'Yes, at last,' continued Roland, as they grasped each other's hands, and the latter, when looking intently into his brother-in-law's face, detected a grave, grim, keen-eyed, harassed, and even haggard expression, which was all unlike the jovial, free, and open one he was wont to see there. 'Why, Jack,' said he, 'what the devil is up? Are you ill with fever, or what? Did you leave all well at home?' he added as he drew him aside.
'Well—yes—I suppose; but ill or well, thereby hangs a tale—a devil of a tale; but ere I can tell it, give me something to drink, old fellow—my water-bottle is empty—flask ditto, and then I shall relate that which you would rather not hear.'
Jack unbuckled and flung his sword aside, while Roland hastily and impatiently supplied his wants, and then heard his brief, rapid, and startling story, winding up with the disappearance of Maude from the villa, and the incoherent and mysterious letter of farewell she left for him.
'After this—the deluge!' exclaimed Roland in the direst perplexity.
'God and my own heart only know what it cost me to start for the seat of war, leaving Maude, as I did, untraced, unfollowed, and undiscovered; but I had neither time nor an address to follow up,' sighed Elliot; 'and God only knows, too, how all this has cut her as it must have cut her—my poor darling—to the soul!'
The meeting of Roland and Jack Elliot was one of perplexity, gloom, and genuine distress. Far away from the land where they could be of help or use in unravelling the mystery, or succouring Maude, whom they deemed then a houseless fugitive, they felt themselves miserably powerless, hopeless, and exasperated; but curiously, perhaps, they never thought of suspecting the real author of the mischief, and were utterly at a loss to conceive how such a complication and accusation came about in any way.
Neither Jack nor Roland could know or conceive that she was safe under her uncle's wing at Merlwood. Thus they had to endure the anxiety of supposing her, with all her beauty, refinement, and delicacy, to be adrift in some homeless, aimless, and despairing way in London—haunted by anger and terror of an injury and irreparable wrong. The contemplation of this state of affairs filled the minds of both with incessant torture—a torture for which there was no relief, and would be none, either by letter or telegraph, for a long time, if ever, to them, as inexorably—in two days now—the regiment would be again on the Nile.
'Reason how we may,' was the ever-recurring and gloomy thought of Roland now, 'it has been said that Fate does certainly pursue some families to their ruin and extinction, and such is our probable end—the Lindsays of Earlshaugh!'
And so, apart from their brother officers, these two conversed and talked of the mysterious episode of the woman and her claims again and again, viewing it in every imaginable way, till they almost grew weary of it, in the hopelessness of elucidating it while in the Soudan; and as for poor Malcolm Skene and his fate, that was supposed to be a thing of the past, and they ceased to surmise about it.
At 2 p.m. on the 28th of December the start for Khartoum began!