ONLY AN ENSIGN

A Tale of the Retreat from Cabul.

BY JAMES GRANT,

AUTHOR OF "THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "FIRST LOVE AND LAST LOVE," "LADY WEDDERBURN'S WISH," ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III.

"Come what come may, Time and the Hour runs through the roughest day."—Macbeth.

LONDON: TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE ST., STRAND. 1871. [All Rights Reserved.]

LONDON: BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

CONTENTS.

CHAP.

I.—PAR NOBILE FRATRUM! II.—DOWNIE'S REFLECTIONS III.—MR. W. S. SHARKLEY'S PLOT IV.—THE HOPE OF THE DEAD V.—RETRIBUTION VI.—AT JELLALABAD VII.—THE SCHEME OF ZOHRAB VIII.—MABEL DELUDED IX.—BY THE HILLS OF BEYMAROO X.—AGAIN IN CABUL XI.—THE ABODE OF THE KHOND XII.—THE SHADE WITHIN THE SHADOW XIII.—ROSE IN A NEW CHARACTER XIV.—WITH SALE'S BRIGADE XV.—THE BATTLE OF TIZEEN XVI.—TO TOORKISTAN! XVII.—MABEL'S PRESENTIMENT XVIII.—THE GOVERNOR OF BAMEEAN XIX.—THE ALARM XX.—TOO LATE! XXI.—THE PURSUIT XXII.—THE HOSTAGES XXIII.—THE DURBAR XXIV.—THE LAMP OF LOVE XXV.—CONCLUSION

ONLY AN ENSIGN.

CHAPTER I. PAR NOBILE FRATRUM!

"So, fellow, I am expected by you to swallow this 'tale of a tub,' which has been invented or revived solely for the purposes of monetary extortion!" exclaimed Downie Trevelyan, with the most intense and crushing hauteur, as he lay back in the same luxurious easy chair in which his uncle died, and played with his rich gold eye-glass and watered silk riband.

"It ain't a tale of a tub, my lord; but of the wreck of a steamer—the steamer Admiral of Montreal," replied Sharkley, meekly and sententiously.

Downie surveyed him through his double eyeglass, thinking that Sharkley was laughing covertly at him; but no such thought was hovering in the mind of that personage, who was not much of a laugher at any time, save when he had successfully outwitted or jockeyed any one. He seemed very ill at ease, and sat on the extreme edge of a handsome brass-nailed morocco chair, with his tall shiny hat placed upon his knees, and his long, bare, dirty-looking fingers played the while somewhat nervously on the crown thereof, as he glanced alternately and irresolutely from the speaker to the titular Lady Lamorna, who was also eyeing him, as a species of natural curiosity, through her glass, and whose absence he devoutly wished, but feared to hint that she might withdraw.

She was reclining languidly on a sofa, with her fan, her lace handkerchief, her agate scent-bottle, and her everlasting half-cut novel—she was never known to read one quite through—lying beside her; and she had only relinquished her chief employment of toying with Bijou, her waspish Maltese spaniel (which nestled in a little basket of mother-of-pearl, lined with white satin), when an aiguletted valet had ushered in "Mr. W. S. Sharkley, Solicitor."

"Leave us, Gartha, please," said her husband; "I must speak with this person alone."

Curiosity was never a prominent feature in the character of Downie's wife, who was too languid, lazy, or aristocratically indifferent to care about anything; so, with a proud sweep of her ample dress, she at once withdrew, followed by the gaze of the relieved Sharkley, who had a professional dislike for speaking before witnesses.

Mr. Sharkley's present surroundings were not calculated to add to his personal ease. The library at Rhoscadzhel—the same room in which poor Constance and Sybil had undergone, in presence of the pitying General Trecarrel, that humiliating interview, the bitterness of which the wife had never forgotten even to her dying hour, and in which Richard had, some time previously, found Downie by their dead uncle's side, with that suspicious-looking document in his hand, the history of which the former was too brotherly, too gentlemanly, and delicate ever to inquire about—the library, we say, was stately, spacious, and elegant enough, with its shelves of dark oak, filled by rare works in gay bindings, glittering in the sunlight; with the white marble busts of the great and learned of other days, looking stolidly down from the florid cornice that crowned the cases; with its massive and splendid furniture, gay with bright morocco and gilt nails; with the stained coats of arms, the koithgath and the seahorse of the Trevelyans, repeated again and

again on the row of oriels that opened on one side, showing the far extent of field and chace, green upland and greener woodland, the present owner of which now sat eyeing him coldly, hostilely, and with that undoubted air and bearing which mark the high-bred and well-born gentleman—all combined to make the mean visitor feel very ill at ease.

He mentally contrasted these surroundings with those of his own dingy office, with its docquets of papers, dirty in aspect as in their contents; its old battered charter-boxes filled with the misfortunes of half the adjacent villages—a room, to many a hob-nailed client and grimy miner, more terrible than the torture chamber of the Spanish Inquisition—and the comparison roused envy and covetousness keenly in his heart, together with an emotion of malicious satisfaction, that he had it in his power perhaps to deprive of all this wealth, luxury, and rank, the cold, calm, and pale-faced personage who eyed him from time to time with his false and haughty smile—an expression that, ere long, passed away, and then his visage became rigid and stony as that of the Comandatore in Don Giovanni, for whatever he might feel, it was not a difficult thing for a man who possessed such habitual habits of self-command as Downie Trevelyan, to appear at ease when he was far from being so. Yet Sharkley's mission tried him to the utmost, whatever real pride or temper he possessed.

"My lord," resumed the solicitor, while the revengeful emotion was in his heart—"if, indeed, you are entitled to be called 'my lord'——"

"Fellow, what do you mean by this studied insolence?" demanded Downie, putting his hand on a silver bell, which, however, he did not ring, an indecision that caused a mocking smile to pass over the face of Sharkley, while the iris of his eyes dilated and shrunk as usual. "You are, I know, Sharkley the—aw, well I must say it—the low practitioner who got up by forgery and otherwise—don't look round, sir, we have no witnesses—the case of the adventuress Devereaux against me and my family. So what brings you here now?"

"To tell you what I was beginning to state—the story of the wreck, by which your brother Richard, Lord Lamorna, perished at sea; and to prove that the certificate of his marriage with Miss Constance Devereaux, daughter of a merchant trader in the city of Montreal, has been discovered and safely preserved, and is here in Cornwall now, together with his lordship's will."

Sharkley spoke with malicious bitterness, and Downie paused for a moment ere he said,—

"You have seen them?"

"Yes."

"Well, when I see those documents I shall believe in their existence—till then, you must hold me excused; but even their existence does not prove either their legality or authenticity. This is merely some new scheme to extort money," added Downie, almost passionately; "but it shall not succeed! That unhappy woman is dead—she died of paralysis I have heard—the victim, I doubt not, of her own evil passions. Her son—"

"Your nephew, is with the army in India. Her daughter—"

"Has disappeared," said Downie, almost exultingly, "too probably taking a leaf out of her charming mamma's book; and the army in Afghanistan has been destroyed—my son Audley's letters and the public papers assure me of that."

"Yet your lordship would like to see the documents?"

"Or what may seem to be the documents—certainly; in whose hands are they—yours?"

"No—in those of one who may be less your lordship's friend—Derrick Braddon."

"Braddon!" said Downie, growing if possible paler than usual; "Braddon, my brother's favourite servant, who was in all his secrets, and was with him in the Cornish regiment?"

"The same, my lord."

"D—n—but this looks ill!" stammered Downie, thrown off his guard.

"For your lordship—very," said Sharkley with a covert smile.

Downie felt that he had forgot himself, so he said,

"Of course, this Braddon will show—perhaps deliver them to me."

"You are the last man on earth to whom he will now either show or deliver them. Be assured of that."

"For what reason, sir?"

"The account he received from his sister and old Mike Treherne of your treatment of—well, I suppose we must call her yet—Mrs. Devereaux."

Downie's steel-gray eyes stared coldly, glassily, and spitefully at Sharkley. He longed for the power to pulverise, to annihilate him by a glance. He loathed and hated, yet feared this low-bred legal reptile, for he felt that he, and all his family, were somehow in his power. Yet he could not quite abandon his first position of indignant denial and proud incredulity.

He spread a sheet of foolscap paper before him, and making a broad margin on the left side thereof, an old office habit that still adhered to him, like many more that were less harmless, he dipped a pen in the inkstand, as if to make memoranda, and balancing his gold glasses on the bridge of his sharp slender nose, said, while looking keenly over them,

"Attend to me, sir—please. When was this pretended discovery made?"

"Some nine months ago."

"Where—I say, where?"

"At Montreal, in the chapel where this Latour, of whom we have heard so much, was curate."

"A rascally scheme—a forgery in which you have a share."

"Take care, my lord—I'll file a bill against you."

"You forget, scoundrel, that we are without witnesses."

"Well—there are a pair of us," was the impudent rejoinder; "but what good might such a scheme ever do an old pensioner like Derrick Braddon?"

"I do not pretend to fathom—for who can?—the secret motives of people of that class," said Downie, haughtily.

"Ay—or for that of it, any class," added Sharkley, as he shrugged his high bony shoulders.

"Relate to me, succinctly and clearly, all that this man has told you," said Downie Trevelyan, dipping his pen again in the silver inkstand; and as Sharkley proceeded, he listened to the narrative of his brother's sufferings and terrible death with impatience, and without other interest than that it served to prove his non-existence by a competent witness, who, were it necessary, might bring others of the crew who were present on the wreck, and had escaped in a boat.

Ere the whole story was ended, Downie was ghastly pale, and tremulous with the mingled emotions of rage and fear, doubt and mortification. He felt certain that in all this there must lie something to be laid further open, or be, if possible, crushed; and on being reassured by Sharkley that Derrick Braddon would "surrender the documents only with his life——"

"We must not think of violence, Mr. Sharkley," said he, coldly and mildly.

"Well, it ain't much in my line, my lord—though I have more than once got damages when a client struck me."

"We must have recourse to stratagem or bribery. For myself, I cannot, and shall not, come in personal contact with any man who is so insolent as to mistrust me, nor is it beseeming I should do so. To you I shall entrust the task of securing and placing before me those alleged papers, for legal investigation, at your earliest convenience. For this, you shall receive the sum of two thousand pounds; of this," he added, lowering his voice, "I shall give you, in the first place, a cheque for five hundred."

The eyes of Sharkley flashed, dilated, shrunk, and dilated again, when he heard the sum mentioned; and rubbing his gorilla-like hands together, he said, with a chuckle peculiarly his own,—

"Never fear for me, my lord; I'll work a hole for him—this Derrick Braddon. He spoke insultingly of the profession last night—but I'll work a hole for him."

With an emotion of angry contempt, which he strove in vain to conceal, Downie gave him a cheque for the first instalment of his bribe, taking care that it was a crossed one, payable only at his own bankers, so that if there was any trickery in this matter, he might be able to recall or trace it.

Sharkley carefully placed it in the recesses of a greasy-looking black pocket-book, tied with red tape, and saying something, with a cringing smile, to the effect that he had "in his time, paid many a fee to counsel, but never before received one in return," bowed himself out, with slavish and reiterated promises of fealty, discretion, and fulfilment of the task in hand; but he quitted the stately porte-cochère, and long shady avenue of Rhoscadzhel, with very vague ideas, as yet, of how he was to win the additional fifteen hundred pounds.

So parted those brothers learned in the law.

CHAPTER II. DOWNIE'S REFLECTIONS.

His odious visitor and tempter gone, Downie sat long, sunk in reverie. He lay back in the softly-cushioned chair, with his eyes vacantly and dreamily gazing through the lozenged panes, between the moulded mullions of the oriel windows, to where the sunlight fell in bright patches between the spreading oaks and elms, on the green sward of the chace, to where the brown deer nestled cosily among the tender ferns of spring, and to the distant isles of Scilly, afar in the deep blue sea; but he saw nothing of all these. His mind was completely inverted, and his thoughts were turned inward. "The wildest novel," says Ouida, "was never half so wild as the real state of many a human life, that to superficial eyes looks serene and placid and uneventful enough; but life is just the same as in the ages of Oedipus' agony and the Orestes' crime."

Doubtless, the reader thought it very barbarous in the fierce Mohammedan Amen Oollah Khan to twist off his elder brother's head, and so secure his inheritance; but had the civilised Christian, Downie, been in the Khan's place, he would have acted precisely in the same way. The men's instincts were the same; the modes of achievement only different.

But a month before this, and Downie, at his club in Pall Mall, had read with exultation, that, of all General Elphinstone's army, his own son, Audley, and Doctor Brydone, of the Shah's 6th Regiment, had alone reached Jellalabad. Little cared he who perished on that disastrous retreat, so that his son was safe, for, selfish though he was, he loved well and dearly that son, his successor—the holder of a young life that was to stretch, perhaps, for half a century beyond his own shorter span. Now it had chanced that on the very morning of this remarkable visit, he had seen, with disgust, in the Times, that, among those alleged to be safe in the hands of an Afghan chief "was Ensign Denzil Devereaux, of the Cornish Light Infantry, an officer, who, according to a letter received from Taj Mohammed Khan the Wuzeer, had succeeded in saving a colour of Her Majesty's 44th Regiment."

The daughter, whose artful plans upon his son's affections he had, as he conceived, so cleverly thwarted—the daughter Sybil gone no one knew whither; the son, a captive in a barbarous land beyond the Indian frontier, and their mother dead, the little family of Richard Trevelyan seemed on the verge of being quietly blotted out altogether; and now here was this ill-omened Derrick Braddon, this Old Man of the Sea, come suddenly on the tapis, with his confounded papers!

General Elphinstone had died in the hands of the Afghans; so might Denzil; or he and the other survivors or hostages might yet be slain or—unless rescued by the troops from Candahar or Jellalabad—be sold by Ackbar Khan (as Downie had heard in his place in the House) to the chiefs in Toorkistan, after which they would never be heard of more. Oh, thought Downie, that I could but correspond with this Shireen Khan of the Kuzzilbashes; doubtless such a worthy would "not be above taking a retaining fee."

By the dreadful slaughter in the Khyber Pass, and the capture of all the ladies and children, the sympathies, indignation, and passions of the people were keenly roused at home; thus if Denzil returned at this crisis, with the slightest military éclat, it would greatly favour any claims he might advance.

If the documents were genuine and could be proved so in a court of Law—or Justice (these being distinctly separate), were his title, his own honour (as Downie thought it), the honour, wealth, and position, privileges and prospects of his wife and children, to be at the mercy of a mercenary wretch like Schotten Sharkley; or of a broken-down, wandering, and obscure Chelsea pensioner, who possessed the papers in question?

It was maddening even for one so cold in blood—so cautious and so slimy in his proceedings, as Mr. Downie Trevelyan. He had no great talents, but only instinct and cunning; barrister though he was, the cunning of the pettifogger. A legal education had developed all that were corrupt and vile in his nature. A country squire, Downie would have been a blackleg on the turf and a grinding landlord; a tradesman, he would have been far from being an honest one; a soldier, he might have been a poltroon and a malingerer; a legal man, he was—exactly what we find him, a master in subtlety, with a heart of stone. In the same luxurious chair in which he was now seated in fierce and bitter reverie, he had sat and regarded his brother's widow, in her pale and picturesque beauty, and watched the torture of her heart with something of the half amused expression of a cat when playing with the poor little mouse of which it intends to make a repast; and now he sat there shrinking from vague terrors of the future, and in abhorrence of suspense; but there was a

species of dogged courage which he could summon to meet any legal emergency or danger, if he would but know its full extent. He was in the dark as yet, and his heart writhed within him at the prospect of coming peril, even as that of Constance had been wrung by the emotions of sorrow and unmerited shame.

He knew himself to be degraded by acting the part of a conspirator in all this; yet how much was at stake! No family in ancient Cornwall was older in history or tradition than his, and none was more honoured: yet here by intrigue, fatality, and the debasing influence of association was he, the twelfth Lord Lamorna, the coadjutor of a man whose father had been a poor rat-catcher, and, if report said true, a felon. He felt as if on Damien's bed of steel, or as if the velvet cushions of his chair had been stuffed with long iron nails, and he repeated bitterly aloud,—

"What! am I to be but a locum tenens after all—and to whom? Denzil Devereaux—this filius nullius, this son of an adventuress, or of nobody perhaps!"

The grave, grim, and somewhat grotesque portraits of Launcelot, Lord Lamorna, in Cavalier dress—he who hid from Fairfax's troopers in the Trewoofe; of Lord Henry, with beard, ruff, and ribbed armour, who was Governor of Rougemont in Devon, and whose scruples did not find him favour with the "Virgin" Queen; and even of his late uncle, with his George IV. wig, false teeth, and brass-buttoned blue swallow-tail, seemed to look coldly and contemptuously down on him.

"Pshaw!" muttered Downie, "am I a fool or a child to be swayed by such fancies?—I should think not; the days of superstition are gone!"

Yet he felt an influence, or something, he knew not what, and averted his stealthy eyes from the painted faces of the honester dead.

The irony of the malevolent and the vulgar; the gossip and surmises of the anonymous press; the "Honourable" cut from Audley's name in the Army List, the Peerage, and elsewhere, and from that of his daughter Gartha, who was just about to be brought out, and had begun to anticipate, with all a young beauty's pleasure, the glories of her first presentation at Court, were all before him now.