And so, with many warm wishes, almost prayers, for my preservation from danger, and offers of money if I required it, the letter of my kind old friend ended; but it gave me food for much thought, and far into the hours of the chill night I sat and pondered over it. Why did Winny refuse so excellent an offer as that of Sir Watkins, whom I knew to be a wealthy and good-looking young baronet? I scarcely dared to ask myself, and so, as before, dismissed that subject. Why had not Estelle's answers reached me, if she had actually written then? That Lady Naseby had surreptitiously intercepted our correspondence, I could not believe, though she might forbid it. Was my Lord Pottersleigh, now Earl of Aberconway, at work; or had they, like many others, perished at sea? Heaven alone new. His flatteries "pleased her," his, the senile dotard! And he had taken up his residence at Walcot Park; his earldom, too! I was full of sadness, mortification, and bitter thoughts; thoughts too deep and fierce for utterance or description. Could it be that the earldom and wealth on one hand were proving too strong for love, with the stringent tenor of her father's will on the other?
At the opera and theatre I had seen Estelle's beautiful eyes fill with tears, as she sympathised with the maudlin love and mimic sorrow, the wrongs or mishaps, of some well-rouged gipsy in rags, some peasant in a steeple-crowned hat and red bandages, some half-naked fisherman, like Masaniello, and her bosom would heave with emotion and enthusiasm; and yet with all this natural commiseration and fellow-feeling, she, who could almost weep with the hero or heroine of the melodrama, while their situation was enhanced by the effects of the orchestra, the lime-light, and the stage-carpenter, was perhaps casting me from her heart and her memory, as coolly as if I were an old ball-dress! So I strove yet awhile to think and to hope that her letters were with the lost mails at the bottom of the Ægean or the Black Sea; but Sir Madoc's letter occasioned me grave and painful doubts; and memory went sadly back to many a little but well-remembered episode of tenderness, a word, a glance, a stolen caress, when we rode or drove by the Elwey or Llyn Aled, in the long lime avenue, in the Martens' dingle, and in the woods and gardens of pleasant Craigaderyn. The wretched light in my lantern was beginning to fail; my little fire had died quite out, and the poor sentry shivering outside had long since ceased to warm his hands at the flue. The tent was cold and chill as a tomb, and I was just about to turn in, when a sound, which a soldier never hears without starting instinctively to his weapons, struck my ear.
A drum, far on the right, was beating the long roll! Hundreds of others repeated that inexorable summons all over the camp, while many a bugle was blown, as the whole army stood to their arms. It was the morning of the battle of Inkermann!
[CHAPTER XXXVI.--THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER.]
We had all long since forgotten the discomfort of early rising. In my case I had never been to bed, so to buckle on my sword and revolver was the work of one moment; in another I was threading my way among the streets of tents, from which our men, cold, damp, pale, and worn-looking, were pouring towards their various muster-places, many of them arranging their belts as they hurried forward.
"What is the row? what is up?" were the inquiries of all.
But no one knew, and on all hands the mounted officers were riding about and crying,
"Fall in, 19th Regiment!" "Fall in, 23rd Fusileers!" and so on. "Stand to your arms; turn out the whole; uncase the colours, gentlemen!"
"It is gunpowder-plot day," cried a laughing aide-de-camp, galloping past with such speed and recklessness that he nearly rode me down.
It proved to be a sortie from Sebastopol, made chiefly by a new division of troops brought up by forced marches from Bessarabia and Wallachia, many of them in wagons, kabitkas, and conveyances of all kinds; and all these men, to the number of many thousands, left the beleaguered city inflamed by the sermon I have described, by harangues of a similar kind, by the money or martyrdom they hoped to win, and by a plentiful distribution of coarse and ardent raki; while to Osten-Sacken, Volhonski, and other officers of rank, one of the Grand Dukes held out threats of degradation and Siberia if we were not attacked and the siege raised! All our men, without breakfast or other food, got briskly under arms, by regiments, brigades, and divisions; they were in their gray greatcoats, hence some terrible mistakes occurred in the hurry and confusion; many of our officers, however, went into action in scarlet, with their epaulettes on--most fatally for themselves. All the bells in Sebastopol--and some of these were magnificent in size and tone--rang a tocsin, while the troops composing the sortie, at the early hour of three A.M., stole, under cloud of darkness and a thick mist, into the ravines near the Tchernaya, to menace the British right, our weakest point; and, unknown to our out-guards, and generally unheard by them--though more than one wary old soldier asserted that he heard "something like the rumble of artillery wheels"--in the gloom and obscurity several large pieces of cannon were got into position, so as completely to command the ground occupied by us. Cautiously and noiselessly the masses of Russian infantry had stolen on, the sound of their footsteps hidden by the jangle of the bells, till they, to the number of more than 50,000 men, were on the flank as well as in front of our line; and the first indication we had of their close vicinity was when our outlying pickets, amid the dense fog of that fatal November morning, found themselves all but surrounded by this vast force, and fighting desperately!