At last there came tidings which made the Sheikh Moussa eye him darkly, dubiously, and with undisguised hostility—tidings which Malcolm Skene heard with no small concern and alarm.
These were the close arrest of Zebehr Pacha as a traitor to the Khedive Tewfik, and his sudden deportation from Cairo beyond the sea to Gibraltar, by order of Lord Wolseley.
This event, thought Skene, must seal his own fate as an enforced and most unwilling hostage now!
The golden grain, the full-eared wheat and bearded barley had been gathered in every field and on every upland slope around his home; the year had deepened into the last days of autumn; the woods and orchards of ancient Dunnimarle were odorous of autumnal fruit and dying leaves; the skies were gray by day and red and gloomy at eve.
White winter had come, and every burn and linn been frozen in its rocky bed; the thundering blasts that swept the bosom of the Forth had rumbled down the wide chimneys of Dunnimarle and swept leaves and even spray against the window panes; while the aged trees in the glen below had shrieked and moaned ominously in the icy winds till winter passed away, and people began hopefully to speak of the coming spring, but still a lone mother mourned for her lost son—her handsome soldier son, ever so good, so tender, and so true to her, now gone—could she doubt it?—to the Land of the Leal!
CHAPTER XLIII.
A MARRIAGE.
While Malcolm Skene was counting the days wearily and anxiously, and, in common parlance, 'eating his heart out,' in that distant zereba, near the Third Cataract of the Nile, time and events did not stand still with some of his friends elsewhere; among these certainly were Roland Lindsay and Hester Maule, and the latter did indeed mourn for the hard and unknown fate of one whose love she never sought but surely won.
Roland did not start immediately for Egypt after turning his back in mortification and disgust on Earlshaugh, but for a brief time took up his quarters at the United Service Club in Edinburgh with Jack Elliot. The speedy marriage of the latter and Maude, who had gone to Merlwood with Hester, was then on the tapis, and fully occupied the attention of all concerned.
It was impossible for anything like love to exist long, after the rude shock—the terrible awakening—Roland had received; yet ever and anon he found himself rehearsing with intense bitterness of spirit the memory of scenes and passages between himself and Annot—drivelling scenes he deemed them now! How had he said to her more than once: