'I am going to marry this man Hawkey Sharpe. Odious man! I cannot pretend, even to myself, to be much in love with him—if at all; yet I am going to marry him—and why? Because I love the splendid patrimony that, in time, will become his; this beautiful estate, this grand old house, the parure of family diamonds, and the settlements that must be made upon me. I always meant to marry the first wealthy man who asked me, and now I am only true to my creed—the creed mamma taught me. Can anyone blame me for that? Of course I would rather a thousand times have had poor Roland with Earlshaugh, because he is a man that any woman might love and be proud of; but failing him, I must put up with the person and name of—Hawkey Sharpe. Can anyone think it very wicked that I—a penniless little creature—should prefer such a well-feathered nest as this to that gloomy and small poky house in South Belgravia, with its one drab of a servant, cold meat, shabby clothes, and all its sordid concomitants? No; give me the ease, the prosperity, the luxury, and the flesh-pots of Earlshaugh, with its manor and lands, wood, hill, and field.'
But it was a considerable relief to her mind—shamelessly selfish though she was—when within twenty-four hours after Roland's departure her two cousins and Jack Elliot (whose faces she cared never to see again) also left for the capital, and she remained behind the guest of—Mrs. Lindsay.
'As for Roland,' Annot thought, 'he will get over our little affair easily. He loved me, no doubt, but love we know to be only a parenthesis in the lives of most men.'
CHAPTER XLI.
THE CAPTIVE.
We must now change the scene to the Soudan—Beled-es-Soudan, or 'The Land of the Blacks,' so called by ancient geographers—whither a single flight of imagination will take us without undergoing a fortnight's voyage by sea to Alexandria, viâ the Bay of Biscay, with its long, heavy swells, and the Mediterranean, which is not always like a mill pond; and then a long and toilsome route across the Lower and Upper Provinces to where the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil was journeying towards his remote home, with the luckless Malcolm Skene in his train—a place on the borders of the Nubian Desert, not far from the Nile, in the neighbourhood of the third cataract, and situated about midway between Assouan, the name of which had not, as yet, become a 'household word' with us, and Khartoum, where then the well-nigh despairing Gordon was still waging his desperate defence against the Mahdi.
By this time how weary had the eye—yea, the very soul—of the luckless captive become of the desert scenery, in a land visited only by a few bold travellers, who in times past had accompanied the caravans from one valley to another. There the desert sand is deep and loose, with sharp flinty stones, in some places sprinkled with glistening rock salt, and showing here and there a grove of dwindled acacias or tufts of colocynth and senna, to relieve the awful dreariness of its aspect.
The water in the pools, even in the rainy season, is there black and putrid; hence the Arabs of the district remove with their flocks to better regions, where the higher mountains run from Assouan to Haimaur.
Steering, as it were, unerringly by landmarks known to themselves alone, the Sheikh Moussa Abu Hazil and his followers made progress towards his home—or zereba—in the quarter we have mentioned.
Malcolm Skene had now been conveyed so far inland by his captors that escape seemed hopeless; yet, buoyed up by the secret chance that such might come, he struggled on with the party day by day, ignorant of the fate that awaited him, though he could never forget that of Palmer and his companions on the shore of the Red Sea.