And with a wasted and trembling hand he would consign the soft leather case to the breast of his tattered and faded tunic. He was so weak, so utterly debilitated that sometimes he shed involuntary tears—a sight that filled Roland with infinite pity and commiseration, and a dread each day that he might have to leave Jack, as he had left others, in a lonely tomb by the river-side.
Jack, poor fellow, was dwelling generally in a land of shadows; familiar scenes and faces came and receded, and loved voices came and sank curiously in his ear, while his apparently dying eyes and lips pled vainly for one kiss of his sunny-haired Maude to sweeten the bitter draught of that death which seemed so close and nigh.
But he was still struggling between life and eternity, when in the ruddy haze Roland hailed the purple outlines of the Pyramids in the Plain of Ghizeh, the ridge of the Jebel Mokattam, the distant minarets and the magnificent citadel of Cairo.
On reaching the Kasr-el-Nil Barracks, Roland was ordered to be attached for duty purposes to a regiment quartered there till further orders, as no more troops were proceeding up the Nile.
Though the battle of Hasheen was to be fought and won, and the lamentable fiasco of Macneill's zereba to occur at Suakim, the war was deemed virtually over, as the cause for it had collapsed by Gordon's betrayal and the fall of Khartoum.
With the general advance of the expedition under Lord Wolseley to rescue Gordon, our story has only had a certain connection—a mission undertaken far too late, but during which the mind at home was kept at fever-heat by news from that burning seat of strife, recording the sufferings of our soldiers, and the bloody but victorious battles with the Mahdists, till the dark and terrible tidings came, that just as Wilson's column was ready to join Gordon, who had sent his steamers to Metemneh to meet him—Khartoum, after a defence perhaps unsurpassed in the annals of peril and glory, had fallen by storm and treachery, and the people of Britain were left to wonder, and in doubt, whether a stupendous blunder or an unpardonable crime had been perpetrated.
CHAPTER LVIII.
IN THE SHOUBRAH GARDENS.
Roland lost no time in telegraphing home for news of the missing ones, but received none; Mr. M'Wadsett was absent from town, so he and Jack Elliot, who was far from recovery yet, had to take patience and wait, they scarcely knew for what. One fact was too patent, that both Hester and Maude had disappeared—one too probably in penury and the other in an agony of grief and shame. It was not even known, apparently, whether they were together.
They had vanished, and, save a cheque or two cashed by Jack's bankers, left no trace of how or when; and a chilling fear crept over the hearts of both men as to what might have happened—illness, poverty, unthought-of snares, even death itself.