Alas! her story Denzil knew not, and might never, never, know it.
But he was beginning now to know and to feel that "the God who was but a dim and awful abstraction before" seemed very close and nigh. No fear was in his heart, however: he was very calm and courageous, save when he thought of Rose's future, and how lonely and lost she should be when he was gone. This reflection alone brought tears from him; it wrung his heart, and made him the more keenly desire to live.
No Bible or Book of Common Prayer had Rose wherewith to console either the sufferer or herself; all such had gone at the plunder of the cantonments and the baggage, and had likely figured as cartridge paper at Jugdulluck and Tizeen; but no printed or hackneyed formulæ could equal in depth or earnestness the silent yet heartfelt prayers she put up for Denzil and herself.
"My poor Denzil—poor boy! I never deserved that you should love me so much: I have thought so a thousand times!" Rose would whisper fervently, and, heedless of any danger from fever, and perhaps courting it, place his brow caressingly in her neck, and kiss his temples, as if he were a child, telling him to "take courage, and have no fear."
"Fear! why should I fear death, Rose?" he would respond, speaking quickly, yet with difficulty—speaking thus perhaps to accustom himself to the topic, or to accustom her, we know not which; "why should I fear death, since I know not what it is? Why fear that which no human being can avert or avoid, and which so many better, braver, and nobler than I have so lately proved and tested in yonder Passes?—aye, Rose, my mother too, at home—my father on the sea—Sybil perhaps—all!"
Then his utterance became incoherent, his voice broken, and Rose felt as if her heart were broken too; for when he spoke thus, there spread over his young face a wondrous brightness, a great calm; and the girl held her breath, in fear, if not awe, for she read there an expression of peace that denoted the end was near.
All was very still in the great square Afghan fort and in the Khan's garden without.
The summer sun shone brightly, and the birds, but chiefly the melodious pagoda-thrush—the king of the Indian feathered choristers—was there; and the flowers, the wondrous roses of Cabul, were exhaling their sweetest perfume. There the world, nature at least, looked gay and bright and beautiful; but here, a young life, that no human skill, prayer, or affection could detain, was ebbing away so surely as the sea ebbs from its shore, but not like the sea to return.
If Denzil died, what had she to live for? So thought the heedless belle, the half coquette, the whole flirt, of a few months past; but such were "the uses" or the results of adversity. Was not the end of all things nigh? Without Denzil Devereaux and his love, so tender, passionate, and true, what would the world be? and her world, of late, had been so small and sad! This love had been all in all to her; and now all seemed nearly over, and nothing could be left to her but forlorn exile and the gloom of despair.
As there is in memory "a species of mental long-sightedness, which, though blind to the object close beside you, can reach the blue mountains and the starry skies which lie full many a league away," so it was with Denzil; and now far from that bare and desolate vaulted room in the Afghan fort, from the mountains of black rock that overshadowed it, and all their harassing associations, even from the presence of the bright-haired and pale-faced girl who so lovingly watched and soothed his pillow, the mind of the young officer flashed back, as if touched by an electric wire, to his once-happy home. Again his manly father's smile approved of some task or feat of skill performed by bridle, gun, or rod; again his mother's dark eyes seemed to look softly into his; the willowed valley (that opened between steep and ruin-crowned cliffs towards the billowy Cornish sea), the little world of all his childhood's cares and joys, was with him now, and with that world he was mingling over again in fancy, though death and distress had been there as elsewhere; the hearth was desolate, or strangers sat around it; their household gods were scattered, and home was home no longer, save in the heart, the memory, of the dying exile.