He dashed off his application for leave, and had it at once despatched. He commanded the inlying piquet that night, and, like an automaton, had to go through the formula of parading it in line with forage caps, great-coats, and side arms, and seeing the camp patrolled between retreat and half an hour after the first post of tattoo.
Never would he forget the gloom of that few hours' duty, which seemed to be done, not by himself, but some one else. He had a curious and perplexing sense of a dual existence.
Would leave be refused him? That was not to be thought of.
He could not rest in his hut alone. Nearly all that night he wandered about the silent camp like an evil or unquiet spirit, challenged again and again by great-coated sentinels, who marvelled whether this officer who passed their posts so often, and to all appearance so aimlessly, was demented or not; and so, for hours and hours of a gloomy and inclement night, he roved about, and heard the wind swaying the tops of the trees. He shivered, and tried to collect his thoughts, but seemed to have none to collect.
He tried to reason with himself, but, whatever idea suggested itself, one was always uppermost—Alison drowned, Alison in the cruel and merciless sea.
'I must get out of this place, do something, pull myself together, or I shall go mad,' he muttered.
Was he dreaming? was all this sorrow a vision of the night that would pass away?
Till the morning gun boomed from Gun Hill, and the sweet low reveille began to steal out on the moistened air, he continued to wander thus, till, drenched with the dews of night, he retired to his hut, and flinging himself upon his bed, endeavoured to sleep for an hour or two—the sleep of utter exhaustion.
From this happy state he was soon roused by an uproarious rattling at the door of his room, and his subaltern, Frank Fleming, in undress uniform—a heedless, noisy young fellow, and a second edition of Jerry Wilmot, but neither revised nor corrected—came bustling in, shouting,
'The black ball is hoisted alone at headquarters. Thank God!'