"Mabel and Rose—my own Mabel, where is she?" he muttered again and again.
Love left his heart with her; she was, like others, a hostage—a thing unheard of in modern wars;—a prisoner—too probably a victim! In such terrible hands, what worse fate could she have? She had been diplomatically torn from him, by a treaty that proved futile, and which cast dishonour on our arms. Duty had compelled him to march with his men; for the stern duty of the soldier had to rise superior to the soft affection of the lover, and now he was there alone, with the memory of her last tearful kiss lingering on his lips.
"My beautiful darling—my loved, my lost Mabel!" murmured the usually matter-of-fact Waller; "oh, why were you reft from me? God," he added, looking up imploringly in the gathering gloom, "shall we ever meet again?"
He knew that no fear of future vengeance would deter the Afghans from committing any outrage on their captives. In their utter ignorance of the locality, the nature, and vast resources of Britain, they can form no correct idea of her power by sea or land. They vaguely know all Europe by the general term of Feringhistan, or the Country of the Franks; and that ships from there come to Bombay and Bassora (the Bassora of Sindbad the Sailor), to Madras, and Calcutta; and that a Queen rules one portion of it—a dreary island somewhere in the sea; and their learned Moollahs were wont to assert, that her red soldiers, by their close resemblance to each other, the extreme similarity of their uniform and motions, must all be the sons of one mother.
An intense thirst, which successive handfuls of snow failed to allay, hunger, and extreme cold from lying so long in that dark den in such a season, made Waller hail the descending night, and with sombre satisfaction he quitted his lurking place, to seek on foot the road to Jellalabad.
"In England," thought he, "the Poor Law guardians have studied at times to discover upon how little mankind can be kept alive; and there have been learned philosophers who declared it possible for people to exist without food at all! By Jove, I wish they had been on this retreat from Cabul, and all their problems would soon have been solved."
He heard now the voices of the jackals revelling over their ghastly meal on the hill of Gundamuck, and shudderingly he turned away in the opposite direction. Snow covered all the country; but the footsteps and horse tracks of those who had pursued Doctor Brydone were, for a time, a sufficient indication of the route he was to follow. He had lost his shako in the late conflict, but the loonghee of a dead Afghan supplied its place.
The night was clear; the deep blue sky was full of brilliant stars; around him the stupendous mountains of the Khyber range towered on either side of the way in silence and solemnity, that proved something awful to the then oppressed mind of the poor fugitive, who wished from his soul that he had been as dark in complexion and as black of eye as his friend Polwhele; for Waller's face and hair were of the thorough Saxon type, and hence any attempt to pass himself off as a fair-visaged Oriental was impossible, for swarthy indeed is the fairest of them. He had never possessed such a hand-book as "Afghani before breakfast," or "without a master," if such a thing ever existed; but he had contrived to pick up enough of the strange polyglot medley forming the language of the natives, to have aided any disguise, could he have found one.
Voices and the clatter of hoofs, the latter partially deadened by the snow, fell on his ear, before he had proceeded a mile; and, on the whiteness that stretched in distance far away before him, appeared the dark figures of a group of mounted men approaching rapidly.
Near the roadside there stood, and doubtless still stands, a little musjid, or temple, and over its tiny dome one giant poplar towered skyward, like a dark gothic spire. The strangers might halt and pray there, profuse piety being an element in the Afghan character; but it was equally probable they might not; so, as it was his only hope of concealment, he hastened to avail himself of it—but too late; he was already observed, and a series of wild shouts made his heart sicken, as the horsemen came galloping up, unslinging from their backs their long juzails as they advanced.