James Grant

“ On either side of the drive all the hawthorns, pink and white, were in bloom, loading the morning air with the perfume of the almond; and the waters of the Serpentine were seen at intervals between the flowery shrubs and long avenues of leafy trees in all the fresh greenery of May; but as Alison looked around her she thought of Essilmont in May—Essilmont, which too probably she would never see again, with the pool in the Ythan where the Black Hound appeared when one of her race was drowned in it; where the grey-clad angler loved to linger by the stream in the silvery morning mist ”

“ Poor Jerry! The life of the mess and the life of Wilmothurst when at home, where, in consideration of his five feet ten inches and irreproachable moustache, he had been latterly permitted to be termed a 'son,' and not, as his mother would have wished, a 'boy.'
Lady Julia Wilmot had never posed in society save as a beauty, and the great consideration that was ever shown her was due to that beauty and her birth and position as an earl's daughter; but not to any brilliant qualities of head—still less of amiability of heart. ”

“ Jerry lay long when we left him last in a state of semi-unconsciousness, thoughts of his past life rather than of his present most perilous and deplorable predicament hovering in his mind. He sometimes imagined himself at the mess, and heard the voices and saw the faces of Goring, Dalton, Frank Fleming, and others; anon he was in the Long Valley at Aldershot skirmishing with his company, or riding a hurdle-race by Twesildown Hill. Then came dreams of the ball at Wilmothurst and of Bella Chevenix in all her beauty, and his cold, pale, passionless mother. ”

“ You are young, more than most attractive, and are without a protector—you understand?'
'Oh, sir, how you have wronged him!'
'I am sorry you think so, but——'
'Good heavens, you may have parted me and Bevil for ever!' she exclaimed, in a voice of intense pathos and sorrow.
'Not so, my darling—I am here!' said Bevil Goring, who had entered unannounced by the boarding-house servant, and in a moment his arms were round her and her head upon his breast.
The darkest hour is always that before the dawn, it is said, even as clouds are a prelude to sunshine. ”

“ Miles on the happy homeward march to the coast, with the swollen rivers all unbridged and impassable in their rear!
He saw it all—he felt it all, and knew that he was a lost man. Feeble, defenceless, and single-handed he would fall a victim to the first savage and infuriated Ashantee he met, and his skull would soon be laid as an ornament—a royal trophy—at the foot of the king.
A heavy moan escaped poor Jerry; but the love of life, the instinct of self-preservation is strong in human nature, and his first thought was to endeavour to follow the army. ”

“ How gladly would poor Bella Chevenix have gone too; but she had no valid excuse—no friend or chaperon going save Laura, of whose movements she was ignorant; so she had but to wait, in the secluded village, the tidings given by the newspapers, but with more impatience and certainly less equanimity than Lady Julia at splendid Wilmothurst.
Greater was her love for Jerry than the latter could actually realise; for, with all her past coquetry, Bella was one of those ardent and impulsive girls that a man only comes across once in a lifetime, or, it maybe, thinks so. ”

“ In Sister Lisette Alison found an able nurse, for she had served as one in the German war under the Red Cross; her soft, white hand had dressed many a ghastly wound and closed many a glazing eye, and often amid the horrors of Sedan and elsewhere the heads of the dying had rested on her bosom, and with low, loving words she had soothed their moments of death and agony—words that were sometimes taken for those of mother, or wife, or some young love that was far, far away. ”

“ His voice failed him, and Alison's heart failed her too as he spoke in this pitiful strain.
'As for loving Lord Cadbury,' said Alison, with a voice that seemed full of tears, 'do not talk to me of that when you are so ill and feeble, as it wrings my very soul to oppose you. I may—nay, I must—be grateful for the service his money gift——'
'Say gifts, Alison.'
'Well, gifts have done for you; but I can do no more, my dislike of him is so intense and rooted.'
'Dislike! The proverb has it that a woman's dislike is only love turned inside out; and he loves you so! ”

“ At Chilcote the first day of death stole quietly on. Prostrate with grief, Alison remained in her own room, leaving all that was to be done with the vicar, the doctor, and Archie, who, plunged in sorrow great as any could feel who shared not the blood of the dead man, hovered about her in a helpless kind of way, as if he would have striven to console—yea, almost to caress her. Was she not the child he had carried often in his arms? ”

“ But the waters which destroyed it had subsided, and where that waste of water, so troublesome to our troops, once rolled, the ground was dry and even hard, but the odours that loaded the air from the bodies of the slain Ashantees lying in the bush, left Captain Sartorius and his companions in no doubt of their being on the line of march followed by Sir Garnet Wolseley.
Poor Jerry had felt himself like one in an evil dream when he found his limbs so powerless that he was incapable of resistance and sinking on the earth. ”

“ See, Lisette, how lovely the day is— how bright the sun, and how beautiful the white and pink hawthorn that load the air with fragrance."
'"Well, what of that?"
'"Does not such a day make you long to leave dusty Antwerp behind you, and to roam in the country?"
'"It does indeed; but I dare not think of such a thing—till—till next week," I replied, coyly.
'"Lisette," said he, "were you ever at the village of Elewyt, where the old château of Rubens stands, between Malines and Vilvorde? It is a lovely place, and wild as lovely; not a soul would see us there. ”

“ Oh, Jerry my darling, can it be that I shall never see you again!' Thus she said to herself over and over in sad reiteration, though no sound but sighs left her lips.
Anon she rose and paced her room, with half uttered exclamations of anguish and sorrow; and then she would throw herself on her bed, burying her face in her hands, in mute and tearless agony. To think that he was gone—in his grave, if he ever found one—gone without the memory of a kind word from her that would make her future life less bitter. ”

“ Alison sighed deeply. She was too prostrate in body and even mind to regard anything as very extraordinary, even her unusual surroundings in the convent; yet she longed for her father to come to her, or to have tidings of him; of aught else she said nothing.
'Oh, if I should die without seeing papa again!' said she, wringing her hands.
'One can die but once,' said Sister Lisette, placidly. 'You are too strong and too young to die, though those who die are sometimes better off than those who are left in the world. ”

“ Apart from sorrow lest he should never more see Laura and his little daughter so lately found and known, Dalton had a great horror of finding such a tomb, and being left so far away; and the funeral of a brother officer, Captain H——, who had died at Essiman of fever, haunted him like a dream.
He remembered how the forest re-echoed to the three death volleys over the lonely grave, which lay in a beautiful spot, certainly so far as tropical flowers and foliage went, and had as a headstone a stately cotton-tree; but ages may elapse ere the foot of a white man treads near it again. ”

“ Excitement over now, Jerry Wilmot felt his soul sicken as he marched at the head of his company up one of the principal streets, with the awful odour of dead flesh everywhere around—victims never being buried, but left where they were killed, or cast into the adjacent swamp. Over all that town, as a writer has it, the odour of death hung everywhere, and came on every sickly breath of hot wind—'a town where here and there a vulture hops at one's very feet, too gorged to join the filthy flock, preening itself on the gaunt dead trunks that line the way ”

“ We are told that if a man, 'overborne by any grief or pain—not the more endurable because no outward sign can be discerned—should go forth into a crowd to seek for solace, the chances are that he will return in a more discontented frame of mind than that in which he set out, simply from realising the fact how infinitely little his own sufferings affect the most of the world at its work or play.'
Amid the bustle, gaiety, and business of the crowded camp at Aldershot, Bevil Goring realised all this to the fullest extent. ”

“ In the hotel where Laura and Bevil Goring were, there were more than one old Scottish veteran officer of the Crimea, and even of the Peninsular war, who had come from the land beyond the Tweed to see, as they said, 'their dear old Black Watch again;' and more than one lady in widow's weeds, some young, some elderly, with their little brood, come to look again upon the ranks of the Welsh Fusiliers and the Rifles, though there a beloved face would be seen no more. ”

“ My life in the world was a happy one till one dire calamity fell upon me, and drove me to find peace for ever here; but how true it is "that it is vain to try to knit up the present with the past; each part of our lives has its own pleasures and hopes." But now my pleasure is to do good—my only hope to die soon and well.'
'And the calamity to which you refer?' asked Alison, softly, while greatly interested by the singularly sweet and subdued manner of the young Beguine. ”

“ Thus, if she was not plunged in profound grief when she heard of the poor fellow's supposed death, neither was she greatly excited with joy when she heard that he was safe and coming home again. To this noble daughter of twenty earls, an only son more or less in the world really seemed of no great consequence, unless it were, if he 'married money,' to serve her own ends.
When tidings of Jerry's death came, she had attired herself most becomingly in fashionable mourning of the requisite depth of wear, as understood by the drapers in Regent Street. ”

“ Suffice it that, fortunately for herself, it was in the spacious Beguinage of Antwerp that Alison found succour, shelter, and protection.
Alison had often seen nuns, but never spoken to or been intimate with one before, and, as all she knew of such recluses was derived through the medium of novels and romances, when strength returned to her she began to invest Sister Lisette with the halo of fiction, and to suppose that she must have some story—that a lost lover or a broken heart accounted for her sweet sadness of face and her present vocation ”

“ Death was indeed closer than either perhaps thought.
'But there is your mother,' urged Dalton, after a pause.
'She! It wouldn't break her "noble" heart, even were it so with me, and I were lying stiff, as hundreds are now, in yonder bush,' replied Jerry, with an irrepressible gust of bitterness, as he snipped the end off a cigar with his teeth, and, lighting it, proceeded to smoke, silently and sorrowfully, while re-charging his revolver for the coming attack ”

“ Can't make Bella out at all,' replied Mr. Chevenix, as he nodded, smiled, and trotted away on his cob.
Jerry was, we say, perplexed on hearing of this. Bella's refusal of Twiseldown's hand delighted him greatly, but was it born of regard for himself or regard for someone else? He had not gone near her for some time past, and knew not how many might have been hovering about her, now that, with all her beauty and brilliance apart, she was known as the virtual heiress of Wilmothurst. ”

“ Antoine; to Cadbury, at the thought of which she shivered; to the Bal Masqué at the theatre; the Café au Progrès, and the insolence of 'Captain Smith;' her flight through the snowy streets; her fall at the door of a house, the nature of which she knew not; all these things floated dimly and dreamily before her now, though they seemed to have happened but a few hours ago.
'How fortunate that you had the power to ring our bell before you fainted, child,' said the nun, caressing her and kissing her cheek. ”

“ Accompanied by this retainer, she paid a farewell visit to the churchyard of Chilcote Vicarage, where, amid the bright sunshine of spring, the earth seemed at its fairest, and the quaint, old, picturesque fane of the Norman days, moss-green, ivy-grown, and tree-shaded, was casting its shadows across 'God's Acre.'
She laid a chaplet of flowers, woven by her own loving hands and watered by her tears, on her father's grave—that spot which to her no sunshine could brighten—the spot where he lay, without a stone as yet, the last of an old, old warlike and historic race ”

“ The vicar of Chilcote had read the prayers for the dying, and not without deep emotion, for he was a warm-hearted old man; and after placing the book in Alison's hand, with certain pages marked for her perusal, had departed also; and she—declining all offers of feminine assistance from the vicarage—remained alone, and choked with emotion by the bedside, with one of her father's passive hands clasped in hers, to wait and to watch. ”