My poor comrades! Be a soldier but for six months, and you will never forget the new world that is opened to you—a respect for your brother officers and soldiers, and a kindly feeling for the old number of the corps; it lasts with life.
But that ghastly trench in the green valley, and the pale, moustached, and upturned faces! God bless all who lie there, and green be the graves of our people in the Crimea!
It was on the second day of the new year that we—Pitblado and I—sailed in H.M.S. Blazer for Southampton, with many other invalids, and, as we steamed round the Seraglio Point, and stood away into the Sea of Marmora, I thought of that day twelvemonth, when I was at Calderwood Glen, sharing the contents of my good old uncle's ancestral wassail-bowl. How much had passed since then!
Trebitski's Cossacks had taken the miniature, the ring; even Louisa's lock of hair was gone too, and luckily now I had nothing to remind me of the beautiful traitress by whom I had been galled, befooled, hoodwinked, and so cruelly abandoned!
And Lady Chillingham could witness this horrible sacrifice, this English suttee, or act of immolation, quietly and approvingly. She had married without love herself—so had her mother before her—and both had been happy enough in their own heartless and stupid way. Such alliances, made on mere worldly grounds, were part of the system of that society in which they moved; so Lady Chillingham viewed the whole affair as a matter of course.
As for Louisa Loftus, why should she be different from other women of the world, and of her aristocratic class? I must have been deluded—mad indeed, to think otherwise for a moment! And yet she could crash my hope for the future recklessly, as a child breaks the glittering soap-bubble he has so carefully developed, or casts aside the plaything he once treasured. She could cruelly trample on the best love of a true and honest heart, to make a marriage that was advantageous only in point of rank and wealth, both of which she already inherited in the fullest degree.
Yet something of pity mingled with my fierce and bitter scorn of Louisa—pity for the dreary years she would have to spend, while tending a senile dotard, whom she could neither respect nor love. She would suffer in secret, or perhaps console herself by some scandalous flirtation, that Sir Bernard Burke would never record in his usually flattering pages, though he might have to chronicle the unexpected appearance of an heir to the noble old Anglo-Norman line of Slubber de Gullion.
While Louisa, plunged in all the gaiety of London life, forgot all but it and herself, Cora—I learned this after—had thought it a crime to be even happy, while I was suffering or absent. Such was the difference in the nature of those two girls.
At Stamboul I had procured an inlaid Turkish rifle, a high-peaked saddle, a cherry-pipe stick, and some yataghans, as trifles for Sir Nigel; slippers, all sewn with pearls, a shawl, a veil, a little trunk of essences, and other pretty things, for Cora.
Our homeward voyage was rapid and pleasant, so we steamed steadily on, passing many a transport hurrying to the seat of war, with her human freight, ardent and eager to replace the fallen; on by Malta and old Gib. I was too ill to land at either; but I was well cared for on board, for the officers treated me as if I had been their brother, and were never weary of extolling the terrible charge of the Light Brigade on the fatal 25th of October.