It was the sound of drums—drums beaten in regular marching cadence, coming on the wind of evening down from the rocky pass in the hills of Siah Sung.
Oh, there could be no mistake in the measure—British troops were coming on; and how welcome once would that sound have been to the young soldier who lay on his pallet there, and whose ear could hear the English drum no more!
She started to the window, and looked forth to the black mountains, which, though distant from it, towered high above the Kuzzilbashes' fort. The dark Pass lay there, its shadows seeming blue rather than any other tint, as the receding rays of the setting sun left it behind; but her eyes were dim with weeping and with watching now, so Rose, with all her pulseless eagerness, failed to see the serried bayonets, the shot-riven colours tossing in the breeze, or the moving ranks in scarlet, that showed where the victorious brigades of Pollock, Sale, and Nott were once more defiling down into the plain that led to humbled Cabul.
Welcome though their sound, they had come, alas, too late!
The drums were still ringing in her ears; and this familiar sound, like the voices of old friends, caused her now to weep plentifully. Once again she turned to the bed where Denzil lay so pale and still, his sharpened features acutely defined in the last light of the sun; and she felt in her heart as she pressed her interlaced hands on her lips, seeking to crush down emotion—
"So the dream it is fled, and the day it is done,
And my lips still murmur the name of one
Who will never come back to me!"
CHAPTER XXI.
THE PURSUIT.
The same evening of this event saw the Union Jack floating on the summit of the Bala Hissar, and our troops in or around Cabul, in the narrow and once-crowded thoroughfares of which—even in the spacious and once-brilliant bazaar—the most desolate silence prevailed. The houses of Sir Alexander Burnes, of Sir William Macnaghten, and all other British residents were now mere heaps of ashes, and their once-beautiful gardens were waste. Human bones lay in some; whose they were none knew, but they remained among the parterres of flowers as terrible mementos of the past.
Having, among many other trophies, the magnificent and ancient gates of Hindoo Somnath with them, the victorious troops of General Nott were encamped around the stately marble tomb of the Emperor Baber, where the British were watering their horses at the Holy Well, quietly cooking their rations of fat-tailed dhoombas or of beef, newly shot, flayed, and cut up, after a long route; and the natives were gravely boiling their rice and otta; while the staff officers, Generals Pollock, Sale, Nott, Macaskill, and others, some on foot and some on horseback, were in deep conference about a map of Western India, and Bokhara, and as to where the hostages were, and what was to be done for their relief, if they still lived.