board, and gave Roland, familiarly, a slap

on the shoulder, 'how are you--going out again to the land of the

Pyramids? Just keep your eye on my fellows for a minute, will you,

while I get some tiffin below--hungry as a hawk--tore through London

to reach the Anglesea Barracks to-day; had only time to get a glass

of sherry and a caviare sandwich at the Rag, then to get goggles and

gloves, etc., in Regent Street--ta-ta--will be on deck in a minute.'

The old familiar rattling society was delightful again, even with its

rather exaggerated gaiety and banter, and all about him were so

heedless, so happy, and full of the highest spirits, that it was

impossible not to feel the contagion.

The bustle, though orderly, was incredible, and the shipment of

stores of all kinds seemed endless, including ammunition, carts and

waggons, draught and battery horses, with thousands upon thousands of

rounds of Martini-Henry ball-cartridges, and innumerable rounds of

filled shells for thirteen and sixteen-pounder guns.

As senior officer of the mixed command going out, Roland certainly

found that he had work cut out for him just then, and no time for

farther regretting or thinking of the past, amid all the details

consequent on embarkation for foreign service.

The medical examinations were over elsewhere; but there were

'returns,' endless, as useless apparently, to be made up and signed

in duplicate; inspection of equipments; extra kits at sea to be seen

to, and dinner provided for the embarking soldiers, the arms racked

and two men per company told off to look after them, extra dogs on

the upper deck to be pursued, caught, and sent ashore despite the

remonstrances of owners, with the excess of baggage; chests piled

upon chests were being sent down below, with bedding, valises,

uniform cases, bullock trunks, and tubs; the knapsacks to be stowed

away over the mess-tables, sentries posted on the baggage-room and

elsewhere.

Amid all this a buzz of conversation was in progress at the break of

the poop among soldiers and their friends, some of whom had contrived

to get on board, and to one of these in which there was something

absurd he could not help listening.

'Sorr, is Tim Riley aboord?' asked a young Irish labourer, looking

anxiously and with a somewhat scared look about him.

'Who the devil is Tim Riley?' asked a petty officer in charge of the

gangway.

The Irishman slunk back and addressed a somewhat _insouciant_-looking

English recruiting sergeant, with ribbons fluttering from his cap,

and whose business then could only be to get a few stray 'grogs'

before the bell sounded for 'shore.'

'Sergeant, dear, may be you know Tim Riley who inlisted into the

sogers?'

'Tim Riley? How do you spell his name?'

'Devil a one of me knows, but he was a boy from Dublin.'

'Oh, I knewed him well. He's a colonel now,' replied the sergeant.

'A colonel--oh, glory be to God! Is it Tim, whose ears I've warmed

many a time for stealing the ould man's Scotch apples? Where is the

shilling, sergeant?'

'Now be off and make an _omadhaun_ of yourself,'said one of the 18th.

'I knew Thady Boyle; he 'listed as a captain--devil a less--in the

Royal County Down, and when he joined he was put in the black-hole by

a spalpeen of an English corporal.'

The bustle of the embarkation seemed endless, but at last the bugle

sounded, and a bell clanged for all visitors to quit the ship; the

various gangways were run ashore, the screw began to revolve, and

H.M.S. _Bannockburn_ was off.

While the air seemed to vibrate with cheers, the great white trooper,

slowly and stately in aspect, came out of the harbour between the

Blockhouse Fort and the Round Tower, and steamed abreast of the

crowded Clarence Esplanade, which was gay with people even at that

season, and there the soldiers, as they clustered like red bees on

the vessel's side and in the lower rigging, could see the troops of

jolly children with frocks and trousers tucked up paddling in the

water, so far as they dared venture, or making breakwaters and

fortifications of sand as actively as if they had to defend the

shores of old England.

Portsmouth, its spires, batteries, and ultramural line of

magnificent, but now obsolete, batteries and casemates, its masts and

shipping, was becoming shrouded in the golden haze of evening, and

the farewell greetings of the women on board the harbour craft and

those of the youthful tars of the old _St. Vincent_ had died away

astern; but cheers rose in volleys, if we may use the term, when the

_Bannockburn_ neared Cowes, where the Queen--the Queen herself--was

known to be in the _Alberta_ yacht, which had the Royal Standard

floating at her mainmast head, and every heart beat high as the

vessels neared each other, and the Queen--a small figure in

black--was seen amid a group waving her handkerchief.

Roland had only two buglers on board, but these poured forth the

Royal Anthem with right good will from their perch in the foretop,

while instead of the boatswain's shrill whistle the steam siren was

sounded. The Royal yacht steamed round the towering trooper, which

slackened speed, and the signal fluttered out, 'You may proceed.'

Once more the hearty cheers responded to each other over the water;

again the little white handkerchief was seen to wave as the yacht led

the way down the Solent and through Spithead, that famous reach and

roadstead, the rendezvous of our fleets in time of war.

'Farewell, God speed you!' came the signal from the yacht once more,

and the _Bannockburn_ stood out to sea under the lee of the beautiful

Isle of Wight.

The boats were all finally secured; the anchors hauled close up to

the cat-heads by the cat-fall; the forecourse and maintopsail were

set to accelerate her speed, and the troop-ship stood on her voyage

down the Channel.

The high excitement of the last few hours had now completely passed

away. On deck the half-hushed groups of soldiers in their gray

greatcoats were lingering, watching the occasional twinkling of the

shore lights, taking their last look of old England; and when night

had completely fallen, and the bugles had blown tattoo, the Mother of

Nations had faded out in the distance as the ship gave the land a

wide berth.

Weary with the unintermitting toil and bustle of the day, Roland,

after mess, betook himself with a cigar to his own little cabin; a

small substitute certainly for the luxuries of Earlshaugh, as was his

sole retinue now, for the staff there; his single soldier-servant by

this time had made his bed, arranged his toilette and sea-going kit,

and put the entire place in the most perfect order; and of old,

Roland knew well how invaluable a thorough soldier-servant is.

'What cannot he do with regulation pipe-clay?' it has been asked.

'In his hands it is omnipotent over cloth. He can charm stains and

grease-spots thereout, even as an Indian juggler charms snakes; and

what sleight of hand he exercises over your garments generally. The

tunic, grimed and mud-bespattered, he can switch and cane, and, when

folded away, it comes out as from a press. Trousers baggy at the

knees as the historical parachute of old Mrs. Gamp, are manipulated

into their former shape. Compared to the private valet, always

expensive and frequently mutinous, he is a pearl of the greatest

price. His cost is a dole, and, thanks to the regimental guard-room,

he can always be kept within control.'

In the great cabin, which was brilliantly lighted still, Roland heard

the loud hum of many voices where the jovial fellows he had left were

lingering over their wine and talking unlimited 'shop'--discussing

everything, from Lord Wolseley's supposed plan of the Soudan campaign

to the last fashion in regimental buttons.

How he envied the jollity and lightheartedness of his

brother-officers--Dick Mostyn in particular.

Dick had not lost an inheritance nor a false love to boot, certainly;

but it was nothing to him that his pockets were well-nigh empty, his

banker's account over-drawn, and that he had debts innumerable, all

but paid by the proverbial 'a roll on the drum;' his talent for

soothing irate tailors had failed him; still his wardrobe was

faultless; he still wore priceless boots and irreproachable lavender

kids as steadily as he retained his step in the waltz and his seat in

the saddle, which would be of good service to him if he joined the

Mounted Infantry. He could take nothing deeply to heart, and even

now, leading the van in Bacchanalian noise and jollity--a verse of

his song--it was from poor 'Tilbury Nogo,' ran through the cabin, and

just then it seemed exactly to suit Roland's frame of mind as he

lounged on a sofa with his uniform jacket unbuttoned:

'I sigh not for woman, I want not her charms--

The long waving tress, the melting black eye--

For the sting of the adder still lurks in her arms,

And falsehood is wafted in each burning sigh;

Such pleasure is poisoned, such ecstasy vain--

Forget her! remembrance shall fade in champagne!'

CHAPTER XLV.

THE DEATH WRESTLE.

Tidings had come, as stated, to the zereba of Sheikh Moussa of the

deportation of his kinsman Zebehr in a British ship of war as a State

prisoner to Gibraltar, and Malcolm Skene--no longer cared for as a

hostage--found himself in greater peril than before among his

unscrupulous captors.

He was conscious that his movements by day were watched more closely

than ever now, and by night he was always placed in a close prison

beyond the court wherein the lions were chained.

Other Sheikhs came and went, with their standard-bearers and

horsemen; conferences were evidently held with Moussa Abu Hagil;

Skene found himself an object of growing hostility, and suspected

'that something, he knew not what,' was in progress; that Gordon had

actually been victorious or rescued at Khartoum, or some great battle

had been lost by the Mahdi.

He could gather from his knowledge of the language, and the remarks

that were let fall unwittingly in his hearing that the zereba was to

be abandoned for a general movement on Khartoum, or for another

fortified post farther up the country--a move worse for him; and the

consequent preparations, therefore, packing tents, provisions, and

spoil, had begun.

To save further trouble, and gratify the lust of blood which forms a

part of the Oriental nature, he might be assassinated after

all--after having found protection under the roof and eaten the salt

of Moussa--killed as poor Hector MacLaine was killed after the battle

of Candahar, two or three years before this time.

The expression of Moussa's face as he regarded him occasionally now,

was neither pleasant nor reassuring; his deep set eyes, when he was

excited, glared with fire, like lights in the sockets of a skull; and

Malcolm Skene never knew when the supreme moment might come.

In the morning he had no assurance that he should see night--in the

night that he would be a live man in the morning.

Anything--death itself--were better than this keen and cruel suspense.

One evening about sunset there was a vehement beating of tom-toms,

and a body of Baggara Arabs, some on horseback, others on camels, but

many on foot--a fierce and jabbering mob, all but nude--though

well-armed with bright-bladed Solingen swords and excellent Remington

rifles, passed the zereba, bound for some point of attack; and the

Sheikh Moussa, with every man he could muster, joined them in hot

haste.

So great had been the bustle and hurry of their departure that

Malcolm Skene, to his astonishment, found himself forgotten,

overlooked; and, full of hopeful thoughts, he lay quiet and still in

the poor apartment allotted to him, watching the strange

constellations and stars unknown to Europe through the unglazed

aperture that served as a window, and listening to the silence--if we

may use such a paradox--a silence that seemed to be broken only by

the pulsations of his own heart, as hope grew up in it suddenly, and

he thought that, considering a kind of crisis that had come in his

fate, now or never was the time to make a stroke for liberty, and to

elude, if possible, the few Arabs who were left to watch the gates in

the dense mimosa hedge that surrounded the zereba.

To elude them--but how?

The stars were singularly bright even for that hemisphere; but there

was no moon as yet, fortunately, and softly quitting his hut, he

looked sharply about the 'compound,' as it would be called in India,

and found himself alone there, unnoticed and unseen. He drew near

the hedge in the hope of finding, as he ultimately did, an opening in

that barrier, a thinner portion of its dense branches, close to the

ground, and at once he proceeded to creep through.

How easy it seemed of accomplishment just then; but when the zereba

was full of armed men, and watchers and sentinels were numerous, the

attempt would have been useless.

Slowly, softly, and scarcely making a twig or a thorn crack, he drew

himself through on his hands and face ere many minutes passed;

minutes? they could not have been more than five, if so many; but

with life trembling in the balance, to poor Skene they seemed as ages.

At last he was through!

He was outside that hated place of confinement, every feature of

which he knew but too well, and every detail of which he loathed; and

yet he was not quite free. Keen eyes might see him after all, and

every moment he expected to hear an alarm.

He thanked Heaven for the absence of the moonlight, and, favoured by

the obscurity, crept on his hands and knees for a considerable

distance ere he ventured to stand erect, to draw a long breath, and

with a prayer of hope and thankfulness on his lips, set out at a run

towards the Nile.

By the oft-studied landmarks he knew well in what direction the great

river lay, a few miles off, however.

A boat thereon, could he but find one, might be the means of ultimate

escape, by taking him lower down the stream to more civilized regions.

Anyway, he could not be worse off, be in greater hourly peril, or

have a more dark future, than when in the zereba, unless, too

probably, thirst and starvation came upon him.

While the darkness of night lasted, he had a certain chance of safety

and concealment, and he dared scarcely long for day and the perils it

might bring forth in a land where every man's hand was certain to be

against him.

He was totally defenceless, unarmed--oh, thought he, for a weapon of

any description, that he might strike, if not a blow for liberty or

life, at least one in defiance and for vengeance!

So, full of vague and desperate yet hopeful ideas, he pushed in the

direction to where he knew the river lay. On its banks he hoped to

obliterate or leave behind all trace of his footsteps, for he knew

but too well the risk he ran of recapture on his flight or absence

being discovered; and that there were Arabs in the zereba who had

applied themselves diligently to the study of tracking or tracing the

human foot.

So acute are these men of vision that they can know whether the

footsteps belong to their own or to another tribe, and consequently

whether a friend or a foe has passed that way; they know by the depth

of the impression whether the man bore a load or not; by the

regularity of the steps whether the man was fatigued or fresh and

active, and hence can calculate to a nicety the chances of overtaking

him; whether he has trodden in sand or on grass, and bruised its

blades, and by the appearance of the traces whether the stranger had

passed on that day or several days before.

Malcolm Skene knew all this, and that with dawn they would be like

scenting beagles on his trail, hence his intense anxiety to reach the

river's bank.

Swiftly the dawn came in, red and fiery, and his own shadow and the

shadows of every object were cast far behind him. He looked back

again and again; no sign of pursuit was in his rear. In the distance

he saw a few Arab huts with _sakias_ or water-wheels, and then with

something like a start of joy that elicited an exclamation, he got a

glimpse of the river, rolling clear and blue, its banks a stripe of

narrow green, between the rocky, rugged, inexorable black mountains;

but there no boat floated on and no sail whitened the yellowish blue

of the Nile. But the morning light was vivid, the breeze from the

river was pleasant and exultant, the glories of Nature were around

him, yet anxiety made him gasp for breath as he struggled forward.

Not a bird or other living thing was visible. The silence was

intense, and not even an insect hummed amid the scrub mimosas; the

hot, red sun came up in his unclouded glory. All seemed sad,

solitary, yet intensely sunny.

Ere long he did hear a sound of life; it was the shrill cry of a

little naked boy attending on a _sakia_ wheel. Irrigation is done by

the latter, which is driven by oxen turning a chain of water-jars,

which admits of being lengthened as the river falls. It is usually

enclosed in an edifice like an old tower, green with creeping plants,

and as the boy drives the oxen, his cry and the creaking of the great

wheel are sounds that never cease, day or night, by the Nile.

To avoid this _sakia_ and its too probable surroundings or adjuncts,

Malcolm Skene turned aside into a rocky chasm that overhung the river

at a considerable height, and then, far down below, on the blue

surface of the stream and between its banks, which in some places

were barred in by rocks, blackened by the sun and rent by volcanic

throes into strange fragments, and which in others, where the desert

touched the stream, was bordered by level sand, he saw a sight which,

were he to live a thousand years, he thought he could never, never

forget!

There, about half a mile distant, was a regular flotilla of boats,

manned by redcoats, with sails set and oars out--broad-bladed oars

that flashed like silver as they were feathered in the sunshine,

pulled steadily against the downward current of the river, and all

apparently advancing merrily within talking distance--a sight that

made his heart leap within his breast, for he knew that this was a

relieving column, or part of it, _en route_ for Khartoum!

For a minute he stood still, as if he could scarcely believe his

senses, or that he was not dreaming--paralysed, as it were, with this

sudden joy and sight--one far, far beyond his conception or hope of

ever being realised.

He stretched his tremulous hands towards these advancing boats; he

fancied he could hear the voices and see the faces of the oarsmen in

their white helmets and red coats; and never did 'the old red rag

that tells of Britain's glory' seem more dear to his eye and more

dear to his heart than at that supreme moment!

What force might already have passed up?

How many days had they been passing, and if so, how narrowly had he

escaped being left behind? This was assuredly the Khartoum

Expedition, or part of it, and the recent bustle, consternation, and

excitement at the zereba of Moussa Abu Hagil were quite accounted for

now.

The sight of his comrades imbued him with renewed strength of mind

and purpose, and his whole soul became inspired with new impatience,

hope, and joy--hope on the eve of fulfilment.

While looking about for a means of descent to the river bank, from

whence to attract the attention of the nearest crew, he heard a sound

like a mocking laugh or ironical shout. He turned and looked back,

and--with what emotions may be imagined, but not described--he beheld

a man clad like an Arab, and covering him with a levelled rifle, at

about a hundred yards' distance.

The condition of his uniform--in tatters long since--had not been

improved by the thorns of the prickly zereba hedge in his passage

through it; his helmet had since given place to a tarboosh, and, all

unkempt and unshorn, his aspect was somewhat remarkable now, but

quite familiar to Pietro Girolamo--for Girolamo it was--who knew him

in an instant.

Whether the revengeful Greek had tracked him or not, or whether

Moussa's followers were within hearing of a musket-shot, Skene might

never know; the fact was but too evident that, intent on death and

dire mischief, the Ionian Isleman and _ci-devant_ gambling-den keeper

was there, with his white, pallid visage, fierce hawk nose, long

jetty moustache, and gleaming black eyes.

Every detail of his tantalising and most critical position flashed on

the mind of Malcolm Skene.

On one hand were the boats of the River Column--life and freedom!

On the other, death--no captivity, but death, certain and sure; for

even if he escaped Girolamo, in the direction where the zereba lay he

could now see a cloud of dust, and amid it the dusky figures of men

and camels, with the gleam of burnished steel, and then within almost

his grasp, was Girolamo, rifle in hand, arresting his path to the

boats.

With another mocking laugh, the Greek levelled his weapon more

surely, took aim, and fired.

Skene heard--yes, felt--the bullet whiz past his ear. Powerless,

defenceless, unarmed, his heart burned with rage and desperation at

the narrow escape his life had; but discretion and scheming were then

the better part of valour, and, with thought that came upon him quick

as a flash of lightning, instead of risking another discharge, he

resolved to feign death, and, after reeling round as if shot, he fell

on the ground.

Then he heard the steps of his would be assassin approach ing him

slowly and steadily, to give a _coup de grace_ if requisite with his

knife, perhaps, rather than to seek plunder, as Skene, he knew, would

possess nothing worth taking.

Restraining his breath till the Greek was close upon him, Skene lay

still; and then, as the former was about to stoop, he sprang to his

feet and confronted him. So startled was Girolamo by this unexpected

movement that the rifle dropped from his hand, slipped over the

rocks, and the two enemies were face to face on equal terms, for

Girolamo was minus knife or poniard.

He clenched his teeth; his glittering eyes blazed; his long, lean

fingers were curled like the claws of a kite; and he uttered strange,

guttural sounds of astonishment and rage; but Skene had no time to

lose.

Straight out from the shoulder he planted his left fist, clenched,

with a dull thud on the hooked beak of Girolamo, followed by a

similar application of his right, and knocked him with a crash on the

rocks.

Agile as a tiger and blindly infuriated like one, the Greek sprang

again to his feet, and was rushing forward like a mad thing to get

Skene's throat in the grasp of his long and powerful fingers, which

would speedily have strangled the life out of him, but the latter

bestowed upon his antagonist another 'facer,' which sent more than

one of his sharp teeth rattling down his throat and loosened many of

the rest, covering his pale face with blood; but, blinded by fury--a

fury that endowed his wiry form with double strength--he closed in,

and contrived to encircle Skene in his grasp--an iron one; for, long

accustomed to a seafaring life, his muscles and nerves were like

bands of steel, and now came the tug of war, even while distant cries

came to the ears of the wrestlers.

No sound escaped either now, but hard and concentrated breathing; it

was a struggle for death or for life, and each scarcely paused a

moment to glare into the other's eyes. Fiercely as the first of his

race and name is said to have grappled with the wolf in the wilds of

Stocket Forest, did Skene grapple with his athletic adversary.

Near the edge of the rocks that overhung the river at the end of the

chasm, backwards and forwards they swayed, locked in a savage and

deadly grasp. Finding that every effort to uproot Skene, to get him

off his legs and throw him, so that he might resort to strangulation,

proved unavailing, he strove to drag him towards the Nile, in the

hope of flinging him down the bank; but whether the said bank was a

precipice of a hundred feet or only the drop of a few yards Skene

knew not, and in the blind fury of the moment, with pursuers coming

on, never thought of it.

Nearer and nearer the verge, by sheer strength of muscle and weight

of limb, the Greek was dragging him, and already some shouts in

English ascending from the bosom of the river evinced that the

struggle was visible from the boats; but Skene now gave up all hope

of being able to conquer his opponent or free himself from his

terrible grasp, and had but one thought--that if he perished, Pietro

Girolamo should perish too!

Now they were at the edge, the verge of what was evidently a

precipice of considerable height, and more fiercely and breathlessly

than ever did they wrench, sway, and grasp each other, their arms

tightening, as hatred, rage, and ferocious dread grew apace

together--the clamorous dread that one might escape the doom he meant

to mete out to or compel the other to share with him.

As last a species of gasping sigh escaped them. Both lost their

footing at once and fell for a moment through the air; they then

crashed upon bushes and stones, and without relaxing their grasp

rolled over and over each other with awful speed down a precipitous

steep, sending before and bringing after them showers of gravel and

little stones, crashing through mimosa bushes and other scrub,

maimed, bruised, and covered with each other's blood, for some forty

feet or so.

Mad was the thirst for each other's destruction that inspired these

two men; for Malcolm Skene, by the peril and circumstances of the

time, was reduced to the level of the Ionian savage with whom he

fought--if fighting it could be called.

Another moment and they had rolled into the Nile--a fall, ere it was

accomplished, that in a second seemed to compress and contain the

epitome of life, and down they went under the surface, cleaving the

water at a rate that seemed to take all power out of heart and limb,

and, parting, they rose at a little distance from each other.

Faint and breathless Skene went down again, water bubbling in his

eyes, choking in his throat, and all breath had left him ere he rose

to the surface again, and saw Girolamo clinging to a rock round which

swept the beginning of a rapid. He was visible for a moment only;

exhaustion made him relax his hold. He sank, rose again only to

sink; then a hand was visible once or twice above the water as he was

swept away into eternity by the fierce current that bubbled round the

sun-baked rocks.

Then Skene felt hands laid upon him, and while English voices and

exclamations came pleasantly to his half-dulled ears, he was dragged

by soldiers on board one of the boats, where he lay so completely

exhausted as to be almost insensible; and he had not fallen into the

river a moment too soon, for, just as he did so, a group of armed

Arabs, the followers of Moussa Abu Hagil, crowned with a spluttering

fire of musketry, and with wild gesticulations, the rocks above the

Nile.

CHAPTER XLVI.

MAUDE'S VISITOR.

'The lives of some families,' it is said, 'are exactly like a pool in

which--without being exactly stagnant--nothing occurs to ruffle the

surface of the water from year's end to year's end, and then come a

series of tremendous splashes, like naughty boys throwing stones.'

So it was with the Lindsays of Earlshaugh latterly, as we will soon

have to show.

The few weeks of his leave of absence that intervened before Jack

Elliot would have inexorably to start for Egypt, glided happily and

all too swiftly away, when he and Maude took up their residence at

the pretty villa in the southern quarter of Edinburgh, near the

ancient Grange Loan; and often if they sat silent, or lingered hand

in hand amid the faded flower-beds of the garden, they seemed to be

only listening--if one may say so--to the silent responses of their

own hearts, and that language of instinct understood only by kindred

souls.

'We have not exactly Aladdin's lamp in the house, Maude,' said Jack

laughingly, 'nor have we all the luxuries of our future home at

Braidielee, where now conservatories are springing up, a

billiard-room being built, and gardens laid out, all for you; but we

are happy as people can be----'

'Who have a coming separation to face and to endure, Jack,' she

interrupted, with a break in her voice.

In the newspapers they read the announcement of the marriage, at

Earlshaugh, of 'Hawkey Sharpe, Esq., to Miss Annot Drummond, of South

Belgravia,' at which Jack laughed loud and long.

'Well, Roland _is_ lucky to be out of the running there!--Sharpe,

Esq.--I wonder he did not add "of Earlshaugh," and doubtless the

creature would figure in all Roland's splendid jewels and gifts.

Pah!' said he; but the gentle Maude had a kind of pity for the girl,

and her views of the matter were somewhat mingled.

Annot's mother had toiled always in the matrimonial market--long

unaided by the young lady herself--and now the latter had landed a

golden fish at last, as she thought, in the future heir of

Earlshaugh--Mr. Hawkey Sharpe!

No longer was she to be perplexed by questions how few or how many

thousand a year had such as Bob Hoyle, and on other delicate matters

dear to the Belgravian mater, and concerning 'detrimentals.' After

more than one season spent in the chase, after dinners that were too

costly for a limited exchequer, handsome dresses and much showy

appearance, laborious days and watchful nights, snubs and

disappointments--_homme propose, femme dispose_--Annot was fairly off

her hands, and to be a 'Lady of that Ilk.'

She had played her cards in Scotland beautifully!

And now came to pass the event which ruffled the calm pool of Maude's

existence, when within three days of Elliot's departure to rejoin the

army in Egypt. The crisis from which she ever shrank seemed now to

have come!

Oftentimes before this had she wondered whether it were possible such

unbroken happiness as her present life would ever come again, despite

the tender, earnest, and trusting love that glowed in her breast; and

on one particular evening, when Jack Elliot was absent making some

final preparations, and would not be home till late, she sat alone,

striving to prepare herself for the change, the solitude and anxiety

that were to come, and praying tearfully for strength to pass the

bitter ordeal--the wrench that was before them both.

This happy, happy honeymoon of a few weeks was drawing to its close,

and her soft blue eyes grew very full as she thought over the whole

situation, when a visitor was suddenly announced.

A showily-dressed and smart-looking little woman, about thirty years

of age apparently, rather pretty, but flippant and nervous in manner,

and having a slight _soupçon_ of 'making-up' about her cheeks and

eyelashes, was ushered in, and eyed, with some boldness and

effrontery (to conceal the nervousness referred to), Maude, who, by

force of habit, bowed and indicated a seat, which her visitor at once

took, and threw up her veil.

Maude saw that her features were good, but this colouring and

expression made them cunning and daring, if somewhat remarkable and

attractive.

Maude then remembering that this person had not sent in a card or

announced herself, inquired to what she owed the occasion of her

visit.

'The occasion--you'll soon know that--too soon for your own peace of

mind, poor girl! You are--Miss Lindsay?'

'I was Miss Lindsay,' replied Maude.

'And who are you now?'

Maude stared at her visitor with some alarm.

'If you take an interest in Captain Elliot, it is a pity,' continued

the latter.

'Interest--pity?' questioned Maude, rising now, and drawing near to

the handle of the bell.

'Take my advice in time, and don't touch that!' said her strange

visitor with sudden insolence of manner, while something of

malevolence and triumph sparkled in her dark eyes.

'You must be mad, or----'

'Tipsy, you would say--I am neither; but I have that to say which you

may not wish to furnish gossip for your servants, so do not summon

them until I am gone.'

'Will you be so kind as to state at once the object of your visit?'

said Maude, with as much hauteur as she could summon to her aid.

'So you are his wife--a doll like you! Mrs. Elliot of Braidielee,

you think yourself!' said the woman mockingly; 'I fear I have that to

tell which your dainty ears will not find very pleasant. But "gather

ye rosebuds while ye may;" for ere long only the leaves, dead and

without fragrance, will be left you!'

Maude felt herself grow pale and tremble; she knew that there was a

great lunatic asylum somewhere in that quarter of the city, and began

to fear that her visitor was an escaped patient. She moved a step

towards the bell again, and cast a lingering, longing glance at it,

on which the woman again said sharply:

'Don't! Listen to me, I tell you!'

Placing her elbows on a small Chippendale table, off which, without

ceremony, she thrust a few books, she rested her chin upon her left

hand, and looking at the shrinking Maude steadily and defiantly--for

the perfect purity of the girl, her position in life, her whole

aspect and bearing filled this fallen one--for fallen she was--with

rivalry, envy, and hatred, she asked:

'Now, who do you think I am?'

'That I have yet to learn,' replied Maude, who was moving towards the

door, when the next words of the woman arrested her steps.

'Learn that I am Captain John Elliot's--lawful wife!'

'Oh--she is mad!' thought Maude, who neither tottered, nor fainted,

nor made any outcry, deeming the bold assertion as totally absurd.

'You don't believe me, I suppose?'

'You must hold me excused if I do not,' replied Maude, thinking that

she must temporise with a woman who, for all she knew, might bite her

like a rabid dog; for poor Maude had very vague ideas of the ways and

proclivities of lunatics in general.

She had but one desire, to rush past, to gain the door and escape;

but was baffled by the expression of the woman's watchful black eyes.

That she was not and never had been a lady was evident; neither did

she seem of the servant class; so Maude's inexperienced eye was

unable to fix her place in the scale of society, though her costume

was good--if showy--even to her well-fitting gloves.

'You would wish to see my marriage-lines, I doubt not,' said the

visitor with a smile, drawing a couple of folded papers from her

bosom; 'but perhaps you had better read this first. I am a great

believer in documentary evidence, and hope you are so too.'

Somewhat ostentatiously she flattened out a letter on the table, but

carefully kept her hands thereon, as if in fear that it might be

snatched away by Maude; and impelled by an impressible but hideous

emotion of curiosity the latter drew near, and the woman with a

slender forefinger traced out the lines she wished her to read--lines

that seemed to seal the fate of Maude, whose dull eyes wandered over

them like one in a dreadful dream--for the letter, if a forgery, was

certainly to all appearance in the handwriting of Jack Elliot, and

some of its peculiarities in the formation of capitals and certain

other letters seemed to her too terribly familiar and indisputable.

They seemed to sear the girl's brain--the words she read--but

summoning all her self-control, and seeming scarcely to breathe, she

permitted as yet no expression of sorrow, of passion, or emotion of

any kind to escape her.

'DEAREST LITTLE WIFE,

'I write you, Maggie, as I promised, as I cannot see you before

leaving for Egypt, and fear the sorrow of such another parting as our

last may kill me, for you know that all the love of my heart is

yours, though I have been entrapped into a marriage with Maude

Lindsay--a mad entanglement, for which I ask your forgiveness and

pity, that you may not bring me to punishment and shame. I will buy

your silence at any price; let me have back the marriage certificate

and all letters, and I herewith enclose a blank cheque for you to

fill up at your pleasure. This I do, dear little one, for the sake

of our old----'

Here Maude reeled, for the room seemed to revolve round her.

'There!' said this odious woman exultingly, as she hastened to refold

the letter and replace it in her breast, 'will you deny it longer?'

The speaker showed neither the certificate nor the blank cheque; but

poor Maude had seen enough. She fainted, and when she recovered her

obnoxious visitor was gone--gone, but had left a dreadful sting

behind.

Had her presence and her story been all a dream? No! There was the

chair in which she had been seated; there was the little Chippendale

table on which she had spread the terrible letter that told of Jack's

perfidy; and there on the floor, just where she had thrown or thrust

them, lay the scattered books--his presents in the past time.

She cast herself on the sofa--she could neither think nor weep; her

heart beat painfully--every pulsation was a pang! What was she to

do--whither turn for advice before madness came upon her?

'Well, my old duck, Maggie, you have earned your money fairly, by all

accounts--and my wonderful caligraphy was quite a success!' said

Hawkey Sharpe, exploding with laughter, when he heard the narration

of his 'fair' compatriot or conspirator, as he handed her a

twenty-pound note, and drove with her townward in the cab with which

he had awaited the termination of her visit at the Grange Loan. 'By

Jove! a pleasant home-coming that fellow will have! "All men are

brothers," says the minister of Earlshaugh; Cains and Abels, say I.'

'I don't care about him or what he may suffer--you men are all alike,

a bad, false, cruel lot,' replied the woman; 'but, with all her airs

and graces, her haughtiness and her touch-me-not manner, I _am_ sorry

for what that poor girl may be--nay, must be--enduring now.'

'The devil you are! all things are fair in love and war--and this is

_war_!' said Hawkey, still continuing his bursts of malignant

laughter; 'would she care for what you might endure?'

'I am sure she would--her face and her voice were so sweet and

gentle.'

'For all that she would draw aside her skirt if it touched yours, as

though there was a taint in the contact.'

The woman made no reply, but glared at him with defiant malevolence

in her bold black eyes, and now seemed shocked at the very act which,

a few minutes before, had given her much malignant satisfaction.

But we have not heard the last of Mr. Hawkey Sharpe's skill in

caligraphy.

CHAPTER XLVII.

THE RESULT.

Sense returned to the unhappy creature ere her servants discovered

her or knew that the mysterious visitor had departed.

'It cannot be! It cannot have happened--it is too dreadful--too

cruel!' she repeated to herself again and again; but could she doubt

the tenor of the letter she had seen and read--the letter in her

husband's own handwriting? 'Oh, Heaven!' she murmured; 'our days

together have been so blithesome and so happy, even when their

brightest hours were clouded by a separation to come; but Oh, not

such a separation as this! What have I done that God deems me so

unworthy--that I am tortured, punished thus?'

'There is scarcely in the whole sad world,' it is said, 'and in the

woeful scale of mental suffering, aught sadder than the helpless

struggle of a poor human heart against a crushing load of misery,

strengthening itself in its despair, taking courage from the

extremity of its wretchedness in the frenzied whispers of

reassurance.'

Thus did Maude continue to whisper to herself: 'It cannot be--it

cannot be!'

She passed her hot hand several times across her throbbing forehead;

her brain was too confused--too unable yet to grapple with this

disillusion, the miserable situation, and with all the new and sudden

horrors of her false and now degraded position in the world--in

society, and in life!

She had heard stories; she had vague ideas of the temptations to

which young men--young officers more than all--are subjected; and

Jack might have been the victim of some hour of weakness, or evil, or

treachery.

Holding by the bannisters, she ascended to her bedroom--_their_ room,

as it was but one short hour ago--and there on every hand were

souvenirs of Jack which had once seemed so strange amid the

appurtenances of her toilet; the slippers she had worked for him were

under the dressing-table; his razors and brushes lay thereon; his

pipes littered the mantelpiece; and his portmanteaux and helmet-case,

ready for Egypt, stood in a corner.

Novels Maude had read, plays she had seen, stories she had heard of,

in which concealed marriages and other horrors had been amply

detailed; and in the heart of one of these episodes she now found

herself, as they crowded on her memory with bewildering force and

pain.

She strove to think, to gather her thoughts, in vain. Jack could not

be so vile, and yet there was that letter--that horrible letter!

'If this woman is his wife--what then am I? Oh, horror and

misery--horror and misery!' thought Maude, covering her face with her

tremulous hands, while the hot tears gushed between her slender

fingers.

Was all this happening to her or to some one else? She almost

doubted her own identity--the evidence of her senses. A moment or

two she lingered at a window wistfully looking over the landscape,

which she had often viewed from thence with Jack's arm round her, and

her head on his shoulder, watching dreamily the light of the setting

sun falling redly on the long wavy slope of the lovely Pentlands, or

the nearer hills of Braid, so green and pastoral, the scene of

Johnnie of Braidislee's doleful hunting in the ancient time, and

where in a lone and wooded hollow lies the dreary Hermitage beside

the Burn, haunted, it is said, in the present day by the unquiet

spirit of the beautiful Countess of Stair, the victim of a double and

repudiated marriage, and whose wrongs were of the days when George

IV. was king; and now as Maude looked, the farewell rays of the sun

were fading out on the summit of bluff Blackford, the haunt of

Scott's boyhood, and then the sober hues of twilight followed. Of

the hill he wrote:

'Blackford! on whose uncultured breast

A truant boy I sought the nest,

Or listed as I lay at rest;

While rose on breezes thin

The murmur of the city crowd:

And from his steeple jangling loud

St. Giles's mingling din.'

'All is over and ended--God help me!' wailed the girl many times as

she wrung her white and slender hands, and yet prepared nervously and

quickly to take measures that were stern and determined. There

seemed to be a strange loneliness in the sunset landscape as she

turned from it, and thought how beautiful, yet cruel and terrible,

the world of life can be, and choking sobs rose in her throat.

Should she await Jack's return--face him out and demand an

explanation? No, a thousand times no; there seemed degradation in

receiving one. Her resolution was taken; she would leave now and for

ever, and now with the coming night a long journey to London was to

be faced--to London, where she would quickly be lost to all the world

that knew her once.

Jack would not be home (home!) for hours yet, but no time was to be

lost, and action of any kind was grateful to her tortured spirit.

She quickly dressed herself for travelling; reckoned over what was in

her purse, and what was in her desk, and for more than an hour sat

writing--writing endless and incoherent letters of farewell and

upbraiding--letters which she tore in minute fragments by the score,

as none of them seemed suitable to the awful occasion. At last she

feverishly ended one; placed it in an envelope, addressed it--oh how

tremulously!--and placed it on the toilet table, where he was sure to

find it when she would be far away.

'I now know all--all about "Maggie!"' ran the letter. ('Who the

devil is Maggie?' thought the terrified and bewildered Jack when he

_did_ come, to peruse it.)

'You cannot forget that I once loved you--that I love you still,

when--oh, my God!--I have no right to do so, nor can you forget the

misery that obliges me to take this step and leave you. Oh, Jack!

Jack!

'God forgive you, but you have broken my heart!

'When you read this, Jack, I shall be gone--gone to London or

elsewhere--to where you shall never be able to follow or to trace me

in my hiding place.

'The horrors of a public scandal must be avoided; but how, and

however cautious our mode of action?'

'I shall never see you more--never from this evening; never again

hope for a renewal of happiness; and yet with all your perfidy, Jack,

your memory will always be most precious to me, and I only fear I

shall always love you too well!'

Much more in the same incoherent style followed.

Time was short; she moved about noiselessly. She drew sharply off

her bracelet and brooch, which were gifts of Jack's; she did more;

she drew off her wedding ring with its keeper, her engagement ring

also, and placed them in another envelope; she put a few necessary

garments and toilet appurtenances into a travelling-bag, stole from

the house, found a cab, and ordered the man to drive her at once to

the railway station for London.

It was night, now, and the silent suburbs had been left behind, and

the cab, swift and well-horsed, and all unlike a London 'crawler,'

bowled through the busy streets that were flooded with light.

She was off--the die was cast! Nothing occurred to hinder or delay

her, nor did she wish for any such thing at that time.

It was not too late to return; but why should she return--and to

_whom_?--'Maggie's' husband? and she set her little teeth firmly and

defiantly, as she was driven along the platform of the Waverley

Station, with the city lights towering high in the air above her, and

where the train that was to bear her away was all in readiness for

starting.

A new but unnatural kind of life seemed opening up to her, and under

her thick Shetland veil her hot tears welled freely. Until she was

quite alone now, she knew not what a feature Jack had been in her

life, what an influence his presence had upon her; and now their days

of earnest and peaceful love were over, and his whispers of

endearment would fall upon her ear no more. Withal, she had a

stunned feeling, and she began to accept her present position as if

it was the result of something that had happened long, long ago, with

a kind of desperate resignation and grim indifference as to what her

own future might bring forth.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

'INFIRM OF PURPOSE!'

The night, one of the last of autumn, was very cold. She had secured

a compartment to herself, fortunately; but there was no kind hand to

adjust her rugs, to see that the foot-warmer was hot, to provide her

with amusing periodicals, or attend to her little comforts in any

way. She did not miss them, but she missed Jack.

All her actions were mechanical, and it was not until she was fairly

away in the last train for the South, and had emerged from the Gallon

Tunnel, leaving Edinburgh with all its lights and lofty mansions

behind, that she quite knew she was--vague and desperate of

purpose--on her way to London.

As the hours dragged slowly on--so slowly in strange contrast to the

lightning-like speed of the clanking train that bore her away--she

thought, would she ever forget that dreadful and hopeless night

journey--in itself a nightmare--fleeing from all she loved, or had

loved her, with no future to realise? Would she ever forget that

dreadful, mocking woman, with her painted cheeks and cunning black

eyes--her letter and her visit, every incident and detail of which

seemed photographed in her heart and on her brain?

Mentally she conned over and thought--till her head grew weary--of

the letter she was to write Roland on the subject, and how this new

distress must pain and shock him.

On, on went the train; the stars shone bright in the moonless sky;

the smoke of the engine streamed far behind, and strange splashes of

weird light were cast on hedges, fields, and trees, on bank cuttings

and other features on either side of the way.

Now she had a glimpse of Dunbar, with its square church tower of red

sandstone; now it was Colbrands-path, with all its wild woods and

ravines; anon it was the German Sea, near Fast Castle, rolling its

free waves in white foam against steep and frowning precipices; and a

myriad lights gleaming on the broad river far down below announced

the bordering Tweed at Berwick, and Scotland was left behind.

She lowered the windows from time to time, for her temples felt hot

and feverish. She seemed to have nothing left her now but light and

air, and just then the former was absent and the latter choking; and

to her tortured soul life had but lately seemed so beautiful.

'How proud I was of his love! oh happy, happy days that can return no

more!' were her ever recurrent thoughts.

Yet such love as he had professed for her had been but a disgrace and

a sham! With all her affection, earnest and true, when she reflected

how far he must have gone, and so daringly, out of his way to deceive

her, and to throw dust in the eyes of her and her brother Roland, she

felt one moment inclined to hate and scorn him, and the next her

heart died within her at such a state of matters; and, with all her

shattered trust, love came back again--but love for what--for _whom_?

Then came other thoughts.

Why had she been so precipitate? What if the whole apparent

catastrophe was some dire but explainable mistake? Why had she not

consulted Hester, who was so clever, so gentle, and loving, and her

old uncle, Sir Harry? But he was old and sorely ailing now.

_Infirm of purpose_, she began to fear that she had been perhaps too

rash, and starting up, as if she would leave the carriage, she began

to think--to think already--that to undo all she had done, she would

give her right hand.

Her left--it bore no wedding-ring now. She looked at her

watch--midnight; long ere this Jack must have known that she had

discovered all!

Morning drew on, and in its colder, purer air and atmosphere her

thoughts seemed to become clearer, and as the train glided on through

the flat and monotonous scenery of England she began to consider the

possibility that she might have been deceived--that she had been too

swift in avenging her wrongs, or supposed wrongs--and this impression

grew with the growing brightness of the reddening dawn, and with that

impulsiveness which was characteristic of her, an hour even before

the dawn came, she resolved that she would return--she would face the

calamity out; she would cast herself upon her friends--not on the

world; but how to stop the train, which flew on and on, inexorably on

past station after station, every one of which seemed almost dark and

deserted.

The steam was let off suddenly; the speed of the train grew slower

and slower; it stopped at last in an open and sequestered place, on

an embankment overlooking a great stretch of darkened, dimly seen,

and flat country, half shrouded, as usual, in haze and mist.

Heads in travelling caps and strange gear were thrust from every

window; inquiries were made anxiously and angrily; but no answer was

accorded; the officials seemed all to have become very deaf and

intensely sullen, while no passenger could alight, as every door was

securely locked, to their alarm and indignation.

There was evidently an accident or a breakdown--a block on the line

somewhere, no one knew precisely what. Signals were worked and

lights flashed to avert destruction from the front or rear, and when

the rush of a coming train was heard, 'the boldest held his breath

for a time,' till it swept past--an express--on another line of rails.

If she were killed--smashed up horribly like people she had often

read of in railways accidents, would Jack be sorry for her? There

was a kind of revengeful pleasure in the thought, the conviction that

he would be, even while she dropped a few natural tears over her own

untimely demise.

The excitement grew apace. The next train might _not_ be on the

other line, and the mental agony of the travellers lasted for more

than an hour--an hour of terror and misery, and of the wildest

impatience to Maude, who in the tumult of her spirits would have

welcomed the crash, the destruction, and, so far as she was

personally concerned, the death by a collision, to end everything.

At last the steam was got up again, and slowly the train glided into

the brilliant station at York just as dawn was reddening the square

towers of its glorious minster, and the pale girl sprang out on the

platform to find that the train for Edinburgh had passed nearly two

hours before, and that she would have to wait--to wait for hours with

what patience she could muster.

Great was the evil and distress Hawkey Sharpe, in a spirit of useless

revenge, had wrought her.

How slow the returning train was--oh, how slow! It seemed to stop

everywhere, and to be no sooner off than it stopped again. Stations

hitherto unnoticed had apparently sprung up like mushrooms in the

night, and the platforms were crowded with people perpetually getting

in or going out.

How long ago it seemed since last night--since that fatal visit, and

since she left her pretty home, if home it was.

Even then, in the dire confusion and muddle of her thoughts, they

lingered lovingly on the apparently remote memory of the happiest

period of her young life--the day when Jack Elliot first said he

loved her, and she had the joy of believing him to be entirely her

own, to go hand-in-hand with through the long years that were to

come--and now--now!

Looking forward to ample explanations from him, perhaps an entire

reconciliation with him if these explanations were complete--or she

knew not what--how the revolving wheels of the train seemed to lag!

Then she would close her tear-inflamed eyes and strive not to think

at all.

Already the Lion mountain of Arthur Seat, and the Gallon with its

Grecian columns, were rising into sight, and she would soon be at her

destination.

To save appearances even before her servants--a somewhat useless

consideration then--as even without the usual sharpness of their

class they must now be aware of the fact that something unpleasant

was on the _tapis_, and that their mistress had, unexplainedly, been

absent from her own home for a whole night and longer; as the train

approached the capital, Maude smoothed her sunny-brown hair, adjusted

her laces, and bathed her pale face with _eau-de-cologne_. Oh, how

grimy the process made her handkerchief after the dust of her long

and double journey!

The afternoon of the day was well advanced when Maude, still paler,

weary, unslept, and unrefreshed, faint from want of food and the wear

and tear of her own terrible thoughts, arrived once more at the

pretty villa Jack's love had temporarily provided for her.

The blinds were all closed as if death were in its walls, and her

heart died within her.

She rushed up to her room; it might just be the case that Jack might

not have returned, and she might still find the packet she had

addressed to him and her incoherent letter of farewell.

Is she in time? Yes--a letter is there--a packet on her

toilet-table; she _is_ in time--and makes a snatch of it. It is

addressed not to her but to Hester Maule at Merlwood; so Jack had

been there and was gone, as were also his portmanteaux, his sword,

and helmet-case.

In wild and vague search she moved swiftly from room to room.

'Jack--Jack!' she called in a low voice that sounded strangely

resonant in the silent rooms; but there was no answer, nor did any

sound evince that he was in her vicinity. A chill crept over her,

and she strove in vain to shake it off as her wondering servants

gathered round her, and from them she soon learned all.

Their master had returned late last night--had got her letter, and,

after a time, had driven away to catch the first early train for

London--on his way to Egypt, he simply said. Egypt! His train must

have passed her somewhere on the line. Where was she to seek

him--where telegraph to him? Who was to advise her now?

He had made up a packet of her letters, her rings, and other little

mementos she had left, with a brief and certainly incoherent note to

Hester Maule; addressed it with a tremulous hand and carefully sealed

it with his familiar signet, bearing the baton or on a bend engrailed

of the Elliots of Braidielee; and then, throwing himself into a cab,

had driven away with no other trace than his farewell words given to

the startled domestics.

Apart from the humiliation of uselessly attempting to explain matters

to them, it was somewhat gratifying to Maude to learn that after his

return 'the poor master' had been for a time quite quiet, as if

stunned; then that he had been like 'a tearing lunatic'; had

telegraphed to Merlwood, to Braidielee, and even to Earlshaugh for

tidings of her, but in vain; and in the latter instance, fully

informing Hawkey Sharpe that the train the latter had laid was ending

in an explosion; and then that 'the master' had set off by daybreak.

He was not at his club in Queen Street.

Could he have taken London _en route_ to Southampton, in the wild,

vague hope of tracing her?

Eventually she was made aware that he had written to his own agents,

and to Mr. M'Wadsett, to endeavour to elucidate the mystery which

hung over the actions of Maude, the author of the forged letter, and

to look after her during his probably prolonged absence in Egypt.

Thus, in rage and bewilderment, grief and anxiety, had Jack Elliot

taken his departure, never doubting that they were both the victims

of some nefarious plot, which he had not then time to unravel.

He was indignant, too, that Maude should so cruelly mistake and doubt

him. He started for Egypt some twenty-four hours sooner than he need

have done, and hence came fresh complications.

'Oh, what new and unexpected worry is this, Maude?' exclaimed Hester

Maule, when a few hours later the girl threw herself speechless and

in a passion of tears into her arms.

And now, or eventually, three lives they were interested in beyond

all others (if Malcolm Skene survived), would be involved in the

terrible risks of the war in the Soudan.

CHAPTER XLIX.

CHRISTMAS DAY IN CAMP AT KORTI.

The last days of December saw Roland Lindsay with his regiment--the

1st Battalion of the South Staffordshire--of old, the 38th--a corps

of the days of Queen Anne--the corps of the gallant old Luke

Lillingston, who led the troops in Wilmot's West Indian Expedition of

1695--toiling in the boats up the great river of Egypt against strong

currents by Kodokal, and within sight of the ruins of old

Dongola--ruins of red brick covering miles--by Debbeh, where the

currents were stronger still, and awnings could not be used, though

the heat was 120 degrees, and the men became giddy and distracted by

the white glare and the hot simmering atmosphere, with lassitude and

thirst, and where it was so terrible at times, to emerge from the

shadow of some impending rock, once more to plod and pull the heavy

oar under the fierce and fiery sun. Though occasionally spreading

the big sails like wings on each side of the boats, they would have a

pleasant hour's run in the evening ere darkness or a rapid barred

their upward way.

Then, on the redly-illuminated waters of the mighty and mysterious

river, the white sails of the squadron would show up pleasantly in

the twilight, after the landscape had been ablaze with that rich

profusion of colour only to be seen where dark rocky hills, yellow

desert sand, and patches of verdant vegetation border, as they do on

the upper reaches of the Nile.

Then, when darkness came, the boats would close in with the shore,

where they were moored to a bank, and the sails were lowered and

stowed on board; while under the feathery palms, or date trees, fires

were lighted, the frugal ration of bully-beef, onions, and potatoes

was cooked and eaten amid the jollity and lightness of heart which

are ever a characteristic of our soldiers, and then the poor fellows

would coil themselves up to sleep and prepare for the coming toil of

the morrow.

On the 22nd of December the camp at Korti was reached at 9.30 in the

evening, after a hard struggle amid a labyrinth of sand banks.

Roland found the camp to be prettily situated on the edge of the

river, and surrounded by mimosa trees, and there the advanced guard

of the expedition, detailed to relieve Gordon and raise the siege of

the doomed city, was now assembling fast.

It was a spot never trod by Britons before. There the caravans from

Egypt to Sennar quit the Nile and proceed across the Bayuda Desert,

the route from Dongola being easy for travelling, and the land on

both banks of the river rich and fertile.

At Korti, where now every hour or so our bugles were blown, there

stood in the days of Thothemus III. a great temple dedicated to Isis,

whose tears for the loss of Osiris caused the regular inundations of

the Nile.

Under some wide spreading trees the tents of the Camel Corps were

pitched along the western bank of the latter; and the whole scene

there was most picturesque. The leafy shade tempered the fierce heat

of the sun, and, after their long toil in the boats and over the

burning sands and glittering rocks, our soldiers were charmed for a

time with the place; but some wrath was excited when it was

discovered that a correspondence between a French journalist in the

camp of the Mahdi before Khartoum, and a clique in Cairo, supplied

the former with the fullest information of Lord Wolseley's

proceedings, with hints as to the best means of baffling them.

Though the enemy were at some distance, every precaution was taken

against a surprise by night. Cavalry vedettes were posted out beyond

the camp by day, and strong outlying pickets, with chains of advanced

sentries by night; but, as Christmas Day drew near, considerable

anxiety was felt in the camp at Korti at the total cessation of all

news from blockaded Khartoum, which was two hundred and sixty miles

distant by the desert, and by river where the former touched the

latter at Gubat or Abu Kru.

The total strength of the advanced force at Korti, after the

departure of Roland's regiment, was under two thousand five hundred

men, with six screw guns, two thousand two hundred camels and horses,

two pinnaces, and sixty-four whale boats, while the 19th Hussars,

when the advance began, had orders to ride by the western bank of the

Nile and act as scouts to the Khartoum relief column.

By this time there was not a single sound garment in the latter--the

result of fifty days' river work from Sarras. The mud-stained

helmets were battered out of all shape; the tunics and trousers were

patched with cloth of every kind and hue; officers and men had beards

of many days' growth, and the skin of their faces was peeled off in

strange and uncouth patches, the result of incessant exposure to the

fierce sun by day and the chill dews by night.

Christmas morning, 1884, was ushered in by a church parade, and by

prayer, when the whole force--slender though it was--was present,

under the feathery palms, by the banks of the Nile, that river of

mystery, which has its rise in a land unknown; and at night the

soldiers gathered round two great camp-fires and made merry, singing

songs, and doubtless thinking of those who were far away at home.

It was on this occasion that the South Staffordshire, under the

gallant Eyre, raised three hearty cheers, when, from the rear, a

telegram was brought, sent all the way from their second battalion in

England, wishing 'all ranks a happy Christmas and a brilliant

campaign.'

And happy and jolly all certainly were, though they were now in the

region of bully-beef, for they fared on hard biscuits and coffee in

the morning, with bully-beef for tiffin, and bully-beef for dinner.

As the evening of Christmas Day closed in, Roland, with a cigarette

in his mouth, reclined on the grass under a mimosa bush, watching the

picturesque groups of tanned and tattered soldiers that hovered round

the two great watch-fires, which cast weird patches of light on the

feathery palms, the glittering piles of arms, the few white tents

occupied by Lord Wolseley's staff and officers of rank; on the long

rows of picketed camels; on the distant figures of the advanced

sentinels seen darkly against the sky of pale green and orange that

showed where the sun had set beyond Gebel Magaya in the Bayuda

Desert; on the quaint boats and barges moored in the Nile; and on the

broad flow of that majestic river, reddened as it was by the flames,

to which the active hands and sharp bill-hooks of the soldiers added

fuel every moment; while the high spirits of the troops--seldom wont

to flag--were irrepressible then in the great hope of getting

on--getting on and reaching Khartoum--to shake hands with Gordon ere

it might be--too late!

In three days the South Staffordshire were to start and take the lead

in that eventful expedition, and led by jovial Dick Mostyn, Wilton,

and other kindred spirits; already the soldiers were chorusing a song

with which they meant to bend their oars; and more than once, as they

sang, they turned to where their favourite officer, Roland Lindsay,

lay looking on, for he was one of those men who are by nature and

habit born to be the leader of others, and possessing that kind of

magnetic influence which inspires confidence.

Roland had plenty of spirit, bodily vigour, and perseverance; but

when a halt came, and with it a brief term of rest, he could not help

indulging in occasional regretful thoughts, haunting memories, and

wishes that were hopeless. He had, as Annot anticipated, got over

his rudely-dispelled passion for her, true love it could not have

been, he flattered himself now, and he was fully justified in

dismissing _her_ from his mind; and in that matter he was disturbed

by the fact no more 'than a nightmare disturbs the occupations of the

dreamer, as he goes about his business on the following day in the

full light of heaven, and with his brain clear of the idle fantasies

of the darkness.'

But now he could not help thinking of Hester Maule, especially as he

had seen her last, when she stood at the door of Merlwood, and

murmured good-bye, her hand in his, her dark blue eyes dimmed with

gathering tears--the tears that he knew would fall when he was

gone--her graceful head drooping towards him, and how he now, as

then, longed to whisper in her little white ear the words he scarcely

knew how to utter, and which were withheld through very shame of

himself.