COLVILLE OF THE GUARDS

BY

JAMES GRANT

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

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1885.

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

I. The Queen's Shilling II. In London III. No. 60, Park Lane IV. 'So Near and Yet So Far!' V. 'Some Day.' VI. Jack Shows His Teeth VII. The Daughter of Nox VIII. Mrs. Deroubigne IX. Was It Not a Dream? X. Going to the Front XI. At Jellalabad XII. The Hadji XIII. A Fight with the Mohmunds XIV. In the Lughman Valley XV. The Fancy Ball XVI. The 10th Hussars XVII. Lost XVIII. The Sequel XIX. The Hakim Abou Ayoub XX. At Cabul

COLVILLE OF THE GUARDS.

CHAPTER I. THE QUEEN'S SHILLING.

Robert Wodrow, we have stated, had disappeared from his home.

Ellinor had apparently passed out of his life, and he felt as if he had nothing more to hope for in it; but the influence of her memory hung over him still.

Even the love he bore his poor old mother failed to restrain his wild impulse, his craving, to begone, he cared not where; thus her influence also failed in getting him to resume those medical studies which he once pursued with enthusiasm, but now relinquished with indifference or disgust; and, under the disappointment and mental worry produced by Ellinor's falsehood to himself, he failed to graduate at the expected time.

'My poor boy!' his mother said again and again, while stroking his dark brown hair caressingly with her now shrivelled hand; 'that cold-blooded girl has come between you and your wits.'

'Don't call her so, mother. Perhaps I did not deserve her,' said he, humbly.

'I used to sit and watch you both when children many a time and oft, and think what a winsome couple you would be in the days to come. Ah me, Robert, your one ewe lamb, and that stranger took it from you, to be but a plaything for his idle hours too probably!'

'Mother, you torture me by all this kind of thing!' exclaimed Robert.

'It is perhaps but a sudden girlish fancy hers for that man Sleath. It may pass away and all yet be well.'

'Never for me, mother. And you think so meanly of me as to take that view of the matter? I would not and could not with my knowledge of the present seek to have the past over again, and never more can I look upon Ellinor Wellwood or think of her save as I would of the dead. The charm is broken, the flower has lost its fragrance, and the peach its bloom.'

'Why should the weakness or falsehood of one person—one person only—wreck the whole life of another?' asked his father, with some asperity. 'It should not be so.'

'The old and the young view these matters differently, father,' said Robert, gently.

'True. I have read that "in youth grief is a tempest which makes you ill; in old age it is only like a cold wind which adds a wrinkle to your face and one more white lock to the others. Yet there are people who can feed themselves on their grief till they grow fat on it."'

But arguments proved unavailing. The vicinity of Birkwoodbrae had become intolerable to Robert now, and he resolved that he would go far away from them and the pleasant birks of Invermay; and he openly announced his intention of becoming a soldier, adding that nothing would make him swerve from his purpose, as by that means he would be taken to other scenes and be under other influences.

'Most evil ones, I fear!' exclaimed the doctor, striking his hands together.

'Oh, my poor infatuated boy!' added his mother, while her tears fell hotly and fast, and his father started from the table on which the untasted dinner was spread, tore open his waistcoat as if he was suffocating, and paced about the room with impatient strides, his whole form agitated with a kind of convulsive agony that cut Robert to the soul, but did not make him swerve from his bitter purpose.

'Consider the society and profligacy you have to encounter—yea, such as even our ancestor, in the third volume of his Analecta, details when describing the schools of profanity in 1726.'

Then, after a time, finding that all his opposition was vain, he said, in a very broken voice,

'God bless and protect you, Robert, and may He forgive you for all the sorrow you are causing us, as by such a course you will be lost to us and to yourself, after all our care and affection, after all your painful anxieties at college, and after all your good training and religious education.'

'In three years I shall be an officer,' exclaimed Robert, confidently, 'and won't you and the dear old mother be proud of me then?'

But the minister shook his silver head.

'Your future——' he began, and paused. 'Who can see the future?'

'One above, Robert. And may He give you the grace to think overall this terrible purpose again.'

Robert did think again, as he had thought before, deeply and decidedly, and, to avoid more painful scenes and partings, he quitted his bed next morning while the sky was dark, and no ray of light gilded as yet the Ochil peaks. He dressed himself in haste, took a few necessaries in a handbag, and after kneeling softly and saying a prayer at the door of the room in which his parents were asleep, he tore himself as it were out of the house and set forth on his new path in life, the path by which there might be no returning.

In that time of supreme bitterness little could the poor fellow see all that was before him.

The morning was still dark, but the sky was clear and starry; the great hills and tall silver birches in the foreground stood blackly up against it, and he could hear that sound so familiar to his ears—the rush of the May over its rocky bed.

He gave a lingering farewell glance at the roof of the old house which had been his home since first he saw the light there—the abode, with all its old-fashioned but substantial furniture, to which his mother had come a smiling and blushing bride in the past time—the abode, till now, of so much peace, frugality, and happiness—and with a bitter sigh he turned his eyes resolutely away.

Then, if aught was required to nerve him, it was the next feature in the still and sombre landscape; the smokeless chimneys and darkened windows of Birkwoodbrae—the now empty shrine where so long his idol had been.

'Oh, all I have ever loved!' he exclaimed, and, wringing his hands, set out with all speed upon his way, haunted, however, by the coming grief of those he was leaving behind when his place was found empty; when his mother's eyes would have a vacant chair to contemplate and his father's reverend head was bent with sorrow, as it would be in the separation that was to come; and what is separation to the loving but a living death?

The next day found him among the wide and stately streets of the Modern Athens, willing to enlist in the first regiment any member of which came in his way, for he was drawing a chance in the lottery of life now, and to him all regiments were alike; so, as Fortune had it, he met a hussar, to whom he expressed his wishes, and from whom he soon receiyed, with all due formality, that magic coin the Queen's Shilling, and became what is termed 'a Headquarter Recruit,' enlisting for 'short service'—i.e., six years with the colours.

Six years! In these days of steam the progress of events is so rapid, what might not happen in that brief space?

He had answered all the usual questions by those entitled to make them as to his age, name, parish, and calling, with others that were less pleasant, as to whether he had ever served before, or been marked D. or B.C.; this formality over, and oath of attestation taken before a bailie of the city—the oath to 'be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty, her heirs and successors; obey all orders of Her Majesty, her heirs and successors; and of all the generals and officers, &c.,' set over him—being concluded, a night intervening between enlistment and attestation, nothing remained, as his new friend, Sam Surcingle, said, 'but to have a drink over it.'

This opinion was concurred in by several smart but long-legged fellows in braided trousers, and tight jackets, with caps like scarlet muffins, jangling jack-spurs, and riding switches, who seemed all opportunely at hand, and suffering from chronic thirst, all the more so as the new recruit seemed to have some loose cash; and a suitable tavern (the 'Scots Grey') being at hand, Robert Wodrow soon found himself acting as host to a military circle which made up in heedless jollity and noise what it might lack in rank and distinction.

Yet among the half-dozen or so of his new friends were, at least, two of those ill-starred fellows so frequently to be found in our cavalry regiments at all times, but more especially just now, those who by extravagance and dissipation or failing to achieve the insane 'cramming' of the present day, had lost their chance of commissions, and taken 'the shilling' from sheer love of the service, and the desperate hope of rising in it.

One of these was a mere youth, who, as Sam Surcingle said, 'had a long pedigree behind and a long minority before him;' the other, Toby Chase, the heir to an ancient baronetcy, was older, and drank fast to drown care, shouting, with a laugh,

'To-day—to-day is for me; to-morrow is the paradise of the fool! Your health and promotion, Wodrow, old fellow!'

Glass succeeded glass; toasts and anecdotes—some of the latter not very classical—followed each other fast, till the sharp trumpets blew 'the last post' in the adjoining barrack square of Piershill, and the hussars had to hurry to quarters, and we are sorry to admit that for perhaps the first time in his life—even during his college career—Robert Wodrow had contrived to get disreputably tipsy.

He had no care for the present and no anticipation of the headache and shame of the morrow, with the disgusts of the rough riding and 'barrack fatigue,' such as carrying coals or refilling mattresses with fresh straw; neither was he troubled with the natural reflection of what would be the emotions of his highly-principled and purely-minded old father and mother could they have seen him then, when he had spent the last of his cash on his new comrades, and was voted the king of good fellows, and with one of the before-mentioned scarlet muffins on his head, but cocked very much over the right ear, he flourished a riding-whip, while joining, but with a somewhat 'feathery' voice, in the song,

'How happy's the soldier that lives on his pay, And spends half-a-crown out of sixpence a day! Little cares he for the bailiff or bum, When he pays all his debts with a roll on the drum.'

And so, for a time, Robert Wodrow passes out of our story; but a time only.

CHAPTER II. IN LONDON.

Ellinor was thinking of Redmond Sleath—when was she not thinking of him!—during all that long, long journey from the North to London, and Mary had been painfully struck by her alternate nervous anxiety and dull, mechanical acceptance of her own attentions and care during its progress. She seemed at times like a somnambulist—one moving in her sleep rather than one to whom the journey should have been an excitement and a novelty after the long years of quiet and seclusion at Birkwoodbrae, hence the strain upon her overwrought nerves was ere long to bring a serious illness upon her.

A cab—a genuine London cab, one of those clumsy four-wheeled 'growlers,' peculiar to the modern Babylon and to no other place—cramped, damp, frowsy, far from sweet-smelling, and sorely perilous for ladies' dresses—had conveyed the sisters, both feeling somewhat scared and disconsolate, from the Northern Railway to the classic region of Paddington by day, and luckily for them not by night.

The long drive westward by the Euston and Mary-le-Bone Roads had seemed apparently interminable, and most weary after a long journey by rail; and then the architecture, construction, and material of the houses—brick, always and for ever brick—looked strange and foreign to their eyes, and so ere long they reached the Terrace, which adjoins Paddington Church. They had read of and heard a deal about the famous old Court suburb of Kensington, and thought the locality to which a chance had taken them might prove something like it.

Mrs. Fubsby, their landlady, whose address had been given to them by her nephew, Joe Fubsby, guard of the northern train (the chance above referred to), and hence their selection of such a singular place, received the weary travellers kindly enough. She seemed a motherly, well-disposed woman, but soured in disposition by past wrongs or sorrows.

She was about forty years of age, had some remains of beauty, and had seen better days and had other hopes (as usual with her class), all of which she was not long in hinting.

The sitting-room into which she ushered them, though scrupulously clean, had a mouldy odour, suggestive of the adjacent hideous churchyard; it looked small, poor, and shabby. Gaudy artificial flowers in vases of Derby spar were on the little mantelpiece, and some highly-coloured prints in Oxford frames were hung upon the walls.

The air felt close and heavy—oh, so heavy, the girls thought, after the fresh, pure breezes of Invermay! In fact, there seemed to be no air at all.

Their sweetness and gentleness of manner, together with their undeniable beauty, attracted and won the—at first suspicious—landlady, who bustled about and prepared tea for them. She, however, put great weight upon an introduction coming through her nephew Joe; and her confidence grew apace when she found Mary scrupulously correct in her weekly payments, and others of every kind, and thus she complacently tolerated the presence of Jack in her household. To have parted with him would have stricken Mary's heart.

Ere the first day of their residence with her was past, they were in full possession of Mrs. Fubsby's personal history, which she thrust upon them with that loquacious communicativeness peculiar to the English lower orders—at least so much of it as she cared to tell—how her maiden name was Seraphina-Mary-Ann—how she had married a gentleman, who, however, did not behave as such in the end, as he had left her years ago, and she was now reduced to have lodgers or boarders, and so forth.

Coming from a secluded country place like their Perthshire parish, Mary and Ellinor had no real idea of the world or of life, as it is called—more than all, the bustling, busy, tearing, selfish, and suspicious life of London, or the mighty and close race for existence there. They knew not yet that without friends and introductions employments in teaching music or drawing were all but unattainable.

A few days passed on. Advertisements were studied daily and replied to sedulously; but no answer came. They could not know that for each of these employments there might be two thousand applicants! So their poor hearts grew hopeless and weary—often sick with alarm as money dwindled away; and day by day they looked out, either on the frowsy churchyard, where not a blade of grass grew between the closely packed tombstones, or the equally frowsy canal, with its barges cleaving the muddy water and oozy slime; and as they were totally ignorant of London, for a time, the poor girls supposed it must be all like their then sordid surroundings.

Paddington, where Francois Thurot, the famous corsair, won the bride in whose arms he died in battle, and where in the last century the Guards coming from Hounslow were wont to halt for the night, prior to marching for the little London of George II., was, some fifty years ago, a kind of suburban village, a rural and pretty place, with its grassy green and the old 'Wheatsheaf' Tavern, where Ben Jonson drank his beer, even after its quaint Gothic church, where the Sheldons were entombed by its solemn yew-tree, was replaced by the present hideous square edifice, with its pillared portico and trumpery cupola starting from amid that veritable stoneyard of graveslabs, among which lie the remains of the beautiful Mrs. Siddons and of the luckless painter Haydon—an odious and festering place, where, Dr. Ashburner tells us in his work on 'The Dynamics,' his nervous patients were wont to see nightly the pale and lambent dead-lights rising from the corrupted soil.

Whether it was the result of all she had undergone of late, or that the atmosphere of the place affected Ellinor, Mary never knew; but her colour faded out—the ruddy tint left her lips, and her dark hazel eyes grew dull as she became prostrated by a nervous illness, which added sorely to the cares, the troubles, and expenses of the latter, for Ellinor required wine and many little luxuries.

Energy seemed to have left her. Ellinor was but twenty, but already her life seemed over and done with!

And now that her secret love affair was apparently a thing completely of the past, Ellinor showed Mary the gift of Sir Redmond, and bursting into a flood of hysterical tears told her all—of the baffled elopement; and then Mary, catching up Jack, covered the dog with kisses.

There were at least two reasons why no letters ever reached Dr. Wodrow, and that, to him, the movements of the sisters seemed involved in painful mystery.

Two letters that Mary wrote to him had miscarried, and, as no answers came to them, with over-sensitiveness and doubt, she misconstrued the silence of her good old friend, and, believing that he resented Ellinor's treatment of his son, would now ignore their existence.

'I shall write no more,' said Mary. 'Can it be that Lady Dunkeld has ruined us among those who knew us? If so, there is one use in adversity—we can tell our friends from our enemies.'

So in sorrowful doubt she did not write again; seeking for employment and nursing Ellinor occupied all the thoughts of Mary, who became almost distracted with a fear that the former might be sent by Mrs. Fubsby to a common hospital. Nothing, perhaps, was further from the good woman's thoughts; but Mary had heard, or read, of such things. Thus, fully occupied, she wrote no more; and, as time went past, the mystery grew at the manse of Kirktoun-Mailler, and in the mind of Colville also. Everything painful, horrible, and disastrous was fancied, and advertisements put by the latter in the Times, however carefully yet pointedly worded, were never seen by Mary. So in these our days of penny post and cheap telegrams, they remained lost, untraced, and undiscovered by those who loved them best.

She had both confidence and patience; and patience is mental strength concentrated. Her religious education had also taught her resignation, and she felt that 'let the sands drop through the glass ever so slowly, there is a time when they end; there is a time for us all; no matter the hour, for God thinks it the best.'

Yet often as she sat, busy with crewel work for sale, by Ellinor's bedside, the notes of the passing bell in the cupola of the adjacent church—a toll unknown in Scotland—smote a gloom upon her heart with every measured stroke.

No pessimist was Mary Wellwood in temper or heart, and no manufacturer of artificial sorrow; yet the idea occurred to her with terror—what if she should lose Ellinor, and be left alone in this bitter world?

As petty trifles, like airs and scraps of frivolous songs, will haunt the mind in times of dire calamity, even of death, Mary's thoughts would run persistently on the feathered pets and flowers she had once at home—even on the sparrows for which she was daily wont to spread crumbs, where they would find none now; and she actually envied her old owl; he, at least, was at home in his ivied ruin, that looked down on Invermay.

Thinking thus, Mary would sit in the evening twilight by the open window, through which came the roar of mighty London; but not the flower-scented air that hovered over their lost home; and while the stars, dimly seen in the smoke-laden sky of London, stole into sight, she thought of the green Ochil peaks, over which the same stars were shining brightly, like vast diamonds set in azure.