'The deuce—from the Crimea!'
'Nay, pardon me,' said the colonel; 'he is to be married almost immediately, and is now en route to Edinburgh after some of the little necessary arrangements.'
'Of course—there will be the bride's trousseau to order at a fashionable magazin des modes—the usual case of jewels—the twelve morning and evening dresses—the four dozen of everything necessary for ladies fair. Thank heaven, my marching luggage never consisted of more than a portmanteau, an epaulette-box, and a boot-jack.'
'Perhaps so, Catanagh,' replied the bantering colonel; 'but little Laura Everingham, with her English acres and funded property, is a better prize than our Poonah widow, with all her rupees and indigo; and drinking iced champagne at Elton Hall will be better than eating chutney and pickled monkey, with the thermometer at 104° in the shade—the punkah out of order, and not a breath of air to be had for love or for money. Pass the claret: gentlemen, fill your glasses—we will drink to my friend Captain Clavering, of the Grenadier Guards—happiness to him!'
The wine almost choked me; but mastering my emotion, I left the mess-room, and sought my quarters. There I tore off my red coat, for it seemed to stifle me. I threw myself upon my bed in an agony of mind difficult to portray—an agony such as we feel but once in a life-time; and I strove to be calm—to think—to reflect, and to realize all that the colonel had said so heedlessly, but yet so innocently, to torture me.
One fact stood palpably and painfully before me: Laura Everingham was lost to me for ever! It was, perhaps, a just punishment for the vanity and presumption—or the folly—with which I had permitted a fervent and enthusiastic heart to give full scope to a love which it fostered in defiance of reason and of hope. The tenor of the conversation I had overheard in the arbour occurred to me again and again. I endeavoured to analyze it. To me, there now seemed too much lightness of heart and of expression in Laura, when on the eve of a hopeless separation from one whom she knew to love her so well—one then so humbled, so crushed and ruined as I—but perhaps she could not have acted otherwise without exciting still more the suspicion and the ridicule of Fanny Clavering. Were her words to be considered as really indicative of her secret thoughts? Moreover, what claim had I, so poor in all this world's gifts and gear, on one so rich in all the gifts of heaven and earth? None. Nor was she to blame for the secret love I had nourished and fostered in my heart since the first moment of our acquaintance. Yet her silence, her pallor, her deep unspoken emotion when I left her, would seem to say that I was not without an interest in her heart. May she not, thought I, have wept for me, and prayed for me, on the midnight pillow, even as I, all lonely and unseen, had sighed and prayed for her?
No—no; the light had vanished at last, and Laura was for ever lost to me—a just punishment to one of the wildest fancies that ever warmed a romantic heart. The pearl ring, with a thousand 'trifles light as air,' came in all their bitter, blighting strength, to confirm the news of Clavering's marriage, and, covering my face with my hands, I wept like a child. Until that burning hour I knew not the depth of my hopeless passion, or how much I had really loved Miss Everingham.
The night was a miserable one to me, but it passed away like others; and the sharp brass drum, and then the yelling war-pipe, as they rang in the early morning air, waking the deep echoes of 'Balclutha's walls of rock,' announced that 'to march' was now the order; and first Jack Belton, and then Callum Dhu, burst breathlessly into my room.
'What the deuce—why the champagne must have been strong last night,' exclaimed Jack, on seeing me lying on my bed, and not in it; 'come, my boy—bustle up—turn out—the route has come!'
'The route—for where?'