CHAPTER LV.
WITH GENERAL EARLE's COLUMN.
While the column of Brigadier Sir Herbert Stewart was toiling amid thirst and other sufferings across the vast waste of the Bayuda Desert, and gaining the well-fought battles of Abu Klea and Abu Kru, the column of Brigadier Earle had gone by boats up the Nile to avenge the cruel assassination of Gordon's comrade and coadjutor, Colonel Donald Stewart, on Suliman Wad Gamr and the somewhat ubiquitous Moussa Abu Hagil with all their people.
The succession of cataracts rendered the General's progress very slow; thus the 4th of January found his advanced force, the gallant South Staffordshire, only encamped at Hamdab, as we have stated a few chapters back.
Suliman, on being joined by Moussa a few days after Abu Klea, had fallen back from Berti, thus rendering it necessary for General Earle to push on in pursuit, through a rocky, broken, and savage country, bad for all military operations, and altogether impracticable for cavalry.
On the river the Rahami cataract proved one of great danger and difficulty, and severe indeed was the labour of getting up the boats. There the bed of Old Nile is broken up by black and splintered rocks, between which it rushes in snowy foam with mighty force and volume.
The boats had to be tracked up the entire distance, often with many sharp turns to avoid sunken rocks in the chasms; and, as a large number of men were required for each boat, the column, comprising the Staffordshire, the Black Watch, a squadron of Hussars, and the Egyptian camel corps, with two guns, had work enough and to spare. 'The perils and difficulties,' we are told, 'were quite as great as any hitherto encountered on the passage up the Nile. For the last six miles below Birti the river takes an acute angle, and then as sharply resumes its former course. The Royal Highlanders were first up; but after they got their boats through, another channel was discovered on the western side of the stream, and as it turned out to be less difficult, the succeeding regiments were enabled to come up more quickly.
Roland's regiment remained in a few days encamped at Hamdab. 'We are now leading the whole army,' says its Colonel, the gallant and ill-fated Eyre, in his 'Diary,' 'and are the first British troops that have ever been up the Nile.'
On the 6th of January there was a sand-storm from dawn till sunset; it covered the unfortunate troops, who seemed to be in a dark cloud for the whole day. Around them for a hundred miles the country was all rocks, and yet bore traces of once having a vast population.
At Hamdab the river teemed with wild geese—beautiful gray birds, with scarlet breasts and gold wings. Dick Mostyn shot one, which Roland's soldier servant prepared for their repast in a stew, that was duly enjoyed in the latter's quarters—a hut made of palm branches and long dhurra grass; while their comrade Wilton, when scouting on Berber road, captured a couple of Arabs, who gave the column a false alarm by tidings of an attack at daybreak, thus keeping all under arms till the sun rose.
The 18th was Sunday, when Colonel Eyre read prayers on parade, and three days after came tidings of the battle of Abu Klea, the death of Burnaby, after all his hair-breadth escapes, and of many other brave men.
'Poor Malcolm—poor Malcolm!' said Roland; 'what dire news this will be for his old mother at Dunnimarle. This event gives you your company in the corps——'
'Don't speak of it!' interrupted Mostyn, with something like a groan; 'I would to Heaven that poor Skene had never given me such a chance.'
The last days of January saw Earle's column making a sweep with fire and sword of the district in which poor Colonel Stewart and his companions had been murdered; and on the 2nd of February it had reached a country beyond all conception or description wild, and quite uninhabited.
The sufferings of Earle's troops were considerably severe now. The faces and the knees of the Highlanders were skinned by the chill air at night and the burning sun by day; while, in addition, there were insects in the sand, so minute as to be almost invisible, yet they got into the men's ragged clothing, and bit hands and feet so that they were painfully swollen.
On the 9th of February Earle's column reached Kirbekan, near the island of Dulka, seventy miles above Merawi, which is a peninsular district of Southern Nubia, and the enemy, above 2,000 strong, led by Moussa Abu Hagil, Ali Wad Aussein, and other warlike Sheikhs, and chiefly composed of the guilty Monnassir tribe, some Robatats and a force of Dervishes from Berber, were known to be in position at no great distance; thus a battle was imminent.
Ere it took place Roland Lindsay and his friend Elliot were destined to hear some startling news from home. At this time all papers and parcels for the column got no further than Dongola, but a few letters from the rear were brought up, and the mail-bag contained one of importance for Roland, and several for his friend Dick Mostyn.
Lounging on the grass, under a mimosa tree, with a cigarette between his teeth, and with just the same lazy, debonnair bearing with which he had taken in many a girl at home in pleasant England, lay Dick Mostyn reading his missives. Some he perused with a quiet, insouciant smile; they were evidently from some of the girls in question. Others he tore into small shreds and scattered on the breeze; they were duns. How pleasant it was to dispose of them thus on the bank of the Nile!
Roland, a little way apart, was perusing his solitary letter.
It was from Mr. M'Wadsett, the W.S., dated several weeks back, from 'Thistle Court, Thistle Street, Edinburgh' (how well Roland remembered the gloomy place under the shadow of St. Andrew's Church, and the purpose of his last visit there!); and it proved quite a narrative, and one of the deepest interest to him.
His uncle, Sir Harry, was dead, and his daughter Hester was going forth into the world as a companion or governess. (Dead! thought Roland; poor old Sir Harry!—and Hester, alone now—oh, how he longed to be with her—to comfort and protect her!)
But to be a governess—a companion—where, and to whom? His heart felt wrung, and he mentally rehearsed all he had heard or read—but not seen—of how such dependents were too often treated by the prosperous and the parvenu; obliged to conform to rules made by others, to perform a hundred petty duties by hands never before soiled by toil; to never complain, however ill or weary she might feel; to stumble with brats through wearisome scales on an old piano; to be banished when visitors came, and endure endless, though often unnecessary affronts. He uttered a malediction, lit a cigar, and betook him again to his letter.
'About seeking a situation, I know there is nothing else left for the poor girl to do,' continued the writer; 'but I besought her to wait a little—to make my house her home, if she chose, for a time; but she told me that she did not mind work or poverty. I replied that she knew nothing of either, but a sad smile and a resolute glance were my only answer.'
The old man's love of himself, his upbraiding words when they last parted, and his own unkind treatment (to say the least of it) of Hester, all came surging back on Roland's memory now.
'I shall not readily forget Miss Maule's passionate outburst of grief and pain on leaving Merlwood,' continued the old Writer to the Signet; 'but all there seemed for the time to be sacred to the hallowed memories of her father, her mother, and her past childhood!
'And next I have to relate something more startling still—the sudden death of your stepmother, and to congratulate you on being now the true and undoubted Laird of Earlshaugh.
'Actuated, I know not precisely by what sentiment—whether by just indignation at the character of her brother, or by remorse for your false position with regard to the property—Mrs. Lindsay, as an act of reparation, and to preclude all legal action on the part of any heir of her own or of her brother, Hawkey Sharpe, that might crop up, by a will drawn out and prepared by myself, duly recorded at Her Majesty's General Register House, Edinburgh, has left the entire estate to you, precisely and in all entirety as it was left to her.
'She sent a message when she did this. It was simply: "When my time comes, and I feel assured that it is not far off now, and that I shall not see him again, he will know that I have done my best."
'There must have been an emotion of remorse in her mind, as I now know that for some days before the demise of your worthy father, he eagerly urged that you should be telegraphed for, and more than once expressed a vehement desire to see me, his legal adviser, but in vain, as Mrs. Lindsay number two and her brother Hawkey barred the way; so the first will in the former's favour remained unaltered.
'Since you last left home, Mr. Hawkey forged his sister's name to a cheque for £2,000 to cover a bill or racing debt. It duly came to hand. Mrs. Lindsay looked at the document, and knew in an instant that her name had been used, and, remembering the amount of Hawkey's demand on her, knew also that she had been shamefully and cruelly deceived.
'The sequence of the numbers in her cheque-book showed by the absence of the counterfoil where one had been abstracted—that for the £2,000 payable to bearer. In her rage she repudiated it, and the law took its course.
'The nameless horror that is the sure precursor of coming evil took possession of her, and then it was that she executed in your favour the will referred to, instigated thereto not a little by Hawkey's incessant and annoying references to her secret ailment—disease of the heart.
'To me she seemed to have changed very much latterly. Her tall, thin figure had lost somewhat of its erectness, and her cold, steel-like eyes (you remember them?) were sunken and dimmed.
'Her illness took a sudden and fatal turn at the time that rascal Hawkey was arrested; and she was found that evening by Mrs. Drugget, the housekeeper, and old Funnell, the butler, dead in the Red Drawing-room. Thus her strange faintnesses and continued pallor were fully accounted for by the faculty then.
'When she was dead Mr. Hawkey was disposed to snap his fingers, believing himself the lord of everything; but the will prepared by me precluded that, and he was forthwith lodged by order of the Procurator-Fiscal in the Tolbooth of Cupar, where he can hear, but not see, the flow of the Eden.
'His wife, the late Miss Annot Drummond, on seeing him depart with a pair of handcuffs on, displayed but small emotions of regard or sorrow, but a great deal of indignation, despair, and shame. She trod to and fro upon the floor of her room during the long watches of the entire succeeding night, tore her golden hair, and beat her little hands against the wall in the fury and agony of her passion and disappointment to find herself mated to a criminal; and now she has betaken herself to her somewhat faded maternal home in South Belgravia, where I do not suppose we shall care to follow her.'
'So, I am Earlshaugh again!' thought Roland with pardonable exultation. His old ancestral home was his once more. But a battle was to be fought on the morrow. Should he survive it—escape? He hoped so now; life was certainly more valuable than it seemed to him before that mail-bag came up the Nile.
Roland could not feel much regret for the extinguisher which Fate had put upon the usurpers of his patrimony, but he was by nature too generous not to recall, with some emotions of a gentle kind, how Mrs. Lindsay had once said to him in a broken voice, when he bade her farewell, of something she meant to do, 'If it was not too late—too late!'
And when he had asked her what she referred to, her answer was that 'Time would show.'
And now time had shown. She had certainly, after all, liked the handsome and debonnair young fellow who had treated her with that chivalrous deference so pleasant to all women, old or young.
Roland, as he looked up at the luminous Nubian sky, felt for a time a solemn emotion of awe and thankfulness, curiously blended with exultant pride; that if he fell in the battle of to-morrow he would fall, as many of his forefathers had done, a Lindsay of Earlshaugh, but alas! the last of his race.
'By Jove, there is a postscript—turn the page, Roland!' exclaimed Jack Elliot, who had been noting the letter, as mutual stock, over his brother-in-law's shoulder.
'Since writing all the foregoing,' said the postscript, 'I find that your sister, Mrs. Elliot, appears to have had some news, after receiving which she and Miss Hester have suddenly left Edinburgh, but for where or with what intention I am totally unable to discover.'
'News,' muttered Roland; 'what news can they have had?'
Roland, by the field telegraph rearward, viâ, Cairo, wired a message to Mr. M'Wadsett for further intelligence, if he had any to give, concerning the absentees, but no answer came till long after the troops had got under arms to engage, and Roland was no longer there to receive it.
'By Heaven, this infernal coil at home is becoming more entangled!' exclaimed Jack. 'Were it not for my mother's sake I would hope to be knocked on the head to-day.'
'Not for poor little Maude's sake?' asked Roland reproachfully.
'God help us both!' sighed Jack.
'To every one who lives strength is given him to do his duty,' said Roland gravely. 'Do yours, Jack, and no more.'
'To me there seems a dash of sophistry in this advice now; but had you ever loved as I have done——'
'Had I ever loved! What do you mean?' asked Roland, almost impatiently. 'But there go the bugles, and we must each to his company.'
Then each, seizing the other's hand, drew his sword and 'fell in.'
The mystery involving the fate of Maude and the movements of both her and Hester were a source of intense pain, perplexity, and grief to the two friends now, even amid the fierce and wild work of that eventful 10th of February.