"Yes, I—but poor Jack Polwhele, Devereaux, Burgoyne, and all the rest, have perished—all—all!" replied Waller, with deep emotion, as the men of the 13th crowded about him. "The bravest and the best are always cut off first; but, save me, all who came through the Khyber passes have gone to God!"
"Trevelyan of yours, and Dr. Brydone, of the Shah's army, are safe with us; so three have escaped that terrible carnage."
"And what of the hostages?"
The face of Sinclair—a Scot from the banks of the Thurso, and, like all his surname, tall, grey-eyed, and fair-haired—grew dark as he replied,
"Elphinstone, the general, is dead—he expired in the hands of the enemy, who insulted his body, and beat the head with stones. The tribes are all in arms now—a regular 'gathering of the clans,' we should call it in Scotland. Ackbar Khan has fulfilled his threat, we are told, by sending the ladies for sale to the chiefs in Toorkistan; but nothing is certain save that, by a combined movement on Cabul, we are about to take a terrible vengeance."
Waller groaned, and ground his teeth in silence, for he was too much of an Englishman to make a scene, or give vent to the emotions that maddened him as he thought of Mabel, of her helpless companions, and the awful mystery that overhung the fate of Rose.
The hostages, to the number of eighty-eight officers and soldiers, with thirty-three females (three being wives of soldiers) and children, were at the mercy of barbarians, and what might have happened to them by that period? How many of them, husband and wife, parent and child, must have caressed and embraced each other despairingly from time to time, with only one idea in their minds,—that the lips they touched, the eyes they looked into with tenderness and love, the form they held, that was warm and living, might all belong to a dead and mangled corpse ere the dawn opened or the night closed!
CHAPTER XXIII.
DENZIL A NAWAB.
When consciousness came back to Denzil he found himself alone—alone with the dead. He knew not what time had elapsed since he had been struck down by the treacherous wretch whose life he had sought to save; and no vestige of the retreating troops remained, save those whose bodies dotted all the wintry waste. Angrily and sadly the rising wind howled from the mountain pass, blowing before it over the frozen snow the long leaves of the coss, or dead grass, the fir cones and pistachio nuts from the thickets close by; and some of these cones, that fall from the jelgoozeh, or mountain pine, are larger than artichokes. The dark and tortuous pass had apparently swallowed all his comrades; yet through it now his way must lie, and, staggering up, he strove to follow the blood-stained track; but the landscape, the mountains, the abandoned cannon, dead horses, camels, and bodies of soldiers, of the Hindoo dhooley-wallahs, and of many women, seemed all to whirl round him, and he nearly fell on the snow once more. Benumbed as he was, stiff and cold in every limb, with a dull crushing sense of pain in the back region of his head, from which the blood, now crusted and frozen, had flowed freely, he felt that he could only remain there and wait for death or succour, the former too surely, for already the gloom of evening seemed to be setting over the mountains, and he looked about him wildly and despairingly.