[CHAPTER XXXV.--THE NIGHT BEFORE INKERMANN.]
I told Phil Caradoc of the strange meeting with Mr. Hawkesby Guilfoyle, and his emotions of astonishment and disgust almost exceeded mine, though mingled with something of amusement, to think that such a personage should be with the army before Sebastopol in any capacity; and he predicted that he must inevitably do something that would not add to the budding laurels of the Land Transport Corps, which we scarcely recognised as a fighting force, though armed, of course, for any sudden emergency. On this morning, the mail had come in from Constantinople; but there was still no letter for me--no letter from her with whom I had left my heart, and all its fondest aspirations--yea, my very soul it seemed--in England, far away.
Many mails had gone missing; and I strove to flatter and to console myself by the vague hope, that the letters of Estelle were lying perhaps in the Gulf of Salonica, or in the Greek Archipelago, rather than adopt the bitter and wounding conviction that none were written at all. I counted the days and weeks that had elapsed since our detachments sailed from Southampton; the weeks had now become months; we were in November; yet, save when once or twice I had seen her name among the fashionable intelligence in a stray newspaper, I knew and heard nothing of Estelle, of her whose existence and future I so fondly thought were for ever woven up with mine. For a time I had been weak enough to conceal from kind-hearted Phil Caradoc the fact that I had not been getting answers to my letters; and often over a quiet cigar and a bottle of Greek wine I have listened nervously to his congratulations on my success and hopes, blended with his own personal regrets that Winifred Lloyd could not love him. He had sent to her and Dora, from Malta and from Constantinople, some of those beautiful articles of bijouterie, which the shops of the former and the bazaars of the latter can so exquisitely produce to please the taste of women, and they had been accepted with "kindest thanks," a commonplace on which poor Phil seemed to base some hope of future success.
"Winifred Lloyd is very lovely," said I, as we sat in my tent that night over a bottle of Crimskoi; "sweet and pure, happy in spirit, and gentle in heart--all that a man could desire his wife and the mother of his children to be."
"But--"
"But what, Phil?" said I, curtly.
"She cannot love me, and she will never be mine," sighed Caradoc.
"Never despair of that; we have to take Sebastopol yet; and that once achieved, we shall all go merrily sailing home to England."
"That I doubt much; some of the regiments here will be taken for the Indian reliefs--our fighting here will count as service in Europe--but surely the war cannot end with the fall of Sebastopol. A war between three of the greatest countries in the world to dwindle down to the somewhat ill-conducted siege of a fortified town would be absurd."
"Ill-conducted, Phil?"