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Title: The Master of Aberfeldie, Volume 3 (of 3)

Author: James Grant

Release date: June 14, 2021 [eBook #65617]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MASTER OF ABERFELDIE, VOLUME 3 (OF 3) ***

  THE MASTER OF ABERFELDIE



  BY

  JAMES GRANT

  AUTHOR OF
  "THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "THE CAMERONIANS,"
  "THE SCOTTISH CAVALIER,"
  ETC., ETC.



  IN THREE VOLUMES.

  VOL. III.



  LONDON:
  HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
  13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
  1884.

  _All rights reserved._




  Contents

  Chapter

  I. Suspicion
  II. At Tel-el-Kebir
  III. At Grand Cairo
  IV. The Telegram
  V. Dead and Buried in the Sand
  VI. A Skirmish in the Desert
  VII. Hurdell Hall
  VIII. Sir Harry
  IX. The Cub-hunting
  X. Allan's Adventure
  XI. Among the Dwellers in Tents
  XII. Kismet
  XIII. The Last of Sir Paget
  XIV. The Young Widow
  XV. In the Desert
  XVI. Eastward Ho!
  XVII. At Ismailia
  XVIII. Clouds and Sunshine




THE MASTER OF ABERFELDIE.



CHAPTER I.

SUSPICION.

Many a wife, mother, and maid watched the progress of our troops from
point to point in Egypt, from the bombardment of Alexandria, with the
subsequent landing, up to the last telegram which announced that the
army had begun its auspicious night march from Kassassin towards
Tel-el-Kebir, but none could do so with more anxiety than had Olive
Raymond and Eveline.

To them and to how many loving hearts at home were the next telegrams
fraught with terror and anxiety!

Olive was free to rush to the newspapers as soon as they arrived.
But not so Eveline, for so suspicious of her secret interest in one
who was far away had Sir Paget become, that he absolutely kept them
out of her sight as much as possible; and she had a terror in her
heart that Evan Cameron might be killed in action, and, for a time,
all unknown to her.

Great was her craving for intelligence.  She could not, like a man,
go to clubs or newspaper offices, when the latest telegrams--often
false ones--were posted up; and often nightly she went to bed with
the agonising yet unasked question on her lips, 'Oh, what has
happened to-day in Egypt?--what is happening _now_?' and she had to
scan the morning papers, if at all, surreptitiously, eagerly, and
feverishly, for what she did not want to see.

How would she have suffered the old Peninsula war time, when news and
battle lists appeared in the weekly and bi-weekly journals more than
a month, yea, sometimes two months, after victories were won (we had
no defeats in those long-service days), and after the grass was green
above the graves of our gallant dead--the men that knew how to die,
but never turn their heel before a foe--when our regiments fought for
the historic glory of their number, as steadily as for king and
country!

Sir Paget knew the source of his young wife's anxiety, and watched
her grimly.

'How dull my life is with _him_, kind though he tries to be,' thought
the girl; 'we have not a thought, feeling, or inspiration in common.
When with Evan, it seemed all inspiration, and thoughts came and went
so fast.  He always brought bright ones to me.'

He was her first and only love--the love that leads a girl to see
only ideal perfection in the object so beloved.  Their passion had
been like the diva in of a mid-summer night, and now they were to
meet never more--never more!

She recalled the words of the song he was wont to sing to air of
'Rousseau's Dream'--

  'See the moon o'er cloudless Jura
    Shining in the loch below;
  See the distant mountain towering
    Like a pyramid of snow.

  'Scenes of grandeur, scenes of childhood,
    Scenes so dear to love and me!
  When we roam by bower or wild wood,
    All is lovelier when with _thee_!

And, as she touched the piano, his voice seemed to come to her ear
again.

'Eveline!' she would murmur, dreamily, 'he called me Eveline--his
own--yes, I can hear his voice plainly now--plainly I heard it at
Dundargue, and on that last evening at Maviswood.'

Then her eye would fall on her wedding-ring, and a kind of shiver
passed over her.

She strove to read, but that was almost impossible; her mind wandered
from the story, or sometimes certain passages struck her painfully.
In a novel ('Out of Court') one ran thus:--'she married him; she
ceased to love him, and she died, which, on the whole, was a better
fortune than generally befalls the women who make this
_irretrievable_ stumble on the threshold of life.'

'Oh! would I but die too; but I am too young, and too strong!' she
thought bitterly.  'Our hearts choose for us, in spite of us, and I
chose Evan.'

Bound though she was to a husband beyond her years, uncongenial, and,
in some points, unappreciative, she could respect him, but she could
never love him; that was impossible.  Her love was far away, where
the shadows of the Pyramids fell on the sands of Ghizeh, and the
pipes of the Black Watch sent up their wild war-notes in the desert
of Goshen.

She had still the companionship of Olive, who, with her aunt, Lady
Aberfeldie, was lingering at Southsea.

'Take care, Eveline,' said the former, warningly, 'lest this useless
and hopeless regret for Cameron becomes too apparent to Sir Paget.'

'I cannot help it, however wrong and sinful it may be,' she replied.
'I do my best.  I let myself love him from the first moment I met
him, and knew that he loved me--loved me well--before the secret
escaped him.  Many have admired me, but,' she added, simply and
sweetly, 'no one ever spoke to me before as Evan spoke, and I gave
him all the love of my heart; but to cherish it is, I grant you,
hopeless now.'

'Hopeless as mine; for now Allan, I fear, loathes me, if he thinks of
me at all,' said Olive.

'I am very tired, Olive,' observed the other girl, 'of trying to
compel duty to triumph over sorrow.'

In her soft hazel eyes there was the expression of one who was always
looking far away at some horizon unseen by others.  Sir Paget was not
so dull or so slow as not to perceive all this, and to draw his own
deductions therefrom.  A change had decidedly come over him since he
detected her emotion on the day the Black Watch marched, and he had
become captious, fractious, jealous, and inclined to be sneering,
while watchful of every expression in her face.

In the library one day she was looking at a terrestrial globe on a
tall and handsome stand.  She saw that, as the crow flies, the
distance was two thousand five hundred miles at least to where the
Black Watch were face to face with the swarthy followers of Arabi;
and, stooping, she pressed her lips to Egypt in general.

'_He_ is there--I here!  On the globe, how short the distance seems!'

'What _are_ you about, Lady Puddicombe?' said a voice, sharply,
behind her--the voice of Sir Paget, who was jerking his bald head
forward most alarmingly.  'Kissing a globe!--what tomfoolery--what
strange fancy is this?'

'I was only examining it,' she faltered.

'Only examining it!' he snarled; 'very, closely apparently, and in
what quarter did your geographical studies lie?  Why, your lips were
absolutely upon it.'

'A giddiness came over me,' replied Eveline, ashamed alike of her
sudden emotion and enforced duplicity.

He eyed her viciously, and his eyes glittered dangerously.

'At luncheon this afternoon you were more dull and _distraite_ even
than I have seen you before,' said he, peering at her through his
gold _pince-nez_.  'Now, pray, what was the meaning of that?  What
ails you--what oppresses you?'

'It is very wrong.  I cannot help it,' urged the girl, desperately.

'Like all the rest of the world, you were thinking of--I suppose,
Egypt?'

'I was, Sir Paget.'

'D--n Egypt, and everyone there!' exclaimed the baronet, coarsely and
savagely.  'What is Egypt to you, madam, in particular?'

'My brother----'

'Your brother--bosh, madam, bosh!  Don't think to hoodwink me.  A
young married lady should always make herself agreeable, especially
to her husband; it is one of the first principles of good-breeding
and of wifely quality.'

Eveline coloured with pain and keen annoyance at what these remarks
implied; but Sir Paget in his anger was not disposed to content
himself with them alone.

'Kissing a globe, indeed!  To my mind it is evident that you think
less of your brother than of your brother's friend--that fellow
Cameron,' he exclaimed, giving full swing to his jealousy.  'He
comes, I believe, of a decent stock enough; but that should not have
encouraged him to act like the other adventurer Holcroft with your
cousin, and dare to raise his eyes to you.'

'A decent stock--an adventurer!' repeated Eveline; and then, as she
thought of Evan Cameron's long line of warlike and heroic ancestors,
as compared with the peculiar line of the Puddicombes, she laughed
bitterly, while Sir Paget eyed her questioningly, and said,

'It is fortunate you were separated.  Well, I suppose you won't die
of a broken heart, and all that sort of thing, like the girls we see
on the stage and read about in novels.'

Roused at last by these coarse taunts, Eveline said,

'Sir Paget, I thought you were ignorant of the ways and meannesses of
the fashionable world; don't, please, adopt those of sneering and
being jealous--if, indeed, that world is ever jealous, or can love
enough to be so.'

And, turning away, she took refuge in a gush of tears, inspired by
intense mortification, while Olive caressed and strove to soothe her.

'An absurd old man!' exclaimed Olive, angrily--'a widower, too, who
began life by loving and marrying another--how dare he treat you
thus?'

'Oh, Olive, how shall I ever pass all the long years before I die,
and with _him_, not Evan?'

'My darling--hush--this will never do,' urged Olive, who became
alarmed by the chance of some new _esclandre_.

'I don't understand all this, Lady Aberfeldie,' said Sir Paget,
greatly ruffled, when he saw that handsome and always serenely calm
matron; 'your daughter is an enigma to me,' he added, ashamed to
acknowledge what he suspected and she perfectly knew.  'I sometimes
surprise her in tears, and, if I ask the cause, she pleads a passage
in a novel, or that her music made her sad.  Stuff and nonsense!  I
should like to see the book or hear the music that would wring tears
from me.'

'Try change of scene,' said Lady Aberfeldie.

Daily Eveline's hazel eyes seemed to become larger and brighter,
while her face grew paler, and all the delicate rose-leaf colour and
complexion faded out of it.  The lines of her young features, if
sorrowful, were very sweet, and her eyes, if somewhat sad, seemed
calm in expression now.  Yet the girl had ever before her the last
_haunting_ look that Evan gave her as he marched past, amid the wild
hurly-burly of the dense crowd that surged around the departing Black
Watch--the long, silent, and indescribable look of those who gaze
their last upon the silent dead; for dead she was to him!

At times, when quite alone, she would linger on her knees, in prayer
for his safety, and that his days should be ever happy--often with
her open Bible before her, but without looking at it, like many
honest folks, as if to have it there would work a spell.

Her life, as yet, was one of constant dread--the effort to hide her
anxiety and sorrow, with her recent love for another, under a hollow
smile.  She feared even to sleep, lest in a dream the name of Evan
might escape her.

She would get over all this nonsense in time, her mother thought; for
in time people get over everything.

Sir Paget thought he would take that lady's advice, and try change of
scene; and conceiving, not unwisely, that she would be infinitely
better away from the military associations of Portsmouth--the
incessant arrival and departure of crowded transports, the marching
in and out, the bugling, drumming, and drilling daily and hourly of
'those infernal soldiers' on the grassy common between Puddicombe
Villa and Southsea Castle, he resolved to take her abruptly to his
house in London, though the season was long since over, the town and
the parks empty--not that the latter fact would affect Eveline in the
least.

'He is taking me to London, Olive dear, away from you,' said she,
sadly; for with Olive alone could she commune in secret.

'He is wise.  London will not be associated with Evan Cameron.  You
cannot think so much there as here by the seashore.'

'I shall think of him, anywhere and everywhere.'

'Change of scene, faces, places, and people will do much.  Try, dear,
to forget.'

But poor Eveline only looked yearningly, and kissed the soft cheeks
of her handsome cousin, with much caressing and many tears.




CHAPTER II.

AT TEL-EL-KEBIR.

A letter from Allan Graham to Lady Aberfeldie proved, by its
introduction, a very bitter one to Olive, and the source of many
tears.


'Belbeis, September.

'My DEAREST MOTHER,

'But for Evan Cameron of Ours saving my life at the risk of his own
in action two days ago, I had not been alive to write you this
letter--the first I have had time to attempt since we landed.

'Poor Evan!

'Whatever the mysterious influence was that that scoundrel Holcroft
possessed over Olive is ended now, as I saw him fall into the sea,
where he was drowned like a dog.  I could not help him or save him,
even had I been disposed to do so.  Strange it is that a blackleg, a
sharper, and worse, for such he became, should have been preferred by
her at Dundargue to me, the companion and playmate of her
childhood--her cousin, her affianced husband under her father's will,
absurd in its tenor though that document be; and now, neither
verbally nor in writing, shall I ever refer to her again.  My
pride--if I ever had any--has indeed been humbled in the dust, and by
her!

'After quitting our camp on the evening before last, we moved to the
sandhills above Kassassin, where we piled arms, and the men lay upon
the sand or sat in groups, all chatting gaily and hopefully of the
coming conflict at Tel-el-Kebir.

'Carslogie, who was always in wild spirits, was busy spouting
Shakespeare--

  "Thus far into the bowels of the land
  Have we marched on without impediment,--"

and so forth, and I overheard some of our men remarking that he "was
surely _fey_," when word was passed to stand to our arms, unpile, and
advance at one in the morning.

'Never before, perhaps, did fourteen thousand men get under arms so
quietly, so softly.  The orders were now issued in whispers, and,
noiselessly as an army of phantoms, we moved off, our footfalls
muffled by the soft sand.  No moon was visible, but we had a clear,
starlit Egyptian sky overhead.  No man was permitted to speak or
smoke, and our brown helmets, red serges, and dark kilts seemed to
blend with the gloom.

'If the silence of that weird, solemn, and impressive time were
broken, it was by the occasional rumble of an artillery wheel or of a
commissariat waggon, the clatter of a rammer or a steel scabbard
against a stirrup-iron, as we advanced through the gloom, expecting
every moment to hear the explosion of a musket or a shrill shout from
the scattered Bedouin horsemen, who were alleged to be scouting in
the vicinity--men belonging to the band of the Sheikh Zeid-el-Ourdeb.

'Dear mother, our Highland Brigade led the advance--thank God for the
honour!--with the Indian contingent under Sir Hugh Macpherson, having
the veteran Albany Highlanders as our support.

'Ever and anon there were brief halts to enable the regiments to
maintain touch on the flanks.

'I cannot describe the order of our advance as yet, nor would you
understand it if I did so.

'A silence that seemed something awful reigned over the vast plain,
and none save the initiated could have imagined that, formed in a
species of semi-circle, fourteen thousand men were approaching the
enemy's earthworks, ready to dash at them like hounds at the deer
when the leash is slipped.

'Arabi's lines consisted of solid entrenchments, bound together with
wattles, four miles in extent from flank to flank, heavily armed with
cannon, and having ditches about nine feet deep.

'The 74th Highlanders were next the canal, opposed to the most
formidable part of these works, where many of their dead are lying on
their faces shoulder to shoulder, shot down in the act of charging;
next them were the Cameron, the Gordon Highlanders, and then
ourselves, the Black Watch, each company with its piper in the rear,
ready to strike up the onset when the time came.

'Every heart was swelling proudly and wildly then, with the grand
conviction that every heart at home in Britain--and dearer still
among our native hills--would exult in our triumph, for a triumph it
was sure to be.

'Silently, swiftly, and noiselessly we swept forward to the attack.
No word was spoken, no command given save in a whisper, and not a
shot was fired, as, with fixed bayonets, we came within three hundred
yards of the Egyptian batteries, and even then the soldiers of Arabi
seemed unaware of our presence.

'Suddenly an alarm was given, and a terrific fire--a literal garland
of flame--flashed along the bulwarks, a storm of lead went whistling
over our helmets, and the air seemed laden with the pinging and
whizzing of bullets, while cannon boomed hoarsely, and the roaring
rockets screamed high in the air.

'The pipes struck up along the Highland line, a wild cheer burst from
every man, and we advanced with a furious and headlong rush, flinging
ourselves into the ditches and climbing up the scarp; all weariness
after the toilsome night-march was gone; sore feet and thirst were
alike forgotten.

'And now for the first time the voices of the officers were heard:
"Come on, Camerons--this way, the Gordons--forward, the Black Watch!"
The marines and the Irish regiments were on the right, and bravely
they went at the trenches, too; but the _first_ within them were the
Highlanders, and the first of these was young Donald Cameron, of the
Camerons, who, as he leaped in with bayonet fixed, was shot through
the head just as we carried the first line of works.

'The dim light of the early morning enabled the enemy now to direct
their fire; for a minute or two we drew breath, poured in some heavy
file-firing, and again dashed on, while one portion of our forces
that had passed between the redoubts now opened a flank fusilade,
which proved too much for the Egyptians, who--all save their wretched
gunners, who were chained to the cannon--fled wildly across the open,
where our fire mowed them down in hundreds, while they rent the air
with cries of, "Ya Allah! ya mobarek!" (O God!  O Blessed!)

'Then it was that our brigadier rode up and said to the 79th, "Well
done, the Cameron men!  Will not Scotland be proud of this day's
work!"

'So much for our share of it.

'On the other flank of the works, the Horse Artillery were pouring in
shell, till the Royal Irish carried them at the bayonet's point,
after a regular hand-to-hand fight, in which Major Hart shot an
Egyptian leader, who endeavoured to wrest away his revolver.

'Our troops swept over the batteries on every hand, and the enemy
fled as rapidly and hopelessly as those on the other side of the
Canal had fled before the Highlanders, whose costume and fury alike
terrified them.  Arabi, we are told, informed his people that "the
Scottish soldiers were only old women;" but now they dub us demons.

'To hear our pipes send up their pæan of victory over the battered
and corpse-strewn trenches of Tel-el-Kebir, was to feel for a time
that exultation of the soul which is said to be worth a long life of
dull and sluggish quiet.

'The Egyptians did not present the least appearance of order, but
fled, a demoralised rabble, at the top of their speed, flinging away
everything that might impede their flight, and pursued by our cavalry
and Horse Artillery, who mowed them down like sheep.

'As one battery swept past the flank of the Black Watch, the gunners
brandished their swords and shouted 'Scotland for ever!' and then we
knew them to belong to the new division of Scottish Artillery.

'To hear that cry in such a time of supreme triumph was to make one
feel what those must have felt, who heard it raised by the Greys at
Waterloo and by the Albany Highlanders at Kotah.

'The total casualties of the Highland Brigade are two hundred and
twenty of all ranks.

'One of the first we lost was poor Carslogie, the life of the mess.
He was shot by a wounded Egyptian, to whom he had just given a
mouthful from his water-bottle, and I blew out the miscreant's brains.

'We have also to sorrow for our noble Serjeant-Major, John M'Neill,
whose tall and soldier-like figure was long a feature at the head of
the column.  He cut down several Egyptians with his claymore, but
fell at last, pierced by three wounds.  He was, we know, the sole
support of a widowed mother, to whom he was tenderly attached.

'The fight was fought and won in the good old British fashion, with
the cold steel; the breech-loader has not yet rendered the bayonet
obsolete.

'The Guards and Highlanders made themselves at home among the tents
and spoils of the Egyptians; but our soldiers, flushed with glory and
fresh from conquest, no more spoke of the Gordons, the Ross-shire
Buffs, or the Black Watch, but of Donald Cameron of the Camerons--the
young hero from the Braes of Angus, who was the first in Tel-el-Kebir!

'Who could say what heroic blood was in his veins, for his name was
old as the hills, when the Camerons were known as the children of the
Follower of Ovi.

'I had some narrow escapes.  A ball carried away the pommel of my
dirk.  I had a bayonet thrust through my kilt, and two shells
exploded near me, covering me with sand; but I had a closer shave
than that.  In the rush as I led on my company, two powerful
Egyptians in white uniforms, with scarlet tarbooshes, seemed to
devote their energies to killing me, as an officer or prominent
leader.  Both attacked me with their fixed bayonets.  By a circular
parry of my claymore, I turned one of them aside, and ran the man
through--or near--the heart.  He screamed and grappled me by the
throat, dragged me down amid the blood-soaked sand.  So savage and
powerful was his death-grip that had he failed to strangle me, I must
have perished under the bayonet of the other, whom Cameron cut down,
through tarboosh and bone to the chin, and then released me.  A third
who came up he pistolled, and I hope Evan will get a clasp to his
V.C. for this.

'The papers will, of course, tell you all the rest--how we captured
the standing camp and immense stores of provisions and plunder; how
the victorious troops advanced with tremendous cheers across it to
the railway station, where soon after Sir Garnet came up; and how
Drury Lowe with his cavalry cut across the enemy's line of flight,
killing and capturing on every hand.

'I know how my father, with his great love of the old Black Watch,
will appreciate the story of our glory at Tel-el-Kebir; but the
aspect of the place was awful after the firing ceased and the sun
came up in his morning splendour--a sight never to forget, though I
have seen some terrible work in India.

'The dead lay about in scores and hundreds, many disembowelled by
shot or shell; some with brains oozing out; others with their heads
literally blown off; and some were scorched to death by their
clothing becoming ignited by the flame of an exploded shell.  There
were wounds of every kind--by the bayonet, the rifle-butt, and sword;
and many of the maimed were seen to cast aside their tarboosh and
bury their head in the sand for coolness, while the cries for water
were simply agonising.

'I found the third Egyptian from whom Cameron's pistol had saved me.
He was dying.  "Turn my head towards Mecca," I heard him say faintly
to a comrade who lay near him.  The fellah did so, and the poor
wretch passed away in peace.  I saw some who died making signs of the
cross, but these, of course, were Coptic Christians.

'Two ill omens, it is said, occurred before the conflict to chill the
ardour of the Egyptians.  In the fight of Kassassin a man was shot
through the heart by a rifle ball, which pierced a copy of the Koran
that he carried there as a charm, and took a part of it into his
body.  The other was the crescent of the new moon, which encircled a
star and sank with it below the horizon just before the attack, and
this, being emblematic of the crescent and star, was deemed ominous
of defeat and destruction.

'Arabi has fled towards Belbeis, pursued by Drury Lowe.

'The canal is filled with dead and dying men and horses, yet our men
are fain to fill their water-bottles from it.'

This letter concluded with kindest regards and wishes to everyone he
knew and loved, by name--Olive Raymond alone excepted; and keenly and
with tears she resented the omission.

In hot haste Lady Aberfeldie wrote to Allan, explaining the story of
Hawke Holcroft's surreptitious visits, his fancied power over Olive,
and the abstraction of the unlucky diamonds; but owing to various
circumstances--the fortune of war included--the letter was a
considerable time of reaching him to whom it was addressed, and some
stirring events occurred in the meantime, before he could reply to it.




CHAPTER III.

AT GRAND CAIRO.

The Black Watch had barely buried their dead at Tel-el-Kebir before
they were sent by railway to Zag-a-zig; a breakdown occurred on the
line, and the regiment slept for the night on the slope of the
railway embankment.  On reaching Zag-a-zig, more fighting was
expected; but the Egyptians did not show face, so the Highlanders
were marched to Belbeis, from whence Allan despatched the preceding
letter.

Belbeis is now a little town, about forty miles from Grand Cairo,
situated on the borders of the desert, famous in the Crusade of the
twelfth century as the first place captured by the Saracens, and held
by them as a fortified magazine for supplies, and to this day it has
a trade in corn.  In the same century it made a vigorous resistance
to Amurath of Jerusalem, and in more modern times it was occupied by
the French army to keep open the communication between Cairo and the
coast.  Here a junction takes place of the canals derived from
different parts of the Nile.

It had been reached by our cavalry on the evening of the day
Tel-el-Kebir was captured, and after a slight skirmish was taken
possession of by Drury Lowe.

The Black Watch was eight days at Belbeis, during which they had
scarcely any other food than hard biscuits and a small supply of
tinned meat, with muddy water from the canal to wash them down with;
and as the knapsacks did not come in from Tel-el-Kebir for five days,
neither officer nor private could have any change, but slept in the
kilt without blanket or other covering, while nearly driven mad by
mosquitoes, sand-flies, and other plagues of Egypt.

Arabi and Toulba Pasha had been taken prisoners, and nothing was
spoken of now but the advance on Grand Cairo.

Meantime the surrender of the Egyptian position at Kafr Dowar took
place.  On its frowning batteries white flags in token of peace were
everywhere displayed, and our troops entered without resistance.  The
terrible lesson taught the enemy at Tel-el-Kebir was not likely to be
soon forgotten.  Moreover, the firing of the Egyptian infantry was
always rather defective, their Remington rifles being sighted much
too high for short distances; thus, at the long range, their firing
was always better than at close quarters.

From Belbeis General Lowe pushed on towards the capital, keeping on
the borders of the desert.  At every village he passed through, the
swarthy population came pouring forth waving white flags and
declaring themselves faithful to the Khedive, while masses of flying
fugitives, on seeing our cavalry overtaking them, threw down their
rifles and made signs of submission.

Galloping on without drawing rein, our cavalry entered Grand Cairo,
after a forced march of fifty miles in thirty hours in heavy marching
order, and by that act practically ended the war, and our troops had
no adversaries now but the savage and plunder-loving Bedouins, who
hovered and hung upon their skirts intent upon rapine and murder, as
Allan Graham and some others ere long found to their cost.

The advance to Cairo was headed by the Bengal Horse, led in person by
Sir Hugh Macpherson, though General Lowe was in command of the whole.

On the 22nd of the month the Black Watch left Belbeis for Grand
Cairo, where the corps arrived in the evening, when the last rays of
the setting sun tinted with the hue of blood and saffron the water of
the Nile as it wound past the islets near El Ghizeh--flushed and red,
as on the evening when, in long ages past, according to Mohammedan
legends, Joseph sank Jacob's marble coffin in the stream; and it was
with no ordinary emotion of admiration and interest that Allan and
his comrades beheld the capital of Egypt basking in the sun ere he
went down beyond the hills.

'Skirted by groves and gardens,' says a writer, 'its light airy
structures seem to be based upon a mass of verdure; long lines of
buildings, white, glittering, and infinitely varied in form, rise
beyond each other, and the palace and citadel, cresting a steep
projection of the Mokattam ridge, conduct the eye to the vast rocky
barrier which protects "the victorious city" from the blasts of the
desert.'

Streets of lofty and latticed houses abounding in carved balconies
and florid arcades; the mosques, with delicate domes and airy
minarets, covered with tracery and arabesques; the houses of beys and
grandees; the fortified abodes of the stern old Mamelukes, now those
of Egyptian nobles, recalling in their architecture the Moorish
glories of the Alhambra and the Alcazar of Cordova--a perpetual dream
of the Arabian Nights.

Even with night the bustle in its streets did not cease; the
coffee-houses and hotels were filled with light, and, in the warm
atmosphere, teemed with outdoor life, for there all who are afoot
have lanterns, and there were the tellers of Arabian tales, the
Nubian singer with his mandolin, and the Egyptian magician performing
such tricks as one might think the devil alone could do; and now once
again, as in the days of General Hutchison, the walls and towers of
'the Queen of Cities'--El Kahira of the fatalistic caliphs--re-echoed
to the British drum and the Scottish warpipe, as the Highlanders
defiled round it to their camp, where the tents were pitched outside
the walls.

The soldiers were not allowed to enter the city, except on duty or
with a pass, and, as a general rule, the latter was chiefly given to
sergeants.  This plan did not, of course, apply to officers, thus
Allan, Evan Cameron, and some others lost no time in making their way
to an European hotel, where something better than the repasts they
had partaken of at Belbeis and elsewhere could be procured, and
where, amid a somewhat polyglot society, consisting of Greeks and
Egyptians, Hungarians and Cypriotes, they supped at an open window on
a balcony overlooking a street abounding with bazaars, and lanterns
swinging to and fro, crowded by people and innumerable vendors of
street goods--turbaned or tarbooshed--the water-seller tinkling his
dishes and quoting the Koran; the sellers of melons, of cresses and
lily roots, of flowers of henna, wherewith to dye the nails of
copper-coloured damsels; little donkeys ambling everywhere, and now
and then a huge camel swaying along; and more than once the
procession of a harem returning from the evening bath--the women
enveloped in black garments and veils, with masks of white linen.

Amid the scenes of warfare the organ of wonder becomes blunted
considerably, and thus after a time Allan, soothed by the fumes of a
fragrant havannah, and weary, perhaps, with the events of a long
day--the entraining and detraining of the regiment, its baggage and
stores, and so forth--fell sound asleep in his chair, oblivious of
the clatter of voices in the large room of the hotel, and the many
sounds in the street below; while Cameron, re-entering the room,
idled over an album of views of Grand Cairo and its vicinity.

Allan's short sleep was a restless one, for there came before him a
vivid recollection or vision of Hawke Holcroft, and his pale face,
with its last expression of horror and despair, as the waves closed
over it and sucked him down.

A little cry that escaped him made Cameron look his way, and he saw a
man, in the dim light without, regarding Allan with a fixed and
hostile expression.  He was clad somewhat like a European, but wore a
tarboosh, with a blue tassel, and had a voluminous beard; and his
eyes seemed savage and sinister in expression.

It is said that there is some mysterious and magnetic force in a long
and fixed stare or gaze; and there is, it is also said, 'within us
some vigilant quality that is only exercised when every other faculty
is at rest, that permits all ordinary sounds to pass unheeded while
we sleep, but that instinctively sounds the alarm when anything
unusual or fraught with danger is at hand.'

Be all that as it may, Allan suddenly awoke, and started up, and the
watcher as suddenly vanished, but not before his pale and sinister
face had been seen by the wakener.

Cameron sprang out on the balcony.  There was no one there, save his
comrade, and it was evident that the lurker must have passed into the
hotel by some other window.

'A dream,' muttered Allan, looking rather confused, 'a dream of that
wretch Holcroft.  Why should his face haunt me?  I did not kill
him--he drowned himself; and I need have no more remorse for that
affair than for pistoling the fellow who shot poor Carslogie.'

'Whether the cause of your dream or not,' said Cameron, who was too
genuine a Highlander to be without a considerable spice of
superstition in his nature, 'a fellow lurked beside you whose look I
little liked.'

'What was his appearance?'

'Difficult to describe in the dim light, but the gleam of his eyes
was sinister.  Some disbanded Egyptian turned thief, most likely.
But he bolted the moment I approached, and you awoke.'

'All this is a strange coincidence,' said Allan, as he lit another
cigar; and they turned their steps towards the camp without the
walls.  'But I am not much given to dreaming, and our work has been
too hard for some time past for indulgence in long naps, yet I had a
strange and creeping sense of some evil presence near me, with a pain
that was strange and intolerable.'

But Allan had not seen the last of the man with the tarboosh.

Before returning from history to our narrative and the adventures of
our friends, it is impossible to omit reference to the impression
made on the population of Alexandria by the warlike aspect and
stately bearing of the Black Watch and other Highland regiments at
the review, in the great square before the Abdin Palace, the official
residence of the Khedive, whom our forces had now restored to place
and power.

To see our eighteen thousand troops go past, the palace was crowded,
not only at every window, but on its flat roof, and the Viceroy's
wife, who had shared all his perils, was there with her children, and
the closely-veiled ladies of the harem.  The streets were lined by
multitudes of curious but stolid Egyptians, not more inclined to hiss
than cheer, feeling no sense of shame for their recent defeats and
humiliation, but only one of quiet amusement and desire to behold a
spectacle that did not cost them a piastre.

After the blue jackets, the Guards, and others had passed, the brass
bands stopped, and then were heard the pipes and drums, as, led by
its one-armed general, the Highland Brigade, every company steady and
straight as a wall, the ranks well 'locked-up,' every officer and man
looking stately and graceful in his waving tartan, came on at a
swinging pace, amid mutterings of _Scozzezi diaboli nudi_.

Their general, Sir Archibald Alison, in honour of the occasion, wore
a sprig of his native heather in his helmet.  The idea had got
abroad, said the _Times_, 'that the Highlanders, who bore the brunt
of the fighting, who were the first in the trenches, and who suffered
most severely, had been rather ungenerously ignored in official
despatches.  At all events, the crowd seemed disposed to grant
unofficial honours, for the second cheer of the day was accorded to
the Black Watch, easily distinguished by their red plumes, and led by
Colonel Macpherson, also sporting the heather,' and exciting more
interest even than our brown-clad Punjabees or the Belooches, in
their black and red uniforms, tall and strapping fellows though they
were; and with them came the heroes of Candahar, the Seaforth
Highlanders, wearing Mackenzie tartan, covered with medals, and
marching past as old Scottish soldiers can.

Then it was that the _Times_ reporter heard an Italian say, '_Poveri
Egiziani_!  If you had only seen them before, instead of _after_!'

The Black Watch were halted for a minute or two, prior to marching
back to camp, when suddenly Cameron said to Allan, in a loud whisper,

'Look--there is the fellow I saw on the hotel balcony.'

Allan turned, and amid a crowd of Egyptians, Italians, and jabbering
and gesticulating _bheesties_ and _syces_ (water-carriers and
grass-cutters), belonging to our Indian contingent, he saw a man with
a fair beard and a pallid face regarding him steadily with keen eyes
and knitted brow; but, the moment he turned towards him, the stranger
shrank back amid the crowd, and disappeared.

'Hawke Holcroft, by heaven,' exclaimed Cameron.

'Impossible!  He is dead,' replied Allan, feeling curiously
uncomfortable nevertheless.

'I would I were as sure of a thousand guineas,' said Cameron.

'One reads of such things only in romances--yet the eyes and beard
were the colour of those of Holcroft.'

'Truth is always strange--"stranger than fiction," as Byron tells us.'

'Stranger, indeed, should this prove the case.  But, if alive, how
comes he here, and why does he seem to dog me?'

'I regarded him at first vacantly, then with indistinct recognition,
and anon with certainty, though the beard and red tarboosh disguise
him so much!'

Allan Graham knew not what to think.  If the man referred to was
actually Holcroft, by what miracle was he then in Grand Cairo, and
how was he rescued from the sea?  Strange it was, indeed, that if the
lurker at the hotel was he, Allan should dream of him at the moment
of his appearance in the balcony.

'There is always a skeleton in every fellow's cupboard, and Hawke
Holcroft was the skeleton in mine, poor devil!' said Allan.

'You are still disposed to think and speak of him in the past tense?'
observed Cameron, whose mind was made up as to his identity.

'I cannot do otherwise, but the moment the parade is dismissed we
shall make inquiries at the hotel.'

They did so, but in vain.  No person of that name or appearance was
known there.

Instead of being put into the comfortable barracks of Kasr-el-Nil in
the city, the Highland Brigade was kept in camp while October and
November crept on, and this time was not entirely a peaceable one;
for in the former month the Bedouins, who were greatly puzzled with
their garb, and conceived them to be the English soldiers' wives all
camped in one quarter, thought to make a dash there, and secure a few
'moon faces' to embellish their tents in the desert.

A body of them belonging to the band or tribe of Zeid-el-Ourdeh, the
sheikh of Jebel Dimeshk, a mountain range that lies north-eastward of
Grand Cairo, came swooping down upon the Highland lines with this
view, and a result which very much bewildered them, for the Scottish
forces turned out with rifles and fixed bayonets, and in a very few
minutes more than forty amorous Bedouins bit their native dust.

On several other occasions the spiteful natives amused themselves by
firing at a distance among the tents at random, and one evening a
bullet whistled through Allan's tent within an inch of his head, thus
necessitating some severe patrol duty.

It was while encamped here that he received Lady Aberfeldie's letter
explaining the apparently false position in which the villainy of
Holcroft--combined with his spite, avarice, and
desperation--contrived to place Olive Raymond.

'Look here, Evan,' said Allan, to his _fidus_ Achates, in a grumbling
tone, 'read this letter from the mater.  I don't know what to think
of this strange story; but, without some other proofs, if she thinks
we are going to kiss again with tears as the poet has it, she is very
much mistaken.  The mater says that Olive's own unruly heart has
perhaps made a shipwreck of her life, whatever that may mean.  Poor
girl, what a fool she was not to confide more completely in me!'

In his tone tenderness was blended with bitterness and regret.

From this little speech Cameron was hopeful that all would come right
in the end; but a short time was given them to think or talk over the
matter, as both were hurriedly sent with a detachment consisting of
about half-a-company--Allan, of course, in command--to a place called
Matarieh, near Heliopolis, to take part there in a demonstration
against the prowling Bedouins among the mountain ranges that overlook
the desert traversed by the disused railway that ran from Cairo
towards the plain of Muggreh.

And for this place, which lies some miles north-east of Cairo, they
marched accordingly, taking with them provisions, ammunition, and
tents, for the modern village was a small one, situated among the
ruins of the ancient town, which was deserted far back as the days of
Strabo, and is now to be traced only in extensive mounds of earth and
a noble obelisk nearly seventy feet in height; and there disasters
occurred which Allan Graham was fated never to forget.




CHAPTER IV.

THE TELEGRAM.

'By Jingo, there is old Pudd's carriage at the door, and his wife in
it--a deuced fine girl, a stunning girl indeed!'

'Queer time this, to bring her up to London, when there is not a soul
in town.'

'Perhaps that is the very reason he has done so.'

'I'll invite old Pudd down to the cub-hunting, and, if he brings her
with him, won't I improve the shining hour!'

The speakers were two very _blasé_ but good-looking young men, who
were lounging in the bay window of the otherwise empty room of a
stately club-house overlooking Pall Mall, then lonely, dusty, rather
sun-baked, and the chief figures in which were the sentinels of the
Guards at the War-Office and Marlborough House, and who, with no
small interest, had seen Sir Paget Puddicombe's open carriage drop
him at the door, where he waved his hand to Eveline as she drove away
to shop or go round the park.

Now, Sir Harry Hurdell, a sporting baronet, well known on the turf
and at Tattersall's, and his chief chum, Mr. Pyke Poole, a famous
hand at billiards, more skilled with the cue than any marker in
London, were not Sir Paget's style of men, for both were horsey,
fast, given to gambling and loose living, but both were anxious to
stand in the good graces of one who, as they phrased it, 'was
proprietor of such a devilish handsome girl.'

They had not seen him since his marriage, on which both complimented
and congratulated him in such well-chosen terms that he felt quite
flattered, and his heart warmed to them.

It flashed upon him that by the society of other young men it was
possible to neutralise--if he did nothing more--the recollection of
Evan Cameron in the mind of Eveline, and thus it was that he said,

'We are quite alone in town, but will you dine with us to-day?'

'With pleasure--delighted--charmed to be introduced to Lady
Puddicombe,' said Sir Harry, with a swift glance at his friend Poole.

'Sharp eight, then.  I daresay our chef will not fail us.'

'All right.'

'Good-morning,' and away he went.

The friends looked at each other, each with an eye half closed, and
then laughed heartily.

'I'll have him down at the Hall for the cub-hunting,' said Sir Harry,
'and have other sport than that.  She'll soon get tired of her
fogie--is bound to do so.  What young girl could tolerate such an old
pump, and why shouldn't I go in and win at a canter?'

'Hawke Holcroft knew her people, didn't he?'

'Yes--before he came a cropper altogether.  When last I heard of him
he was actually a visitor at their place, Aberfeldie, wherever that
may be.'

Eveline heard with total indifference that they were to have guests
that evening, and with all his admiration of her Sir Paget thought,

'What a fool I was to marry her, knowing or suspecting what I
did--that she loved that fellow--loved him first (me she never loved
at all) and last, and loves him now, no doubt.  They say no woman
ever forgets her first love, simply because he was her first.
Pleasant for me!'

Like the hero of a recent novel, 'he could not forget that his wife
had loved another man better than she ever loved or even pretended to
love him.  It was her _candour_ he felt most keenly.  Had she been
willing to play the hypocrite, to pretend a little, he would have
been much better pleased.'

She loved Evan still; but it was with a love purified of every
sensuous thought, of every earthly hope.

To Sir Paget the story of how Allan's life had been saved at
Tel-el-Kebir by Cameron was a source of profound irritation,
annoyance, and mortification, as he knew but too well how the event
must enhance the latter in the estimation of Eveline, in whose heart
gratitude and admiration for high courage would now be added to love.
He would rather have heard that the two friends had been shot down
together.

With all her secret love for Evan, she was too wise and modest to
desire ever to be face to face with him again.  She felt that they
had parted in the belvidere at Maviswood never to meet again; that
henceforward he was as if dead to her; but it was a delicious
privilege to hear of him and of his bravery, and that her dear
brother owed his life to Evan's courage and Evan's sword.

She felt that a change had come over the tenor of Sir Paget's ways of
late, more especially since the episode of Tel-el-Kebir.

Not a day--scarcely an hour--passed over her head in which she was
not made to feel keenly the utter want of sympathy that existed
between herself and the man to whom she had been married by her
parents--sold by them--as in the bitterness of her heart she thought
it.

He said sharp things to her, and made bitter asides when Egypt or the
war there was casually mentioned, as, of course, it constantly was;
he shot many a poisoned arrow; but Eveline never blushed, though she
felt a calm, cold scorn at the cruelty and injustice of such conduct.

So here were a couple bound together by the strongest of all the
legal ties, yet utterly unsuited to each other by age, thought, and
habits; yet most punctilious was poor Eveline in the performance of
every wifely duty she owed her captious old man; but a sickly dread
of coming sorrow pervaded the girl's mind every morning she quitted
her pillow, and it came sharply and surely at last.

To dare to look at a newspaper was sufficient to worry him.

'So, so,' he would say; 'thus it is--is it?  Egypt and the Black
Watch.  D--n the Black Watch, I say!  Where is the affection that you
as a good woman----'

'I am only a girl,' she urged, piteously.

'As a good woman, say I, should feel for her husband after marriage,
even if she felt none of it for him before that little ceremony--for
little and trivial doubtless it may appear to you, madam--and your
regard for me should be all the deeper and more lasting that no vain
protestations preceded it.'

Eveline made no response, but resumed her occupation of gazing
listlessly from the back window of the drawing-room into one of those
dull and flowerless London gardens which a writer has truly described
as looking 'like a burial place without any graves;' so Sir Paget
returned to the charge.

'It is said, when love fails to beget love, it often engenders
hatred.  Is it so, madam?'

'Not in our case, I hope,' said Eveline, wearily, as she sighed, and
her slender foot in its satin shoe began to tap the carpet with
nervous impatience.  'Why did you marry me--buy me from papa?' she
asked, with a tone and bearing a little unusual in her, she was ever
so gentle and meek.

'I married you because I admired your beauty, and believed in the
love that would come after marriage--the love that is grounded not on
childish fancy, but on tried friendship and esteem.'

'Then you believed in too much,' said Eveline, driven desperate.

'Too much?' he repeated, changing colour, and jerking his head
forward.

'Yes, Sir Paget.'

'Indeed!  I asked you to be my wife in full assurance that I should
never find my confidence in you misplaced.'

'You asked mamma rather, and your confidence has not been misplaced.'

Then she paused and coloured deeply for the first time, as she
recalled that painful and passionate interview in the belvidere at
Maviswood, and Evan Cameron's farewell glance; two episodes that
seemed to have happened years ago.

Thus had a life of jealousy and 'nagging' begun for poor Eveline--a
life that was ere long to become almost insupportable--for the most
trivial matter was liable to misconstruction, or to excite suspicion.

If her eye followed a soldier in the street, which, as the daughter
of a line of soldiers, was in her not unnatural; if she ventured to
speak of the news of the day, or glance at a public journal, he
watched her; it was 'Egypt again!' that she was thinking about; and,
sooth to say, in that suspicion he was not far wrong.

Punctually a few minutes before eight, Sir Harry Hurdell and his
friend Mr. Pyke Poole were ushered into the drawing-room, and she
received them with as much sweetness, ease, and grace as if no gloomy
conversation had preceded their appearance, and she and Sir Paget
billed and cooed from hour to hour.

Fresh from the clever hands of Clairette her toilet was perfection,
and her appearance excited the admiration of her husband's friends,
who were both connoisseurs of female beauty, and disposed to be all
the more appreciative that the husband was, as they thought, 'such a
devil of a fogie.'

'I mean to have Sir Paget down at my place for a little cub-hunting,'
said Sir Harry, glancing in a mirror at his accurately-parted fair
hair and pointed moustache; 'and, if so, I hope you will accompany
him.  My sister Lucretia will make you most welcome, Lady Puddicombe.'

Ere Eveline could respond, Sir Paget warmly accepted for both, again
believing much in change of scene and change of society.

'I can mount you to perfection, Sir Paget, or you may send down your
own horses,' said Sir Harry, his eyes wandering in secret admiration
over the fair face, the soft, hazel eyes, and delicate contour of
Eveline's head, neck, and little white ears.

Sir Paget thought he would prefer his own.  Strange horses had often
tricks that might prove troublesome to a cavalier of his years and
proportions, and it was carried that the first week of October was to
find him and Lady Puddicombe at Hurdell Hall.  But Sir Paget could
little foresee the terrible and startling events to which the
apparently simple acceptance of a hospitable invitation was to lead.

'You have just come from the club, I presume?' said Sir Paget to his
brother baronet.

'Yes; just waited to see the last telegrams in the reading-room.'

'Anything fresh from Egypt?' lisped Mr. Poole, with his glass wedged
in his eye.

'Only a single telegram, which, by the way, must interest you.  Lady
Puddicombe,' said Sir Harry, with a most serious inflection of his
Voice.

'Me--how?' faltered Eveline, feeling herself grow paler, if possible,
than she really was.

'It refers to your brother.'

'My brother!'

She was pale to her quivering lips now.

'Yes; it states that an officer of the Black Watch had been killed in
action with the Bedouins, and was buried in the sand of the desert by
his friend, the Master of Aberfeldie.'

'And the officer's name?' said Sir Paget, icily.

'Was Evan Cameron.'

'Cameron!' repeated the dry lips of Eveline, who suddenly felt as one
in a dreadful dream.

Dead and buried; buried in the sand of the Egyptian desert!  Did she
hear aright--was this happening to herself or to some one else?  She
made an effort to speak, but her tongue had lost its power.

'Eveline,' she heard her husband say, 'your wits have gone
wool-gathering.'

'I beg your pardon, Sir Paget.  What is it?' she asked, faintly.

'_Sir_!  Can't you call me Paget?' said he; and the two guests
exchanged glances as much as to say,

'What is up now?'

At that moment the dinner-gong sounded, and giddily and mechanically
she took the proffered arm of Sir Harry.

Never while life lasted would Eveline forget the grotesque horror of
that little dinner, with the solemn servants in attendance, and all
its splendid yet, to her, sickening details and talk, the references
to marriages and races--hurdle, steeple, and others--on the _tapis_,
of flirtations and gossip--how terrible, how ghastly they all sounded
to her, who felt as if in a mist, out of which their voices seemed to
come hollowly, and from a vast distance, and she was compelled to
listen with one face--a dead face--coming out of that mist before her!




CHAPTER V.

DEAD AND BURIED IN THE SAND.

How she acquitted herself as hostess, how she got through that
dinner, with its many _entrées_ and courses, from the soup to the
fruit, she never knew.  It passed like a phantasmagoria--a dreadful
dream--but it was over at last; and, as one in a dream, while Sir
Harry held open the door for her, she passed from the table, not to
the drawing-room, as he naturally thought, and where he meant
speedily to join her, but swiftly to rush to her dressing-closet, to
tear off her ornaments, and fling herself despairingly upon a couch.

She recalled her strong but daily presentiment that something was
about to happen, though now the war in Egypt was virtually over, and
that terrible something had happened at last.

Could the telegram have been a mistake?  Improbable and impossible!
Though brief, it seemed too distinct in its grim details.

She felt as if suffocating with grief, and her brain reeled at the
feeble prospect of concealing it from the already exasperated Sir
Paget.

She recalled Evan's words when he parted with her at Maviswood, and
how prophetic they seemed now,

'I am going far away, my darling, and shall never see you again.
That I may find a grave in Egypt is the kindest wish you can have for
me.'

And now he had found that grave, and he was buried by the hands of
her brother Allan, not on the sunny slope of a dear highland hill, or
in the grassy glen where his forefathers lay in Stratherroch, within
sound of the waves of Lochiel, where the summer breezes and the
summer birds would be about his tomb, and the clouds and shadows of a
Scottish sky flit over it, but in the desolate sand of cruel and
barren Egypt!

There had been no solemn ceremony by his grave; he had not even a
coffin, perhaps, but was buried, as she had read of others being
buried, in a blanket only, and there to lie in the wilderness,
traversed by the antelope and jackal, till the last trumpet sounded.

She remembered his song at Dundargue.  Could it be that the manly and
bright young face, the love-lit eyes, were dulled by death now, and
that his fresh gay voice was hushed for ever?

'Dead!' wailed the girl in her heart.  'Oh, God, that he might be
raised up as Lazarus was, even though we should never, never cross
each other's paths again.  My love--oh, my love!' she murmured, in a
hushed voice, as if the walls might hear her.

'Only to the dead,' says the author of 'Mount Royal,' 'to the utterly
lost and gone, is given this supreme passion--love sublimated to
despair.  From the living there is always something kept back,
something saved and garnered for an after-gift, some reserve in the
mind or heart of the giver; but to the dead, love gives all--with a
wild self-abandonment which knows no restraint or measure.'

She had felt at first a dull, vague, sensation which became an acute
pang when certainty came upon her; but she dared not as yet shed a
tear.

Henceforward, as before, she had a part to act--that of indifference.
If possible, there must be no pallid face shown, no haggard eyes; no
tell-tale sighs must betray the agony of heart--the great sorrow that
consumed her for the loss of her dead love; and wonderingly she
looked at her white and already worn countenance in her mirror.

Oh, that Allan were returned! from him she would know all.  Allan
knew the secret of her heart, sympathised with it, and would relate
everything; but she could not divest herself of an awful and haunting
fancy that this tragedy--beyond the chances of military life--was her
fault; and that in the recklessness and despair of his heart, Evan
Cameron had risked his life too rashly and lost it.

When this conviction came upon her, tears streamed down her
cheeks--hot salt tears--which she made no effort to restrain; and on
suddenly discovering her thus--after the departure of his guests, Sir
Harry Hurdell and Mr. Poole--Sir Paget felt his soul stung with
jealous fury.

He regarded her sternly rather than lovingly, and puffed out his
chest with what he deemed an air of offended dignity.  Yet he
attempted to take her hand.

'Do not touch me,' said Eveline, imploringly; 'at least not
just--just now.'

'Upon my word, madam!  Do you understand what your romantic pity for
this--this person implies?' he asked, grimly, while polishing his
bald head with his handkerchief till it shone like a billiard ball.

'He has no father or mother--no sister to weep for him--none but
myself to sorrow for him.'

'Well?'

'And he died like a gentleman, upholding the honour of Queen and
country, and the name of Cameron,' said Eveline, a little defiantly.

'Bosh!  I suppose he was paid for all that?  But enough of this.  May
I ask, have you no home interests and home ties like other married
women?'

Eveline made no reply; so, with a violent jerk of his head, Sir Paget
spoke again.

'Listen to me, Lady Puddicombe.'

'I am doing so.'

'To me you seem like one of those oddities or evil spirits one reads
of only in novels.'

'How?'

'Having had a romance in your life, or fancying you had one, and
believing you have married the wrong man, and all that sort of stuff,
you like to live and brood on a memory.  Is it so, Lady Puddicombe?
Answer me--did you actually love this fellow Cameron?'

'Yes,' she replied, wincing, as he laid his coarse hand rather
roughly on her delicate shoulder.

'Indeed.  And you love him still?'

'He is dead--he is dead--and perhaps it is a sin to brood over the
past.'

'An infernal futility, at all events.  All this is pleasant for me,
madam,' said he, applying himself to polishing his pate again.

A wiser man might have partly ignored the affair, in the hope that it
must in time pass away; but her unmistakable emotion of grief for
Cameron's death proved somewhat beyond the patience of Sir Paget, who
recurred to it warmly.

'His demise, if untimely, is very natural; to face death and meet it
was the trade he chose, and for which the country paid him, and well,
too, as we shall find by next year's income-tax.  What more would you
have?  Others quite as good as he--better perhaps--have fallen in
this grotesque war, which, the Ministry tell us, is no war at all,
though it will be deuced expensive work to us who have to stump-up
for it,' he continued, waving his hand as he had done when addressing
the same words to his constituents at Slough-cum-Sloggit.  'Moreover,
madam, we can only die once, which is just as well.  Who is it that
likens the race of man to leaves on the trees?'

'But the leaves fall in autumn, not as he has done--my--my----'

'Love?' he suggested, with a gloomy sneer.

'No,' replied Eveline, quivering with anger.

'What then, madam?'

'My dear friend--my brother's comrade, and the saver of his life at
Tel-el-Kebir.'

For some days the matter was not referred to; Sir Paget sulked a good
deal, and dined often with his friend Hurdell at the club, while
Eveline, in her dumb grief, felt like some piece of strange machinery
that must go through the evolutions for which it was framed.

To Sir Paget she was an enraging enigma.  Dead or alive, what was
this Highland fellow now to her?  But 'who,' asks a writer, 'in
middle age, when the sordid cares of every-day life are paramount,
can comprehend the young heart's passionate mystery--the love which,
like some bright tropical flower, buds and blooms in a single
day--the love which is more than fancy!'

But a fresh impetus was given to Sir Paget's jealous anger, and a
keen edge put upon it, when a letter addressed to 'Lady Puddicombe'
arrived one morning from Messrs. Horning and Tailzie, W.S.,
Edinburgh, anent 'the will of the late Evan Cameron, Esq., of
Stratherroch,' informing her that by that document, he had bequeathed
his estate of that name to her and her heirs, whom, failing, to those
of his brother Duncan.  The letter then proceeded to detail the
encumbrances on the estate, which was rapidly freeing itself; that
besides so much arable land there was fine grouse-shooting, extending
to about eight thousand acres, yielding in favourable seasons about
nine hundred brace of birds, besides black-game, snipe, ducks, and
plover; that there was excellent trout-fishing in the river Erroch.
It then described the mansion-house, stables, kennels, and so forth,
and wound up by asking for 'her ladyship's instructions.'

There was a postscript, saying that 'the late Stratherroch seems to
have been a prime favourite with the crofters on the estate, and they
all deplore his untimely end, even with tears.'

'Oh, what does it all mean?' sighed Eveline, in utter anguish and
bewilderment.  The 'late'--how horrid--how awful did that single word
look, when she recalled the yearning eyes, the farewell glance of
Evan Cameron, as he marched past her on the departing day.

Transported with anger, Sir Paget snatched the letter from her hand,
and, adjusting his gold _pince-nez_ on his nose, focussed the lines
and glared at them; and after he had read he tossed it from him.

'An insult, by Jove, Lady Puddicombe--a deliberate insult!'

'Sir Paget,' began Eveline, but paused; she knew not what to urge or
say, though she knew but too well all the bequest implied.

'Who wants his dirty acres of Highland bog and rock?  Not I--the
presumptuous fellow!'

'Presumptuous!' repeated Eveline, with a bitter smile, as she thought
of the antecedents of the baronet of Slough-cum-Sloggit.  'Cameron's
descent is as old as the hills; his ancestors have hunted with James
V., and in battle were the comrades of Montrose and Dundee.'

'What the devil is all this to me--or to _you_, for the matter of
that?' snarled Sir Paget, puffing out his chest.  'I am at liberty to
reject this bequest on my own part.'

'But not on mine,' replied Eveline, quietly yet firmly.

'The deuce--you will accept it?'

'Why should not I--if I do injustice to none?'

'And degrade yourself in the eyes of the world!'

'How, Sir Paget?'

'What was this man to you? every man will naturally inquire.'

'None can know that he was ever even a friend to me,' said Eveline,
with difficulty restraining her tears.

'It must be rejected, I say!'

'But the estate is not left to you, Sir Paget.'

'Estate!' said he, scornfully.  'A few acres of bog and heather, and
a mansion that probably keeps out neither wind nor weather.'

So no action was taken in the matter for a time, and the letter of
Messrs. Horning and Tailzie, W.S., remained unanswered, much to the
surprise of these gentlemen (who deemed themselves persons of no
small importance), and was to remain so until the return from
cub-hunting at Hurdell Hall.

Sir Paget was sorely ruffled by this new event, and felt himself at
liberty to sneer vulgarly at Eveline's former lover, and at her
shattered fidelity to any vows she made by her marriage with himself;
whereas the poor girl had never made one.

She felt that--as a wedded wife--she must stand alone in her secret
grief, and beyond the pale of human succour or sympathy, and the
sweet words of 'Auld Robin Gray' occurred to her:

  'I daurna think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin.'


Times there were when she dreamt of Evan vividly, and that he was
with her again.  'Why should it be a miracle that the dead come
back?' asks an author; 'the wonder is that they do not.  How can one
go away who loves you and never return, nor speak, nor send any
message--that is the miracle; not that the heavens should bend down
and the gates of Paradise roll back and those who have left us
return.'  At such times he seemed near to her, and his voice was in
her ears--more near to her than he had ever been.  He loved her, but
he was gone--gone, and the grey day was stealing slowly in!

Olive, she thought, she must see Olive; doubtless Allan must have
written home to her, and his letters might contain some details of
this catastrophe that she would learn nowhere else, so she contrived
a visit to Puddicombe Villa at Southsea on their way to Hurdell Hall.
But she gained nothing by this.

Lady Aberfeldie had heard of the late event in Egypt, and saw in a
moment how it had affected her daughter.

'She is a very sensitive girl, Sir Paget,' said she, deprecatingly,
in reply to a somewhat stinging remark of his; 'and thus you see the
sudden death of this young man, so recently our guest at Dundargue,
and so long her brother's tried friend and comrade, and one to whose
courage that brother and all of us owe so much, has--not unnaturally,
I think--greatly shocked her.'

'Shocked her rather too much, apparently,' jerked out Sir Paget, with
a grimace.  'Who could have supposed that so brief an
acquaintance--shall we call it an acquaintance?--could have produced
an impression so deep.'

Lady Aberfeldie bridled up a little and crested her handsome head;
for, like Sir Paget, she had her own thoughts on the subject.

'Well, he is gone now,' said she, after a pause.

'And a devilish good thing, too,' added Sir Paget, roughly.

She made no rejoinder, conceiving that the less that was said on the
matter the better.

Eveline found Olive in a very crushed state.

Allan had never written to her, and, as yet, even his mother's letter
of explanation had not been replied to.  Perhaps he did not believe
in it.  He had left her abruptly and passionately and with a sore
heart.  Many such hearts are caught by others on the rebound, for the
void in them is more easily filled up, and often requires to be so.

'Oh, heaven,' she thought, 'if such should be the case with
Allan--not in Egypt, for that was very unlikely, but at Gibraltar or
Malta, where English ladies were to be met with.'

'Even if married, I fear you would never win the Dunmow Flitch,' Lady
Aberfeldie had said to her angrily on one occasion.

'My unfortunate money has been the cause of all this,' replied Olive.
'It excited the cunning and cupidity of that unfortunate man,
Holcroft, and has led to the saddest misconceptions and
misconstructions from the first between dear Allan and myself,' she
added, in tears.

'Most true.'

Olive knew that the doubtful position in which she had been placed
with reference to Allan had, as she thought, been fully explained
away in writing by his mother, and his father too; but from Allan
there came no letter to herself.

What did his silence mean?  Even anger were better than nothing.

'My unfortunate money,' she repeated: 'my golden chains have proved a
curse to us both.  He has ceased to love me now, and, loving him as I
do, what can my life be to me?  And how shall I live on through all
the months and years of it without him?  What if we never meet again!
He may fall in this war as his friend Cameron fell--oh, my love--not
you--not you--not _that_.'

And the luckless girl wept bitterly.




CHAPTER VI.

A SKIRMISH IN THE DESERT.

Buried in the sand!

Yes--it was all true--too true; the gay, handsome, and usually
light-hearted Laird of Stratherroch, one of the most popular fellows
in the Black Watch--he who had won the V.C. in battle with his good
claymore--he whom Eveline had known in the heyday of his life, when
the world seemed so fresh and fair to both, whom she had last seen as
a despairing and broken-hearted lover, was gone--struck down by a
bullet of some nameless Egyptian savage, buried in the desert, and
she would never see him more, though the poignancy of his farewell
would haunt her for many a day.

And thus it all came to pass.

A band of Bedouins had been hovering in the vicinity of Matarieh,
plundering and looting.  These Allan, after a consultation with
Cameron, resolved to make a demonstration against, and with
Farquharson, his sergeant, and thirty picked men, in light marching
order, they quitted the village, and about an hour before sunrise
took their way towards the desert.

The light of the coming day shone along the latter, a sandy waste,
overlooked by Jebel Mokattam, a chain of rocks abrupt and barren that
extends from Cairo to the cataracts.  They are generally flat, with
beetling summits, while below, on the face which fronts the Nile,
they are furrowed as if water-worn by the rain of ages.

On the other flank, towards Jebel Dimeshk, rises a ridge of
sand-hills that follows in the same direction at an equal distance,
all the windings and sinuosities of that which lines the eastern bank.

Between lay the winding line of the disused railway.  In front the
horizon seemed foggy or dusty, and along the desert the sun shone for
a time, as he rose, like a red ball, shorn of his rays.

In rear the party left behind the village of Matarieh, with the
clumps of palm-trees, beyond which, with the tall obelisk and the
ruins of several sphinxes, rose the great mounds of earth that mark
the site of Heliopolis, 'the City of the Sun,' the inhabitants of
which worshipped a bull called Mnevis, with the same ceremonies as
the Apis of Memphis, and where Apollo had an oracle.

Over the same ground where in 1800 a battle was fought between the
French and Turks, in which the latter were defeated with the loss of
eight thousand men and all their cannon and baggage, Allan's little
band marched merrily on towards the desert in hope to 'polish off' a
few of the Bedouins before returning to quarters.

They were well supplied with ammunition; each man had a day's rations
in his haversack, and his water-bottle filled with the red sandy
fluid of the Nile.  In Exodus we are told that the Egyptians loathed
to drink the waters of that river, and, as Cameron said, 'the men of
the Black Watch were much of the same mind.'

Now, in making a reconnaissance, Allan Graham was a trained soldier
enough to know that cover from view is important, as it enables
troops, whatever their strength, to form for action; thus he hoped to
utilise the railway bank, or, if not that, some of the sandy
undulations around it.

As the first object in reconnoitring is to get observation, with his
sergeant, who was a sharp fellow, he went at some distance in front
of his men, field-glass in hand, and looked sharply about him.

He continued to move in a north-easterly direction for nearly ten
miles till mid-day, but saw nothing of Bedouins, and then, halting
amid a clump of palms, threw out some sentinels towards the front,
piled arms, and the Highlanders in their kilts and red serges threw
themselves on the grass and prepared to make a meal of what they had
brought with them, washed down by Nile water.

There he remained till noon was long past, and he began to think of
falling back on Matarieh.

Even under the shadow of the palms they were tormented by gnats and
sandflies.

'We are in the land of the "Arabian Nights"--the land of giants,
fairies, and genii, and all that sort of thing,' said Cameron, as he
lit a cigar; 'but, if a little picturesque, Allan, the discomforts
are abominably real.'

'Surely water is lying yonder, sir,' said Sergeant Farquharson, 'and
we might get our water-bottles filled.'

All looked eagerly in the direction indicated, towards the base of
the Jebel Dimeshk range.  The sun was clear, bright, and powerful
now.  Amid the silent waste of sand a long, narrow lake seemed at no
great distance.

'If water it is,' exclaimed Cameron, 'there are certainly men moving
through it.'

'The Bedouins, by Jove!' cried Allan.  'Down, down,' he shouted to
his sentinels, 'lie down, under cover if you can.'

They lay down flat, and Allan, adopting the same position, turned his
field-glass towards the mirage, for such it was--that beautiful
optical illusion produced by the sun's rays reflected from the heated
sand, and which raises before the eye of the thirsty wayfarer the
tantalising but perfect representation of distant lakes or pleasing
sheets of water.

About eighty Bedouin horse were moving slowly from the direction of
the Jebel Dimeskh range towards the line of the railway.  Whatever
their object was, from a description given to Allan, he was certain
they were those of whom he was in search, and that their object was
to turn up in the vicinity of Matarieh after sunset, intent on
plunder, as everywhere these lawless sons of the desert were taking
advantage of the confusion of affairs in Egypt.

Some were armed with long muskets of antique form, but by far the
greater number had Remington rifles--flung away by Arabi's fugitive
soldiers--slung over their backs, or at their saddles, weapons that
had superseded the javelin, the bow, and in many instances the spear.
They were clad in barracans of dark brown wool, with floating
burnouses, many of them spotlessly white; and as they seemed to be
making slowly, for shelter doubtless, towards the clump of palms
occupied by Allan's party, which was yet beyond their range of
vision, he drew the whole off and took post behind the bank of the
abandoned railway, a movement which was fortunately quite unseen by
the foe.

Formation against cavalry would be useless, as these wild horsemen
have no idea of tactics; and, to deceive them as to his force, Allan
formed his men in extended order, three paces apart, each man lying
on his face, close under the line of the embankment.

Allan knew from experience how fire from a steep slope becomes
plunging; thus he congratulated himself that the slope for his
musketry was one that was parallel to the trajectory of the rifles.

By a single word he could, if necessary, form his men in a rallying
square on the crest of the line.  As the Bedouins came riding
forward, in a disorderly group, at an easy, ambling pace, Allan, by
means of his field-glass, was certain that in their leader he
recognised the Arab, Zeid-el-Ourdeh, whom he had succoured after his
wounds at Kassassin, and sent to the hospital at Ismailia.

He was wearing the same robes with wide sleeves, and the richly
embroidered girdle he wore when found near the camp.

'Steady and still, men,' cried Allan, 'and we'll play old gooseberry
with these beggars, as we have done everywhere else.'

They were about five hundred paces distant, a range for which the
rifles were sighted, when suddenly a Bedouin uttered a shrill cry of
alarm, and all began to unsling their firearms.  His eye had detected
a clay-coloured helmet with its red hackle on the left side.

Ere they could fire a shot, the Highlanders from their cover poured
in a deadly fire, and more than twenty men and horses went down in
confused heaps; the latter, in the agony of their wounds and terror,
kicking and lashing wildly out with their hoofs, raising clouds of
sand, while braining the skulls and breaking the limbs of the fallen
riders, whether dead or wounded; then shrieks and groans, cries and
curses loaded the air, as all who were untouched or able to keep
their saddles, after firing, half at random, a ragged volley, wheeled
round their light chargers and went off with the speed of the wind.

'Cease firing!' cried Allan Graham; 'we have taught these fellows a
lesson severe enough for the day, and I don't think they will venture
near Matarieh again.'

In that, however, he was mistaken, as he afterwards found to his cost.

'And now,' he added, as he crossed the line of railway, sword in
hand, 'to give water to the wounded, succour any we can, smash all
their weapons, and leave them to fate or their returning friends.'

He, with most of his party, approached the place where the victims of
the fusilade lay, and, so far as blood, wounds, and agony went, they
presented a very dreadful scene, and yet a trifling one when compared
with that witnessed so lately in the trenches of Tel-el-Kebir.

Many were shot outright; others, severely wounded, lay wallowing and
choking in their blood, and they regarded the victors with a firm,
scowling, and defiant expression in their long, thin, tawny faces,
and black, bright, glittering eyes, that made them look, as Allan
said, like dying eagles.

But, before anything could be done for the survivors, the fatal
episode of the day took place.

A little way apart from the group of death and agony, lay a Bedouin,
who, though untouched, was partly under his horse, from which he
freed himself, and then Cameron advanced to take him prisoner.  He
was an athletic and gigantic fellow, all bone and sinew, lithe as a
serpent, and active as the antelope of his native deserts.

Drawing a long pistol from his girdle, he levelled it at Cameron, but
it snapped, on which he flung it furiously at the head of the latter,
who ducked, and escaped it.

Several Highlanders now rushed forward, as he had drawn a large and
heavy Damascus sabre, but they paused with their hands on their locks
when Cameron cried,

'Stand back, my lads, and leave him to me!'  And in a moment both
their blades were flashing in the setting sun, for Cameron fell upon
him claymore in hand.

'May your head be covered by a whirlwind of fire!' hissed the Bedouin
in Arabic, through his clenched teeth, while he hewed away without
the least intention of surrendering.  The hood of his red and white
striped burnous had fallen back, and his whole head and face, with
flashing eyes and gleaming teeth, were displayed to view.

Cameron was a skilful swordsman, but so was the Bedouin, who was his
superior in height and muscular power.  Their blades struck red
sparks from each other.  Cameron forgot to draw his long dirk: but he
had 'Sir Garnet's' ugly jack-knife in his left hand, for parrying
purposes.  How the combat would have terminated, it is difficult to
say, but a vile Bedouin, who lay wounded close by, armed with a long,
straight sword, with the last effort of expiring nature, writhed
himself up from the sand, ran poor Cameron through the body from
behind, and fell back dead.

With a hollow groan, Cameron fell backward across him, and was about
to receive a finishing stroke from his antagonist, when the latter
was shot through the head by Sergeant Farquharson.

This catastrophe rather cooled Allan's humane ideas of succouring the
wounded.  Very few of the Highlanders had been touched, and these but
slightly.  However, it seemed as if Cameron was dying.  He was
speechless, and his mouth at times was filled with blood.  It was
impossible then to ascertain the exact nature of his wounds, or what
part of the body was injured.  Allan, full of tenderness, anxiety,
and the deepest commiseration, formed a pad of his handkerchief, and,
using his sash as a bandage, endeavoured, so far as in him lay, to
stop the bleeding, while a litter was improvised by a couple of
rifles, with a blanket stretched over them; and the party began to
fall back on Matarieh, but often had to halt, for the agony of
Cameron was great, and Allan began to despair of getting him conveyed
in life to Matarieh, which, as we have said, was nearly ten miles
distant, while, to enhance their difficulties, a troop of nearly a
hundred Bedouins were visible, pouring down a rocky gorge of the
Jebel Mokattam range; so nothing was left to Allan but to continue
his retreat, which they seemed slow or disinclined to follow up.

Yet their presence was fraught with danger, especially after the sun,
with its usual rapidity in these regions, went down like a red, fiery
ball, and the lurid haze exhaled from the flat desert on which the
darkness fell.

The stars were coming out in the blue zenith; the dew was already
beginning to fall; long and dark shadows lay across the plain, but
the line of the railway was a sure guide back to Matarieh and the
vicinity of Heliopolis.

Every step of his bearers elicited a moan of pain from Cameron, and
these went to the heart of his friend as if they had been the
utterances of a brother, while now and then the sufferer muttered his
thanks to the soldiers for their care and kindness, and his regret
for the trouble he gave them after a day of toil, and his fears that
he was retarding their retreat and thereby involving them in danger.
Of his own pain or peril he never uttered a word.

Constellations new to him and his comrades were in the sky now--a
vast blue dome that stretched far, far away, all bright with glorious
stars.

At last it was absolutely necessary to halt for a time, for all
thought the sufferer was dying, and the Highlanders said that if the
Bedouins came on again they would form square round him; and soon it
became too evident that Evan Cameron was lying 'on the bleak neutral
ground between life and death.'

Accustomed though they were to suffering and slaughter, the
Highlanders stood around him leaning on their muskets, full of
commiseration, and looking attentively at the pale face of the dying
officer and back to the desert where they had last seen the enemy
hovering; and more than one wished that the Bedouins would only come
on again.

'Has no man among us here any water?' asked Allan, for by this time
the tin bottles of the detachment were empty.

A man who was in the act of taking the stopper out of his, paused
instantly.

'Captain Graham, here is mine,' said he; 'there are only a drop or
two left, but if it was my blood I'd give it for Evan Cameron,' he
added, emphatically, with that familiarity which is peculiar to the
Highlander, and has no rudeness in it.

'Donald, thank you,' said Allan.

'My mother bides nigh the braes of Stratherroch, and I am not likely
to forget that to-night,' said the soldier, with a break in his voice.

Raising Cameron's head gently, Allan put Donald's water-bottle to his
lips, and he drank thirstily of the fetid and odious water it
contained, 'the Nile soup,' as our men called it.

Refreshed even by it for a few minutes, Evan Cameron spoke to Allan,
but in whispers, and, as they seemed to be meant for the ear of the
latter alone, the soldiers with one accord drew back a little way.

'I knew from the first that I should never pull through--nor do I
wish to do so, Allan,' said he, speaking at long intervals and with a
husky effort.

'We have faced death together in many ways, but I wish your case had
been mine, Evan, even if it is to be a fatal one.'

'Don't say that, Allan, dear fellow,' replied Evan, with that
strange, far-off expression of eye which belongs alone to a
fast-ebbing life--an expression which Allan could see even in the
starlight as he stooped close over the sufferer, 'my sight is failing
me, yet I can in fancy see Eveline--oh! so distinctly, Allan--and I
seem to hear her voice--you don't mind me saying this now, lying, as
I am here, face to face with God--the voice that seemed to whisper to
my heart.'

Allan could only press the clammy hand that never again would grasp
the broad claymore.  Evan spoke again, but still more brokenly,

'I am not jealous now of my married rival; I only sorrow for the lost
future of Eveline; married to an old man whom she may respect but
never love, and with whom she cannot have a sympathy in common.'

'You are talking too much, Evan.'

'And thinking of her rather than my prayers.  When I am lying here in
my long and peaceful sleep, far from my father's grave in bonnie
Stratherroch, she will live all the years of a young life, and, in
the time to come, will--of course, forget me.'

His voice was almost gone now, yet his eyes dilated when Allan said,
with sorrowful emphasis,

'Evan, she will never forget you.'

'Nearer me--come nearer, Allan; I--I want you to tell her--tell
her----'

What he was to tell Allan never heard, as the voice of Cameron
ceased; a change, perceptible in the clear starlight, was passing
over his face; a dew was gathering on his forehead, and dark shadows
under his eyes.

'He's gone, sir,' said Sergeant Farquharson, lifting his helmet for a
moment in mute reverence.  'Well, Captain Graham, the golden gates
have never closed upon a better officer or a braver man!  Poor Evan
Cameron,' he added, stooping over the body and looking at it
earnestly.

Allan cast a long and sad glance at it too; then he laid a hand on
the heart; it might be only syncope--no, it did not seem to be that.

The profile of his face in its stillness looked like a classic cameo
cut in high relief.  His fair, almost golden, hair, clipped close
with military precision, retained still its crispy ripple.  The brown
moustache shading the short upper lip had been somewhat untrimmed of
late; but he looked so life-like that Allan almost shuddered as he
spread the blanket over him and covered him up--for he felt that in
that wretched substitute for a shroud lay one whom he knew his
sister--married albeit as she was to another--loved better than life!

It was hard to think of so young and gallant a life being cut short
thus by the inexorable scissors of Fate; but he was gone to the 'Land
of the leal,' where there can be no sorrow nor thought of sordid
things.

'We cannot leave him lying here thus; neither can we carry him off;
while there is a chance of these Bedouin devils coming on again.
Besides, there are always jackals about,' said Allan, as he took
possession of Evan's claymore, dirk, and ring.  'Scoop a hole--a
temporary grave in the sand--and cover him up, till we can return by
daylight, and bring him into quarters for proper interment.'

The soldiers, with their hands, bayonets, and rifle-butts, hollowed a
trench some three feet deep, and therein, rolled in a blanket, they
reverently deposited the yet warm form of Cameron, and covered it up
with sand.

Allan maintained a grim silence, and, though his heart was full of
genuine grief, the remarks of his soldiers pleased him.

'Those who have lived with us and died as he has done will never be
forgotten in the regiment, sir,' said Sergeant Farquharson.

'Mourn for the mourner, I have heard my mother say in Gaelic, and not
for the dead, as they are at rest and we in tears,' said Donald, as
he hooked-on his water-bottle.

'He has none to mourn for him now but one, and she is far away,'
remarked Allan, with a swelling in his throat.  'And now fall in,
lads.'

The Highlanders marched on their way back to Matarieh in silence,
impressed by the recent episode; for, if gallant and reckless fellows
in battle, they were thoughtful and full of sorrow for the brave
young officer they had lost.

A shot or two, fired apparently at random in the distance, sparkling
out redly amid the obscurity, showed that the Bedouins were following
them up, and must have passed over the very place where Cameron lay.

The silence of the starry night was upon the world then--upon the
ridgy summits of Jebel Mokattam, and darkness now enfolded the desert
where Evan Cameron lay in such awful loneliness, without even the
grim companionship of the dead--the last Cameron of the old fighting
line of Stratherroch.

Two days after, with an ambulance waggon, Sergeant Farquharson, and
some of his men, Allan went along the line of the old railway from
Matarieh to the place where they had left the body--a place marked in
their memory by the presence of two large stones and some shrubs near
the embankment--but of these they could find no trace, though they
searched for hours, believing they might have passed them or
miscalculated the distance.

Nothing was to be seen about the real or supposed spot but sand,
smooth and drifted sand everywhere.  Thus Allan could but come to the
sorrowful conclusion that some species of sand-storm must have swept
from the desert south-eastward between the mountain ranges, and
buried every trace of the hastily-made grave.




CHAPTER VII.

HURDELL HALL.

'Welcome to Hurdell Hall!  My sister Lucretia--Lady Puddicombe and
Sir Paget, Lucretia--Sir Paget, our mutual friend Poole, you know.'

Thus did Sir Harry Hurdell introduce Eveline and Sir Paget, with much
_empressement_ and effusiveness, to his home in Hampshire, when the
carriage duly deposited them, with Mademoiselle Clairette, Sir
Paget's valet, and 'no end' of trunks and boxes in a van, at the
porte cochère.

Situated in the northern district of the shire, where the woods are
chiefly hazel, birch, alder, and willow, where flocks of deer scour
the coppice, Hurdell Hall is a fine example of the old Tudor
architecture, and, as Eveline saw it for the first time with the rays
of the evening sun casting dashes of golden light upon its ogee
gables, mullioned bay-windows, its long gravelled approach, and
stately terrace, she thought what a charming picture it would make,
with its background of oaks, which in Hampshire seldom rise into
lofty stems, but have branches that are usually twisted into
picturesque outlines.

Below the terrace lay a kind of pool, in which a couple of swans were
floating lazily, each with one leg tucked up under a wing, and where
the snow-white water-lilies gleamed in the sunshine.

Nor was the inside of the Hall--which was to be associated with
events never to be forgotten by Eveline--any way inferior to the
outside.  There were stately apartments furnished with every modern
luxury in the way of upholstery, and others where the furniture spoke
of an old, old past, and of generations of Hurdells who had long
since been gathered together in the old family vault; panelled
corridors adorned with busts of Roman emperors and gods; stuffed
tropical birds and horns of gigantic size; cabinets, swords, daggers,
helmets, and armour; and where portraits were hung of knights and
dames in brilliant colours; one of Sir Harry, who accompanied the
Royal Bluebeard to the field of cloth of gold; another who had been
the comrade of Sir Horace of Tilbury in many a field in Flanders; and
the Hurdells of later times in powdered wigs, toupees, and long
stomachers.

There was also a charming little Gothic private chapel, which had now
a luxurious divan around it, as the present Sir Harry, not being much
addicted to devotions, had turned it into a billiard-room, and a most
commodious and excellent one it was, as the niches were tall enough
to hold cues and the basin of the font was admirably calculated to
hold the balls.

Sir Harry was rather handsome, but _blasé_ in aspect and bearing;
there was an indolent and rather lascivious expression in his eyes,
the light colour of which it is difficult to define; he had a
transparent nostril and short upper lip, with long tawny moustache,
and a face which, though difficult to say why, was not a pleasing one.

His sister Lucretia, his senior by several years, was somewhat his
counterpart in appearance, and, nearer her fortieth than her
thirtieth year, was still very handsome, but handsome in a faded way;
and she received the young wife of old Sir Paget with considerable
effusiveness, kissing her on both cheeks _à la Francaise_; though
Eveline, fair, soft, and timid even in friendship, felt oppressed
rather than soothed or pleased by the society of this somewhat
_blasé_ and disappointed woman of the world, with her cold, steely
eyes, ashy-tinted hair, thin lips, and caressing manner; and Eveline
soon discovered she was vain, shallow, selfish, and not unaddicted to
white lies when they suited her purpose.

Perhaps the creature she cared most for in this world, after herself
and her brother, was a little, wheezy 'King Charles,' with a blue
ribbon and silver bell adorning its neck.

While the gentlemen were smoking and idling in the billiard-room--the
same place where Philip of Spain, _en route_ from Southampton to
marry Mary, had made his devotions--she entertained Eveline with
afternoon tea in a charming little room dark with oak-panelling, with
rare old oak furniture, and hangings of ancient tapestry that
testified to the industry of white-handed Hurdells in generations
past.

Something of _ennui_, at least, in the young face of her new
acquaintance did not fail to catch the attention of the sharp
Lucretia, who knew from the first that Eveline's marriage had been an
ill-assorted one; yet, she said, after a pause,

'You long to join the gentlemen, I think; they are not far off--only
at the end of the corridor.'

'Pardon me, I am more pleased to be with you.'

'Thanks, dear; but I fear that you and Sir Paget are a pair of
regular love-birds, and must go through a systematic amount of
billing and cooing every day.'

Eveline smiled faintly, but made no response.  Did Miss Hurdell mean
this as a sneer? she thought; it seemed so.

'Dear Sir Paget!' said Miss Hurdell again, a little irrelevantly.  'I
thought love-matches were out of fashion now.'

'She _is_ mocking me,' thought Eveline, yet the rather aristocratic
face of Lucretia was as inscrutable as her manner was suave to
sweetness.

'All who know Sir Paget respect him--he is a thoroughly good man,'
said Eveline, feeling the necessity of saying something.

'"Women always like wicked fellows," says Lefanu, in one of his
novels.  It is contrast; but it has been my experience that they do.'

'No right-minded woman would endorse this opinion of our sex, I am
assured.'

Miss Hurdell laughed at Eveline's gravity, and refilled their cups of
dragon-blue china.

'I always hated the idea of being married,' said she.

'Why?' asked Eveline.

'Because it would make life--I thought--so tame.'

'How odd!'

'Ah, no doubt you think so.  I didn't care about being engaged and
all that sort of thing; but no, I never would have married.'

Sooth to say, she had never had an offer, or been engaged, in her
life.

'It is so nice to be a _fiancée_--the object of daily attention.'

'Then you must have been engaged to know all this, Miss Hurdell.'

'Like yourself, dear, of course--but call me Lucretia.  A girl has
more freedom when engaged than before it; though the envy of her
female friends, she can be more natural with her gentlemen friends,
and may say many a merry and rantipole thing she dared not have said
before.  Goldsmith was right when he makes Dr. Primrose declare that
courtship is generally a happier state than marriage.  To me it seems
to turn the butterfly into a caterpillar.'

Eveline knew what to think of these novel views, but she sighed as
she thought of what her own existence was now.

'To me,' resumed the fair Lucretia, 'it always seemed as if, when the
wedding-ring was slipped on my slender finger, I should have nothing
left to live for; that my existence would belong wholly to another
person.'

Eveline set down her tea-cup and looked at the speaker with something
of mute wonder.  In society she had met with many strange persons,
but none who had such odd views as the mature chatelaine of Hurdell
Hall.

'But you would have your husband to live for,' she urged gently, but
certainly not thinking of her _own_.

'A very commonplace style of living, I should think.'

'Not if one marries for love,' said Eveline softly.

'As you married' (old was on her lips) 'as you married dear Sir
Paget.'

Eveline felt her colour rise, yet she only said, 'But--but to marry
with any doubt in one's heart would be deception.'

'Well,' said Miss Hurdell, raising her eyebrows, 'if a woman may not
deceive her own husband whom has she a right to deceive?'

This was a new view of the matter to poor Eveline, who began to have
rather a horror of her hostess.

'There goes the dressing-bell, dear--we dine at eight,' said
Lucretia, rising; 'let me conduct you to your room.'

Once there, Eveline was free to give full vent to her own thoughts.
She would never see that lonely grave in the desert where Evan
Cameron lay; but to her mind it was sacred, as of old was the place
whereon the angel of the Lord alighted.

'Oh for some news--news of how it all came about!  If Allan would
only write to me--or to Olive; he surely will tell her.  This is more
than I can bear!' and interlacing her slender white fingers--a way
she had contracted now when alone--she pressed them with palms
outward, against her throbbing forehead, as if she meant to break
them.

Alas! she was to learn too soon tidings of another dire calamity, and
_why_ Allan was unable to write to any one.

There was no trace of all this deep emotion in her soft face when she
descended to the drawing-room, with a velvet dress of that blue which
so suited her pale complexion, cut square at the neck, and having
elbow sleeves with lace, and rich mosaics set in gold clasping her
white neck, and exquisitely rounded arms that were so white and taper.

There could be no two opinions about her rare beauty, and Sir Harry
Hurdell and his fast friend--fast in more ways than one--both
acknowledged it at a glance, as their sharp and critical eyes took in
every detail of her witching face, her rounded girlish cheek, her
sweetly curved mouth, with its short upper lip, her nose and delicate
nostrils.

Sir Harry Hurdell was very sceptical of the purity of all women.  He
would not have believed in that of his own mother had she been alive;
so he was perhaps to be pardoned for deeming that Lady Puddicombe
'was just like the rest,' whatever that might mean.

He was intensely gratified and glad that the girl was so young and
lovely, and that her husband was so old and so common-place: thus he
resolved, in his own phraseology, 'to enter stakes for the filly--to
make his innings if he could, or the devil was in it!'




CHAPTER VIII.

SIR HARRY.

There was an air of lassitude, of settled melancholy, and at times of
abstraction, apparent about Eveline, which she could not always
successfully conceal, that did not fail to impress and surprise the
baronet of Hurdell Hall and his sister, and the latter observed her
narrowly when they were together in the drawing-room.

'I have heard that you sing beautifully, Lady Puddicombe,' said she,
opening the piano.

'I used to sing--a little,' replied Eveline.

'Used to sing!  Why drop so charming an accomplishment?'

'I have had thoughts of late that make me sad.'

'We must cure you of all that.  What style of music do you love most?'

'I love all music that is beautiful.'

'And songs?'

'That are melancholy.'

'Then sing me some favourite thing before the gentlemen join
us--there is a dear, do.'

Thus urged, and fearing to appear ungracious, Eveline seated herself
before the instrument--a grand and very stately one it was, and began
to sing in a voice that became tender, passionate, and beautiful,
touching; even the somewhat arid heart of her listener--by two of the
verses especially:--

  'Perchance, if we had never met,
  I had been spared this mad regret,
  This endless striving to forget,
          For ever and for ever!

  . . . . . .

  Ah me, I cannot bear the pain,
  Of never seeing thee again,
  I cling to thee with might and main,
          For ever and for ever!'


She felt as if she were singing to Evan, who, perhaps, in spirit was
hovering near her; for Eveline was beginning at times to have strange
fancies now.  There were tears in her voice as she sang, and there
were tears in her eyes too; but she paused abruptly as the gentlemen
came in from the dining-room, and the eyes of Sir Paget were fixed
inquiringly and reprovingly upon her.  Her voice seemed to pass away,
nor could any entreaties of Sir Harry and his sister make her
conclude the song--a well-known one.

'Hah--thereby hangs a tale!' thought the fair Lucretia, as Sir Harry
conducted Eveline back to her chair, and took a seat by her side.

No idle or constitutionally dissipated man can withstand the
temptation of attempting to fascinate a pretty woman, and, if
possible, of eclipsing another man, and to eclipse one like old Sir
Paget would seem no very difficult task; so, while talking quietly
with Eveline on the last play, the last news, or any current subject,
Sir Harry was thinking to himself, while admiring the contour of her
head, her rich brown hair, long eyelashes, and lovely little hands,

'By Jove, if old Pudd would only go off the hooks, anyhow!  She can't
care a straw for him, don't you know, with his old bald pate that he
is always jerking forward like a hen when she has laid an egg.  She
was in love with some fellow who has gone to Egypt--so Holcroft told
me--been engaged to him perhaps; but her mother was set upon her
marrying old Pudd's coin, and among them all they talked her into it,
no doubt.  Poor little girl, I must try to console her.'

Lucretia Hurdell, who at times affected girlish airs, now brought
that piece of drawing-room foolery, her 'Confession Book,' upon the
_tapis_.

'You must positively write me yours, dear Lady Puddicombe,' said she.

'Or permit me to write there for you,' suggested Sir Harry.  'Now to
begin--"Were you ever in love?"'

'The idea of asking a married woman that,' exclaimed Miss Hurdell.

'If so, how often?' continued her brother.

'I would say "never," according to the novelist's idea of it,'
replied Eveline, with an air of annoyance.

'Don't know what that idea is,' said Sir Henry, eyeing her askance
and admiringly.

'I should rather say I have been in love, but never mean to be so
again.'

Eveline shivered as she said this, for while conversing apparently
with Mr. Pyke Poole the cold eyes of Sir Paget were upon her again.

She felt the rashness of her speech.  It was offensive to him, and
was not without some point in the mind of Sir Harry.

The cub-hunting was not to begin for a few days yet, and meanwhile
the master of the house followed her about pretty persistently, so
that she had, ere long, a restless feeling about it.  When departing
on a riding-party he anticipated Sir Paget by swinging her into the
saddle, adjusting her skirts and reins, leaving Pike Poole to do that
office for Miss Hurdell, to whom, in return for pleasant quarters, he
usually devoted himself, while she, with all her alleged indifference
to matrimony, was not indisposed to receive his attentions.

There was something in the occasional gaze of Sir Harry that puzzled
the innocent Eveline and made her feel restless under it, especially
when he hung over her at the piano, as he constantly did; and now she
played more than she cared for, to avoid conversation and have
freedom to indulge in her own sad thoughts.

'Surely you must be tired of standing there so long, Sir Harry,' she
said once, with surprise.

'Tired of what--listening to you or gazing on you?' he replied,
lowering his voice for her ear alone; 'either were impossible.'

If he had been addressing a barmaid he could scarcely have made a
more pointed remark; but so full was Eveline of thoughts too deep for
words--thoughts of the untimely fate of one who loved her so
dearly--to whose fate or past existence she dared not refer, and for
whom she dared not wear even a black ribbon--that she did not
perceive the admiration she was exciting in the breast of Sir Harry
and in the quiet purity of her own heart that such sentiments as his
could exist, never occurred to her.

He ventured on one occasion to say something very pointed about the
beauty of her hands as she idled over the piano keys.

'As there are other ladies in the room, I cannot compliment you on
your discrimination, Sir Harry,' she replied, coldly.  'But what do
you mean by saying such things to me?' she added.

She began at last to perceive that there was a meaning in his voice.
She felt offended, and wished the cub-hunting would begin, that the
visit of herself and Sir Paget to Hurdell Hall might come the sooner
to an end.

'If I could only achieve a good long and quiet walk and talk with
her,' grumbled Sir Harry to himself; 'but in this cursed place we are
always interrupted--can't attempt to make my innings or be with her
alone.  Lucretia, Poole, or some one else always turns up, and
she--herself--never gives a fellow the chance wanted.'

Though innately wicked in heart and rejoicing that the poor girl had
made--or been compelled by others to make--an ill-assorted marriage,
something of pity for her began to mingle with his nefarious ideas
and hopes, and that pity was as much akin to love as his _blasé_ soul
could feel.

'It is a regular case of Beauty and the Beast, this marriage of old
Pudd's,' thought he.

Finding her promenading on the terrace alone one evening overlooking
the pool where the swans swam among the snow-white water-lilies, he
hastened to join her.

'I don't think you have seen our conservatories,' he said.  'Permit
me to show you them.'

'Thanks, I do so love flowers.'

They entered the long glazed avenues of potted plants and rich
exotics, where rustic sofas with luxurious cushions were placed under
the feathery foliage of acacias, and after idling a little, admiring
flowers that were of great beauty and the perfection of professional
gardening, Sir Harry brought her a tiny bouquet of beautiful and
sweetly-scented violets, which, thoughtlessly, she placed in the
bosom of her dress.

His eyes gleamed as he saw her do this.  He said,

'So charmed to see the place assigned to my gift.'

'Why?'

'When I know what the flower imports in the language of flowers.'

'What does the violet import?' asked Eveline, shortly.

'Is it possible you do not know?'

'I do not.'

'It means eternal love and constancy.'

'Indeed,' responded Eveline, with a tone of indifference.  She felt
inclined to detach the bouquet from her dress, and restore it to the
giver or deposit it on one of the iron shelves, but as that might
have implied that she understood too much, she simply quitted the
conservatory and went once more upon the terrace.

'The air is chilly here after the hot atmosphere of the
conservatories,' said Sir Harry, greatly encouraged by the acceptance
of his flowers; 'and that Shetland shawl is only an apology for a
wrap over your head, though you look charming in it--permit me,' he
added, as he drew it closer round her.

Their eyes met as he did so, and she read an expression in his
downward gaze that made her pale cheek crimson, and then grow pale
again; and to avoid anything more she re-entered the house.

'It is because I am married to an old man that he dares to treat me
thus, and so thinks little of me,' she began to reflect--'an old man
whose eyes are ever full of angry reproach about poor Evan, who never
wronged him, even in thought.  Oh, how hateful, how loathsome my life
is!  If luxurious it is duplicity, all!'

She actually began to think she would go away somewhere--where her
father and husband would never find her--change her name and be a
governess or something of that kind.  The idea of suicide or anything
so dreadful, in all her sorrow, bitterness, and humiliation of
spirit, never occurred to her for a moment.  She only hoped that God
would direct her, pardon her for these rebellious feelings against
fate, and let her live her own way and then die.

Why did she not run away before her absurd marriage? she thought now,
and before her young life was so utterly wrecked by it?  But she
forgot how, under the motherly care and authority of Lady Aberfeldie,
she had always been in a certain constraint and awe, and how her own
sudden jealousy of Evan Cameron had helped to bring that catastrophe
about.

But this growing admiration on the part of Sir Harry Hurdell was a
new experience in life to her.

She was justly incensed by it, and knew that he was presuming upon
her youth, her husband's age, and the too apparent aspect of an
ill-assorted marriage.  Their visit must be cut short at all risks;
but what excuse was she to make to Sir Paget; for, with her knowledge
of his jealousy of one who was dead, how was she to enlighten him on
the subject of Sir Harry, whose manner proved to her somewhat
obnoxious.

The truth was that he was so much in the use and wont of having
'sherry-glass flirtations' at railway buffets, and so forth, that he
was quite incapable of showing his admiration or regard in a subtle
or pleasing, respectful or cavalier way, and even his own grooms
might have been better hands at it than he, the lord of that grand
old ancestral home.




CHAPTER IX.

THE CUB-HUNTING.

The gong for breakfast sounded betimes at Hurdell Hall on the morning
of the first day's cub-hunting, as an early hour is always most
favourable for scent, and, as several guests were invited, an ample
meal was spread in the great dining-room, the several bay windows of
which overlooked the terrace and stately chase that spread far away
beyond it.

Sir Harry and his sister were the first who appeared, and the latter
looked round for the morning papers, but could see none.

Now, though the 'fair Lucretia,' as her friends frequently called
her, cared nothing about the war in Egypt, she liked to read about
the movements of 'the upper ten thousand'--their births, marriages,
deaths, and so forth--to all of which she addressed herself first, as
a City man does to the money article.

'Where are the papers, Harry?' she asked.

'I have ordered the butler to take them all away,' said he.

'Even the _Morning Post_?'

'Yes; even the _Post_.'

'Why?'

'Look here.  I do not wish Lady Puddicombe to see _this_,' he
replied, taking a newspaper from his pocket, and indicating a
paragraph--another brief telegram from Egypt--which ran thus:

'The detachment of the Black Watch which was sent to Matarieh to make
a demonstration against the Bedouins of Zeid-el-Ourdeh has been
ordered back to head-quarters, and seems to have lost its other
officer--a very distinguished one--Captain Allan Graham, the Hon. the
Master of Aberfeldie, who is supposed to have fallen into some of the
same butcherly hands amid which Professor Palmer and his companions
perished.'

'Good heavens! _her_ brother!' exclaimed Miss Hurdell, actually
changing colour.

'Yes; and it must be kept from her--to-day, at least,' said Sir
Harry, concealing the fatal newspaper.

'Taken by the Bedouins--but she must learn it some time.'

'Well, I don't want her to learn it just now, poor girl, at all
events.  I can't make a mull of the arrangements for the day, and I
don't want her to learn it here, if possible.'

'Why not here?'

'Certainly not from me.'

'Why not from _you_?'

'I hate to be imparter of evil news.'

'Oho,' said Miss Hurdell, elevating her eyebrows; 'sets the wind in
that quarter?'

'What do you mean, Lucretia?'

'Well, that she is not the first married lady you have taken a tender
interest in.'

'Lucretia!' exclaimed the baronet, in a tone of angry expostulation,
as some of their gentlemen guests came noisily in, in Russell cords,
top boots, and spurs, some in pink and some in black coats.


At that moment elsewhere were others who were more deeply and
terribly interested in the startling tidings from Matarieh, flashed
by the same electric wire.

Lord Aberfeldie was leisurely opening the _Times_, which Mr.
Tappleton had duly cut and aired for him, with the other morning
papers.  His eyes ran rapidly over the columns for the last, news
from Egypt, which seemed very tame now, as all the fighting and
excitement were over; so Lady Aberfeldie was not watching him, as she
used to do, with anxiety, and neither was Olive, who was already deep
in the pages of the _Queen_, when an exclamation that escaped him
made them both start.

'What is the matter?' cried Lady Aberfeldie.  'You look ill, dear.'

'Uncle, what do you see?' added Olive.  'Is anything wrong
with--with----'

'Allan--yes.'

He was pale with a strange grey pallor, totally unlike his usually
sunburned and healthy tint, and he looked dazed as his face sank
forward on his breast.

'Our poor boy--our poor boy!'

'God help us, Aberfeldie!  What is it?'

Olive snatched up the paper, and, after reading the paragraph we have
copied, reeled into a chair.  And now a great horror fell upon all
the three, the mother's memory flashing back to the baby-boy that had
crowed and smiled upon her knee, and whose first tottering efforts to
cross the nursery floor she remembered yet.

Lord Aberfeldie, after recovering a little from the shock,
telegraphed to the War-Office for further information, but could
obtain none.  They read the fatal paragraph again and again, till
every word of it seemed to be burned into their brains, and could but
indulge in endless surmises, and hope against hope; for had not the
public prints been teeming with the harrowing details of the capture
of Professor Palmer, Captain Gill, and Lieutenant Charrington, and of
them being pitilessly slaughtered by the Bedouins of the Aligal tribe?

As Olive recalled all this, her blood grew cold with apprehension.
The paragraph, though a terrible one, was frightfully vague.  He was
'supposed to have fallen' into the hands of the Bedouins.  At all
events, his party had come into Grand Cairo _without him!_

She, like Lady Aberfeldie, could not realise it for a time.
Alternately she sat like one stunned, and then walked up and down the
room with her slender fingers interlaced tightly and clasped upon her
head, as if she would thereby still the trouble that throbbed in her
brain and repress her heavy sorrow.

In memory and imagination how often did she rehearse her angry
parting scene with poor Allan and the last time she saw him--the
forcible embrace of Hawke Holcroft; the latter's mocking love-making;
the horror and loathing with which his touch inspired her; and
Allan's terrible glance as he flung away and left her--left her for
ever, as it seemed now.

Allan taken captive; he was sure to be slain like those of whom she
had read so much lately.  He was gone from her, and never more--never
again could she show her repentant love for him, or make up for the
omissions and follies of the past by days of tenderness in the time
to come.

All was over now!

Profound was the speechless grief of his parents, and she was past
attempting to console them.

'Oh, Olive darling, don't look so strange!' said Ruby Logan, who had
come on a visit to them at Puddicombe Villa.

The tears were running down Ruby's cheeks, while those of Olive were
strangely dry, as if her fount of tears was frozen as yet.

Of Evan Cameron, if they thought at all amid this home calamity, they
knew the worst--that he was dead and buried like so many of his
brother-soldiers who fell at Tel-el-Kebir; but of Allan they had yet
the worst to know, if aught was ever known at all, which was
extremely improbable.

So the long day passed on and night came, and Olive stood at the open
window looking out at the waters of Spithead, the cold air from the
sea blowing upon her face.  She was in a kind of waking trance rather
than deliberate thought, and strange figures like a phantasmagoria
seemed to evolve themselves out of the darkness.

But to return to the hunting breakfast at Hurdell Hall.

All unconscious that a fresh sorrow would fill her tender heart ere
long, Eveline came down in a charming morning-dress, looking pure and
pale as a young arum lily, and was at once the cynosure of many
admiring eyes; for, in addition to Sir Harry, Sir Paget, and Mr.
Poole, there were seven or eight others present, all in high spirits
and eager for the sport.  Not that Sir Paget affected field sports
much, but he thought that it became his position to do so, and more
especially as he was the husband of so young a wife, to display a
certain amount of juvenility.

All present were ruddy-featured country gentlemen of various ages,
and while discussing an ample and genuine hunting-breakfast, though
some who were connected with the farming interest spoke of the
weather and the turnip-fly, of the Devonshire breed and short-horns,
of mangold-wurzel and the rotation of crops, matters about which,
sooth to say, Sir Paget and Mr.  Poole knew no more than they did
about the philosophy of the Infinite, the conversation chiefly ran on
the matter in hand that day--the disadvantage of having the dogs'
collars too tightly buckled, of coupling a young hound with an old
one, and so forth.

'A very bad plan,' said Sir Harry, 'as the older dogs always vent
their spite on the younger by biting and rolling over them.'

'Because the pulling on both sides is not even,' said the Squire of
Furzydowns, a noted old sportsman, 'and, if a pair of dogs so coupled
come across a donkey, there is sure to be a row, for, when a bullock
will look round in stupid wonder, a donkey is apt to fly at hounds
with tooth and hoof.'

'A glorious morning this for the scent,' said Sir Harry; 'a dry
autumn one.  And now let us be off.  The advantage of hunting early
is that cubs or foxes, after a late supper or early breakfast, are
seldom in a condition to run long, and get blown, as we all know.'

To Sir Paget, who had neither heart nor interest in sport, and was
rapidly discussing the weather in all its probabilities, as to
whether there would be a change or continuance of its present aspect
and condition, Sir Harry said,

'Puddicombe, are you still determined to ride that bay horse with the
white star?'

'Yes,' replied Sir Paget, with just the slightest _soupçon_ of
bravado.

'Remember, I have warned you that he is rather a vicious brute, and
apt to shy his fences.'

'Please, do not ride him, Sir Paget,' urged Eveline, in a whisper;
'do not, for my sake.'

'I should rather think of my own, if I do it for anyone's sake at
all,' he snarled.  He could not forgive her the general pallor and
sadness of her face.  Death, it is said, hallows the dead anew to the
living.  So it would be with the memory of Evan Cameron in the mind
of Eveline, thought Sir Paget bitterly, nor was he far wrong.  And,
no doubt, it was rather hard upon him to know that his wife's
thoughts were all of another; but how innocently!

'As regards the bay horse,' he added, 'I will take my chance.'

He was loth to appear unable to do anything, and always deemed such
advice as the present an imputation on his age or capability; thus,
he did many a thing he would not have done had Eveline been twenty
years older.

After a few words aside with Sir Harry, Eveline turned again to her
husband, who had now left the table, and was finally adjusting his
tan-coloured boot-tops.

'Do not ride the horse,' said she, entreatingly.  'From what I hear,
he is beyond you.'

'Is he?' snarled Sir Paget, who was in one of his worst humours this
morning.  'But let me tell you, Lady Puddicombe, that I know
something about the choice of a horse, if I don't about the choice of
a wife!'

Eveline shrank back at this rude speech, and thought that, sooth to
say, he knew little how to choose either.

'Well--ride the horse, if you will,' said she, resignedly.

'I shall!' he replied, sharply.

Lucretia detected that something was wrong, and, raising her voice in
reply to something the Squire of Furzydown had said, she exclaimed,
laughingly,

'Ah, yes, the country is indeed glorious; for here you can have eggs
to breakfast that are laid while your hair is being dressed, and
flowers on the table fresh with the morning dew on them--yet, I love
London most, after all, especially in the season.  And now,' she
added, 'shall my Charlie have its nicey, nicey breakfast of cream?'

And she emptied a silver jug of the latter into a china bowl for her
wheezy spaniel.

'What's up with old Sir Peter Teazle?' whispered her brother.

'That is more than I can tell you, Harry.'

The two ladies came forth to the door to see the gentlemen mount and
depart.

Sir Paget got into his saddle with some difficulty, as the bay hunter
swayed round and round, laid its ears back, and looked askance at
him, with red and bloodshot eyes.

Eveline knew not of her brother's calamity, and neither did Sir
Paget, for none had spoken of Egypt or Egyptian news, and no one at
Hurdell Hall was particularly interested in the Black Watch, herself
excepted; but she felt a mysterious and unaccountable prevision of
coming evil, and once more drew near to offer her pretty hand to Sir
Paget, doing so with affected playfulness, as the eyes of others were
admiringly upon her; but he, giving full rein to his thoughts about
that dead Cameron, whom she had loved and he hated, stooped from his
saddle, and said to her, with a bland smile meant also for other eyes,

'I have read, Lady Puddicombe, that "nothing exalts a man so much in
a woman's mind as his dying.  Look at the affection of widows as
compared with that of wives."  Ah, you are sorrowful, no doubt; but
sorrow takes a long while to kill anyone.'

She knew well what he meant.  Her pale cheek crimsoned, and she
turned without a word, deeming it both absurd and cruel that he
should thus be retrospectively jealous.

The hunters rode merrily off, all in high spirits, save Sir Paget,
who jerked away with his head and was disposed to sulk, for the visit
to Hurdell Hall had wrought no change on Eveline; thus he did not,
like his companions, enjoy the delightful sense of rest and peace in
the cool morning ride to covert.

The country was silent; ploughmen and shepherds were, as yet,
scarcely abroad; and the full-fed cattle lay couched on the damp
grass that glistened with dew, and from amid which their breaths rose
like silvery steam, and ere long the pack was in sight--Grasper,
Pilot, Holdfast, Catch, and all the rest of them--

  'With tails high mounted, ears hung low, and throats
  With a whole gamut filled, of heavenly notes'

--at least in the estimation of the huntsmen.

Ere long the pack was put into the covert, and stirrup leathers were
tightened and readjusted in hot haste, but with the hunting, the
whipping of unbroken hounds that took to running after sheep, the
gallops over a few fields to get up an appetite for an early luncheon
at the Squire of Furzydown's, the 'chopping' of cubs, our story has
nothing to do, save in so far as one episode of the day is concerned.

Sir Paget in his heart wished 'the whole affair at Jericho,' or in a
warmer latitude.  To him it was no amusement to set out without time
for shaving, to breakfast at an untimeous hour and before he could
get up an appetite, and to ride through the morning mist, with icy
feet and grasping reins sodden with dew, with the certainty of an
attack of rheumatism, when he should have been cosily nestling in
bed; and in addition to all these, having a terrible conflict ever
and anon with the bay hunter.  Sir Harry thought him 'a silly old
fogie, who _would_ go cub-hunting to show the world how juvenile he
was,' and he was now beginning to console himself with the prospect
of a luxurious luncheon at Furzydown and the long, lazy afternoon he
would enjoy there before riding leisurely back in the evening to
dinner at Hurdell Hall, when Sir Harry would be sure to sing them the
old Coplow hunt song--

  'Talk of horses and hounds
   And the system of kennel,
  Give me Leicestershire nags
   And the hounds of old Menyell!'


To Eveline the long day after the early breakfast passed very slowly
at the Hall.  She was in no anxiety for Sir Paget's speedy return,
especially after the cloudy manner of his departure, but there were
no other lady visitors there just then, and she and Lucretia Hurdell
had not a thought, sympathy, or topic in common, and she sighed in
utter weariness of spirit as the October day drew to a close, and the
brown and purple shadows of evening began to fall.

She thought how many such empty days as this were before her, as
autumn passed into winter, winter into spring, and the joyless
summer--joyless at least to her--would come again.  Every morning
with its hopelessness, every noon with its listlessness, every
evening seeming more blank than the one that preceded it.  Would she
ever more feel bright and merry as at Dundargue, and regain her sweet
and playful habits of caressing affection?

And for whom?

She stood in one of the many beautiful Tudor bay windows overlooking
the terrace and chase, idly and full of her own thoughts, and
curiously enough, to her, the rustle of the ivy on the painted panes,
of leaves as they fell from the trees, the stillness of the evening
hour, and the cawing of the rooks in the old belfry of the house
seemed ominous of coming evil.

Dusk had come on, the trees were taking strange shapes against the
sunset sky, a bat circled noiselessly before her, and the silver
crescent of the moon came out above a coppice.

A few of these trivial things were, by after events, fixed in her
memory, and associated with that calm and almost sultry October
evening--the lurid brightness of the sun as he set beyond the black
stems of the trees of the chase, the perfume of roses from a majolica
jardinière in the bay window, and the angry hum of a great bee
entangled among the lace of the curtains.

Suddenly she became aware that a group of men, some on horseback and
some on foot, was slowly approaching the house by the avenue.  Amid
this group were four carrying a burden--a man apparently--on a door,
or some such improvised litter.

Then appeared a groom leading a horse by the bridle--the bay hunter
with a white star on his forehead!

A gasping cry escaped her; her poor, torn heart leaped, and then
seemed to cease beating, with the dreadful certainty that
something--a new calamity--had happened.




CHAPTER X.

ALLAN'S ADVENTURE.

Evil tidings travel fast in these our days of electricity, and true
it was that the unfortunate Allan Graham had fallen into the hands of
the Bedouins, but nothing more was known.

He had disappeared from Matarieh!

When his detachment marched into headquarters, Sergeant Farquharson
reported that the Master of Aberfeldie had left the village for a
ramble in the vicinity one evening, so far as could be known, and had
not returned.  After a careful search by the Highlanders at a certain
spot, a cigar-case which had been given to him by Cameron of
Stratherroch had been found, and in the immediate vicinity the soil
bore the impression of foot and hoof marks, as if a struggle of some
kind had taken place.  If killed he had not been killed there, as his
body could not be found.

Beyond these meagre and unsatisfactory details nothing more was
known, save that the Bedouins, intent on plunder and outrage, had
been daily hovering about in the vicinity of the mounds and ruins of
Heliopolis.

Allan had felt very lonely after the loss of his friend Cameron, all
the more lonely and full of tender interest for the general
circumstances of his life and fate, and thus--as the sergeant
reported--he had rambled from the village where his men were
cantoned, a little way into the vicinity to smoke and to ponder over
the past and future.

After Cameron's catastrophe he felt himself more disposed to think of
Olive, and to think kindly and tenderly, and of his mother's
explanatory letter concerning the extraordinary conduct of Holcroft
and Olive's love and grief; for we are told that 'among all the many
kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is
the strongest and most enduring; when passion comes to unite its
force to long affection, love is at its spring tide,' and in childish
affection had the love of Allan Graham and Olive Raymond begun.

He lay stretched on a patch of grass, where two or three banana-trees
grew near a ruined wall.  The setting sun shed its red light far
along the desert that stretched to the land of Goshen, with its
luxuriant plains--yea, to the far horizon--and Allan, a thoughtful
and a well-read man, as he looked around him, reflected, as he often
did, how strange was the land where just then his duty led him--how
strange that the Egyptians were there, without a tradition of a
parent stock or of another land; that it was only known that a few
generations after the Deluge they had become a great nation.  In the
words of Apollonius Rhodius:

  'Oldest of mortals they who peopled earth,
  Ere yet in heaven the sacred signs had birth.
  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
  Ere men the lunar wanderings learned to read,
  Ere yet the heroes of Deucalion's blood
  Pelasgia purpled with a glorious brood;
  The fertile plains of Egypt flourished then,
  Productive cradle of the first of men.'

Allan thought as he manipulated and lit another cigar, that the
Egyptians of Arabi Pasha must be of different and inferior stuff from
those to whom the poet of the Argonauts referred.

And there, but a little way off, lay Heliopolis and Matarieh, two
places of great and solemn memories--Heliopolis, where Herodotus
sought the wisest men in Egypt; where Strabo says they pointed out
the house of Plato, where he then resided; where Potiphar lived, who
bought Joseph from the patriarch; and Matarieh, a spot where the
Blessed Virgin, St.  Joseph, and the Holy Child Jesus tarried,
including a well under a withered sycamore in which--according to the
legendaries--the Holy Mother washed her Divine Infant's linen; a spot
the turbanned Mussulmans still view with respect; and thereby was the
piper of Allan's company playing 'The Evening Retreat,' and from the
distance, over the flat ground, came the sound of his pipes, as he
played 'The Birks of Aberfeldie.'

Perhaps it was that his reflections were not of a very lively nature,
or that he was wearied by a long reconnaissance that morning in the
direction of El Khan-Kah, but he, perilously for himself, dropped
insensibly asleep, all unaware that a party of Bedouin horsemen, with
hoofs muffled in the soft sand, had formed a kind of semi-circle
round him, cutting off all chance of escape.

He could not have been asleep more than five minutes when the little
prick of a lance which drew blood roughly roused him.  He started to
his feet and found himself confronted, surrounded indeed, by some
twenty dusky sons of the desert, with hawk-like features, eyes that
gleamed, and teeth that glistened exultantly.

The adjective had rather an unpleasant sound just then, so Allan said,

'And if not ransomed?'

The Bedouin slapped the butt of his Remington rifle and grinned,
showing all his pearly teeth, with fierce signification.

'Who is your leader?' asked Allan, after a pause.

'That you will discover when you see him.'

'I trust he will spare my life, at all events.'

'What does your life, or the lives of all the accursed Franks in the
world, matter?' exclaimed another Bedouin; 'may you all perish by the
hand of God by drowning, as Pharaoh and his host perished, or by His
causing the earth to open and swallow you up, as, the Koran tells us,
happened to Korah!'

Whether a rumour had reached them of the sharp manner in which
Colonel Warren overtook and punished the Arabian assassins of
Professor Palmer and his companions in misfortune, Allan knew not.
One fact was evident, that they were resolved to lose no time in
carrying him off to their tents among the sandy recesses of Jebel
Dimeshk.

They ambled on their way so fast, keeping him at a species of run,
that he was on the point of sinking, and besought them to spare him a
little; so, at the command of their leader, they halted for a little
time in the starlight, and, weary and worn with toil and many
emotions, he threw himself on the ground to rest.

He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to think over his new and
calamitous position, and the chances of achieving an escape from it.
If money was required--unless the sum demanded proved too
enormous--he could produce a ransom, and he turned uneasily on his
sandy couch as he thought over all his chances of success.

How like a horrible dream--a nightmare it all appeared--as those
terrible hours spent in the vault at Dundargue had done.

What would be thought of his disappearance by the regiment, and at
home, and memory flashed back to his soldierly father and tender
mother--for, with all her aristocratic pride, tender she had ever
been to him--so his first thoughts were of her.  'In the man whose
childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that
can be touched to gentle issues;' so--a captain now, and in such
savage hands--his first ideas were of his mother's grief, rather than
of poor, repentant Olive.

He might be butchered in the desert, and never heard of again, for
his life was at the mercy and caprice of the most lawless people in
the world.

His disappearance as a mystery would soon become public property at
home.  There would, he knew, be all manner of newspaper paragraphs,
suggestions, and surmises for a few weeks, and then, when these
ceased, his story and his fate would be as much forgotten as last
year's snow.

Again his captors began their march towards the mountains; and times
there were, as he struggled forward to keep pace with them, when, in
fierce revolt against the whole situation and its dreadful
uncertainties, he felt as if his heart would burst, and a kind of
agonised hopelessness crept into it.

The Bedouins conveyed him some five and twenty miles or more into the
mountains, till they reached a kind of oasis, where their tents,
which were very numerous, stood.  Day was on the point of breaking,
and Allan was utterly worn out.  However keen excitement may be,
Nature will demand her due, so he slept on a dirty Bedouin
_barracan_, and ere he did so, so great was the mental and bodily
toil he had undergone, that he felt a kind of pleasure as drowsiness
came upon him--a happiness to find oblivion--oblivion for a time
even.  To forget was a species of joy.  And so he slept, despite
those plagues of Egypt, the gnats, mosquitoes, and sand-flies.

In the morning he was informed that the chief of the tribe, who would
be the arbiter of his fate, was as yet absent; and that, if he made
the slightest attempt to escape, he would be shot down without mercy.

'God is great,' added his informant, who, like most Mussulmans,
interlarded his conversation with pious allusions and quotations from
the Koran; 'and whatever He has decreed will and must come to pass.'

For breakfast they brought him a few dates soaked in melted butter, a
little sweet milk and curds.  So simple are the habits of the
Bedouins that one can subsist for a whole day on such a repast, and
deem himself happy and luxurious if he can add a small quantity of
corn-flour or a little ball of rice.  Meat being usually reserved for
the greatest festivals, they rarely kill a kid, save for a marriage
or a funeral, though some tribes eat the flesh of the gazelle and the
desert cow.

A couple of days on such food, with rough usage and toil--for they
compelled him to groom their horses--a toil degrading to a man of
spirit, rendered Allan somewhat faint.

He learned incidentally that there was another Frank a prisoner in
their hands, who no doubt, like himself, was anxiously awaiting the
return of the Bedouin chief.




CHAPTER XI.

AMONG THE DWELLERS IN TENTS.

With waking each morning Allan's miserable thoughts returned, and,
undeterred by the threat of being shot if he attempted to escape, he
thought of nothing else, and closely inspected the Bedouin camp and
its vicinity with that view, despite the warning of the principal
Bedouin, whose name he ascertained to be Abdallah, or 'the servant of
God,' who repeatedly told him that he hoped 'the English would have
their faces confounded,' the exclamation of the Angel Gabriel when he
threw a handful of gravel against the foe at the battle of Bedr.

As the Bedouins never reside in towns or occupy houses, they live in
encampments, pitching their tents wherever they can find pasturage
for their horses and camels, changing the site of their abode as
often as the support of their cattle or the vicinity of a more
powerful and hostile tribe may compel them.  Sometimes they sow a
little Indian corn, and return to reap it when grown.  The milk of
their cattle and a few esculents found in the desert are their chief
food.

All are trained to the use of arms, and are skilled in horsemanship,
and Allan could perceive that the care of the flocks and herds was
committed mostly to the women, while the youth of the tribe--all
fellows spare of form, light of limb, and active as their native
gazelles--were in their saddles scouring round the camp, and
practising the use of the javelin, the spear, and the Remington
rifle, with which many in Lower Egypt were now armed, as they had
been flung away in thousands by the fugitive soldiers of Arabi.

The innate love of freedom which is fostered by the facilities for a
nomadic life, and the desert-locomotion which his horses and camels
afford him, impart to the Bedouin a dignified and haughty bearing,
which contrasts powerfully with the servility and pusillanimity of
the rustic sons of Egypt.

Unchanged from unknown generations, they are the same as when Volney
wrote of them--'Pacific in their camp, they are everywhere else in a
habitual state of war.  The husbandmen whom they pillage hate them;
the travellers whom they despoil speak ill of them; and the Turks,
who dread them, endeavour to divide and corrupt them.'

Their wandering life affords more freedom to their women than usually
falls to the lot of Moslem females, and the wild desert, where they
always dwell, becomes in many cases the actual scene of those keen
and passionate love adventures which are depicted in the tales and
poems of the Arabians.

If Allan would escape from these Bedouins, he would require to have
all his wits about him, and not risk the slightest mistake.

'The child of the desert, reared in continual wandering, possesses in
the fullest degree the activity of _sense_,' says a writer.  'His
spirit is all abroad in his perceptive organs; he is voluble and
sagacious, quick, passionate, and sympathetic, but by no means
intellectual.  Quickness of perception and strength of imagination
are mental characteristics of the Bedouin, and superstition, the
child of ignorance, is nowhere more powerful than among the wanderers
of the desert.'

But in what direction was Allan to bend his steps, if he contrived to
elude his captors?  He might only wander into the barren desert--a
sea of sand--there to perish of hunger and thirst, or be overtaken to
suffer a cruel death.

Reflection showed him that it would be better to temporise--to await
the return of the sheikh, and endeavour to treat about a ransom.

Beyond the encampment of rude tents, which they carry with them from
wadi to wadi--the male portion employing their horses and camels in
the transport from one oasis to another--Allan could see the desert,
traversed by the camel-route to Suez by Regum-el-Khel, spreading far
away to the north-east, the horizon enveloped in fog in the morning
and evening, for the season was moist now.

Near the camp was the tomb of a santon, or holy man, surmounted by a
little white dome, and shaded by date-trees.

Had the camp been pitched on higher ground, instead of in a green
hollow, Allan might have known his precise whereabouts, as he would
have seen in the distance to the south Mount Mokattam, crowned by the
citadel of Cairo, with the many minarets of the great capital at its
base.

On the third day, a commotion was caused by the arrival of the
sheikh, who rode in, accompanied by an escort, all well armed and
mounted.  Allan was at once brought before him, full of natural
anxiety to learn his fate, and great was his satisfaction to discover
in him Zeid-el-Ourdeh, the Bedouin whom he had found wounded and
bleeding near the camp of the Black Watch, and whom he had succoured
and sent rearward to the hospital at Ismailia.

The recognition was mutual.  He sprang from his horse, tossed the
bridle to an attendant, and welcomed Allan to his tents, adding,

'I called you my brother when, after Kassassin, I thought the hand of
death was upon me; and you are not the less my brother now that you
have eaten bread and salt with my people.'

He had quite recovered from his sword-wound apparently, and as he
moved about in his long, flowing dress, with the ends of his
shawl-turban floating over his shoulders, his bearing and aspect were
stately and graceful.

Allan, encouraged to find that his personal safety was now so far
secured, ventured to speak of his liberty; but Zeid shook his head,
while a glitter, suggestive, not of cruelty, but unmistakably of
greed and avarice, came into his eyes; and he informed his prisoner
that he would have to accompany the tribe further into the desert, to
another oasis, where the grass was green.

His heart sank on hearing this.

Whether Zeid-el-Ourdeh meant to retain him as a species of hostage,
in the hope of a ransom, or in the absurd idea of attaching him to
his own fortunes, as useful from his knowledge of arms and European
tactics, Allan could not divine.  Anyway, his life for the present
was safe in his hands, though Zeid's power might fail to protect him
from other Bedouins, or the exasperated fellaheen of Arabi Pasha.

Zeid gave him back his claymore, which Allan greatly valued, as it
was a family heirloom--an old Ferrara blade, which his father and
grandfather had worn in the Black Watch long before him.

Zeid's own sword was a very remarkable one, which he had found in the
sand near the Red Sea.  It was long, straight, and double-edged, with
a cross-guard of the middle ages, and had evidently been the trusty
blade of some pious crusader, who had lost it, with his life perhaps,
on the way to Jerusalem; and, like the sword of the Cid, it was
inscribed, _Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum_.

'You look half-starved!' said Zeid, as he regarded Allan's face.

'I am wholly starved.  I have had only some dates and milk for three
days,' replied Allan, who, with some satisfaction, heard him order a
kid to be killed, that they might have a repast together, and then he
ordered the other Frankish prisoner to be brought before him.

'Holcroft!' exclaimed Allan, in a breathless voice, and scarcely able
to believe his senses, when one, who seemed undoubtedly that
obnoxious personage, was dragged before the sheikh with a sullen and
defiant air scarcely suited to the situation.  His European surtout
and trousers were discoloured, tattered, and torn; he had on a
scarlet tarboosh, and wore his fair beard at some length now.

'Holcroft!' exclaimed Allan again, 'you here?  Here in Egypt--what
miracle is this?'

'Your words express more surprise than pleasure,' replied Holcroft,
while Zeid-el-Ourdeh looked from one to the other in some surprise at
their evident sudden recognition.  'Ah,' he continued, with a
malevolent grimace, 'you thought I was drowned, no doubt, and feeding
the fishes in the Solent!'

'You are reserved for a drier and more deserved death, I presume,'
said Allan.

'Sneer as you may over me and my misfortunes----'

'Misfortunes, you miscreant!  But how in the name of wonder----'

'If you care to know how I come to be here, in the same unpleasant
and unsavoury hands with yourself--a gunboat picked me up off
Southsea, for I am a strong swimmer, but, for all that, was too
exhausted to be sent ashore.  I was put into the sick-bay and brought
on here, all the way to Ismailia, and then turned adrift to live by
my wits.  I made my way to Cairo, and was fain to become
billiard-marker at the hotel where I saw you, and once again at the
review before the Abdin palace.  The 196hotels, and cafes too, tired
of me.  I was setting out on foot to overtake some of your invalids
en route to Ismailia when these infernal Bedouins nabbed me, and I am
here.'

'And now that you are here, may I inquire what you mean to do with
your precious self?'

'Take office under the Khedive's government.  There will be no end of
nice pickings for Europeans now that the shindy is over.'

'Office--as what?'

'Oh, anything--I am not particular--Inspector-General of Harems would
suit me to a hair--down to the ground, in fact.'

'Bantering villain!  And how about those diamonds you stole from Miss
Raymond--a luckless heirloom in our family, always bringing evil to
the holder or wearer?'

'Well, they have brought no evil to me yet,' replied Holcroft, with a
defiant grin--a dogged one too; 'I have them safe here,' he added,
slapping his breast pocket, 'and don't mean to part with them.  They
are quite a fortune to me.'

And he had the folly, the madness, in mere bravado, to show them for
a moment.

'Keep these, fellow--they are certain to bring you ill-luck in some
way.'

Allan was nearer the truth than he thought, as the sharp eyes of the
sheikh saw the flash of the stones, and the spirit of acquisition was
instantly kindled in his breast.

'Well,' thought Allan, 'this unexpected meeting is a strange
coincidence; but, as Miss Braddon says, "life is made up of curious
coincidences."'




CHAPTER XII.

KISMET.

Allan was aware that the sheikh had seen the jewels, though for a
moment only, that were in Holcroft's possession.  He knew that greed
and the _Lex Talionis_, or law of retaliation, are distinctive marks
of the Bedouin character; but he also knew that their regard for
hospitality is not a less remarkable characteristic, and that even an
enemy is secure if he can obtain refuge in a tent.

Ali Bey (otherwise known as Don Pedro de la Badia) relates that when
a Bedouin heard that his wife had given food to his mortal foe, who
had sought charity at his tent, not knowing who or what he was,
observed, 'I should probably have slain my enemy had I found him
here; but I should not have spared my wife had she neglected the
sacred laws of hospitality.'

But Allan felt doubtful how the sheikh might be disposed to respect
these laws in the case of one like Holcroft, who had not fled to his
tents for succour, but been brought there a captive, and had
comported himself in a dogged and defiant way.

'And you had actually sunk to being a billiard-marker?' said Allan.

'For a time--yes; nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal.  When
taking stock of my affairs I found them shady--very; my assets
falling far short of my liabilities.  Thus I was forced to play out
the only card left me, and put the screw upon your wealthy cousin,
Miss Raymond.  Sorry I can't give you a copy of that remarkable photo
of Olive and myself, of which, no doubt, you all know now.'

'All,' replied Allan, amazed that the man could exult in his utter
and degrading villainy.  To him it seemed almost incredible that one
who was by birth a gentleman, the son of a gallant old officer, and
bad been the associate of gentlemen, could fall so low as Holcroft
had done, and be so callous and shameless.

'Oh, for a glass of bitter or Burton and a good cigar!' said
Holcroft; 'and, by the way, as you seem to speak his lingo, will you
ask this old nigger in the striped counterpane why he keeps me here,
and what he means to do with me.'

Allan inquired this of Zeid in Arabic; but to him it seemed that
Hawke Holcroft totally failed to comprehend or to take it in that he
was in any peril at all.  As an Englishman he thought that no 'dashed
foreigner' dared meddle with or molest him, yet these Bedouins had
him at their mercy sure enough; and to judge of matters or chances by
the standard of Regent Street and Piccadilly, would hardly do under
the summits of the Jebel Dimeshk.

Remarking the tarboosh worn by Holcroft, and using Allan as an
interpreter, the sheikh asked,

'Are you a Mussulman?'

'No,' replied Holcroft, with a laugh.

'A Christian, then?'

'No,' was the strange response.

'You must believe either in the Prophet or Christ?'

'I believe in neither.'

'Unhappy wretch!' exclaimed the sheikh, with astonishment in his tone.

'Men may believe in both, yet follow neither.'

'So do the devils believe--and like devils tremble' said the Bedouin.

'Well, I do not.'

'Do you feel no trust in God?'

'None!' was the blunt and defiant reply.

'Why?'

'He has always left me to myself.'

Allan sighed at this hopeless response, while the blasphemy of it
filled the Bedouin--who, whatever his shortcomings in the way of
_meum_ and _tuum_ were, was pious in his way--with horror and
indignation.  After a pause, he said,

'Look at his eyes--they are grey; and does not the Koran say that on
the last day "we shall gather the wicked together having grey eyes."

The twentieth chapter certainly has that curious remark, for with the
Arabs--a black-eyed race--to have grey eyes is the mark of an enemy
or a person to be avoided.

'You knew this man in Frangistan!' said Zeid.

'Too well,' replied Allan.

'Then he has wronged thee?' was the sharp question and suspicion of
the Bedouin.

'Deeply; he tried to kill me, indeed.'

'Yet he lives?'

'Yes.'

'Why is this?'

'I thought he was dead--drowned,' replied Allan, evasively.

'Take this sword and smite off his head.  The blade is sharp enough.'

Allan shook his head and drew back.

'You Franks are fools!' said Zeid, while the miserable Holcroft,
though he knew not a word of what passed, guessed the terrible import
of it, and glanced imploringly at Allan.

'Do you think,' said Zeid, after a pause, 'that his neck is turned to
ivory, as the Koran tells us that of Moses was, when he was about to
be beheaded for slaying an Egyptian?'

'The Koran--always that weary Koran!' thought Allan, impatiently.

'Will you tell him,' said Holcroft, 'that, if he expects a ransom
from me, I have neither a friend nor a farthing in the world.'

Allan did so.

'Liar! may God burn thee!' exclaimed Zeid, as he thought of the
diamonds, and, acting in obedience to a sign from him, Abdallah,
unknown to Holcroft, was stealing behind him, armed with a heavy and
deeply curved Damascus sabre of the keenest edge.

There was a flash in the sunshine as the blade was swept round by a
swift back-handed stroke, and the head of the miserable Hawke
Holcroft rolled along the ground, as his body fell prostrate on it in
a heap, with the red blood welling out from every vein and artery of
the neck.

'He has met his _kismet_,' said Zeid, complacently.

At this sudden catastrophe, Allan turned away horrified--utterly
appalled.  He had seen men wounded in every way, and mutilated too by
shot and shell, but had never seen aught like this--and in cold
blood, too!

'He believed neither in the Prophet nor in Christ,' said Zeid,
complacently; 'now that he is in hell, that cemetery for lost souls,
he may learn the truth.'

And, torn from the pocket of the wretched creature's tattered
surtout, the fatal diamonds were placed in the hands of
Zeid-el-Ourdeh.

Allan, as he saw them sparkling in the sunshine, thought of all he
heard his father say of them, and marvelled to whom they would bring
evil next.  If to the sheikh, he was fated never to know.

It was some time before he recovered the shock this scene gave him,
but it rendered his desire to be gone--to be free--irrepressible; yet
he dreaded just then to approach the subject with Zeid.  Whether it
was the excitement of a blood-shedding or acquisition of the
diamonds, or both together, Zeid was in high good humour, and about
noon gave Allan a dinner unusually sumptuous in his own tent.

Upon a tray of tinned copper were placed saucers of pickles, salad,
and salt, with thin cakes of bread, and in the centre a dish of rice,
highly seasoned with spice and saffron.  Neither forks nor spoons
were there, and he had to use his fingers.  Thus it made him shiver
to see the sheikh plunge his copper-coloured digits into the dish one
moment and thrust them half-way down his open throat the next.

He always clapped his hands when he wanted any attendance.

A cotton towel surrounded the tray on the ground, on which they
occasionally wiped their hands; then pipes of tobacco followed, and
the sheikh became sociable, as he reclined back against a saddle over
which some shawls and a barracan were spread, and Allan began to cast
about in his own mind how to approach the subject of his departure.

He gathered courage from the knowledge that, after eating bread and
salt together, or even salt alone, in the East, produces mutual
obligations of friendship.

The sheikh was a man of great piety, after his own fashion.  He said
his prayers five times daily, the first time being between daybreak
and sunrise, turning towards Mecca, and five times daily he washed
his hands.  He was a firm believer in magic, and that there existed
somewhere in Upper Egypt, Ishmonie, or the Petrified City--so called
on account of the great number of statues, representing men, women,
children, and animals, with which its silent streets abound--all of
which he believed to have been once animated creatures, miraculously
changed into stone by a whisper of the prophet, in all the various
attitudes of standing, sitting, or falling, but none of which are
ever visible save to true believers.

He also firmly believed in the miraculous egg laid by a hen after
Tel-el-Kebir, on which was inscribed the words--'Arabi has lost the
battle because he mutilated the corpses of the enemy.  Allah has
punished him, but He will give victory to him in the end, if he will
keep the commands in the future.'

'Hah!' said he, after a long pull at his chibouque, 'at Tel-el-Kebir
your bare-legged men came on as hell will come at the last day.'

'How is that?'

'As the Koran tells us, with seventy thousand halters, each dragged
by seventy thousand angels--a power nothing can withstand.'

'Accursed as you unbelievers are,' said he, after a pause, 'God seems
to give you a wondrous power, even as he gave Solomon the gift of
miracles in a degree greater than anyone before him; the animals and
the vegetables obeyed him, and he was carried by the winds of heaven
above the stars therein, and his power over the genii was by a seal
ring, of which one part was brass and the other iron, and upon it was
graven the great name of God.  Yes, though unbelievers, you are swift
in action as the pigeons of Aleppo; not like the Osmanli, who would
catch hares in waggons,' he added, with reference to the proverbial
slowness of the Turks.

'Sheikh,' said Allan, in his most persuasive manner, 'you know that I
befriended you when in sore peril.'

'Yes, as my brother would have done,' said Zeid, his expressive face
lighting up and his black eyes sparkling under the hood of his
burnous, as he pointed with his left hand to his right shoulder,
which had been slashed by the long sword of one of our Life-Guardsmen.

'Well, in memory of that you will allow me to depart home freely to
my people?'

'Why?  Are you not comfortable enough here?  Is not one place that
God has made as good as another?  And who and what are your people?
With all their skill and power, they are but wretched unbelievers,
who go to battle with their legs bare, accompanied by bags of devils,
that squall and groan, like those who strove to defame Solomon.'

'Do be just, sheikh!' urged Allan.

'I shall--is not justice the sister of piety?'

'You will allow me to go, then?'

'I have not said so.  Why leave the desert and go back to cities,
where men become intoxicated with the pleasures of this life, and
forget that which is to come?'

Allan sighed.  By this time he was weary of the sheikh and his
stilted conversation.

Beginning with the inevitable aphorism, 'There is only one God and
Mohammed is his Prophet,' the sheikh, after a pause, continued thus
between long whiffs of his cherry-stick pipe: 'Stay with us and pray
with us five times a day, each time turning to the Kebbah; eat not in
the daytime during the whole feast of Ramadan, make the pilgrimage to
Mecca, give alms to the widow and the orphan.  These are the sources
from which all goodness springs.  Stay with us and do all these
things.  Become my brother indeed--a son of the desert.  Why go back
among the accursed Franks?  You know how to use the sword, the spear,
and the rifle.  Stay with us; we shall give you a rich pelisse, a
good blood mare, and a Bedouin girl, beautiful, good, and virtuous.'

This programme scarcely suited the views of the Master of Aberfeldie,
but the situation was such a grave one that he dared not laugh at it.

'But you need not go to Mecca,' said the sheikh, as an after-thought.

'Why?'

'God is everywhere--why seek Him at Mecca, when we have Him here in
the desert?'

Allan pled hard, and spoke of bribes and ransom, but apparently in
vain, and he began to get sorely perplexed by the prospect before
him, especially if the tribe took their departure--of which there was
every prospect--in search of 'pastures new' further from Grand Cairo,
and towards the plain of Muggreh.

He was obliged to dissemble his disgust and mortification, and could
only hope of finding an opportunity of 'making,' as he thought, 'a
clean bolt of it.'

A few uneventful days passed, and during these he could not help
being struck with the simplicity of the domestic life and manners of
the Sheikh Zeid-el-Ourdeh and his family.

Though the commander of more than six hundred horse, he did not
disdain to saddle and bridle his own steed or to give him his barley
and chopped straw.

In his humble tent his wife made the coffee, kneaded the dough, and
cooked all the victuals, though a kind of princess in the desert and
among her people.  His daughters and kinswomen attended to the linen,
and, closely veiled, went to the wells or springs for water, with
classic-looking pitchers of brown ware balanced on their
gracefully-carried heads--in ways, manners, and ideas all unchanged
from those described by Homer, or as we find them in the history of
Abraham and in Genesis.

It was while a prisoner thus with Zeid, that Allan heard the strange
story promulgated by Arabi, that all Egyptians who fell fighting for
the faith would come back to earth as spirits mounted on snow-white
horses and armed with miraculous swords to completely exterminate the
British--an idea evidently borrowed from the Koran, which ascribes
Mohamed's victory at Bedr to his having as allies three thousand
spirits led by the angel Gabriel mounted on his horse Haizum.

On this subject the Paris _Temps_ recorded that an Arab servant
belonging to their correspondent asked the latter whether he had seen
any of the returned spirits from Kassassin in recent encounters, and,
on being answered in the negative, declared that the correspondent
could not see them because he was _not_ an Englishman.




CHAPTER XIII.

THE LAST OF SIR PAGET.

And now to glance homeward at more civilised scenes--to the
catastrophe at Hurdell Hall.

The terrible tidings were soon made known to Eveline that Sir Paget,
on the homeward ride from Furzydown, had been suddenly seized by an
unaccountable fit of irritation, and, in defiance of all advice and
entreaty, though a bad horseman, had lashed and spurred the bay
hunter--a vicious brute--while needlessly rushing it at a high fence,
and been thrown with terrible violence.

In short, his neck was broken, and he had died on the spot without
pain.  A door had been procured from an adjoining barnyard, and on
this humble bier the body had been brought to the Hall.

As one in a dreadful dream Eveline listened to all this, and the
awful shadow of something--_something_, as yet unthought of and
unconceived, fell blackly and bleakly across the dark horizon of her
life, as she saw the body borne past her--the body she shrank from
touching--borne past her indoors; and a darker shadow would yet fall,
when she learned the news from Egypt.

Weakened by all she had undergone hitherto, and overcome by the
sudden horror of the present event, Eveline could scarcely stand.

'You cannot go up the staircase to bed,' said Lucretia Hurdell,
kindly.

'Oh--yes; yes, I can,' replied Eveline, with dry lips.

But she sank in a heap on the Persian carpet.

'Lift her up, Harry,' said his sister.

Harry was only too ready, and raised her at once in his strong arms.

'Oh, please to put me down,' said Eveline, imploringly; 'don't touch
me--I can walk.'

'Nonsense, dear Lady Puddicombe--you must permit me,' he urged.

And holding the helpless girl close to him--so close as to preclude
all attempted resistance on her part--he bore her steadily upstairs,
and past the room where _it_ lay, covered with a sheet, and straight
to a new apartment prepared for her, followed by his sister and
Clairette.

The fast, horsey baronet's breath mingled with hers, but
unconsciously for her, poor girl!  Her soft face reclined on his
shoulder, and he saw just then, more than ever, how fair and
delicate--how very lovely she was; and he began to develop--or scheme
out--some very ambitious plans of his own.

Hurdell Hall and the Hurdell estates were rather deeply dipped, and
thus 'Old Pudd's money, even if encumbered by such a lovely bride,
would be very acceptable when the time came.'

So thought Sir Harry, with the man--but a few hours dead--lying stark
and stiff within a few yards of him.

Fortunately for Eveline, 'Nature's innocent opium, fatigue'--with her
it was fatigue of mind--procured her some sleep; thus she was
supposed to be the better able for what she would be compelled to
hear on the morrow, as a telegram had arrived from Lady
Aberfeldie--addressed to her--a document that, as Sir Harry said,
'proved a regular floorer, by Jove!'

In the morning, he said,

'She must not be told, as yet, of what yesterday's paper
contained--the mysterious disappearance of her brother, to whom she
seems most tenderly attached.'

'But how about the telegram from Southsea?' asked Lucretia.  'No
doubt it refers to that event.  Indeed, we do not know what it
contains, good or bad news.  It must be given to her; we have no
right to conceal or keep it back, and may commit mischief by doing
so.'

Sir Harry tugged his straw-coloured moustache with an air of
perplexity, and said, while busy with coffee and game-pie,

'By all means, then; if Lady Puddicombe is to know about her
brother--which, I fear, will cut her up more than poor old
Puddicombe's catastrophe--there is no one who can break the news to
her better than you, Lucretia.'

'How?'

'You are such a precious cool hand, don't you know.'

Miss Hurdell looked as if this was not very flattering, but quitted
the luxurious breakfast-table, saying,

'Poor thing, she is not fit to hear any more bad news; she has such a
worn-out look already.'

The telegram _did_ refer to Allan--a most unwise mode of breaking
such terrible intelligence--but Lady Aberfeldie never doubted that
her daughter must have seen the public prints.

Eveline uttered a low wail, and fainted.  A cry of terror escaped
Clairette, who drew away the pillows from under her mistress's head,
opened the collar of her laced night-dress, to let the air play
freely about her delicate neck and white bosom, while she bathed her
temples freely with Rimmel and Eau-de-Cologne; and Miss Hurdell,
whose nature was somewhat hard, and who had never seen anyone faint
before, looked on with some fear and suspicion, as animation slowly
came back to the lovely face, with gasping sobs on the lips and heavy
respirations, which made her bosom heave and fall.

George Eliot says, with truth, 'It is a wonderful moment the first
time we stand by one who has fainted, and witness the fresh birth of
consciousness spreading itself over the blank features like the
rising sunlight on the Alpine summits that lay ghastly and dead under
the leaden twilight.  A slight shudder, and the frost-bound eyes
recover their liquid light, for an instant they show the inward
semi-consciousness of an infant, then with a little start they open
wider, and begin to look, the present is visible, but only as a
strange writing, and the interpreter memory is not yet there.'

The dull mental agony that comes after acute anguish or a great
shock, proved too much for Eveline now, and she became prostrate,
seriously ill in the hands of her new friends, and Clairette wrote
instantly to Olive Raymond.

Eveline at times burst into passionate sobs, then she would lie very
still with her long lashes closed and the tears oozing from under
them, slowly down her pale cheeks, though her slender throat would be
agitated by those after-sobs that seem so uncontrollable.  Other
times she would lie perfectly still, lost in deep thought, as she
pictured all the past and tender love her manly brother had ever
borne her, and how gently he pitied her, when he discovered her love
for the lost Evan Cameron.

'The devil!' said Sir Harry to himself, as he smoked a cigar on the
terrace under her windows, and looked up there from time to time and
twirled his long fair moustache; 'who could have imagined all this!
She must have loved that old fellow after all.'

'In the light of a father, perhaps,' suggested Mr. Pyke Poole.

'Of course--you are right; how else could she have looked upon him.
Her sorrow must be for her brother.'

'Perhaps both.'

'Who the devil are all those cads crossing the park?' exclaimed Sir
Harry, with sudden anger, perhaps at his friend's mild suggestion.

'The coroner's inquest.'

The latter was 'a thundering bore' to Sir Harry, who was provoked to
see 'a parcel of louts in half bullet hats' gaping about the Hall.
However, the matter was soon over, permission was given for the
interment, and, after unlimited brandies-and-sodas in the butler's
premises, they all departed in high good-humour with themselves.

Lord Aberfeldie came to attend the funeral, and brought with him
Olive to remain with Eveline.  Lady Aberfeldie did not think the
Hurdells 'good form,' so she remained, as yet, at Southsea.

Eveline's father and cousin were shocked by the expression of her
face.  Intense mental pain seemed written on her brow; and her eyes,
if sunk and inflamed, seemed to have gathered much of intensity.

The stipulated number of days allowed by custom to elapse between the
day of death and that of interment were over, and the funeral too;
Lord Aberfeldie, Sir Harry, Mr. Pyke Poole, and many others in scarfs
and hatbands of wonderful length had departed with the remains for
Slough-cum-Sloggit by train, and some of their carriages were now
returning through the sunshiny park, where the soft rain was falling,
and, as the clouds were breaking up, bright gleams of radiance danced
along the sward.

Unused to death and unsympathetic, Lucretia Hurdell felt intense
relief.

The great Tudor hall, with all its window blinds down and shrouded in
silence and gloom, had seemed to her for all these days like one
large sepulchre, though an odour of hothouse flowers was everywhere
as the gardener brought all his treasures--hyacinths, waxen camelias,
gardenia, faint Dijon roses, and so forth--to decorate the corridor,
the death-chamber, and the coffin, while, unconscious of all the
mischief he had wrought, the bay hunter enjoyed his corn and beans as
usual.

So the coffin was laid in 'the family vault,' where lay the first
baronet of the House of Puddicombe and the first wife of Sir Paget.

'I shall never lie there,' thought Eveline, with a shudder, when her
father, before returning to Southsea, gave her the final details.

Poor Sir Paget was gone, but no one seemed sad about it, and everyone
seemed to grow bright now that he was gone finally.  Sunshine and air
came freely into the house through the open windows now, and the
nameless hush that for days had pervaded the vicinity of the dead was
no longer necessary.  The decorous sadness that was acted, even in
the servants' hall, imposed by the presence of death--especially the
death of a very rich man--was no longer required.  The butler might
whistle as he cleaned the plate, the housemaids might laugh freely
now, and Mademoiselle Clairette indulge in a merry little French
chauson unchecked by that rigid matron in black moire, the
housekeeper.




CHAPTER XIV.

THE YOUNG WIDOW.

So one of the closing scenes of a sudden tragedy had been acted in
that fine old English manor-house, standing amid its richly-wooded
chase, the undulating sward of which was of such a brilliant emerald
that it reminded those who saw it that Hurdell Hall stood in the most
fertile part of Hampshire.

When Sir Harry invited Sir Paget to visit him and join him in the
fatal--as it eventually proved--cub-hunting, his object had been a
nefarious one, but quite adapted to the tone of a _blasé_ man about
town like himself, the hope of engaging the beautiful young wife of
his elderly club friend in a very decided case of flirtation--so
ignorant was he of Eveline's character, and how her ill-assorted
marriage was brought about.

Now he hoped by a more honourable course to secure both her purse and
person.

By will, however, it was soon known that Sir Paget, to prevent a
younger successor enjoying any of his pelf through her, had stripped
her of everything but what he had been compelled to settle upon her
for life.

However, Sir Harry thought she was every way a most desirable widow
to win, but her sorrow and sadness were a sore worry to Lucretia.

'Don't weep, dear,' she would say, in that hard, sharp tone peculiar
to some selfish women.  'It is the worst possible thing for one's
eyes in every way.'

And, sooth to say, Miss Hurdell's cold, steely orbs did not seem even
to have been much afflicted with the weakness of weeping.

'Ah--we all have our trials, dear Lady Puddicombe,' she resumed,
after a pause.  'Do try to bear this patiently, and believe it all
for--all for----'

'All for what?'

'Well--the best.'

'The best--how, Miss Hurdell?'

'Well--he was so old and you so young, don't you see,' replied this
very matter-of-fact person.

Free--for whom and to what extent?  Eveline never viewed the
dispensation of Providence thus; but till Olive came with her
soothing presence, every night amid the darkness of her room, the
pent-up tempest in her bosom--the tempest of unavailing
regrets--would burst forth with loud whispers and sobs till sleep
came, as it always did, at last.

Before Olive arrived, Lucretia was ever by the bed-side of her 'sweet
Eveline,' sitting for hours together, putting Eau-de-Cologne on her
handkerchiefs and Rimmel on her temples, arranging her pillow or her
footstool if she left her couch for a chair, telling her stories of
foreign life at Naples, Homburg, and Monaco, and so forth, for she
believed that Eveline had been left with a splendid jointure, and a
Scottish estate by a former lover; while Sir Harry lounged about
impatiently in the stables and kennels, with his briar-root, and
thinking 'when will all this end?  And _how_ can she go on as she
does about that old pump?'

But a little time before Eveline had been unconscious of any special
blessedness in her life; _now_--with regard to the fate of her
brother and Evan Cameron--it seemed as if the restoration of the
past, even while encumbered with captious, fretful, and jealous old
Sir Paget, would be worth years of happiness.

'Oh, my brother--my brother Allan?  Were there not wicked people
enough in the world to be taken, that you must be reft from us?'

And these words found a terrible echo in the heart of Olive.  More
weary and empty than ever did life look to both, these girls.
Everyone seemed to have some one to love them--some object in life to
engross them--but neither of them had any now.

'If I could only die--if I could only die!' Eveline would murmur, as
she tossed her sweet face and dishevelled hair on her pillow, and
thought of that grave in the desert, and betrayed a frame of mind
beyond the conception of mundane Lucretia Hurdell.

And her mind would go back to the old days with all their brightness
at Dundargue and in Mayfair, before Sir Paget came into the family
picture, and when pleasure seemed all her thought and occupation, and
care quite beyond her province!

And the girl lay there thinking--thinking--it was impossible for her
not to think and surmise.  But for this sudden accident, how long
might Sir Paget have lived at his years: and how long would he have
tormented her about Evan?

As if to infer that she desired his death, how often had he said in
the bitterness of his heart, before the news of Cameron's fall in
action came, that 'he would cheat her yet, and live as long as she
could do!'

She was free now, and not past her girlhood; and, if in life, Evan
would be loving her still.  But she thrust that natural thought
aside; why brood over it now, when Evan was no more, for somehow
there seemed in it a species of treason to her dead husband--little
as she had loved him--now that he too was in his grave.

If this was her mode of viewing Evan Cameron, how little chance had
Sir Harry Hurdell of affecting her heart!

Now that Sir Paget was gone, Eveline repented that his last thoughts
of her as a wife had been bitter, and tried to think of him as a
friend who had been kind at one time, a husband whose settlements had
been generous, and would have been greater but for the jealousy that
made him alter his will.

She now recalled with something like an emotion of pleasure, or
certainly of satisfaction, that though she did not love, she had ever
respected him, though his references to Evan Cameron had always made
her wince and shiver.

'Poor man!' she exclaimed; 'and his soul went out into the night--in
a moment--without time for a prayer or supplication to God!'

'So did the souls of our brave fellows at Tel-el-Kebir and
elsewhere,' replied Olive, who had rather more metal in her
composition than the softer Eveline.

Olive knew enough of life and of human nature to feel certain that
her cousin was too young to relinquish all the hopes and fears, the
many vague and brilliant dreams of girlhood.  Another would come, but
_who_?

Time would show that.

'She'll get over all this nonsense by-and-by, poor little thing,'
said Sir Harry to his chum, Pyke Poole, as they knocked the balls
about in the billiard-room, trying canons and so forth for practice.
'She is, by Jove, the best groomed woman in the whole stud of our
acquaintances--perfect in all her points.  I'll go in for her, if I
can--but it is too soon to begin the running yet.  Girls' fancies
are, however, easily drawn from one object to another.'

'And I don't think she could have fancied old Pudd much,' said Poole,
as he mixed himself a glass of brandy-and-soda.  'I've seen many a
rough spill in the field, but never such a devil of a cropper as he
came!'

'You know I might do worse than marry such a sweet girl, Pyke?'

'You might, by Jingo!' replied Mr. Poole, with a knowing wink, and
thinking--'Why should not he himself enter stakes for such a prize?'

'Puddicombe's settlements are splendid, I hear, but pass away if she
dies without an heir.  No chance of _that_, I think; and then some
soft-headed Scotch fellow--if there is such a thing in the world--who
loved her, has left her a place in the Highlands, where one could
knock over the grouse and blackcock every year.  We'll get married
before the Derby.  She'll have had plenty of time to air her grief
and her weeds--Jay's "unutterable woe," no doubt--for old Pudd by
that time.  I've a heavy bet upon Dasher, and I'll have her in the
grand stand on Cup Day, with my jockey's colours somewhere about her
dress.  She'll look, as she always does, a stunner!'

Poole could not help laughing as his friend ran on thus, in perfect
confidence, and stroked his long yellow moustache.  Though rather a
bit of a reprobate, Sir Harry looked every inch a gentleman, a
long-limbed sanguine blond, alternately blunt and overbearing;
resolute and indolent, with the general air of a man who has seen
everything that was to be seen--done everything that was to be done,
and 'had found nothing in it.'

'To speak to her for a space would never do.  I'll take my time,' he
resumed; 'none but a fool meets trouble half-way.'

She would learn to love him in time--hang it all, how could she
resist!  This comfortable impression made him feel quite easy on the
subject, and by degrees the satisfaction that always accompanies a
weak mind took possession of him.

Olive never doubted that when Eveline got over the death, not of Sir
Paget, but of Evan Cameron, she would marry again.  She was too young
to treasure a morbid grief; but Olive would not like to have seen her
Lady of Hurdell Hall, for, with all a woman's sharp instincts, she
had indefinable doubts about Sir Harry.

After Olive joined her, the two girls were never weary of comparing
their hopeless notes and sorrows, and of searching the public prints.
Eveline could do so freely and unchidden now for any further meagre
tidings that might come of the lost one.

An unexpected and startling event--to be detailed in its place--did
happen, and was duly recorded, but was unnoticed by them; and those
who did see it, cared not to speak or write of it, while others were
unaware of the deep and vital interest it possessed for them both.

'Dear Olive, but for you coming to me I think I might have lost my
life--my reason--certainly my peace of mind--everything!' exclaimed
the affectionate and effusive Eveline, wreathing her soft white arms
round her cousin's neck, and nestling her face therein.

The first day she was 'downstairs' was quite an event at Hurdell
Hall, so great was the fuss made of her by the baronet and his sister.

In her dressing-room she had been fully attired in her crape dress by
Clairette, who might as well have dressed a lav-figure for all the
apparent power of volition there was in Eveline.  Again and again she
had tried to bathe her cheeks into some colour, to smooth her hair,
and went with slow reluctant steps to the drawing-room at last; and
there the extreme depth of her mourning, her girlish face and figure,
and her pure whiteness of complexion--the soft white of the arum
lily--made her delicate beauty seem more striking than ever.

Sir Harry was beside himself with pleasure, and when he rejoined the
ladies in the drawing-room after dinner, and after all the champagne
he had imbibed at table, his attention and extreme effusiveness were
such that Eveline was compelled at last to say, coldly,

'Sir Harry, I wish you would go away and leave me--leave me to my own
thoughts.'

He urged his extreme joy at seeing her again after her long seclusion.

Eveline had now a horror of Hurdell Hall.  It was associated in her
mind with three dire calamities--Evan's death--though she had first
heard of that from Sir Harry in London; Sir Paget's terrible
catastrophe, and, collaterally with it, the strange disappearance of
her darling brother.

She must get away, without delay, she thought, as the atmosphere of
the place seemed to oppress her.  So, in a few days, arrangements
were complete for her departure to join her parents, who were still
at Southsea.

Well, that was not a thousand miles from Hurdell Hall, thought Sir
Harry; and it was too soon to venture on the subject of love or
marriage yet; but a time would come, and a jolly one he doubted not
it would be.

But, ere that time came, some very unforseen events had come to pass
with reference to Eveline.




CHAPTER XV.

IN THE DESERT.

Allan had heard of Private Thomas Keith, of the 72nd Highlanders,
who, after being taken prisoner in Egypt in 1807, rose to the rank of
Aga of the Mamelukes and Governor of Medina; but the prospects of
promotion in the desert, held out to him by Zeid, did not prove very
attractive; and here we may mention that the name of Zeid is of great
antiquity, for it was that of the adopted son of Mohammed, whom he
placed on the Black Stone of the Caaba, and to whom he gave a wife
named Zinab.

Zeid's wife had already suggested that Allan should have his head
shaved, and that a turban or tarboosh should be substituted for his
tropical helmet, with its red 42nd hackle; so he began to think that
something must be done to put an end to this life of idleness and
annoyance.

At times he thought he would affect to fall into the views of
Zeid-el-Ourdeh; get the blood mare and put a burnous over his
regimental jacket and kilt, and--leaving the 'Bedouin girl' out of
the category--take an opportunity of trying the speed of the said
mare, and escaping.

But the time for departing further into the desert drew near, and no
mare was given him; he had, however, the offer of a camel, but that
would not do at all.

He thought of the distress his disappearance must cause his
family--if deemed dead, their sorrow; and ere long the deletion of
his name from the army list, and from his position in what he deemed
a family regiment, and the whole complication of the situation
maddened him.

In that Bedouin band were hundreds of dusky robbers with whom he had
not eaten the mystic bread and salt of the East, and who owed him
neither favour nor protection; and thus the grotesque views and
oppressive friendship of Zeid might fail to secure his life at their
hands.

He knew that they would think no more of killing him than of killing
a kid, and he recalled with sufficient disgust the swift catastrophe
of the wretched Holcroft.

When rambling on the skirts of the black tented camp, under close
surveillance, however, Allan observed that the tomb of the Santon had
a remarkably broad and peculiar cornice round its dome, that it was
curved upward like the rim of a billycock hat, and that a vine
tendril of considerable strength had ascended, in the lapse of years,
from the base to the summit of the dome; and thus he conceived, if he
could ascend thereinto unseen, he might lie _en perdue_, till the
tribe departed, and then he should be safe.

The day before the tents were to be struck, Zeid ordered some food to
be procured by his huntsmen, who--though the food of the tribe was
generally farinaceous--succeeded in capturing some of these gazelles
that live in the open plain, where they browse upon the saline and
pungent herbage.

Fully experienced in the haunts and habits of these animals, Abdallah
and others concealed themselves in a hollow dug out of the sand and
carefully covered over with brambles, and there they captured their
prey by means of a rude network attached to stakes--the former being
slightly concealed in the sand, and raised by means of a rope pulled
when a number of the herd has ventured within its precincts.  Thus
twenty or thirty of these beautiful creatures, with their bright
hazel eyes, spiral horns, and slender limbs were taken at a time.

The gun was used only when other means failed, as ammunition is too
costly for ordinary occasions in obtaining the supplies of food.
Allan, while hovering about the huntsmen, effected a final
reconnaisance of the Santon's tomb, and resolved to make the attempt
that very night.

When sudden darkness fell as usual, instantly after sunset, and no
moon as yet had risen, while Zeid and his family were busy with their
final ablutions and prayers, Allan--his bold heart beating wildly the
while--crept softly out of the tent, under the uplifted canvas wall
thereof, and crawling flatly on his hands and knees, with the blade
of his drawn sword in his teeth, began to leave the hated encampment
behind him.

It was a time of keen and poignant excitement.  Every moment he
expected to hear an outcry announcing that he was missed from his
place, or seen even amid the gloom and obscurity, by the keen eye of
some practised son of the desert.

Fortunately all were at their prayers or engaged in preparations for
departure on the morrow, and, as the distance increased between
himself and the dark camp, his spirit began to rise, and he thought
to himself, why had he not made this attempt before?  But, sooth to
say, it would have been impossible, as he was less watched latterly
than he had been at first.

Even at the distance of half-a-mile he did not assume an erect
attitude, lest his figure might be seen between the sky and horizon,
but continued to creep steadily on, till at last he ventured to rise
from the ground, and strode swiftly towards the tomb of the Santon,
which was about two miles from the camp.

The stars were coming out now, and a sigh of relief escaped him as he
reached it--a sigh that ended in an exclamation of dismay as a tall
Bedouin, who seemed to spring from the ground, so sudden was his
appearance, stood face to face with him, and in a moment he
recognised Abdallah, the second in command under Zeid!

He perceived Allan's sword in his hand, and, knowing that he was
escaping, drew a pistol from his girdle--a pistol the explosion of
which would have proved most disastrous, but by one trenchant stroke
Allan hewed the Arab's left hand off by the wrist, and hand and
pistol fell on the sand together.

Muttering a terrible malediction, the Bedouin, wrapping the bleeding
stump in the folds of his burnous, furiously assailed Allan with his
formidable sabre, shouting, as he did so, something to this purpose:--

'Unbelieving wretch, you shall go from hence to hell, where your
hands will be chained to your neck, and you will be compelled to
oppose your face to the flames.'

'Oho!' thought Allan, 'the Koran again!'

If he had time or means to give an alarm, all would be over.

It was a life for a life now, and both men fought desperately; both
were expert swordsmen, and both were filled with blackest fury--the
Bedouin by the agony of his wound, and Allan by the peril which
menaced him.

After pausing to draw breath for a moment, Abdallah came rushing on
with blind rage; Allan warded a cut, and, closing in, caught his
sword-hand by the wrist and held it with an iron grasp; then,
adroitly dropping the basket hilt of the claymore from his right
hand, he caught the shortened blade and plunged it, dagger fashion,
into the breast of the Arab, who fell at his feet and expired.

Inspired by an instant thought, he dragged the dead body away, and
the hand and pistol also, to some distance from the vicinity of the
tomb, and, returning, proceeded stealthily and speedily, if worn,
breathless, and feeling rather sick by his recent work, to climb by
the branches of the vine up the wall of the circular edifice, and
over its heavily curved cornice, behind which he crouched down flat,
and there he lay for hours, exposed to a shower of rain, the fall of
which he hailed with thankfulness, as it would obliterate any traces
of blood in his vicinity, and also his footmarks from the bruised
branches of the vine which he had used as a ladder.

He knew that, if retaken now, the discovery of Abdallah's fate would
seal his own; so, if found, nothing was left him but to die sword in
hand.

Each respiration came heavily, as he lay there listening for every
passing sound, and wondering how he had achieved the first chapter of
his escape, and all the bloody and necessary work so well.

Strange it was that his hand should avenge the miserable Holcroft;
but he did not think of that till afterwards; nor did he think of the
too baleful effect the wet and damp of the Egyptian night might have
upon his own health.

At length the rain ceased, and the blue dome of heaven appeared in
all its wondrous beauty--for wondrous indeed it is by the shores of
the Nile, though this was in the first season of the Egyptian year,
when the weather is generally moist.

But the sky is so cloudless, and the brightness of the moon so
intense, that the natives, when sleeping in the open air, as they
often do, cover their eyes, as the effect of the moon's rays upon the
sight is more dangerous and violent than that of the sun.

No sleep, however, visited the eyes of Allan that night; he remained
without desire to close them, preternaturally, acutely, and painfully
awake, and watchful as a lynx.

It was all as Allan anticipated.  Day had scarcely dawned, and the
striking of the tents begun, ere he was conscious that his absence
was discovered, and more than a hundred swiftly-mounted horsemen,
with cries and shouts, darted from the camp in every direction around
it in search, and, if afoot, he must inevitably have been overtaken;
but, concealed where he was, he lay in safety, though his heart
throbbed so violently that he seemed to hear its pulsations, as he
heard the Bedouins, at full speed, pass and repass the Santon's tomb,
with guns and rifles unslung, intent on his recapture and destruction.

He clenched the hilt of his claymore.  If traced to where he lay--if
discovered--he could but sell his life, and dearly did he resolve to
do so!

He heard their voices, their surmises, their suggestions, and their
threats; and lucky it was for him that the rain and subsequently the
heavy dew, of the past night had obliterated the traces of his
footsteps near the tomb and on the tendrils of the vine, also the
traces of the blood of Abdallah, the discovery of whose body was
greeted by yells of rage that pierced the air; but the rain and the
dew were ere long to have a baleful effect on Allan in the time to
come.

At last the riders seemed to give up the search as hopeless, and by
twos and threes came slowly back to camp, with horses weary and
bridles loose.  After mid-day, the tents were finally struck, stowed
away, with all household utensils, on the backs of camels and horses,
and the whole tribe of Zeid-el-Ourdeh took its departure in a
north-easterly direction, towards the great desert, through which
lies the route taken by Bonaparte in 1799, and, before evening fell,
the last of them, like black specks, were alone visible, and ere long
they quite disappeared from view.

Now Allan, worn and weary, after a day without food or drink, slept
for a time, and the moon, clear, bright, and refulgent, was high in
the heavens when he prepared to descend from his lurking place.

He looked keenly, anxiously, and carefully round him, as it was
possible that some of the Bedouins might return to their late
camping-ground for some object of their own; and, moreover, others
were to be avoided quite as much as they.

No living thing was visible, and the most awful silence seemed to
reign around him.

Allan descended from his perch, stiff, benumbed, and well-nigh
powerless, to begin his lonely and perilous journey; but whither?

Ignorant of the country and of the way to pursue, he knew not that
the canal which leads from Belbeis to Grand Cairo lay on his left;
and after toiling on without adventure for a few days and nights,
subsisting on dates, wild-beans, and lotus-roots, with a little water
from an occasional spring, he found himself, weary, worn, and faint,
with pains in his head and loins, and shivering in his limbs--the
forerunners of a deadly illness--crossing what is the camel-route to
Suez, as he penetrated into another portion of the desert.

He saw occasionally vultures, storks, and pelicans; and now and then
a herd of beautiful antelopes swept past him; but--as he thanked
heaven--no Bedouins.  More than once he came upon nitre springing up
in the sandy waste, like crystallised fruit.  At times these spots
seemed as if overgrown by moss and coated with hoar frost--hoar frost
under a fervid Egyptian sun; and according to the quantity of the
nitre, their fantastic shapes were either a dazzling white, or more
or less tinted by the yellow hue of the sand.

More than once in his fitful slumbers by night under the baleful dew,
there came before him in a dream the agony of his lurking on the
summit of the tomb in momentary dread of discovery, and then he was
again closing in combat hand-in-hand with Abdallah, the aspect of
whose dark face, with gleaming eyes and glistening teeth, curiously
blended with an idea of Holcroft, came vividly before him; and then,
when just in the act of plunging in his shortened sword-blade, he
would awake with a nervous start to find himself still in solitude
with quiet stars looking down upon him.

At last when about to sink he saw before him the well-known fringes
of greenery and foliage that indicate the line of a canal, and it
proved to be a portion of that of Moses, and a cry of joy escaped him
when he heard the whistle of a locomotive and saw the welcome smoke
of a train running westward.

How much the sound and sight we deem alike so hideous spoke to his
heart of home, of ease, of peace, safety, and civilisation.  In
short, he soon discovered that he was midway between Kassassin and
Mahsameh and by a liberal promise of backsheesh to an Egyptian
labourer whom he met, and whose assistance he solicited, he reached a
railway station and obtained all the succour he needed from the
European officials there.

By them he was placed in a train for Ismailia, and ere long he saw
once more those places which were familiar to him as having passed
them with the troops--Ramses, Tel-el-Mahuta, and El-Magfar, where the
Black Watch had encamped, and where he had befriended Zeid-el-Ourdeh;
and ere long he could recognise, when he had left the sea of sand
behind him, the white-walled houses of Ismailia against the deep blue
of the sky, and the tall forest of masts, those of our transports and
warships in the adjoining lake of Timsah.

He had no recollection of more, or even of reaching the railway
station.  His heart beat wildly, his head swam round him, and a
darkness seemed to envelop him.  He had fainted.

On partially recovering he found himself in bed, but he knew not
where, and dimly seen, as in a glass, he thought he saw Evan Cameron
bending over him--Evan looking pale and wan as when he buried him in
the sand.

'Oh, God,' sighed Allan, as he closed his eyes to shut the vision
out, 'is this madness or delirium that has come upon me?'




CHAPTER XVI.

EASTWARD HO!

Lady Aberfeldie was a Scottish Episcopalian of the first class; one
whose boast it was that she always distinguished Christmas and Easter
by mince-pies and cheesecakes; and who rather looked down on English
Ritualists and Tractarians as 'second chop;' and who never saw a
Michaelmas without its goose; but she forgot the Michaelmas of this
year, and with good reason too.

The sudden arrival in the hospital at Ismailia of Captain Graham, the
missing officer of the Black Watch, who had been carried off by
Bedouins at Matarieh, and who was supposed to have shared the
terrible fate of Professor Palmer and his companions, was duly
'wired' home, like many other items of Egyptian news, and caused no
small excitement among the inmates of Puddicombe Villa, Southsea.
The telegram added that he was without a wound, but was supposed to
be dying of enteric fever, the result of all he had undergone when in
the desert.

'Dying!' exclaimed his mother, pale as a lily; 'oh, it cannot be.'

And Olive looked the picture of mute misery.

Lord Aberfeldie telegraphed to the chief of the medical staff at
Ismailia for distinct intelligence, and the reply--waited for with
intense anxiety--came in its usual orange-tinted envelope.

'Not dying yet, but recovery very improbable.'

Lord Aberfeldie, with the promptitude of an old soldier, and full of
affection and anxiety, wished to start at once for Egypt, and alone;
but the three ladies of his family insisted on going also, so he
yielded to their tears, entreaties, and importunities--especially
those of Olive, whose misery was very great; and he had much sympathy
with a young and loving heart.  'Let no one decry the suffering of
the young because they are young,' says a writer; as we grow older we
get used to pain, both mental and bodily.

Olive passed the hours, previous to departure, pretty much as we do
those which precede a funeral; everything was done as a duty,
dressing, undressing, sitting down to meals, and so forth--seeming to
have no interest in anything, as if for the time, life and all its
interests was over and done with.

'Oh, Eveline,' she exclaimed, 'what advantages men have over us in
this world.'

'Of course they have,' replied her cousin, 'but to what do you refer
in the present instance?'

'Now, if we were men, we could start for Egypt alone; as it is, we
can only go with your papa.'

'If you were a man, Olive, you would not think of going at all.'

'Indeed--why?'

'Little goose!  If a man, would you be engaged to Allan?  Are you
going to become an advocate for women's "rights"--whatever they may
be?'

'No--but it is tiresome to have to run in the grooves of life that
men lay down for us.  Poor creatures, we are only in their eyes the
weaker vessels after all.'

'But weaker vessels they make a great fuss with; but how we chatter!
Oh, heavens, if Allan's peril--dear, dear Allan--should be so great!'

Olive shivered at this exclamation, as she alternated--like all girls
of a delicate and nervous organization--between high spirits at the
prospect of going eastward and the awful dread of what tidings might
await her there.

'Going to the East--actually to Egypt!  Darling papa, how shall we
ever be able to thank you?' exclaimed Eveline, as in her energy she
locked her slender fingers so tightly together that the great diamond
in one of her rings--a gift of Sir Paget--was cutting into her
delicate skin, and yet she felt it not.

And great was the disgust of Sir Harry Hurdell, when eventually he
heard of this sudden disposition to travel, the precise object of
which he failed quite to understand.

Apart from anxiety about her brother, Eveline had another thought,
and she kept repeating to herself,

'I shall see the land where Evan died--the land that holds his grave!
It is a pilgrimage of love--but one that is without deceit to him.'

'Him,' meant Sir Paget, or 'Old Pudd,' as Sir Harry called him.

Allan might die ere they arrived, or after they did so.  In either
case, the famous will of Olive's father would be as only so much
waste paper, so far as the Aberfeldie family was concerned; but at
this time of trial no one thought of that feature in the terrible
contingency.

Their whole idea was to see him; to be with him; to know the best or
worst; to nurse him well, and to bring him home with them to the soft
breezes of the Sidlaw Hills, and his native place, Dundargue.

So Tappleton and Mademoiselle Clairette received their orders;
packing was proceeded with; the Continental Bradshaw consulted, and
all arrangements made for a speedy departure for Egypt, _viâ_ Paris;
by rail then to Marseilles; thence by steamer, Messageries Imperiales
Company, to Alexandria, when the train could be taken for Suez.

The night before their departure Olive was so excited that she could
not go to bed, but sat listening to the booming of the waves as they
rolled on the stormy bluffs of Southsea Castle, while all the past
returned upon her, and when she had last seen the face of Allan.

As she was heard moving about in her room, Clairette was sent to
inquire for her.

'I have a dreadful head-ache,' said Olive.

'Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, why are you not in bed, instead of shivering
there in your night-dress, at an open window, too!  This will never
do; let me coil up your hair and cover you up.'

'Dear little Clairette, I shall be good and go to bed--yes, to bed.'

Clairette, who knew all about it, kissed her lady's hand; but Olive
pressed her lips to the cheek of the French girl, who, in the
impulsiveness of her nature, burst into tears, and then, instead of
leaving her mistress to repose, had a long gossip with her about
Allan, for whose safety she said she gave up a prayer every night.

Appliances for travel are so great and ample now that a few hours
after soon saw the whole party on board the Marseilles steamer, and
traversing the Mediterranean.

Many officers were in the saloon making their way to join the various
regiments, and to these Eveline--so young a widow--was an object of
no small interest.  She seemed to have ripened into the bloom of
early womanhood, though all her girlish manner remained with its
softness and grace.

Her figure had become more rounded and developed; her step was firm,
though elastic as ever; and she carried her head with an air of
stateliness that was somewhat belied by the occasional sadness of her
expression and lassitude of demeanour.

To her and to Olive, ever-recurring was the thought, when fairly off
the coast of Egypt, how strange it was from the steamer's poop to
look upon those places of which they had read so much of late in the
newspapers--Alexandria, Suez, Port Said, and so forth--all 'household
words' at home now.

At the first-named place they saw ample traces of the terrible
bombardment, with the details of which they were more familiar than
with those of its marble palaces and porphyry temples of the times of
old; or of the golden coffin of its young hero, who emulated being a
god; of its streets, two thousand feet in width; and its Pharos,
whose mirrors of polished steel reflected from afar the galleys of
Cleopatra.

Suez, with its mosques and caravansaries, its houses of sun-bricks,
amid, or rather bordering on, a desert of rock, slightly covered with
sand, and where trees, gardens, and meadows are almost entirely
unknown, was soon left behind as the train bore them on by Shalouffe,
Geneffe, Faid, Serapium, and Nefishe, to Ismailia, so named after
Ismail Pasha, and which deems itself the most aristocratic or
respectable place upon the canal, as the Khedive erected a palace for
himself at the east end of it, and the houses have all a substantial
appearance, with neat and trim gardens; and the appearance of its
harbour reminded Lord Aberfeldie of that of Balaclava in the time of
the Crimean war; and still the Lake of Timsah was crowded with
vessels of all sorts and sizes.

Despite the deep and keen interest of the matter nearest their
hearts--the object which had brought them so far from home--it was
impossible for Olive and Eveline not to be occasionally drawn from
their own thoughts, and impressed by the novelty of the new sights,
scenes, and certain memories of the land they looked on, for the
crossing of the Red Sea by the children of Israel took place
somewhere near where Ismailia stands, and certain it is that, at no
great distance therefrom, it was at El-Khantara-el-Khazneh, the
Virgin Mother and the Holy Child passed when Joseph arose by night
'and departed into Egypt.'

The wide lake looked now like a land-locked harbour crowded with
shipping.  Great steamers, magnificent 'troopers,' all painted white,
colossal men-of-war lay like leviathans there, while gunboats,
launches, and steam-tugs were for ever shooting to and fro.

In the streets invalid soldiers of every kind, in tattered _karkee_
uniforms or red serges, Guardsmen, Highlanders, Dragoons, Artillery,
and Rifles, were creeping about, some propped on sticks and crutches,
awaiting their transmission home; and there, too, might be seen,
occasionally, stalwart Bedouins, dirty Jews, and sable negroes,
howling Dervishes, and many breeds of Arabs, Italians, and Frenchmen;
the Turk, with his smart scarlet fez; the Egyptian, with tarboosh and
a turban twisted round it; and in some instances Moors, with
embroidered jackets, white turban, crimson sash, and trousered to the
knee, with yellow shoes, a scimitar and antique gun of enormous
length; and though last, not least, the English Jack-tar, rollicking
about and eyeing curiously the closely-veiled women.

The novelty of these sights and scenes in the minds of Olive and
Eveline became merged at last, especially when they saw our wounded
redcoats and bluejackets, in absorption about Allan, who, dead or
alive, was then in that place, Ismailia.

And, in dread of the tidings that might await her, Olive already
began to pray and wrestle, as it were, with anticipated despair and
dread of how Allan, if in life, might receive her.  Until now this
idea had never occurred to her.

'Oh, my lost love--my lost love!' she whispered to herself; 'what
shall I say or do to convince you that I love you, and you only?  If
gone--oh, my God!--no, no, _no_--but if gone, I cannot call you back
to me--and I cannot go to you.  In another hour we shall know
all--all!'

Aware, as an old Crimean campaigner, that shocking scenes might meet
their eyes in the vicinity of a military hospital, Lord Aberfeldie
took the three ladies of his party to the chief hotel, and then, with
a heart full of the liveliest anxiety, set forth to make inquiries
about Allan, to whom we shall now return.




CHAPTER XVII.

AT ISMAILIA.

The putrid water he had drunk on many occasions, the stone-fruit on
which he had been compelled to feed, the damp sand on which he had
lain under the night dews--the watching, fatigue, and depression of
spirits he had undergone--had served to prostrate Allan now, and even
his magnificent constitution failed to resist such a combination of
evils.

At times he was in a burning fever; at others in cold, shivering
fits, as if his limbs would go to pieces.  These were succeeded by
feeble listlessness and indifference to all around him, and then he
seemed as if about to die.

He first became quite conscious of where he was on being roused from
a species of waking dose by voices near him.

'Captain,' said an Irish Fusilier, one of Sir Garnet's own, 'I want
ten shillings from you.'

'For what purpose?' asked the officer, sharply.

'To bury my brother.'

'Bury your brother, d--n it!  I gave you ten shillings for that
purpose two days ago.'

'To bury his leg that was, your honour.'

'Well!'

'And now I want another ten shillings to bury the rest of him.'

'Have you a non-commissioned officer with you?'

'Yes, sir--Sergeant Carey,'

'Well, you and Sergeant Carey had better be off, or I'll make the
place too hot for you.  As for your brother, you can bury him for
nothing beside the tent-pegs outside.'

Every other morning some poor fellow was reported as dead in the
wards, and they were buried in a little strip of ground near the
canal, a tent-peg, with a label fluttering from it, alone indicated,
in the meantime, the name and rank of the deceased.

As Allan glanced around him, he saw cheeks that were pale, eyes that
were sunk, and forms emaciated by wounds, loss of blood, and fever
like his own of the worst enteric form.

A somewhat oppressive odour of hot soup and poultices seemed to
pervade the wards of the hastily improvised hospital, where, though
wounds were dressed on Lister's antiseptic system, with a care and
minuteness never before seen on a large scale in war, yet it was
reported, and with justice, in the public prints, that through the
meanness, economy, and incapacity of the Government, or the
Government officials, 'the enormous hospital at Ismailia was opened
without drugs, instruments, provisions, or stores, and was unable to
supply the front with any medical essentials, and that there was also
an extraordinary lack of hospital attendants.  Officers who lay in
the wards tell stories which are ludicrous though painful, of neglect
and want of common food.  All acknowledged themselves grateful for
the kindness, sympathy, and skill of the doctors.  The fault was not
theirs; but _red-tape_ finished what incompetence began.'

As Allan looked around him, a familiar figure in the undress uniform
of the Black Watch caught his eye--it was that of an officer
conversing in a low voice with one of the staff-surgeons, and he gave
a nervous start as he muttered and closed his eyes.

'It is a chance likeness, and the world is full of chance likenesses.'

He looked again; the figure--the man was still there, and he could
see his full face now, with its light brown moustache and head of
close-clipped golden hair.

'Great heavens, it is a day-dream of Evan Cameron!' said Allan to
himself in a whisper.

The blood in his veins seemed to congeal or to circulate like water
that was icy cold.  He had heard that we cannot look upon the
supernatural and live, and so Allan believed that his hour had come.

Feeling that it might be only a powerful but optical illusion, he
continued to gaze at the figure with incredulity and awful dread.

'Cameron!'

The name escaped him, while a strange sensation crept over Allan, and
his voice as he spoke sounded thick in his own ears.

But it was no optical illusion--no disembodied spirit he saw, as he
thought he had done before, but his friend and comrade still in the
body, but pale now and barely convalescent after the dreadful wound
he had received.

He grasped the hand of Allan, and laughed at the mingled expression
of blank amazement and dismay he read there, emotions which were
gradually replaced by those of satisfaction and delight.

'I was supposed to be dead and buried in the sand, like Lieutenant
O'Brien in "Peter Simple," but, unlike Lieutenant O'Brien, I was not
discovered by a pretty girl treading on my nose,' said Cameron,
laughing, and in reply to some inarticulate words of Allan, on the
side of whose bed he seated himself.

'Tell me--tell me about it,' said Allan, huskily.

'You could scarcely have left me ere I began to recover from the
syncope--for a syncope it was--only you and Sergeant Farquharson were
not doctors enough to discover that it was so.  A sense of
suffocation made me struggle up and throw off my blanket and the
covering of light sand in which you had so kindly tucked me; and as
the blanket fell from my face the dew refreshed me, and I perceived
in a moment the fatal mistake into which you had all fallen.  Dark
though it was, the detachment was still in sight, and I could hear
your voices; I tried to call out, but lacked the power to do so, and
a horror fell upon me, with insensibility after a time, and, when I
recovered, I found a group of mounted Bedouins gazing at me in stupid
wonder to see a living man half buried in the sand.'

'But how was it that we totally failed to find all trace of the spot
where we interred you?'

'How strange the question sounds as you frame it,' said Cameron,
smiling.  'A sandstorm came on, and must have obliterated the
landmarks.'

'We heard shots as we fell back.'

'The Bedouins fired at something--I know not what.  They proved to
belong to a friendly tribe--Bedouins of that kind who become petty
merchants wandering over the country, trading in such goods as they
can easily transport from place to place, and fortunate--most
fortunate--was it for me that I fell just then into the hands of men
so peacefully disposed.'

'And your wound?'

'Is healing fast, thank Heaven!  They carefully redressed it, put me
in a camel litter, and conveyed me to Abu Zabel on the canal, from
whence I was sent, with others here, by boat to Ismailia on
sick-leave for home.  I heard of your having been carried off at
Matarieh; some of our fellows who are in the wards told me so; but I
was powerless to attempt your discovery in any way--too feeble almost
to think, but the idea of your peril and too probably helpless
butchery cut me to the heart.'

'Any news from home?'

'Home?' repeated Cameron.

'I mean of my people.'

'None, Allan, how should I hear of them?'

'True,' said Allan, wearily and sadly, and in the miserable weakness
of his body, as a paroxysm of shivering came over him, almost
doubting the evidence of his own senses.

Hawke Holcroft had turned up in the camp of Zeid-el-Ourdeh--that was
startling enough in all conscience; but that Evan Cameron, whom he
and Sergeant Farquharson had so regretfully buried in the sandy
grave--the grave of which no trace could be found--should be alive,
well, and chatting with him there, and manipulating a cigar,
outheroded fiction!

The wonderful reappearance of the supposed dead Cameron was the
intelligence in the papers which Olive Raymond and Eveline did not
see.

Little could Cameron imagine that Eveline was so near to him as she
was then!

Often had he dreamt of her face--not when he longed to do so, but
when visions of it came upon him unbidden while he lay asleep on the
deck of the transport, in the bivouacs in the desert, amid the wards
of the hospital at Ismailia and elsewhere, and it always came before
him with a sweetness, a loving expression, and a strange spiritual
charm impossible to define or describe.

After the mutual revelations of the two friends, the intermittent
fever of Allan seemed to become more deadly, and by the time that
Lord Aberfeldie arrived at the hospital he almost failed to recognise
his son, so much had the latter sunk; for, the temporary excitement
consequent to the meeting with Cameron having subsided, Allan's
health seemed visibly to retrograde, and each fit of shivering
rendered him weaker than the last.

A staff-surgeon had prepared Allan for the visit of his father, who
was manifestly shocked when he saw how prostrate he was, and, as they
pressed each other's hands, Lord Aberfeldie perceived how thin, bony,
and wasted those of his son had become.

'My poor boy,' he exclaimed; 'how is this I find you?'

'Not dying, father, but very near it, I fear,' replied Allan, with a
sickly smile.

Lord Aberfeldie gazed lovingly and sadly into his son's wasted face,
and thought of all his mother, his sister, and Olive would feel on
seeing him thus, and in such a squalid place.

Amid the suffering and misery they were enduring, Lord Aberfeldie
thought it strange to hear many expressing regret that the war was
over so soon, and 'Arabi snuffed out.'

The realisation of Sir Garnet Wolseley's confident prediction that
all would be ended by the 16th of September, put an abrupt and speedy
end to all chances of promotion and glory, and now everyone thought
only of going home as fast as possible.

In the huge improvised military hospital much existed, as in every
such place, that proved rather repugnant to the ideas of a fastidious
man, so Lord Aberfeldie resolved upon having Allan removed to another
place--a hotel or villa--whither, when the surgeon would permit it,
he would have him conveyed by soldiers in a dhooley; and, full of
this purpose, he rejoined the ladies, who awaited his return with the
keenest anxiety.

His hopes of Allan's recovery proved balm to their hearts, though he
spoke more confidently of it than his own observations warranted.

At the story of Cameron, Eveline sprang from her seat, while a little
gasping cry escaped her, and Lord Aberfeldie was rather sorry to see
her mother's face darken.

'Evan Cameron--Evan Cameron alive!' exclaimed Lady Aberfeldie,
incredulously.

'Alive, and well!  Old Stratherroch, his father, used to say that the
men of the Black Watch were deuced hard to kill, and, by Jove! he was
right.  For the old man's sake, I am glad that God has spared the
boy!'

Unable to realise the situation, poor Eveline felt stupefied!




CHAPTER XVIII.

CLOUDS AND SUNSHINE.

Olive heard all her uncle had to relate of the condition in which he
found Allan, and, stealing away, she assumed her hat and sunshade,
and, accompanied by Clairette, undeterred by any risks she might run
in a strange place, issued into the somewhat European-looking streets
of Ismailia, over which she could see the great palace of the Khedive
looming in the distance, about two miles off; and obtaining the
guidance of a passing soldier--a Seaforth Highlander--she bent her
steps direct to the military hospital.

In the depth of her love, in the keenness of her anxiety--her
remorse, too, for all she had, in some sense unwittingly, made Allan
endure--she cast the idea of strict propriety and the amenities of
society to the winds, and, following the generous impulses of her own
heart, resolved to see Allan, if she could, without delay.

She passed the temporary burying-ground, with its rows of labelled
tent-pegs, without a shudder, as she knew not what lay there; anon
past wards where lay patients suffering from sunstroke and
ophthalmia, as she could see by the sufferers wearing blue-veils and
dark glasses, till she was ushered into a species of office, where a
staff-surgeon in undress uniform greeted her with some surprise and
_empressement_.

He had not seen an English girl--especially one of Olive's style and
beauty--for a considerable time past, perhaps, and he looked with
genuine interest on Olive, her half-opened mouth, her soft, earnest
eyes, her trembling lips, and the tears that clung to her long lashes.

Shyly she asked if it were possible to see Captain Graham, of the
Black Watch, who was a patient.

He smiled, and shook his head.

'Do permit me, sir,' she asked, with half-clasped hands and her eyes
full of entreaty.

'Do be reasonable, Miss--Raymond,' said he, glancing at her card,
which an orderly had given him.  'Your presence would but excite him
too much.  It will be folly on your part to undo all our precautions
simply from a mere desire, however natural, to speak with or see
Captain Graham.'

'Oh, sir, if you knew all!'

'All that can be done for him is being done.  Besides, there is
danger in being near him.'

'Danger!'

'To you.'

'I care not.  Why?'

'Enteric fever takes a typhoid form at times.'

'Fear not for me--I am his cousin--his promised wife!' urged Olive,
piteously.

'Come with me, then, but softly; this way,' said the surgeon, and,
taking her hand, he led her across a corridor, where hospital
orderlies, men of the Army Hospital Corps, nurses, and others were
hovering, and where Olive narrowly escaped the shock of seeing a
fever-stricken and attenuated corpse carried out, and into a plain,
white-washed room, where on a camp-bed--one of those brought from
Arabi's camp--Allan lay asleep.

Olive, in obedience to a mute sign from the doctor, made no nearer
approach, or attempt to touch or wake him, but she restrained her
heavy sobs with difficulty, for the sight of how wan and worn,
hollow-cheeked and pale he was, and how every way wasted, wrung her
loving heart to the core.

Kneeling down by his bedside, she lightly touched with her lips his
thin white hand that lay upon the coverlit, a mute action which, in
one so charming as she looked, stirred even the heart of the
staff-surgeon, and then she stole softly away.

'Is there any hope?' she asked, in a choking voice.

As the doctor did not speak, she looked in his face and seemed to see
her answer there.

'He cannot recover, you fear?' said she.

'I fear not, Miss Raymond,' said the doctor, in a low voice.

She leant for a moment against the table, and felt giddy.

Then, bowing to the staff-surgeon, she drew her veil close over her
face, took the arm of Clairette to steady her footsteps, and quitted
the sad place in a tumult of grief and horror.

Night came on--the hot Egyptian night--and Allan as he tossed
restlessly on his pillow, all unconscious of who had visited him, as
he looked wearily round his bare and strange-like apartment by the
subdued light of a shaded lamp, pondered doubtfully whether it had
been a dream or a reality that he had that forenoon spoken with and
seen his father, Lord Aberfeldie, and, in the weakness and confusion
of his mind, he was somewhat inclined to think the whole thing was
the effect of fevered fancy.

Ere long Olive was to have him all to herself!


In a beautiful little villa near the Lake of Timsah--one built for
the famous Toulba Pasha, the friend of Arabi--in view of all the
fleet that lay anchored there, Allan, after a little time, found
himself in a luxurious apartment, furnished in European style, yet
fitted up and decorated in the Egyptian manner, with gaily-painted
arabesques.

The windows opened upon an arcaded verandah, the slender pillars of
which were rose-coloured marble, with quaint capitals of purest
alabaster, from which sprung horse-shoe arches elaborately carved and
inscribed with verses from the Koran.

Palm-trees, feathery-branched bananas, and arched rows of
orange-trees shaded the lovely garden walks, all mosaic with polished
pebbles; and there, amid the rose-trees and beds of tulip bordered by
myrtle, a white marble fountain spouted, the very plash of its
ceaselessly falling water seeming to cool the heated air; and, in
view of all this, Allan Graham lay on his couch in the care of his
mother and sister, but more often with Olive alone, for she had
constituted herself by right his nurse, and ere long Eveline found a
sufficient occupation for herself.  How, the reader may guess.

As for Allan and Olive, their reconciliation came speedily about, as
such things never take long in real life if they are to take place at
all; and the few minutes that followed are not very describable, as
they remained, hand clasped in hand, in silence but with a happiness
and content that were inexpressible,--'one of those rare periods in
life when we forget our mortality and believe that heaven has begun
for us.'

At first Allan, fearful of some infectious nature in his ailment, had
implored Olive to leave him.

'Go--go, Olive!' he exclaimed, faintly; 'do not come near me.'

'You dislike me so--so much?' said Olive, more faintly still.

'Oh, no, oh, no--not that, not that, when I now know all.'

'Why then, Allan?'

'Because all the doctors tell me that there is something typhoid in
this Egyptian enteric fever, and if it were to affect you----'

'Allan!' she exclaimed, reproachfully; and, pressing her lips to his,
added, 'if you die, let me die too.'

'Olive!'

'Do you doubt me now?'

'Oh, no--oh, no, my darling; but do leave me.'

'Why?'

'Because this sick-room is no place for you.'

But Olive in the depth of her love was resolute, and kept her place
as a watcher by his pillow, and day after day, with only short
intervals of rest, was she there unvaryingly; and as she bent over
Allan's sick-bed she felt how true it is that 'all the forces of our
nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience, and of love,
and sweep down the choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our
would-be wisdom, and our clamorous, selfish desires.'

Allan's life was for a time hovering in the balance, and Olive, as
she sat by his pillow looking out on the Lake of Timsah, recalled the
pleasant days of their childhood at Dundargue, where they had plaited
rushes beside the trouting stream, and he had garlanded her hair with
scarlet poppies and yellow cowslips, and he used to call her his
little queen and wifie, while the great clouds cast their flying
shadows over the green Sidlaw hills and the bonnie Carse of Gowrie.

  'Days gone beyond recall, save in memory!'


But, when she feared he might be going out from her sight for ever,
her heart crew cold and seemed to die within her.

She watched him when he lay motionless and asleep, when his irregular
breathing stirred his sunburned throat and broad chest, when the
perspiration of fever rolled in globules over his forehead, and when
the cold shivering of the ague followed, till by watching and
confinement her cheek grew pale as Allan's.

There was always a profound and oppressive stillness about the house
and room.  She heard no sound but his breathing and the ticking of a
French clock upon a console table.

Her hand it was that was ever ready to give the compounded drinks the
doctor ordered, and when ere long he became convalescent, to her joy,
she accompanied him in his drives around Ismailia, to Nefische and
Serapium, and along the banks of the Great Bitter Lake, where the
lofty white Indian 'troopers' could be seen under steam, and boats
like those that are to be seen on the Nile at Cairo in
hundreds--elegant barques with long sail-yards and fantastic canvas
that fly with wonderful velocity, and are so ingeniously carved and
painted, fitted up with carpeted cabins, and deck awnings of
brilliant colours as a protection from the heat.

So the days stole on, and, as Allan's fever seemed to pass away, he
and Olive became supremely happy--she all the more so that she had
been his chief nurse.  'Nothing,' says a writer, 'tones down a young
girl's passion into apparent friendship like nursing the man she
loves in illness.  Of course it is there, ready to break out with the
old strength hereafter; but for the time the sense of utter weakness
on his side, of protection on hers--the perfect unquestioned
familiarity, the constant companionship--have done away with all the
old reserve, and doubt, and mystery which to unsophisticated young
women is the very food of love.'

We have said that while all this was in progress Eveline had found an
occupation for herself.

It was very natural that Evan Cameron should call at the villa by the
Lake of Timsah to inquire for his friend and comrade, and it was also
natural that he should meet, incidentally, Lady Puddicombe, which
event came to pass on the very day that Lord and Lady Aberfeldie had
taken the train to Grand Cairo, to be present at the St. Andrew
Festival, held by the Highland Brigade in the magnificent restaurant
in the Ezeb Keyah Gardens.

Evan was suddenly ushered in upon her by old Mr. Tappleton, the
butler, who had charge of the household at Ismailia, and whose
rubicund face became quite radiant when he saw the familiar uniform
of the Black Watch.

A little cap of snowy white lace rested on her soft brown hair; all
the rich beauty promised but a short time ago had been amply
fulfilled, amid the sorrow she had endured, or in the dignity of her
girlish widowhood.

A film seemed to pass over Evan's handsome eyes; a tremulous
sensation, hitherto unknown, seemed to thrill over his nerves, and he
was for a moment more full of emotion than herself; but he did not,
as she expected, hasten to take her in his arms.

'Lady Puddicombe!' he exclaimed, while playing irresolutely with the
red hackle in his tropical helmet.

'I am not the wife of Sir Paget now,' said Eveline, sweetly and
simply.

'What then?'

'His widow.  Is it possible you did not know?'

'He is--dead then!'

'Yes, Evan--killed by a fall from a horse.  I am in weeds, don't you
see?'

And, if a tearless, a very peerless little widow she looked.

Then a half-stifled cry escaped her as she fell upon his breast, and
her white hands groped feebly, as one might do in the dark, about his
shoulders, as her arms sought to go round his neck.  In her crape
dress she seemed to appeal to him and to his tenderness, more
eloquently than she had ever done in the past time, and he gazed into
her delicate face, as he took it caressingly between his hands, with
a growing intensity that showed how he had hungered for the sight of
it.

The first strong tide of emotion swept over that parted pair, meeting
now so differently from how they had ever expected to meet again.

In the intensity of her joy, Eveline had closed her eyes, as if the
light of day had proved too much for them; then their long lashes
began to quiver, the lids unclosed, and the dear eyes were again
turned wonderingly, searchingly, and lovingly on Evan Cameron's face.

She was _free_.

His pulses quickened at the thought.  He had never ceased to love
her--never ceased to wish she should be his.  Sir Paget was
dead--dead as Julius Cæsar--and he, Evan Cameron, had been in
possession of a treasure without knowing it--the free and unfettered
love of Eveline!

'Dead fires are difficult to re-light,' said she, waggishly, while
twirling the ends of his moustache with her fairy fingers.

'But, Eveline, with me the fire was never dead--as I loved you with a
love that partook of adoration in the dear past days at Dundargue, so
I love you still!'

'My poor, dear Evan!' cooed the girl.

'Yes--poor indeed--without you.'

So true it was that 'the thing we look forward to,' as George Eliot
says, 'often comes to pass; but never precisely as we have imagined
it to ourselves.'

Could Eveline ever have looked forward to this when at Hurdell
Hall--to see Evan Cameron in life again, and feel his tender kisses
on her lips and eyes?

Evan had loved Eveline as a maiden; he had trained himself to suffer,
endure, and think of her as a wife; but now he thanked God that he
had not to think of her as a mother--the mother of a wretched little
Puddicombe!

Lady Aberfeldie, who had fresh views concerning her daughter, was
somewhat irate when--on her return from the city of the Caliphs and
Khedives--the latter, with perfect deliberation, informed her that
Evan Cameron had been at the villa to see Allan, and had paid her a
long visit.

'He spoke of his old fancy for you, no doubt?' said Lady Aberfeldie,
rather freezingly.

'He did, mamma,' was the candid reply.

'He had not the hardihood to ask you to marry him?'

'Mamma!'

'Already--I mean.'

'Of course not.'

'But I suppose he will presume to do so in time?'

'I have no doubt of it, dearest mamma,' replied Eveline, attempting
to kiss her; but my Lady Aberfeldie was in no fit of effusion, and
coldly tendered her cheek.  'Was not his escape miraculous, mamma?'

'I admit that it was; and now----'

'Just learn this, dearest mamma; I married a short time ago to please
you, and, now that God in His goodness has spared and restored Evan
to me, I shall marry next to please myself.'

'It is very strange how some girls get it into their head that there
is a special virtue in a man because he is poor.'

'Evan isn't poor now,' replied Eveline, stoutly.  'Stratherroch is
nearly free, and, if it were not, I have enough for two.'

'Your jointure dies with you,' said Lady Aberfeldie, sourly.

'Dear Evan will never think of that, mamma; and long before _that_
day comes every acre, every tuft of heather in Stratherroch will be
disencumbered and free.'

'You have schemed out the whole programme.  But as your father's
daughter, and the widow of Sir Paget Puddicombe, Baronet, you are
entitled to look higher.'

'I don't want to do so, mamma,' said Eveline, coyly and laughingly;
'you see, it is only a case of "heaping up riches, and ye know not
who shall gather them."'

Eveline was in a kind of triumphant and defiant mood, such as her
mother had never seen her in before, for she added,

'The whirligig of time brings curious things to pass, so Lady
Puddicombe will be Mrs. Cameron of Stratherroch after all.'

So the days stole on pleasantly by the Lake of Timsah.  Allan grew
well rapidly, and, now that she was free and under better auspices,
Evan Cameron daily discovered in Eveline some new trait of character
that rendered her more worthy of his love and esteem--or indicative
that those qualities of passion and tenderness that first excited his
interest in her had ripened under all she had undergone--the sorrow
and separation that had tried and purified their mutual love, as gold
is tried by fire.

We have said that the reconciliation of Allan and Olive came about,
and rapidly, too.

'Only love me, Allan,' whispered the girl, as she nestled her sweet
face in his neck; 'only love me as you did in the old days at
Dundargue, and I shall be so happy.  Without your love I could not
live.'

'By your strange actions you destroyed my faith in you, darling--and
yet I loved you still.  Oh, think over it all, and consider if you
did not try me sorely, for there was a powerful appearance of
deception that was unworthy of us both.'

Her beautiful eyes were moist with tears; her hands stole into his,
and he took her in his arms and kissed her passionately, while a
torrent of thankfulness and joy overwhelmed her heart.

'And so that wretched photo was the key to your apparently
inexplicable conduct?'

'Yes,' replied Olive, weeping, while Allan kissed away her tears.

'Why did you not confide freely in me?'

'I was too terrified--too mortified to do so, and you were so proud,
so suspicious of me.  I writhed in secret under the imputation that
that man had it in his power to cast upon me with the tampered
miniature.  I was weak, foolish, Allan, and every act of mine seemed
to be a mistake and misplaced; but now----'

'All is over, and all forgotten.'

'Thank heaven for its goodness, Allan.  You never wrote to me after
that parting at Southsea.  Save in your letter to your mother after
Tel-el-Kebir, you never once referred to me, and then only in terms
of scorn and invective.  Oh, Allan, Allan, all that was very hard to
bear.'

But Allan found ample means of consoling her now.

'How happy I am,' said Lady Aberfeldie, as she nestled both their
heads together on her motherly breast; 'ever since you two were
little children, how I prayed for this; I reared and taught you to
this end, and God has seen fit in His goodness to accomplish it.'

And now, having brought our 'heroes and heroines,' to use the old
novelist's phraseology, to this point, need we follow them into the
region of wedding-bells, wedding-cakes, favours, rice, and old
slippers?

We think not.



THE END.



LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.



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