Playing with Fire: A Story of the Soudan War by James Grant - HTML preview

CHAPTER LIX.
  CONCLUSION.

The fond white arms of Maude were around Jack, his head was pillowed on her breast; so the young pair were once more together, and she had, of course, installed herself as his nurse.

Oh, how haggard, wan, wasted, and changed he was!

He lay quiet, motionless, and happy, if 'weak as a cat,' he said, with the hum of the great city of Cairo coming faintly through the latticed windows that overlooked the vast Uzbekyeh Square and its gardens, whilom a marsh, and now covered with stately trees, under which are cafés for the sale of coffee, sherbet, and punch, where bands play in the evenings, and Franks and Turks may be seen with Europeans in their Nizam dresses, and the Highlander in his white jacket and tartan kilt.

How delightful it was to have her dear caresses again—to feel her soft breath on his faded cheek; all seemed so new, so strange, that he almost feared the delicious spell might break, and he, awaking, find himself again in his grass hut at Korti, or gliding down the Nile in the whaleboat of the old Staffordshire, with Arabs to repel, rocks to avoid, and cataracts to shoot with oar and pole.

'Oh, Jack,' said Maude, for the twentieth time, 'forgive and pardon me for doubting you; but that woman——'

'A vile plot—backed up by a forged letter! My little Maude, it would not have borne a moment's investigation!'

'I know—I know now; but I was so terrified—so crushed—so lonely! And then, think of the days and nights of horror and agony I underwent. The woman dying of a street accident in the Infirmary of Edinburgh, signed a confession of her story—that she was the bribed agent of Sharpe's plot. I wrote all about it, but you never got my letter.'

'And this was "the startling news" that made you so suddenly leave Edinburgh?'

'To come here in search of you. Oh, Jack! I was mad to doubt you; but you would quite pardon me if you knew all I have undergone. Shall I ever forget the night she came—the night of that aimless flight south—aimless, save to avoid you—but ending at York? Oh never, Jack, if I lived a thousand years! I now know that it takes a great deal to kill some people; yet I think that, but for dear, affectionate Hester, I could not have lived very long with that awful and never-ceasing pain gnawing at my heart.'

Jack raised her quivering face between his tremulous hands, and looked into it fondly and yearningly. How full of affection it seemed—so softly radiant with shy and lovely blushes, while her eyes of forget-me-not blue never, even in the past, shone with the love-light that illumined them now, when sufferings were past and their memory becoming fainter.

'How long—how long it seems since we separated, and without a farewell, Jack!'

'A day sometimes seems an age—ay, even a day, when matters of the heart are concerned.'

'And a minute or two may undo the work of years—yea, of a lifetime. But you must get well and strong, Jack, for the homeward voyage. In a few days we shall have you laughing among us again; and you will see what a careful little nurse I shall prove.'

Jack, withal, feared just then that there was but little laughter left for him on earth; yet their reunion and the presence of Maude acted as a wonderful charm upon him, and from her loving little hands, instead of those of a stolid hospital orderly, he now took his prescribed 'baby food' as he called it—beef-tea, eggs beat up in milk, and port wine elixir, with the odious 'diluted hydrochloric acid, one drachm, and of quinine, eight drachms,' as ordered by the medical staff.

But he rallied rapidly, though Maude's heart beat painfully when occasionally a ray of sunshine stole into the room through the picturesque lattice-wood windows (which in Cairo had not been superseded by glass) and rested on his face, and she saw how pale and wan, if peaceful and bright, the latter was now: and then if he spoke too much, she placed her white hands on his lips, or silenced them more sweetly but quite as effectually.

Hester, when she first saw Jack Elliot, little imagined that he would recover so rapidly. She had thought of Maude and then of her own father.

'Strange it is,' pondered the girl, 'that when one sorrow comes upon us—a shock unexpectedly—we seem to see the gradual approach of another, and so realize its bitterness before it becomes an actual fact. Thus I felt, long before poor papa died, that I should be alone and penniless in the world.'

'Hester!' exclaimed Roland, softly but upbraidingly, as she said something of this kind to him.

'Well, Roland,' said Hester, 'no one seemed to care where I went or what became of me; all the world was indifferent to me; I had lost all interest and saw no beauty in it.'

He had both her hands in his now, and was gazing into her white-lidded and long-lashed dark-blue eyes.

Then, as eye met eye, each saw a strange but alluring expression in the other—the past, the present, and future all mingled and combined—an expression of a nature deep and indescribable.

We do not mean to rehearse all that Roland said then. If no woman can without some emotion hear a tale of love, especially if told so powerfully as Roland was telling it then, we may well believe how Hester's heart responded; and he held her in his embrace, and kissed her again and again as a man only kisses the girl he loves, and, more than all, the one he hopes to make his wife.

So everything is said to come in time to those who wait.

They were together again—together at last—and the outer world and all other things thereof seemed to glide away from them, leaving only love and peace and rest behind—love and trust with the radiance of light!

THE END.