The body of troops among which our hero formed a unit, sailed in transports from Spithead, and in the Channel, and when Portland lights were twinkling out upon the weather-beam, poor Quentin endured for the first time the horrors of sea-sickness, and lay for hours half-stifled in a close dark berth, unheeded and forgotten, overpowered by the odour of tar, paint, and bilge, and by a thirst which he had not the means of quenching, for he was helpless, unable to move and longed only for death.
It was no spacious, airy, and gigantic Himalaya, no magnificent screw-propeller like the Urgent, the Perseverance, or any other of our noble steam transports that, on this occasion received the head-quarters of the "King's Own Borderers," but a clumsy, old, and leaky tub, bluff-bowed and pinck-built, with her top-masts stayed forward, and her bowsprit tilted up at an angle of 45 degrees, and having a jack-staff rigged thereon. She was a black-painted bark of some four hundred tons, with the figures "200 T."—(signifying Transport No. 200)—of giant size appearing on her headrails. Between floors or decks hastily constructed for the purpose, the poor soldiers were stowed in darkness, discomfort, and filth. The officers were little better off in the cabin, and hourly their servants scrambled, quarrelled, and swore in the cooks' galley, about their several masters' rank and seniority in the order of boiling kettles and arranging frying-pans, whilst the hissing spray swept over them every time the old tub staggered under her fore course, and shipped a sea instead of riding buoyantly over it.
In the mighty stride taken by civilization of late years, when steam and electricity alike conduce to the annihilation of time and space, the soldiers of the Victorian age know little of what their fathers in the service underwent, when old George III. was King. In stench, uncleanness, and lack of comfort and accommodation, our shipping were then unchanged from those which landed Orange William's Dutchmen at Torbay, or which conveyed our luckless troops in after years to the storming of the Havannah or the bombardment of Bocca Chica.
After Quentin had recovered his strength (got his "sea-legs" as the sailors have it) he presented his pale, wan face on deck one morning, when the whole fleet, with the convoy, a stately 74-gun ship, were scattered, with drenched canvas, like sea-birds with dripping wings, as they scudded before a heavy gale, through the dark grey waters of the Bay of Biscay, the waves of which were rolling in foam, under a cold and cheerless October sky.
On that comfortless voyage to the seat of war, many were the secret heart-burnings he felt; many were the cutting slights put upon him by his cold and hostile commanding officer, who went the tyrannical length of even raising doubts as to whether he should mess in the cabin or among the soldiers; but to Cosmo's ill-concealed rage and confusion, the motion was carried unanimously and emphatically in the poor lad's favour; that the cabin was his place, as a candidate for his Majesty's commission.
Cosmo gave a smile somewhat singular in expression, and unfathomable in meaning, when Major Middleton communicated to him the decision of the officers; but though victorious in this instance, young as he was, the new affront sank deep in Quentin's heart, and he felt that there was "a shadow on his path" there could be no avoiding now.
So rapidly had events succeeded each other since that evening on which the Master had so savagely struck him down in the avenue, that Quentin frequently wondered whether his past or his present life were a dream. His last meeting with Flora Warrender among the old and shady sycamores—Flora so loving, so tender, and true!—his last farewell of old John Girvan (but one of whose guineas remained unchanged); that horrid episode of the dead gipsy, when he sought shelter in the ruined vault of Kilhenzie; the drive in the carrier's waggon; his volunteering at Ayr; the march to Edinburgh, with the voyage to England in the armed smack, and his subsequent military life, all appeared but a long dream, in which events succeeded each other with pantomimic rapidity; and it was difficult to believe that only months and not years, must have elapsed since the kind and fatherly quartermaster closed the gate of Rohallion Castle behind him. And now he was sailing far away upon the open sea, bound for Spain—a soldier going to meet the victorious veterans of Napoleon, in England alike the bugbear of the politician and the truant school-boy; and he was in the 25th too—that corps of which, from childhood, he had heard so much, and under the orders, it might be said truly at the mercy, of his personal enemy and bad angel, the cold, proud Master of Rohallion!
He found it difficult indeed to realize the whole and disentangle fact from fancy—reality from imagination; but that the faces of Monkton, Boyle, and the good Captain Warriston, when he saw him occasionally, were as links in the chain of events, and gave them coherency.
At times, especially after dreams of home (for such he could not but consider Rohallion), there came keen longings in his heart to see Flora once again and hear her voice, which often came plainly, sweetly, and distinctly to his ear in sleep. Of her, alas! he had not one single memento; not a ring, a miniature, a ribbon, a glove—not even a lock of her soft hair—the hair that had swept his face on that delightful day when he carried her through the Kelpie's pool in the Girvan, and which he had kissed and caressed, in many a delicious hour spent with her in the yew labyrinth of the old garden, by the antique arch that spanned the Lollards' Linn, under the venerable sycamores that cast their shadows on the haunted gate, or where the honey bee hummed on the heather braes that sloped so sweetly in the evening sunshine towards the blue Firth of Clyde.
From soft day-dreams of those past hours of happiness he was roused on the evening of the 3rd October by the boom of a heavy gun from the convoy, and several signals soon fluttered amid the smoke that curled upward through her lofty rigging. They were to the effect that land ivas in sight—the fleet of transports to close in upon the convoy—the swift sailers to take the dull in tow; and now from the grey Atlantic rose a greyer streak, which gradually became broken and violet-coloured in the sheen of the sun that was setting in the western waves, as the hills of Portuguese Estremadura came gradually into form and tint, on the lee-bow of the transport.