Bright visions had faded away and airy bubbles burst. Chateaux en Espagne were no longer tenable now! How many gorgeous day-dreams of glory and honour, of rank and fame, of position in society attained by worth and merit, were now dissolved in air! His naturally warm, generous, and kindly heart had become seared, callous, and misanthropical. Experience and the world had tried their worst upon him, and thus, for a time, a mere boy in years became a bitter-hearted man, for a day dawn of a glorious ambition seemed to be sinking prematurely into a black and stormy night.
He had seen so many new places and met such a variety of strangers; he had been involved in so many episodes, and had experienced so much by land and sea, and, within a very few months, so much seemed to have happened, that a dreamy dubiety appeared to obscure the past; and thus his former monotonous existence at Rohallion—monotonous as compared with the stir of war—came only at times with clearness, as it were in gleams and flashes of thought and memory. He had nothing tangible about him—not even a lock of Flora's hair—to convince him of past realities, or that he had ever been elsewhere than with the 25th; and yet out of this chaos Flora's face and figure, her eyes and expression of feature, her identity, stood strongly forth. Oh! there was neither obscurity nor indistinctness there!
And now, amid his sorrow, he felt a keen longing to write to her, under cover to John Girvan; but then, he reflected, was such a course honourable in him or deserved by Lord and Lady Rohallion, who hoped to hail her one day as their daughter-in-law? And what mattered her regard for him now—now, with the heavy doom of a court-martial hanging over his head! And yet, if even death were to be his fate, he felt that he would die all the more happily with the knowledge and surety that Flora still loved him.
Deep, deep indeed were his occasional bursts of bitterness at Cosmo; but when he remembered that Cosmo's mother had also been a mother to himself—when all the memory of her love for him, her early kindness, her caresses, her kisses on his infant brow, her increasing tenderness—came rushing back upon him, his heart flew to his head, and Quentin felt that even yet he could almost forgive all the studied wrong and injustice the narrow spirit and furious jealousy of her son now made him suffer. But how were the members of the regiment or of the division to understand all this!
Amid the reverie in which he had been indulging in the dark, the door of the upper chamber of the old tower opened, and two officers, in long regimental cloaks, entered, accompanied by a soldier with a parcel.
"Well, Quentin, old fellow—how goes it?" said Monkton's cheerful voice.
"Cheer up, my boy," added Askerne; "before this time to-morrow we shall have known the worst, and it will be past. We have brought you a bottle of capital wine. It is a present from Ramon Campillo, the jolly muleteer, who came in after the division, and leaves again, for the French lines, I fear."
"A sly dog, who butters his bread on both sides, likely," said Monkton; "my man has brought you a fowl and a loaf, so we shall make a little supper together."
"Here, boy, drink," said Askerne, when the soldier lighted a candle, and they all looked with commiseration upon Quentin's pale cheek and bloodshot eyes; "I insist upon it—you seem ill and weary."
He could perceive that both Askerne and Monkton looked grave, earnest, and anxious, for they knew more of the charges against him than they cared to tell.