The Sheik is a very awful personage, who combines in his own person the greatest offices of religion, together with the supreme power of the civil law. Every new measure, even to naming the streets and numbering the houses of filthy Stamboul, requires his sanction. The Sultan alone has the power of life and death over the Sheik Islam, who can neither be nobly bowstrung, nor ignobly beheaded, and he enjoys the peculiar prerogative of being pounded to death in a mortar. A word from the Sheik would have restored Magdhalini to her father; but Hadjee Mehmet, the ex-tiruaktzy, had once operated on his holy nails, so a deaf ear was turned to the prayer of the infidel Bishop, who was seeking the dove in the net of the fowler long after we had taken our departure for Varna; and, until the memorable day of Balaclava, I saw no more of the infamous Hadjee Mehmet.
CHAPTER XXX.
Let me see her once again!
Let her bring her proud dark eyes,
And her petulant quick replies;
Let her wave her slender hand,
With its gesture of command,
And throw back her raven hair
With the old imperial air;
Let her be as she was then—
The loveliest lady in all the land—
Iseult of Ireland.
Ere the course of events added to the distance which already lay between me and Great Britain, I resolved to write to Lady Louisa. I could no longer endure the torture of suspense, combined with absence and gathering doubt. In common parlance, ages seemed to have elapsed instead of weeks since the day we marched for embarkation, and when I beheld her for the last time; and thus, notwithstanding our strange compact that there should be no correspondence between us, I wrote to her, even at the hazard of the letter falling into the hands of her I dreaded most—proud, stately, cold, and unsympathetic "Mamma Chillingham."
It was about the middle of May, the day before we were to embark again, for now the Allies were to advance to Varna; and while I wrote, and in thought addressed Louisa, her presence seemed to come before me in fancy, and the inner depths of heart and soul were stirred with a jealous love and sorrowful tenderness that were almost unendurable; but a summons from Colonel Beverley, regarding the baggage and squad-bags of my troop, cut short my epistle in a very matter-of-fact way, and I despatched Pitblado with it to the military post-office. In that letter I sent brief remembrances to Fred Wilford's sister, and to many of our friends; but of the newly-made marquis I could not trust myself to write, though I had no doubt as yet of Louisa's faith and truth. That night a letter came to me from Cora, the first I had received since we landed at Gallipoli. She and Sir Nigel had returned to Calderwood, and had just come back from the Lanarkshire steeplechases.
"Oh, Newton," she continued, "how anxious and frightened we have been, for we heard that cholera had broken out in the British camp, and we trembled for you—dear papa and I. (There was no doubt the "we" did not include Louisa, at all events.) Do you think of us and quiet Calderwood Glen—of the old house, of papa, and of me? Are the Oriental ladies so beautiful as we have been told? One reads so much about their veiled forms, their brilliant eyes, and so forth. Tell us what you have seen of all this—the mosques, the harems, and the Golden Horn. You have seen everything, of course."
There was nothing in Cora's letter that either flattered my passion or soothed my apprehension. Chillingham Park was never once mentioned, and I could only gather from its abrupt passages and assumed playfulness that she still loved me, tenderly, truly, and hopelessly. There were times when, in her dreams—I learned all this long after, when the present had become the past, and could be recalled no more—there were times when, in imagination, she saw Newton Norcliff, safe from wounds and war, at Calderwood—hers, and hers only—a prize of which none could rob her, not even the brilliant Louisa Loftus; and in her sleep, tears of happiness stole down her poor, pale cheeks.
Newton was her cousin, her kinsman, her early playmate and boy lover, her idol, and her hero! What right, then, had this stranger, this Englishwoman, this mere Acquaintance, to seek to rob her of him? But she could not do so now. Newton was Cora's, and in her dreams he was her lover and her husband, of whom she prayed only to be worthy and more deserving still; and so the poor girl would dream on till morning came—the chill, gusty morning of autumn, when the brown leaves were swept by the cold eastern blast against the windows of the old manor-house, and down the wooded glen; and with that chill morning would come the bitter consciousness that it was all a dream—a dream only, and that he whom she prayed for, and loved so hopelessly, was far, far away in the land of the savage Tartars, exposed to all the perils of the Crimean winter and of the Russian war, and that amid them he was thinking, not of her but of another! But to resume my own story. Berkeley, who had been on the sick list since our arrival at Gallipoli, was reported fit for duty on the morning we embarked for Varna. Most of the British troops were ordered there, or to Scutari, while the mass of our allies were to remain about the coast of the Dardanelles. On this morning, however, I saw the 2nd Zouaves march, as Studhome said, "with all their ladies of light virtue and boxes of heavy baggage," for embarkation; and they presented a stirring spectacle, those swarthy, lithe, and black-bearded fellows, their breasts covered with medals won in battles against Bou Maza, and other sheiks of the Arab tribes, and their faces bronzed almost to negro darkness by the hot sun of Africa.
Their turbans and baggy breeches of scarlet gave them a very Oriental aspect; but their swinging gait and rollicking air, together with the remarkably free-and-easy manner in which they "marched at ease," and the songs they sang, announced them all sons of la belle France; and, singularly enough, every second or third file had a pet cat perched on the top of his knapsack. The tricolor was decorated with laurel; their long brass trumpets played a strange and monotonous, but not unwarlike measure, to which they all stepped in rapid time; and in the intervals of the music many of them joined in a song, which was led by Mademoiselle Sophie, who was riding à la cavalier at their head, in rear of the staff, with her little brandy-keg slung over her left shoulder.
I caught just a verse as she passed; but I frequently heard her sing the same song at a future time—