"My next letter will tell you more certainly of my future intentions, and all that immediately concerns myself. Our faithful nurse, Winny Braddon, whose brother perished with papa, has gone to spend—to end, I should say—her days with old Mike Treherne and his wife, who, as you know, is her sister; and the Rector, who takes care of me—for I am all but penniless now—is to give me an introduction to a lady of high rank, who is about to go abroad; to where I know not—to India itself perhaps. Would to Heaven it were! for then we might meet again."
"My sister a companion—compelled, for bread, to submit to whim, caprice, neglect, and mortification! Oh, my father, has it come to this!" groaned Denzil in agony of spirit.
"The sunlight is setting redly on the rough summits of the Row Tor and Bron Welli. All is quiet—quiet as death around me; I can hear but the beating of my own heart, the most earnest prayers and blessings of which go with these lines across the seas to you, dear Denzil."
So ended this letter, which he read many, many times, heedless of the unwonted bustle which reigned in the cantonments, where the gunners were getting additional cannon mounted, the miners forming barricades and traverses, and other vigorous preparations being made for defence in case of a too-probable attack.
Denzil had learned that within every shadow, however deep, there may be a darker shade; and now that shade within the shadow that had fallen on him was the death of his mother.
His mother dead! Another beloved face gone as his father's had gone—a sweet and winning face he saw in fancy still, yet never should look on again. How much there were of past care and years of love and tenderness to remember now! Then there were his only sister's utter loneliness and helplessness to appal him. How trivial a calamity seemed the coquetry of Rose Trecarrel when compared to sorrows such as these! And she had died the tenant of a humble cottage on the moors—the property of Mike Treherne, the miner, whose son was now a sergeant in his company!
And could it be that for months past, while he had been happy, thoughtless, heedless, and full of merriment among his comrades, that she who loved him beyond her own life, purely and unselfishly as only a mother can love an only son, had been in her dark cold grave, and he knew it not? No thought by day, no vision by night, no intuition or thrill of magnetic affinity (such as that of which we read in the Corsican twins and their mother), had told him of this; and yet it was so.
Far away from where the embattled Bala Hissar looked down on the flowing Cabul, on the Mosque of Baber and the Obelisk of Alexander the Macedonian, from the English cantonments and all their associations, even from thoughts of Rose Trecarrel's auburn hair and tender brown eyes, Denzil's mind, swifter than the electric telegraph, flashed home to the land from whence that letter came—to Cornwall with its mines below the rolling sea; to its granite quarries where the thunder-blast, loud as a salvo from the Bala Hissar, told of the riven rock; to its stone avenues solemn and hoary, and the great rock-pillars of the Fire Worshippers of old; to the dark brown moors of Bodmin, where in summer the drowsy bee hummed over the heath-bells and wild honeysuckle; to the towering bluffs on which the empurpled waves were rolling in the light of the sun as he set beyond Scilly, "the isles of the god of day;" to tarns where the water-lily floated, and to pools where the speckled trout was darting to and fro; to his rugged home, we say, went all his thoughts—to the Land's End with all its masses of splintered rocks, worn and bleached by the seas of ages, split and rent like columns of basalt amid the brine—rocks where the fresh-smelling seaweed and the scarlet sea-anemone clung, and on whose summit the weary miner sometimes sat and rested after his toil to watch the passing ships, or to ponder when next his pickaxe would discover "a lode of tin or a goodly bunch of copper ore" in those burrows beneath the sea over which the keels were gliding, their crews little wotting that human beings were in those lighted mines fathoms deep below;—over all these familiar scenes the mind of Denzil wandered, to settle again in fancy on his dead mother's face; to think of his sister's loneliness—of the vast distance by sea and land that separated them,—of his own now-narrow means; and his heart seemed to wither up within him.
So the long night wore away, and the day began to break. Its advent was heralded by the boom of a 24-pounder from the Bala Hissar, by the merry drums and fifes giving the reveillez, and by strokes on the flat metal ghurries that hung in front of the guard-houses; but Denzil sat heedless, very pale, and absorbed in thought.
* * * * * *