Yule-tide had come and gone at Calderwood; again Cora's pretty hands had spiced the great wassail bowl, and all the household had partaken of its contents; but there were heavy hearts at the Glen, as in many a home circle elsewhere. For every icicle that hung from the eaves; every flake of snow that drifted past; every biting gust that swept through the bare woods, made old Sir Nigel and his people think of the horrors our poor fellows were enduring among the frozen trenches of Sebastopol. The golden pheasants and the brown partridges were alike forgotten, and old Pitblado wandered about, alone and forlorn, among them, "though sic a season for breedin' he couldna ca' to mind!"
The meets of the county pack took place at Largo, at Falfield, and elsewhere. The foxes, tan, grey, and brown, were thick as blackberries in Calderwood Glen—ay, thick as the black rabbits on the Isles of the Forth—but the "M.F.H." heeded them little. He had only ridden to the hounds once that season, and preferred in the cold evenings his seat by the ruddy dining-room fire, with his steaming tumbler of toddy on a gueridon table close at hand; and there he dozed in his cosy easy-chair, with his favourite dogs at his slippered feet; or he beat time dreamily to Cora, as she ran her fingers over the keys of the cottage piano, and sang some such old-fashioned song as the "Thistle and the Rose."
CHAPTER XLII.
Alas! what evils I discern in
Too great an aptitude for learning!
And fain would all the ills unravel
That aye ensue from foreign travel.
Far happier is the man who tarries
Quiet within his household lares.
Read and you'll find how virtue vanishes,
How foreign vice all goodness banishes,
And how abroad young heads grow dizzy,
Proved in the under-written Odyssey.
RELIQUES OF FATHER PROUT.
The letter from the Under Secretary of State for War, which announced my capture by the Russians, unfortunately proved more correct in its tenor than the telegram; but the mode in which I fell into their hands, through the foul treachery of Mr. De Warr Berkeley, shall be detailed by myself in the following chapter.
On the 23rd of September, early in the morning, we bade adieu to the Alma, and to all those sad mounds that now lay along its southern bank, marking where seven thousand seven hundred and eighty soldiers were taking their last long slumber.
The dying Marshal St. Arnaud—for he took the field literally in a dying state—wished us to advance on the day immediately after the battle, as his intention was to be at Sebastopol by the 23rd, at latest.
"If," said he, in one of his letters, "I land in the Crimea, and it pleases God to give me a smooth sea for a few hours, I shall be master of Sebastopol and of the whole Crimea; I will push on this war with an activity and energy that shall strike the Russians with terror!"
But the humane Lord Raglan declined to advance until the wounded of all countries were attended to; and to that high-spirited hero and Christian gentleman, Dr. Thompson, of the 44th—still remembered in his native Scottish village as "the surgeon of the Alma"—was committed the care of seven hundred and fifty Russian soldiers, who had lain in their blood on the field for sixty hours. Accompanied by one attendant, with only a flag of truce displayed upon a lance to protect him from the savage and vindictive Cossacks who were hovering about, that self-devoted man worked without ceasing in the care and cure of those miserable creatures, who were all lying side by side, collected in one place—the acre of wounded—a task which proved too great in the end for his energies, as he died of fatigue and cholera soon after the battle.
The day after we marched, Death, who had hovered beside the great French marshal, even while his baton directed the movements of his zouaves and riflemen, seized more firmly on his victim, and on the 29th St. Arnaud died of cholera—that fatal pest, which still hung upon our skirts.