CHAPTER LV.

WITH GENERAL EARLE's COLUMN.

While the column of Brigadier Sir Herbert Stewart was toiling amid thirst and other sufferings across the vast waste of the Bayuda Desert, and gaining the well-fought battles of Abu Klea and Abu Kru, the column of Brigadier Earle had gone by boats up the Nile to avenge the cruel assassination of Gordon's comrade and coadjutor, Colonel Donald Stewart, on Suliman Wad Gamr and the somewhat ubiquitous Moussa Abu Hagil with all their people.

The succession of cataracts rendered the General's progress very slow; thus the 4th of January found his advanced force, the gallant South Staffordshire, only encamped at Hamdab, as we have stated a few chapters back.

Suliman, on being joined by Moussa a few days after Abu Klea, had fallen back from Berti, thus rendering it necessary for General Earle to push on in pursuit, through a rocky, broken, and savage country, bad for all military operations, and altogether impracticable for cavalry.

On the river the Rahami cataract proved one of great danger and difficulty, and severe indeed was the labour of getting up the boats. There the bed of Old Nile is broken up by black and splintered rocks, between which it rushes in snowy foam with mighty force and volume.

The boats had to be tracked up the entire distance, often with many sharp turns to avoid sunken rocks in the chasms; and, as a large number of men were required for each boat, the column, comprising the Staffordshire, the Black Watch, a squadron of Hussars, and the Egyptian camel corps, with two guns, had work enough and to spare. 'The perils and difficulties,' we are told, 'were quite as great as any hitherto encountered on the passage up the Nile. For the last six miles below Birti the river takes an acute angle, and then as sharply resumes its former course. The Royal Highlanders were first up; but after they got their boats through, another channel was discovered on the western side of the stream, and as it turned out to be less difficult, the succeeding regiments were enabled to come up more quickly.

Roland's regiment remained in a few days encamped at Hamdab. 'We are now leading the whole army,' says its Colonel, the gallant and ill-fated Eyre, in his 'Diary,' 'and are the first British troops that have ever been up the Nile.'

On the 6th of January there was a sand-storm from dawn till sunset; it covered the unfortunate troops, who seemed to be in a dark cloud for the whole day. Around them for a hundred miles the country was all rocks, and yet bore traces of once having a vast population.

At Hamdab the river teemed with wild geese—beautiful gray birds, with scarlet breasts and gold wings. Dick Mostyn shot one, which Roland's soldier servant prepared for their repast in a stew, that was duly enjoyed in the latter's quarters—a hut made of palm branches and long dhurra grass; while their comrade Wilton, when scouting on Berber road, captured a couple of Arabs, who gave the column a false alarm by tidings of an attack at daybreak, thus keeping all under arms till the sun rose.

The 18th was Sunday, when Colonel Eyre read prayers on parade, and three days after came tidings of the battle of Abu Klea, the death of Burnaby, after all his hair-breadth escapes, and of many other brave men.

'Poor Malcolm—poor Malcolm!' said Roland; 'what dire news this will be for his old mother at Dunnimarle. This event gives you your company in the corps——'

'Don't speak of it!' interrupted Mostyn, with something like a groan; 'I would to Heaven that poor Skene had never given me such a chance.'

The last days of January saw Earle's column making a sweep with fire and sword of the district in which poor Colonel Stewart and his companions had been murdered; and on the 2nd of February it had reached a country beyond all conception or description wild, and quite uninhabited.

The sufferings of Earle's troops were considerably severe now. The faces and the knees of the Highlanders were skinned by the chill air at night and the burning sun by day; while, in addition, there were insects in the sand, so minute as to be almost invisible, yet they got into the men's ragged clothing, and bit hands and feet so that they were painfully swollen.

On the 9th of February Earle's column reached Kirbekan, near the island of Dulka, seventy miles above Merawi, which is a peninsular district of Southern Nubia, and the enemy, above 2,000 strong, led by Moussa Abu Hagil, Ali Wad Aussein, and other warlike Sheikhs, and chiefly composed of the guilty Monnassir tribe, some Robatats and a force of Dervishes from Berber, were known to be in position at no great distance; thus a battle was imminent.

Ere it took place Roland Lindsay and his friend Elliot were destined to hear some startling news from home. At this time all papers and parcels for the column got no further than Dongola, but a few letters from the rear were brought up, and the mail-bag contained one of importance for Roland, and several for his friend Dick Mostyn.

Lounging on the grass, under a mimosa tree, with a cigarette between his teeth, and with just the same lazy, debonnair bearing with which he had taken in many a girl at home in pleasant England, lay Dick Mostyn reading his missives. Some he perused with a quiet, insouciant smile; they were evidently from some of the girls in question. Others he tore into small shreds and scattered on the breeze; they were duns. How pleasant it was to dispose of them thus on the bank of the Nile!

Roland, a little way apart, was perusing his solitary letter.

It was from Mr. M'Wadsett, the W.S., dated several weeks back, from 'Thistle Court, Thistle Street, Edinburgh' (how well Roland remembered the gloomy place under the shadow of St. Andrew's Church, and the purpose of his last visit there!); and it proved quite a narrative, and one of the deepest interest to him.

His uncle, Sir Harry, was dead, and his daughter Hester was going forth into the world as a companion or governess. (Dead! thought Roland; poor old Sir Harry!—and Hester, alone now—oh, how he longed to be with her—to comfort and protect her!)

But to be a governess—a companion—where, and to whom? His heart felt wrung, and he mentally rehearsed all he had heard or read—but not seen—of how such dependents were too often treated by the prosperous and the parvenu; obliged to conform to rules made by others, to perform a hundred petty duties by hands never before soiled by toil; to never complain, however ill or weary she might feel; to stumble with brats through wearisome scales on an old piano; to be banished when visitors came, and endure endless, though often unnecessary affronts. He uttered a malediction, lit a cigar, and betook him again to his letter.

'About seeking a situation, I know there is nothing else left for the poor girl to do,' continued the writer; 'but I besought her to wait a little—to make my house her home, if she chose, for a time; but she told me that she did not mind work or poverty. I replied that she knew nothing of either, but a sad smile and a resolute glance were my only answer.'

The old man's love of himself, his upbraiding words when they last parted, and his own unkind treatment (to say the least of it) of Hester, all came surging back on Roland's memory now.

'I shall not readily forget Miss Maule's passionate outburst of grief and pain on leaving Merlwood,' continued the old Writer to the Signet; 'but all there seemed for the time to be sacred to the hallowed memories of her father, her mother, and her past childhood!

'And next I have to relate something more startling still—the sudden death of your stepmother, and to congratulate you on being now the true and undoubted Laird of Earlshaugh.

'Actuated, I know not precisely by what sentiment—whether by just indignation at the character of her brother, or by remorse for your false position with regard to the property—Mrs. Lindsay, as an act of reparation, and to preclude all legal action on the part of any heir of her own or of her brother, Hawkey Sharpe, that might crop up, by a will drawn out and prepared by myself, duly recorded at Her Majesty's General Register House, Edinburgh, has left the entire estate to you, precisely and in all entirety as it was left to her.

'She sent a message when she did this. It was simply: "When my time comes, and I feel assured that it is not far off now, and that I shall not see him again, he will know that I have done my best."

'There must have been an emotion of remorse in her mind, as I now know that for some days before the demise of your worthy father, he eagerly urged that you should be telegraphed for, and more than once expressed a vehement desire to see me, his legal adviser, but in vain, as Mrs. Lindsay number two and her brother Hawkey barred the way; so the first will in the former's favour remained unaltered.

'Since you last left home, Mr. Hawkey forged his sister's name to a cheque for £2,000 to cover a bill or racing debt. It duly came to hand. Mrs. Lindsay looked at the document, and knew in an instant that her name had been used, and, remembering the amount of Hawkey's demand on her, knew also that she had been shamefully and cruelly deceived.

'The sequence of the numbers in her cheque-book showed by the absence of the counterfoil where one had been abstracted—that for the £2,000 payable to bearer. In her rage she repudiated it, and the law took its course.

'The nameless horror that is the sure precursor of coming evil took possession of her, and then it was that she executed in your favour the will referred to, instigated thereto not a little by Hawkey's incessant and annoying references to her secret ailment—disease of the heart.

'To me she seemed to have changed very much latterly. Her tall, thin figure had lost somewhat of its erectness, and her cold, steel-like eyes (you remember them?) were sunken and dimmed.

'Her illness took a sudden and fatal turn at the time that rascal Hawkey was arrested; and she was found that evening by Mrs. Drugget, the housekeeper, and old Funnell, the butler, dead in the Red Drawing-room. Thus her strange faintnesses and continued pallor were fully accounted for by the faculty then.

'When she was dead Mr. Hawkey was disposed to snap his fingers, believing himself the lord of everything; but the will prepared by me precluded that, and he was forthwith lodged by order of the Procurator-Fiscal in the Tolbooth of Cupar, where he can hear, but not see, the flow of the Eden.

'His wife, the late Miss Annot Drummond, on seeing him depart with a pair of handcuffs on, displayed but small emotions of regard or sorrow, but a great deal of indignation, despair, and shame. She trod to and fro upon the floor of her room during the long watches of the entire succeeding night, tore her golden hair, and beat her little hands against the wall in the fury and agony of her passion and disappointment to find herself mated to a criminal; and now she has betaken herself to her somewhat faded maternal home in South Belgravia, where I do not suppose we shall care to follow her.'

'So, I am Earlshaugh again!' thought Roland with pardonable exultation. His old ancestral home was his once more. But a battle was to be fought on the morrow. Should he survive it—escape? He hoped so now; life was certainly more valuable than it seemed to him before that mail-bag came up the Nile.

Roland could not feel much regret for the extinguisher which Fate had put upon the usurpers of his patrimony, but he was by nature too generous not to recall, with some emotions of a gentle kind, how Mrs. Lindsay had once said to him in a broken voice, when he bade her farewell, of something she meant to do, 'If it was not too late—too late!'

And when he had asked her what she referred to, her answer was that 'Time would show.'

And now time had shown. She had certainly, after all, liked the handsome and debonnair young fellow who had treated her with that chivalrous deference so pleasant to all women, old or young.

Roland, as he looked up at the luminous Nubian sky, felt for a time a solemn emotion of awe and thankfulness, curiously blended with exultant pride; that if he fell in the battle of to-morrow he would fall, as many of his forefathers had done, a Lindsay of Earlshaugh, but alas! the last of his race.

'By Jove, there is a postscript—turn the page, Roland!' exclaimed Jack Elliot, who had been noting the letter, as mutual stock, over his brother-in-law's shoulder.

'Since writing all the foregoing,' said the postscript, 'I find that your sister, Mrs. Elliot, appears to have had some news, after receiving which she and Miss Hester have suddenly left Edinburgh, but for where or with what intention I am totally unable to discover.'

'News,' muttered Roland; 'what news can they have had?'

Roland, by the field telegraph rearward, viâ, Cairo, wired a message to Mr. M'Wadsett for further intelligence, if he had any to give, concerning the absentees, but no answer came till long after the troops had got under arms to engage, and Roland was no longer there to receive it.

'By Heaven, this infernal coil at home is becoming more entangled!' exclaimed Jack. 'Were it not for my mother's sake I would hope to be knocked on the head to-day.'

'Not for poor little Maude's sake?' asked Roland reproachfully.

'God help us both!' sighed Jack.

'To every one who lives strength is given him to do his duty,' said Roland gravely. 'Do yours, Jack, and no more.'

'To me there seems a dash of sophistry in this advice now; but had you ever loved as I have done——'

'Had I ever loved! What do you mean?' asked Roland, almost impatiently. 'But there go the bugles, and we must each to his company.'

Then each, seizing the other's hand, drew his sword and 'fell in.'

The mystery involving the fate of Maude and the movements of both her and Hester were a source of intense pain, perplexity, and grief to the two friends now, even amid the fierce and wild work of that eventful 10th of February.

CHAPTER LVI.

THE BATTLE OF KIRBEKAN.

On the night before this brilliant encounter the greatest enthusiasm prevailed in the ranks of General Earle's column at the prospect of a brush with the enemy at last, after an advance of eighteen most weary miles, which had occupied them no less than twenty days, such was the terrible nature of the country to be traversed by stream and desert. As a fine Scottish ballad has it:

'With painful march across the sand
    How few, though strong, they come,
Some thinking of the clover fields
    And the happy English home;
And some whose graver features speak
    Them children of the North,
Of the golden whin on the Lion Hill
    That crouches by the Forth.

''Tis night, and through the desert air
    The pibroch's note screams shrill,
Then dies away—the bugle sounds—
    Then all is deathly still,
Save now and then a soldier starts
    As through the midnight air
A sudden whistle tells him that
    The scouts of death are there!'

At half-past five in the morning, after a meagre and hurried breakfast—the last meal that many were to partake of on earth—the column got under arms and took its march straight inland over a very rocky district for more than a mile, while blood-red and fiery the vast disc of the sun began to appear above the far and hazy horizon.

Of the scene of these operations very little is known. Lepsius, in his learned work published in 1844, writes of the ruins of Ben Naga, now called Mesaurat el Kerbegan, lying in a valley of that name, in a wild and sequestered place, where no living thing is seen but the hippopotami swimming amid the waters of the Nile.

Taking ground to the left for about half a mile the column struck upon the caravan track that led to Berber, and then the enemy came in sight, led by the Sheikhs Moussa Abu Hagil, Ali Wad, Aussein, and others, holding a rocky position, where their dark heads were only visible, popping up from time to time as seen by the field-glasses.

It was intended that the Monassir tribe, the murderers of Donald Stewart and his party, should, if possible, be surrounded and cut off; but they were found to be entrenched and prepared for a desperate resistance on lofty ground near the Shukuk Pass on a ridge of razor-backed hills, commanding a gorge which lies between the latter and the Nile, and the entrance to which they had closed by a fort and walls loopholed for musketry.

'The Black Watch and Staffordshire will advance in skirmishing order!' was the command of General Earle.

Six companies of the Highlanders and four of the latter corps now extended on both flanks at a run. The Hussars galloped to the right, while two companies of the Staffordshire, with two guns, were left to protect the boats in the river, the hospital corps, the stores, and spare ammunition.

This order was maintained till the companies of skirmishers gradually, and firing with admirable coolness and precision, worked their way towards the high rocks in their front. While closing in with the enemy, whose furious fusillade enveloped the dark ridge in white smoke, streaked by incessant flashes of red fire, men were falling down on every hand with cries to God for help or mercy, and some, it might be, with a fierce and bitter malediction.

There was no time to think, for the next bullet might floor the thinker: it was the supreme moment which tries the heart of the bravest; but every officer and man felt that he must do his duty at all hazards. Bullets sang past, thudded in silvery stars on the rocks, cut the clothing, or raised clouds of dust; comrades and dear friends were going down fast, as rifles were tossed up and hands were lifted heavenward—as, more often, men fell in death, in blood and agony; but good fortune seemed to protect the untouched, and then came the clamorous and tiger-like longing to close in, to grapple with, to get within grasp of the foe!

In this spirit Roland went on, but keeping his skirmishers well in hand, till they reached the high rocks in front, when they rushed between or over them; and there Colonel Eyre, a noble, veteran officer, and remarkably handsome man, who, though a gentleman by birth, had risen from the ranks in the Crimea—then as now conspicuous for his bravery—fell at the head of his beloved South Staffordshire while attacking the second ridge, 'where, behind some giant boulders, the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil was with his Robatat tribe—the most determined of the Arab race.'

The good Colonel was pausing for a moment beside two of his wounded men. 'Colonel Eyre took one of them by the hand,' wrote an officer whom we are tempted to quote, 'to comfort him a little. A minute after he turned to me and said: "I am a dead man!" I saw a mark below his shoulder, and said: "No, you are not." He looked at me for a second, and said: "Lord, have mercy upon me—God help my poor wife!" ... He was dead in a minute after he was hit, and did not appear to suffer, the shock being so great. The bullet entered the right breast, and came out under the left shoulder.'

Like a roaring wave the infuriated Staffordshire went on, and then the Robatat tribe were assailed by two companies of the Highlanders, led by their Colonel and General Earle in person. 'The Black Watch advanced over rocks and broken ground upon the Koppies,' says Lord Wolseley's very brief despatch, 'and, after having by their fire in the coolest manner driven off a rush of the enemy, stormed the position under a heavy fire.'

But desperate was the struggle prior to this. The Arabs, from the cover of every rock and boulder, poured in a fire with the most murderous precision, while our soldiers flung themselves headlong at any passage or opening they found, no matter how narrow or steep.

Like wild tigers in their lair, the Arabs fought at bay, having everywhere the advantage of the ground, and inspired by a fury born of fanaticism and religious rancour, resolute to conquer or die; but in spite of odds and everything, our soldiers stormed rock after rock, and fastness after fastness, working their way on by bayonet and bullet, the Black Watch on the left, the old 38th on the right, upward and onward, over rocks slippery with dripping blood, over the groaning, the shrieking, the dying, and the dead.

Here fell Wilton and merry Dick Mostyn, both mortally wounded, rolling down the rocks to die in agony; and to Roland it was evident that Jack Elliot was bitterly intent on throwing his life away if he could, for he rushed, sword in hand, at any loophole in the rocks from whence a puff of smoke or flash of fire spirted out.

But brilliant as was the rush of the Staffordshire, climbing with their hands and feet, it was almost surpassed by the advance of the Highlanders, for in the élan with which they went on every man seemed as if inspired by the advice of General Brackenbury when he said: 'Take your heart and throw it among the enemy, as Douglas did that of King Robert Bruce, and follow it with set teeth determined to win!'

When General Earle ordered the left half-battalion of the Highlanders to advance by successive rushes, they went forward with a ringing cheer and with pipers playing 'The Campbells are coming,' and in another moment the scarlet coats and green kilts, led by Wauchop of Niddry, had crowned the ridge, rolling the soldiers of the Mahdi down the rocks before their bayonets in literal piles that never rose again, and then it was that Colonel Coveny, one of their most popular officers, fell.

Roland felt proud of his regiment, the old South Staffordshire, but when he saw the tartans fluttering on the crest, and heard the pipes set up their pæan of victory, all his heart went forth to the Highlanders, who, ere these successive rushes were carried out, had been attacked by a most resolute band of the enemy, armed with long spears and trenchant swords, led by a standard-bearer clad in a long Darfour shirt of mail.

The latter, the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil, was shot, and as his body went rolling down, the holy standard was seized in succession by three men of resolute valour, who all perished successively in the same manner. Some of this band now rushed away towards the Nile to escape the storm of Highland bullets, but were there met by a company of the Staffordshire and shot down to a man.

Within the koppie stormed by the Highlanders was a stone hut full of Arabs, who, though surrounded by victorious troops, defiantly refused to surrender. General Earle, a veteran Crimean officer of the old 49th, or Hertfordshire, now rashly approached it, though warned by a sergeant of the Black Watch to beware, and was immediately shot dead.

An entrance was found to be impossible, so securely was the door barricaded. Then the edifice was set on fire by the infuriated Highlanders, breached by powder, and all the Arabs within it were shot down or burned alive.

The enemy now fled on all hands, while the chivalrous Buller, with a squadron of the 19th Hussars, captured the camp three miles in rear of their position, and Brackenbury, as senior officer, assumed the command.

Our casualties were eighty-seven of all ranks killed and wounded; those of the enemy it was impossible to estimate, as only seventeen were taken alive, but their dead covered all the position, and an unknown number perished in the Nile.

Untouched, after that terrible conflict of five consecutive hours, Roland Lindsay and Jack Elliot grasped each other's hands in warmth and gratitude when they sheathed their swords and felt that their ghastly work was done.

The subsequent day was devoted to quiet and rest, and on the field, under a solitary palm tree, the remains of General Earle, Colonels Eyre, Coveny, and all who had fallen with them, were reverently interred, without any special mark to attract the attention of the dwellers in the desert.

After all this, Brigadier Brackenbury was about to march in the direction of Abu Hammed, when unexpected instructions from the vacillating British Government reached Lord Wolseley from London, and the river column was ordered to fall back on the camp at Korti, a task of no small difficulty; and though a handful of men under Sir Charles Wilson did reach Khartoum, as we all know, the movement was achieved too late, and, cruelly betrayed, Gordon had perished in the midst of his fame.

CHAPTER LVII.

THE SICK CONVOY.

Repeatedly Jack Elliot thanked Heaven that his comrades in the regiment had not got hold of his wretched story—that he and his young wife had quarrelled—were actually separated, and that she had run away from him because of some other woman, as he knew well that but garbled versions of the comedies or tragedies in the lives of our friends generally reach us.

The movements of the column were now so abrupt, and, for a time, undecided, that no telegram in reply to his message reached Roland from Edinburgh, and ere long he had a new source of anxiety.

Enteric fever, that ailment which proved so fatal to many of our troops during this disastrous and useless war, fastened upon poor Jack Elliot, and the column had barely reached the camp at Korti when he was 'down' with it, as the soldiers phrased it, and very seriously so—all the more seriously, no doubt, that the tenor of Mr. M'Wadsett's postscript left such a doubt on his mind as to the plans and movements of Maude.

His head felt as if weighted with lead—but hot lead; he had an appalling thirst, and was destitute of all appetite even for delicacies, and the latter were not plentiful, certainly, in our camp at Korti.

If he survived, which he thought was almost impossible, he believed that he could never, never forget what he endured in the so-called camp there—first, the languor and disinclination for work, duty, exercise, even for thinking; the pains in his limbs; his dry, brown tongue, that rattled in his mouth; mental and bodily debility; and all the other signs of his ailment, produced by exposure, by midnight dew, and the bad, brackish water of the desert.

Roland—of a hardier nature, perhaps—was unwearying in his care of him, and thrice daily with his own hands gave him the odious prescribed draught—hydrochloric acid, tincture of orange, and so forth, diluted in Nile water—while the once strong, active, and muscular Jack was weak as a baby.

Roland greatly feared he would die on his hands, and hailed with intense satisfaction an order by which he was personally detailed to take a detachment of certain sick and wounded, including Jack Elliot, down the Nile to Lower Egypt.

In his tent, he was roused from an uneasy dream that he was again lying at the bottom of the Kelpie's Cleugh at Earlshaugh, by an orderly sergeant, who brought him this welcome command about dawn, and noon saw him, with a small flotilla of boats freighted with pain and suffering, take his leave of the South Staffordshire and begin his journey down the Nile, viâ New Dongola, the cataracts at Ambigol and elsewhere, by Wady-Halfa and other points where temporary hospitals or halting-places were established.

Day by day the boats with their melancholy loads, sometimes by oars, at others with canvas set, had dropped down the Nile between barren shores overlooked by wild and sterile mountains, where the sick were almost stunned occasionally by the harsh yells of the watchful Arabs echoing from rocks and caves! and, after turning a sharp angle, Roland suddenly saw the island of Phite, with all its numerous temples, before his flotilla, and as there was a considerable flood in the river the cataract there became a source of anxiety to him, and rather abated the interest with which he might otherwise have surveyed the scene around him.

'Shellal! Shellal!' (the Cataract! the Cataract!) he heard the yells of the naked Arabs, who hovered on the banks expecting a catastrophe, which they would have beheld with savage joy.

The soldiers held their breath and hung on their suspended oars, the blades of which dripped and flashed like gold in the sheen of the setting sun; yet the boats glided down the foaming rapid without a sound other than the rush of the water; then came a sudden calm, an amazing combination of light and colour on shore, and isle, and stream, with the rays of the moon, in the blue zenith, conflicting with those of the sun at the horizon.

'On either side,' wrote one who was there, 'walls of overhanging rock shut in the river, standing in pious guardianship around the sacred isle. Beneath their frowning blackness lapped and flowed a shining expanse of water stained with crimson in the sunset's glow, in which a line of tall and plumy palms were bending in the wind; to the east, the Libyan sands poured in a golden stream through every cleft and fissure in the darkling hills; and overhead, and all about, floated a splendour of reddening fire. From their station they seemed to look straight into the very heart of the sunset when all the west had burst into sudden flames of fire. The freshening wind tossed them in uncertain rise and fall; the melancholy sound of the distant cataract, and now and then the cry of some night bird cut sharply through the stillness of the hour. An immense sense of loneliness brooded over the empty temples and adjacent isles abandoned by their forgotten gods, whose sculptured faces gazed mournfully out from the crumbling walls, then flushed with the supreme splendour of the dying day.

A few miles further down, the Isle of Flowers, with all its wondrous vegetation, and the many black rocks of Assouan rising from a medley of dust, Roman ruins and feathery palms were left astern; and of the long, long downward journey some 450 miles were mastered, after which lay nearly the same distance to Cairo.

Often had the boats to pause in their downward way, while the melancholy duty was performed of burying those whose journey in life was over, by the river bank, uncoffined, in nameless and unrecorded graves, where the ibis stalks among the tall reeds, and the scaly crocodile dozes amid the ooze.

And as the boat in which he lay under an awning glided down the Nile Jack Elliot was often in a species of stupor, and muttered at times of his boyish days at the High School of Edinburgh; of the brawling Tweed when he had been wont to fish at Braidielee; of matches at Aldershot, and clearing the hurdles in the Long Valley; but he was most often a boy, a lad again in his fevered dreams, and seeking birds' nests among the bonnie Lammermuirs, feeling the pleasant breeze that came over the braes of the Merse, while the sun shone on the pools and thickets of the Eye and the Leader; but of Maude, strange to say, or their mysterious separation, no word escaped him, till he became conscious, and then Roland would hear him muttering as he kissed her photo:

'Where are you, my darling? Shall I ever look upon your face again?'

And with a wasted and trembling hand he would consign the soft leather case to the breast of his tattered and faded tunic. He was so weak, so utterly debilitated that sometimes he shed involuntary tears—a sight that filled Roland with infinite pity and commiseration, and a dread each day that he might have to leave Jack, as he had left others, in a lonely tomb by the river-side.

Jack, poor fellow, was dwelling generally in a land of shadows; familiar scenes and faces came and receded, and loved voices came and sank curiously in his ear, while his apparently dying eyes and lips pled vainly for one kiss of his sunny-haired Maude to sweeten the bitter draught of that death which seemed so close and nigh.

But he was still struggling between life and eternity, when in the ruddy haze Roland hailed the purple outlines of the Pyramids in the Plain of Ghizeh, the ridge of the Jebel Mokattam, the distant minarets and the magnificent citadel of Cairo.

On reaching the Kasr-el-Nil Barracks, Roland was ordered to be attached for duty purposes to a regiment quartered there till further orders, as no more troops were proceeding up the Nile.

Though the battle of Hasheen was to be fought and won, and the lamentable fiasco of Macneill's zereba to occur at Suakim, the war was deemed virtually over, as the cause for it had collapsed by Gordon's betrayal and the fall of Khartoum.

With the general advance of the expedition under Lord Wolseley to rescue Gordon, our story has only had a certain connection—a mission undertaken far too late, but during which the mind at home was kept at fever-heat by news from that burning seat of strife, recording the sufferings of our soldiers, and the bloody but victorious battles with the Mahdists, till the dark and terrible tidings came, that just as Wilson's column was ready to join Gordon, who had sent his steamers to Metemneh to meet him—Khartoum, after a defence perhaps unsurpassed in the annals of peril and glory, had fallen by storm and treachery, and the people of Britain were left to wonder, and in doubt, whether a stupendous blunder or an unpardonable crime had been perpetrated.

CHAPTER LVIII.

IN THE SHOUBRAH GARDENS.

Roland lost no time in telegraphing home for news of the missing ones, but received none; Mr. M'Wadsett was absent from town, so he and Jack Elliot, who was far from recovery yet, had to take patience and wait, they scarcely knew for what. One fact was too patent, that both Hester and Maude had disappeared—one too probably in penury and the other in an agony of grief and shame. It was not even known, apparently, whether they were together.

They had vanished, and, save a cheque or two cashed by Jack's bankers, left no trace of how or when; and a chilling fear crept over the hearts of both men as to what might have happened—illness, poverty, unthought-of snares, even death itself.

Meanwhile, 'the shadow, cloaked from head to foot, who keeps the keys of all the creeds,' was hovering perilously near Jack, for whom Roland procured quarters in a pleasant house in the beautiful Shoubrah Road, near Cairo—a broad but shady avenue formed of noble sycamores, the 'Rotten Row' of the city, and day followed day somewhat monotonously now, though a letter dated some weeks back from his legal friend of Thistle Court gave Roland some occasion for gratifying thought.

'If you can return,' it ran, 'must I remind you that now Earlshaugh is unoccupied; the land so far neglected, and the tenants well-nigh forgotten; the rents are accumulating at your bankers', but no good is done to anyone. Your proper place and position is your own again; justice has restored your birthright; so come home at once and act wisely—home, my dear friend, and you shall have such a welcome as Earlshaugh has not seen since your father came back after the Crimean War.'

Pondering over this letter and on what the future might have in store, Roland was one afternoon idling over a cigarette in the gardens of the Shoubrah Palace, an edifice which rises from the bank of the Nile. On one side are pleasant glimpses of the latter, with its palm-clad banks and sparkling villages; on the other a tract of brilliantly tinted cultivation, and beyond it the golden sands of the desert, the shifting hillocks they form, and the gray peaks of several pyramids.

The gardens, surpassingly beautiful and purely Oriental in character, are entered by long and winding walks of impenetrable shade, from which we emerge on open spaces that team with roses, with gilded pavilions and painted kiosks. 'Arched walks of orange-trees with the fruit and flowers hanging over your head lead to fountains,' says a Jewish writer, 'or to some other garden court, where myrtles border beds of tulips, and you wander on mosaic walks of polished pebbles; a vase flashes amid a group of dark cypresses, and you are invited to repose under a Syrian walnut-tree by a couch or summer-house. The most striking picture, however, of this charming retreat is a lake surrounded by light cloisters of white marble, and in the centre a fountain of crocodiles carved in the same material.'

Lulled by the heat, by the drowsy hum made by the sound of many carriages filled with harem beauties or European ladies rolling to and fro on the adjacent Shoubrah Road, with the ceaseless patter of hoofs, as mounted Cairene dandies and our cavalry officers rode in the same gay promenade, Roland reclined on a marble seat, lit another cigarette, and watched the giant flowers of the Egyptian lotus in the little lake, blue and white, that sink when the sun sets, but open and rise when it is shining, till suddenly he saw a young lady appear, who was evidently idling in the gardens like himself.

He could see that she was a European. With one glove drawn off, showing a hand the pure whiteness of which contrasted with her dark dress, she was playing with the water of a red marble fountain that fell sparkling into the lakelet, not ten yards from where he was seated, unseen by her.

Suddenly his figure, in his undress uniform, caught her eye; she turned and looked full at him, as if spellbound.

'Roland!' she exclaimed.

'Hester—good heavens, can it be?—Hester, and here!' said he.

Hester she was; he sprang to her side, and they took each other's hands, both for a moment in dumb confusion and bewilderment. At the moment of this meeting and before recognition, even when hovering near him, and he had been all unconscious of who the tall and slender girl in mourning really was, she had been thinking of him, and as she had often thought—

'I loved Roland all my life—better than my own soul; but such a love as mine is too often only its own best reward; and many a sore heart like mine learns that never in this world is it measured to us again as we have meted it out.'

Thus bitterly had the girl been pondering, when she found herself suddenly face to face with the subject of her reverie, and, in spite of herself, a little cloud was blended with the astonishment her eyes expressed.

'Hester—what mystery is this? And are you not glad to see me?' he asked impetuously.

'Glad—oh, Roland! glad indeed, and that you escaped that dreadful day at Kirbekan!' she replied, while her eyes became humid now.

'God bless you, my darling!' he exclaimed, as all his soul seemed suddenly to go forth to her, and he would have drawn her to him; but she thought of Annot Drummond, and fell back a pace. 'Hester,' said he upbraidingly, 'will you not accord me one kiss, darling?'

She grew pale now, for she feared that her welcome had been more cordial than he had any right to expect; but the circumstances were peculiar, their place and mode of meeting alike strange and unexpected; but it was impossible for her not to guess, to read in his eyes, in fact, all the tender passion of love, esteem, and kinship that filled his heart for her now.

'How well you are looking, Hester, after all you must have suffered—some of the old rose's hue is back to your cheek, darling.'

'Don't speak thus, Roland—I—I——' she faltered.

'Why not, Hester? You loved me, I know, even as I loved you.'

'Before that beautiful little hypocrite and adventuress came,' said she, with quiet bitterness, 'I certainly did love you, Roland——'

'And love me still, Hester?'

'Do I look as if I had let the worm in the bud feed on my damask cheek?' said she, with a little gasping laugh; 'has my hair grown thin or white? How vain you are, Cousin Roland!'

'No, Hester' (how he loved to utter her name!); 'though I admit to having been a hopeless and thoughtless fool—no worse; but, forgive me, dear Hester; I ask you in the name of your good old father, who so loved us both, and in memory of our pleasant past at Merlwood.'

She made no answer; but her downcast eyes were full of tears; her breast was heaving, and her lips were quivering now.

'It ought not to be hard to forgive you, Roland, as you never said, even in that pleasant past, that you loved me; and yet, perhaps—but I must go now,' she said, interrupting herself, as she turned round wearily and vaguely.

'Go where?' he asked. 'But how came you to be here—here in Cairo—and whither are you going?'

'To where I reside,' she replied, with a soft smile; for, with all her love for him, and with all her supreme joy at meeting him again thus safe and sound, and in a manner so unprecedentedly peculiar, she was not disposed quite to strike her colours and yield at once.

'Reside!' thought Roland, with a flush of anger in his heart; 'as companion, governess, nursing sister, or—what?'

'To where I reside with Maude,' she added, almost reading his thoughts.

'Is Maude here, too?'

'Yes; we came together in quest of you and Jack. Oh! where is he?—well and safe, too, I am sure, or you would not be looking so bright. Maude left her home under a mistake—the victim of a conspiracy, hatched, as we know now, by that wretched creature Sharpe.'

'And she is here—here in Cairo?'

'Yes.'

'This seems miraculous!'

'Come with me to Maude.'

'And then to Jack—to poor Jack, whom the sight of her beloved face will surely make well and strong again.'

And, as people in a dream, in another minute they were in a cab—for cabs are now to be had in the city of the Caliphs and the Mamelukes—and were bowling towards one of the stately squares in the European quarter through strangely picturesque streets of lofty, latticed, and painted houses, richly carved as Gothic shrines, where, by day, the many races that make up the population of Cairo in their bright and varied costumes throng on foot, on horse or donkey-back; and where, by night, rope-dancers, conjurers, fire-eaters, and tumblers, with sellers of fruit, flowers, sherbet, and coffee, make up a scene of noise and bustle beyond description; and now certainly, with Hester suddenly conjured up by his side, Roland felt, we say, as if in a dream wild and sudden as anything in the 'Arabian Nights.'

Does love once born lie dormant to live again?

Judging by his own experience, he thought so, with truth.

More than once when he had gone forth into the world with his regiment he had almost forgotten the little Hester as she had been to him, a sweet, piquante, and dainty figure amid the groves of Merlwood, and in the background of his boyish days; then in his soldier's life, she would anon flit across the vista of memory, fondly and pleasantly, till he learned to love her (ere that other came, that Circe with her cup and the dangerous charm of novelty); and now all his old passion sprang into existence, holding his heart in its purity and strength as if it had never wandered from her—tender, unselfish, and true as his boyish love had been in the past time; yet just then, by her side, and with her hand within grasp of his own, he felt his lips but ill unable to express all he thought and felt, and his fear of—the refusal that might come.

Then he was about to see his dearly-loved sister Maude; but his joy thereat was clouded by the dread and knowledge that poor Jack's life was trembling in the balance.

CHAPTER LIX.

CONCLUSION.

The fond white arms of Maude were around Jack, his head was pillowed on her breast; so the young pair were once more together, and she had, of course, installed herself as his nurse.

Oh, how haggard, wan, wasted, and changed he was!

He lay quiet, motionless, and happy, if 'weak as a cat,' he said, with the hum of the great city of Cairo coming faintly through the latticed windows that overlooked the vast Uzbekyeh Square and its gardens, whilom a marsh, and now covered with stately trees, under which are cafés for the sale of coffee, sherbet, and punch, where bands play in the evenings, and Franks and Turks may be seen with Europeans in their Nizam dresses, and the Highlander in his white jacket and tartan kilt.

How delightful it was to have her dear caresses again—to feel her soft breath on his faded cheek; all seemed so new, so strange, that he almost feared the delicious spell might break, and he, awaking, find himself again in his grass hut at Korti, or gliding down the Nile in the whaleboat of the old Staffordshire, with Arabs to repel, rocks to avoid, and cataracts to shoot with oar and pole.

'Oh, Jack,' said Maude, for the twentieth time, 'forgive and pardon me for doubting you; but that woman——'

'A vile plot—backed up by a forged letter! My little Maude, it would not have borne a moment's investigation!'

'I know—I know now; but I was so terrified—so crushed—so lonely! And then, think of the days and nights of horror and agony I underwent. The woman dying of a street accident in the Infirmary of Edinburgh, signed a confession of her story—that she was the bribed agent of Sharpe's plot. I wrote all about it, but you never got my letter.'

'And this was "the startling news" that made you so suddenly leave Edinburgh?'

'To come here in search of you. Oh, Jack! I was mad to doubt you; but you would quite pardon me if you knew all I have undergone. Shall I ever forget the night she came—the night of that aimless flight south—aimless, save to avoid you—but ending at York? Oh never, Jack, if I lived a thousand years! I now know that it takes a great deal to kill some people; yet I think that, but for dear, affectionate Hester, I could not have lived very long with that awful and never-ceasing pain gnawing at my heart.'

Jack raised her quivering face between his tremulous hands, and looked into it fondly and yearningly. How full of affection it seemed—so softly radiant with shy and lovely blushes, while her eyes of forget-me-not blue never, even in the past, shone with the love-light that illumined them now, when sufferings were past and their memory becoming fainter.

'How long—how long it seems since we separated, and without a farewell, Jack!'

'A day sometimes seems an age—ay, even a day, when matters of the heart are concerned.'

'And a minute or two may undo the work of years—yea, of a lifetime. But you must get well and strong, Jack, for the homeward voyage. In a few days we shall have you laughing among us again; and you will see what a careful little nurse I shall prove.'

Jack, withal, feared just then that there was but little laughter left for him on earth; yet their reunion and the presence of Maude acted as a wonderful charm upon him, and from her loving little hands, instead of those of a stolid hospital orderly, he now took his prescribed 'baby food' as he called it—beef-tea, eggs beat up in milk, and port wine elixir, with the odious 'diluted hydrochloric acid, one drachm, and of quinine, eight drachms,' as ordered by the medical staff.

But he rallied rapidly, though Maude's heart beat painfully when occasionally a ray of sunshine stole into the room through the picturesque lattice-wood windows (which in Cairo had not been superseded by glass) and rested on his face, and she saw how pale and wan, if peaceful and bright, the latter was now: and then if he spoke too much, she placed her white hands on his lips, or silenced them more sweetly but quite as effectually.

Hester, when she first saw Jack Elliot, little imagined that he would recover so rapidly. She had thought of Maude and then of her own father.

'Strange it is,' pondered the girl, 'that when one sorrow comes upon us—a shock unexpectedly—we seem to see the gradual approach of another, and so realize its bitterness before it becomes an actual fact. Thus I felt, long before poor papa died, that I should be alone and penniless in the world.'

'Hester!' exclaimed Roland, softly but upbraidingly, as she said something of this kind to him.

'Well, Roland,' said Hester, 'no one seemed to care where I went or what became of me; all the world was indifferent to me; I had lost all interest and saw no beauty in it.'

He had both her hands in his now, and was gazing into her white-lidded and long-lashed dark-blue eyes.

Then, as eye met eye, each saw a strange but alluring expression in the other—the past, the present, and future all mingled and combined—an expression of a nature deep and indescribable.

We do not mean to rehearse all that Roland said then. If no woman can without some emotion hear a tale of love, especially if told so powerfully as Roland was telling it then, we may well believe how Hester's heart responded; and he held her in his embrace, and kissed her again and again as a man only kisses the girl he loves, and, more than all, the one he hopes to make his wife.

So everything is said to come in time to those who wait.

They were together again—together at last—and the outer world and all other things thereof seemed to glide away from them, leaving only love and peace and rest behind—love and trust with the radiance of light!

THE END.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.