CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE PRESENTIMENT.
Among her letters one morning—though her chief correspondent was her father, the old Indian veteran at Merlwood, whose shaky caligraphy there was no mistaking—there came one which gave Hester a species of electric shock. It bore the postmarks 'Egypt' and 'Cairo,' with stamps having the Pyramids and Sphinx's head thereon.
'From Malcolm Skene!' she said to herself; 'Malcolm Skene, and to me!'
She hurried to her room that she might read it in solitude, for it was impossible that she could fail to do so with deep interest after all that Malcolm Skene had said to her, and the knowledge of all that might have been—yea, yet perhaps might be; but the letter, dated more than a month before at Cairo, simply began:—
'MY DEAR MISS MAULE,
'My excuse for writing to you,' he continued, 'is—and your pardon must be accorded to me therefore—that I am ordered on a distant, solitary, and perilous duty, from which I have, for the first time in my life, a curious, yet solemn, presentiment that I shall never return.
'This emotion may, please God, be a mistake; and I hope so, for my dear mother's sake. It may only be that superstition which some deem impiety; but we Skenes of Dunnimarle have had it in more than one generation—a kind of foreknowledge of what was to happen to us, or to be said or done by those we met. As some one has it, the map of coming events is before us, and the spirit surveys it, and for the time we are translated into another sphere, and re-act, perhaps, foregone scenes. Be that as it may, the unbidden emotion of presentiment seems to have some affinity to that phenomenon.'
'What a strange letter; and how unlike Malcolm—thoughtful and grave as he is!' was Hester's idea.
'I read a few days ago that some calamity had occurred at Earlshaugh; that my dear old friend and comrade Roland had met with an accident—had disappeared! What did that mean? But too probably I shall never learn now, and, as I have not again seen the matter referred to in print, hope it may all be a canard—a mistake.
'You remember our last interview? Oh, Hester, while life remains to me I shall never, never forget it? I think or hope you may care for me now in pity as we are separated—or might learn to care for me at a future time. Tell me to wait that time; if I return from my mission, Hester, and I shall do so—yea, were it seven years, if you wish it to be—if at the end of those seven years you would lay your dear hand in mine and tell me that you would be my wife.
'The waiting would be hard; yet, if inspired by hope, I would undergo it, Hester, and trust while life was spared to me. We are told that "the meshes of our destiny are spinning every day," silently, deftly, and we unconsciously aid in the spinning—scarcely knowing that—as we stumble through the darkness to the everlasting light—the dangers we have passed by, and the fires we have passed through, are all, in different ways, the process that makes us godlike, strong and free.'
Much more followed that was a little abstruse, and then he seemed to become loving and tender in spite of the manner in which he strove to modify his letter.
'I depart in an hour, and tide what may, my last thoughts will ever be of you—my last wish a prayer for your happiness! My life's love—my life's love, for such you are still—once more farewell!
'MALCOLM SKENE.'
Certainly the gentle-hearted Hester could not but be moved by this letter, coming as it did under all the circumstances from the writer in a remote and perilous land. She looked at the date after perusing the letter more than once, and her spirit sank with a dread of what might have transpired since then.
She recalled vividly the face of Malcolm Skene, and his eyes, that were soft yet full of power, more frequently grave than merry, and his firm lips. He was a man whose features and bearing would have been remarkable amid any group of men, and the first to arrest a woman's attention and arouse her interest.
But as she re-read his expressions of love she shook her handsome head slowly and gravely, and thought with Collins:
Friendship often ends in love,
But love in friendship never!'
To this letter a terrible sequel was close at hand. This she found in the newspapers of the following day, and while her whole mind was full of that remarkable and most unexpected missive to which she could send no answer:
'Captain Malcolm Skene, who with a native guide quitted Cairo some weeks ago, has not been heard of since he entered the Wady Faregh, at a point more than ten Egyptian shoni or thirty miles British, beyond Memphis, which was not in his direct way.
'This energetic and distinguished young officer is the bearer of despatches to the Egyptian Colonel commanding a Camel Battery and Black Battalion near Dayer-el-Syrian, which district he certainly had not reached when the latest intelligence came from that somewhat desolate quarter.
'Doubts are now—when too late—entertained as to the fidelity of Hassan Abdullah, his guide. A camel supposed to have been his has been found dead of thirst in the desert, and as there have been some dreadful sand-storms in that district, the greatest fears are entertained at headquarters that Captain Skene has perished in the wilderness—dying in the execution of his duty to his Queen and country, as truly and as bravely as if he had met a soldier's death in battle.'
The paper slipped from Hester's hands, and she sank forward till her forehead rested on the sill of a window near which she sat. She knew this paragraph meant too probably a terrible and unknown death, the harrowing details of which might—nay, too surely, never would—be revealed—death to one who had loved her but too well, and thus all her soul became instinct with a tender and fearful interest in him.
'Poor Malcolm—poor Malcolm Skene!' she murmured again and again, while her face, ashy white, was hidden in her hands.
Few women can fail to take a tender interest in the fate or future of any man who has been interested in them.
For a long time she sat still—nay, still as a statue, but for the regular and slow rising and falling of the ribbons and lace at her bosom, and the ruffling of her dark brown hair in the breeze that came through the open window, kissing her white temples and cooling her eyelids.
Then she recalled her father's strange and weird story of his father's dream, vision, or presentiment, before the storming of Jhansi, where the latter fell; and thought with wonder, could such things be?
She confided the letter and its contents to her bosom friend Maude; but she could not—for cogent reasons—bring herself to say a word on the subject to Roland, whose mind, however, was full enough of the newspaper report of his old friend's misfortune, or as he never doubted now—evil fate!