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.