The subsequent day was devoted to quiet and rest, and on the field, under a solitary palm tree, the remains of General Earle, Colonels Eyre, Coveny, and all who had fallen with them, were reverently interred, without any special mark to attract the attention of the dwellers in the desert.
After all this, Brigadier Brackenbury was about to march in the direction of Abu Hammed, when unexpected instructions from the vacillating British Government reached Lord Wolseley from London, and the river column was ordered to fall back on the camp at Korti, a task of no small difficulty; and though a handful of men under Sir Charles Wilson did reach Khartoum, as we all know, the movement was achieved too late, and, cruelly betrayed, Gordon had perished in the midst of his fame.
CHAPTER LVII.
THE SICK CONVOY.
Repeatedly Jack Elliot thanked Heaven that his comrades in the regiment had not got hold of his wretched story—that he and his young wife had quarrelled—were actually separated, and that she had run away from him because of some other woman, as he knew well that but garbled versions of the comedies or tragedies in the lives of our friends generally reach us.
The movements of the column were now so abrupt, and, for a time, undecided, that no telegram in reply to his message reached Roland from Edinburgh, and ere long he had a new source of anxiety.
Enteric fever, that ailment which proved so fatal to many of our troops during this disastrous and useless war, fastened upon poor Jack Elliot, and the column had barely reached the camp at Korti when he was 'down' with it, as the soldiers phrased it, and very seriously so—all the more seriously, no doubt, that the tenor of Mr. M'Wadsett's postscript left such a doubt on his mind as to the plans and movements of Maude.
His head felt as if weighted with lead—but hot lead; he had an appalling thirst, and was destitute of all appetite even for delicacies, and the latter were not plentiful, certainly, in our camp at Korti.
If he survived, which he thought was almost impossible, he believed that he could never, never forget what he endured in the so-called camp there—first, the languor and disinclination for work, duty, exercise, even for thinking; the pains in his limbs; his dry, brown tongue, that rattled in his mouth; mental and bodily debility; and all the other signs of his ailment, produced by exposure, by midnight dew, and the bad, brackish water of the desert.
Roland—of a hardier nature, perhaps—was unwearying in his care of him, and thrice daily with his own hands gave him the odious prescribed draught—hydrochloric acid, tincture of orange, and so forth, diluted in Nile water—while the once strong, active, and muscular Jack was weak as a baby.