Their carcasses lay long in Balaclava harbour, where they were used as stepping stones by the sailors and boatmen, till their corruption filled the air, adding to the cholera and fever in the town and camp.
All that haunted me must have been fancy, thought I, for my thoughts were always running on Bessie—lost to me and to the world—fevered fancy, especially the cry, and the horrid gurgling as of a drowning person that followed it. The sound of the sea must have produced or suggested the cry in my sleeping ear, and the subsequent vision in the hold—those gleaming eyes and that fierce hooked nose; and yet, as an author has remarked, the whole world of nature is but one vast book of symbols, which we cannot decipher because we have lost the key.
It was ungrateful of me to be always thinking of Bessie, who had scorned, flouted, and deserted me—thinking more of her than of poor old mother in the Weald of Kent, who loved me with all her soul, as only a mother could love a son who was amid the trenches of Sebastopol; but I couldn't help it, for the terrible mystery that involved the fate of Bessie made me brood over it at all times.
As for the trifle of money I had expected, it never came, and now I didn't want it.
It was Christmas Eve before Sebastopol, as it was all over God's Christian world; but I hope never again to see such a ghastly festival. I was not at the breaching batteries that night, having been sent with two horses and four men to bring in a twelve pound gun, which had been left by the Russians in the valley of Inkermann, after the battle of the 5th of November. Tom Inches and many a brave fellow of ours had gone to their long home in that valley of death, and I was a battery-sergeant now.
The cold was awful, and we were rendered very feeble by hunger, toil, and half-healed wounds; so, like men in a dream, we traced the horses to the gun, and limbered up the tumbril, both of which lay among some ruins in rear of the British right attack, and not far from the frozen Tchernay.
Three miles distant rose Sebastopol, and the sky seemed all on fire in and around it, for they were keeping Christmas night, amid shot from our Lancaster guns, and whistling Dicks of all sorts and sizes, from hand-grenades to eighteen-inch bombs, chokeful of nails, broken bottles, and grapeshot.
Yet I couldn't help thinking of home, and how merrily the village chimes would be ringing in the old tower of the rectory church, amid the hop-gardens and the cherry-groves of Kent. And then I saw in fancy the old fireside, where father's leathern chair was empty now, and where one at least would say her prayers that night for me—that happy night at home, when every church and hearth would be gay with ivy leaves and holly-berries, and the lads and the lasses would be dancing under the mistletoe; and with all these came thoughts of Christmas geese and plum-puddings, and I drew my sword-belt in a hole or two, for I was starving—light-headed and giddy with want; and as we rode silently on, the swinging chains of the gun seemed to me like the jangle of our village chimes! but they rung over the snowy waste that lay between Khutor Mackenzie and the Highland camp—a white waste, dotted by many a dead man and horse.
As we rode silently on, man after man of our little party of four gave in, dropped from the gun, to which I had no means of securing them, overcome by cold, fatigue, and death. At last I was riding alone in the saddle, with the gun rattling behind me.
Ghastly sights were around me on that Christmas night, and the glinting of the moon at times made them more ghastly still.