“Will you now grant me one favour? Wear this ring for my sake; a token of mere memory, no more! Nay, I mean to ask Milly to wear another. Don’t refuse me.” He drew her hand towards him as he spoke, and slipped a rich turquoise ring upon her finger. Although her hand trembled, and she averted her head, she had not courage to say him no.
“You have not told us where you are going to, nor when we are to hear from you!” said she, after a moment.
“I don’t think I know either!” said he in his usual reckless way. “I have half a mind to join Schamyl—I know him—or take a turn with the Arabs against the French. I suppose,” added he, with a bitter smile, “it is my fate always to be on the beaten side, and I’d not know how to comport myself as a winner.”
“There’s Milly making a signal to us. Is it dinnertime already?” said she.
“Ay, my last dinner here!” he muttered. She turned her head away and did not speak.
On that last evening at the villa nothing very eventful occurred. All that need be recorded will be found in the following letter, which Calvert wrote to his friend Drayton, after he had wished his hosts a good-night, and gained his room, retiring, as he did, early, to be up betimes in the morning and catch the first train for Milan.
“Dear Drayton,—I got your telegram, and though I suspect
you are astray in your ‘law,’ and don’t believe these
fellows can touch me, I don’t intend to open the question,
or reserve the point for the twelve judges, but mean to
evacuate Flanders at once; indeed, my chief difficulty was
to decide which way to turn, for having the whole world
before me where to choose, left me in that indecision which
the poet pronounces national when he says,
I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
Musing in my mind what raiment I shall wear!
Chance, however, has done for me what my judgment could not
I have been up to Milan and had a look through the
newspapers, and I see what I have often predicted has
happened The Rajahs of Bengal have got sick of their
benefactors, and are bent on getting rid of what we love to
call the blessings of the English rule in India. Next to a
society for the suppression of creditors, I know of no
movement which could more thoroughly secure my sympathy. The
brown skin is right. What has he to do with those covenanted
and uncovenanted Scotchmen who want to enrich themselves by
bullying him? What need has he of governors-general,
political residents, collectors and commanders-in-chief?
Could he not raise his indigo, water his rice-fields, and
burn his widow, without any help of ours? particularly as
our help takes the shape of taxation and vexatious
interference.
“I suppose all these are very unpatriotic sentiments; but
in the same proportion that Britons never will be slaves,
they certainly have no objection to make others such, and I
shudder in the very marrow of my morality to think that but
for the accident of an accident I might at this very moment
have been employed to assist in repressing the noble
aspirations of niggerhood, and helping to stifle the cry of
freedom that now resounds from the Sutlej to the Ganges. Is
not that a twang from your own lyre, Master D.? Could our
Own Correspondent have come it stronger?
“Happily, her Majesty has no further occasion for my
services, and I can take a brief on the other side. Expect
to hear, therefore, in some mysterious paragraph, That the
mode in which the cavalry were led, or the guns pointed,
plainly indicated that a European soldier held command on
this occasion; and, indeed, some assert that an English
officer was seen directing the movements on our flank.’
To which let me add the hope that the—Fusiliers may be
there to see; and if I do not give the major a lesson in
battalion drill, call me a Dutchman! There is every
reason why the revolt should succeed. I put aside all the
bosh about an enslaved race and a just cause, and come to
the fact of the numerical odds opposed. The climate
intolerable to one, and easily borne by the other; the
distance from which reinforcements must come; and, last of
all, the certainty that if the struggle only last long
enough to figure in two budgets, John Bull will vote it a
bore, and refuse to pay for it But here am I getting
political when I only meant to be personal; and now to come
back, I own that my resolve to go out to India has been
aided by hearing that Loyd, of whom I spoke in my last, is
to leave by the next mail, and will take passage on board
the P. and O. steamer Leander, due at Malta on the 22nd. My
intention is to be his fellow-traveller, and with this
resolve I shall take the Austrian steamer to Corfu, and come
up with my friend at Alexandria. You will perhaps bepuzzled
to know why the claims of friendship are so strong upon me
at such a moment, and I satisfy your most natural curiosity
by stating that this is a mission of torture. I travel with
this man to insult and to outrage him; to expose him in
public places, and to confront him at all times. I mean that
this overland journey should be to him for his life long the
reminiscence of a pilgrimage of such martyrdom as few have
passed through, and I have the vanity to believe that not
many men have higher or more varied gifts for such a mission
than myself. My first task on reaching Calcutta shall be to
report progress to you.
“I don’t mind exposing a weakness to an old friend, and so I
own to you I fell in love here. The girl had the obduracy
and wrong headedness not to yield to my suit, and so I had
no choice left to me but to persist in it. I know, however,
that if I could only remain here a fortnight longer I should
secure the inestimable triumph of rendering both of us
miserable for life! Yes, Drayton, that pale girl and her
paltry fifteen thousand pounds might have spoiled one of the
grandest careers that ever adorned history! and lost the
world the marvellous origin, rise, progress, and completion
of the dynasty of the great English Begum Calvert in Bengal.
Count upon me for high office whenever penny-a-lining fails
you, and, if my realm be taxable, you shall be my Chancellor
of the Exchequer!
“You are right about that business at Basle; to keep up a
controversy would be to invest it with more interest for
public gossip. Drop it, therefore, and the world will drop
it; and take my word for it, I’ll give them something more
to say of me, one of these days, than that my hair trigger
was too sensitive! I’m writing this in the most romantic of
spots. The moonlight is sleeping—isn’t that the
conventional?—over the olive plain, and the small silvery
leaves are glittering in its pale light. Up the great Alps,
amongst the deep crevasses, a fitful flashing of lightning
promises heat for the morrow; a nightingale sings close to
my window; and through the muslin curtain of another
casement I can see a figure pass and repass and even
distinguish that her long hair has fallen down, and floats
loosely over neck and shoulders. How pleasantly I might
linger on here, ‘My duns forgetting, by my duns forgot.’ How
smoothly I might float down the stream of life, without even
having to pull an bar! How delightfully domestic and
innocent and inglorious the whole thing! Isn’t it tempting,
you dog? Does it not touch even your temperament through
its thick hide of worldliness? And I believe in my heart it
is all feasible, all to be done.
“I have just tossed up for it Head for India, and head it
is! So that Loyd is booked for a pleasant journey, and
I start to-morrow, to ensure him all the happiness in my
power to confer. For the present, it would be as well to
tell all anxious and inquiring friends, into which category
come tailors, bootmakers, jewellers, &c., that it will be a
postal economy not to address Mr. Harry Calvert in any
European capital, and to let the ‘bills lie on the table,’
and be read this day six years, but add that if properly
treated by fortune, I mean to acquit my debts to them one of
these days.
“That I ‘wish they may get it’ is, therefore, no scornful
or derisive hope of your friend,
“H. Calvert.
“If—not a likely matter—anything occurs worth mention, you
shall have a line from me from Venice.”
“When he had concluded his letter, he extinguished his candles, and sat down at the open window. The moon had gone down, and, though star-lit, the night was dark. The window in the other wing of the villa, at which he had seen the figure through the curtain, was now thrown open, and he could see that Florence, with a shawl wrapped round her, was leaning out, and talking to some one in the garden underneath.
“It is the first time,” said a voice he knew to Emily’s, “that I ever made a bouquet in the dark.”
“Come up, Milly dearest; the dew is falling heavily. I feel it even here.”