Poor Rakeleigh! She remembered how well he waltzed, and what desperate love he made to her at the lancers' ball, when flushed by a furious galop and a bumper of the mess champagne. What mystery was this? Dared she hope? Might papa prove right, after all? And might Newton "turn up" as their old friend Dunnikeir had so often done, from under a pile of dead men and horses, in the old Peninsular days? Sir Nigel instantly wrote to the War Office requesting some information regarding Captain Newton C. Norcliff, and was promptly informed that the telegram should have been, "The name of your nephew is NOT among the killed."
So the omission of those three letters—one little word—made a mighty difference to poor Cora's anxious and affectionate heart; but the letter from the War Office added, after an apology, "We regret to state that, a day or two after the passage of the Alma, Captain Norcliff was severely wounded, mutilated, and taken prisoner in a skirmish with the enemy's cavalry—an affair of which no detail has yet reached headquarters."
Mutilated and taken!—taken by those odious, savage, and terrible Muscovites, of whose barbarities the newspapers were daily giving fresh details! Here was a new horror—another source of anxiety and grief; and Cora and Sir Nigel were never tired of surmising or conjecturing what might be the fate of their kinsman, or of searching the public journals, and the letters from the army with which their columns teemed, for some scrap of information regarding the lost one; but they searched in vain. Time passed on; the Russians sank their fleet across the mouth of the harbour of Sebastopol; Balaclava was captured by the British; and the second week of October saw the first bombardment of the beleagured city. These were important facts; but one was more important still to Cora Calderwood—there came no tidings of her lost cousin Newton. Had he died in the hands of the Russians, or been sent to dig copper in the mines of Siberia?—a place of which she had rather vague ideas, and of which, with its capital, Tobolsk, she had read such thrilling accounts, when at school, in Madame Cottin's celebrated "Elizabeth, or the Exiles," &c. Her heart sank within her at this conjecture, and all that such a fate suggested. She penned several letters on the subject to Lady Louisa Loftus. Now, they could mingle their tears, she wrote; now they could commune and sorrow in common; now——. But she could not tell her that she loved Newton, too, and could only profess a sisterly affection for Louisa.
The responses of the latter were cold—singularly so. She was greatly shocked, no doubt; it made her quite nervous, and all that sort of thing, to think that Captain Norcliff should be mutilated. Had he lost his nose (it was a very handsome one)?—or his ears?—or what had the Russians cut off? If it was a leg, Lord Slubber jocularly suggested that it would mar his fox-hunting and round-dancing for the future; and to think of a husband with a wooden leg, or an iron hook for an arm, like the poor old creatures one sees at Chelsea, would be so funny—so very absurd!
"Oh," exclaimed Cora, "to write thus, how heartless! To write thus, when now, of all men in the world, he most requires commiseration! How horrible! How worldly and selfish she is! She never loved him—never, never loved him—as—as—I do," she dared not add, even to herself.
Then the letter described the new lining of the carriage; the last thing in bonnets, and—but here Cora crushed it up in her quick, impatient little hand, and, with a gesture of impatience, flung it in the fire. November kept on, and the woods in the old sequestered Glen became leafless and bare.
The snow powdered white the bare scalps of the hills, and old Willie Pitblado, the keeper, predicted that the coming winter would be a bitter one, for numbers of strange aquatic birds had been floating on Lochleven and in the Forth above Inchcolm; and one morning the woods round the Adder's Craig, and all the slopes of the Western Lomond, were covered by flocks of wild Norwegian pigeons—large white birds, whose appearance in Scotland always indicates a severe winter in the Scandinavian peninsula—a winter in which all the north of Europe is sure to share; so Cora trembled, in her tenderness of heart, as she thought of our poor soldiers before Sebastopol, and her secret love, Newton, who, if surviving, was a suffering prisoner in the hands of the Russians.
Cora often visited the cottage of old Willie, in the copse near King Jamie's Well (though the rows of half-decayed hawks, wild cats, and weasels, with which its eaves were garlanded, made the atmosphere thereabout redolent of anything but perfume), for Willie's heart, like her own, was with the army of the East; and he "devoured" all the newspapers she gave him for intelligence of the war. But he used to shake his white head, and speak often of the old times of Wellington and his boyhood—of the many fine lads who had gone forth to Spain and Holland—"forth frae the Howe o' Fife, to return nae mair," and he greatly feared such would be the fate of his Willie, now that the poor young master was gone.
The veteran keeper's spirits had sunk considerably. He was rheumatic and ailing now; but he still crept about the woods and preserves with his old double-barrelled Joe Manton and his favourite dogs, and said hopefully, at times, "Aye ailing, ye ken, never fills the kirk-yard, Miss Cora."
But Cora's visits to the gamekeeper's lodge, to the Adder's Craig, the ruined castle of Piteadie, and other old familiar haunts, became circumscribed, when she had the annoyance of Mr. Brassy Wheedleton's company. For there were times when that legal sprout came on the circuit, or visited Sir Nigel on business "anent the bond," or begged leave to have a few blundering shots at the pheasants; and he seldom failed to combine these objects with a more ambitious one, by a pretty close attention upon Cora, and a marked attention, that to her was only productive of extreme annoyance.