"I must mind my mistress, Mr. Bowie," says Clara.
"And how should I interfere with that, as I've said twenty times, when I'm safe in the Crimea? I'll get the licence this day, say what ye will: and then you would not have the heart to let me spend two pounds twelve and sixpence for nothing."
Whether the last most Caledonian argument conquered or not, Mr. Bowie got the licence, was married before breakfast the next morning, and started for the Crimea at four o'clock in the afternoon; most astonished, as he confided in the train to Sergeant MacArthur, "to see a lassie that never gave him a kind word in her life, and had not been married but barely six hours, greet and greet at his going, till she vanished away into hystericals. They're a very unfathomable species, Sergeant, are they women; and if they were taken out o' man, they took the best part o' Adam wi' them, and left us to shift with the worse."
But to return to Campbell. The last week has altered him frightfully. He is no longer the stern, self-possessed warrior which he was; he no longer even walks upright; his cheek is pale, his eye dull; his whole countenance sunken together. And now that the excitement of anxiety is past, he draws his feet along the pavement slowly, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes fixed on the ground, as if the life was gone from out of him, and existence was a heavy weight.
"She is safe, at least, then! One burden off my mind. And yet had it not been better if that pure spirit had returned to Him who gave it, instead of waking again to fresh misery? I must find that man! Why, I have been saying so to myself for seven days past, and yet no ray of light. Can the coward have given me a wrong address? Yet why give me an address at all if he meant to hide from me? Why, I have been saying that too, to myself every day for the last week? Over and over again the same dreary round of possibilities and suspicions. However, I must be quiet now, if I am a man. I can hear nothing before the detective comes at two. How to pass the weary, weary time? For I am past thinking—almost past praying —though not quite, thank God!"
He paces up still noisy Piccadilly, and then up silent Bond Street; pauses to look at some strange fish on Groves's counter—anything to while away the time; then he plods on toward the top of the street, and turns into Mr. Pillischer's shop, and upstairs to the microscopic club-room. There, at least, he can forget himself for an hour.
He looks round the neat pleasant little place, with its cases of curiosities, and its exquisite photographs, and bright brass instruments; its glass vases stocked with delicate water-plants and animalcules, with the sunlight gleaming through the green and purple seaweed fronds, while the air is fresh and fragrant with the seaweed scent; a quiet, cool little hermitage of science amid that great noisy, luxurious west-end world. At least, it brings back to him the thought of the summer sea, and Aberalva, and his shore-studies: but he cannot think of that any more. It is past; and may God forgive him!
At one of the microscopes on the slab opposite him stands a sturdy bearded man, his back toward the Major; while the wise little German, hopeless of customers, is leaning over him in his shirt sleeves.
"But I never have seen its like; it had just like a painter's easel in its stomach yesterday!"
"Why, it's an Echinus Larva: a sucking sea-urchin! Hang it, if I had known you hadn't seen one, I'd have brought up half-a-dozen of them!"