Sadly tarnished has the latter been of late years by the “old womanish” policy of certain foreign secretaries of ours, in re Denmark, and one or two other like matters, not to speak of the moral cowardice and practical stupidity we displayed in the non-recognition of the ill-fated Confederate party in America; but we have not heard the last of that question yet! Vide Mr Sumner and the Alabama claims.
It would be useless to the point of our story, as well as out of place here, to chronicle the different steps of the Abyssinian army, so ably detailed by the graphic author of “The March to Magdala.”
Suffice it to say that the expedition started and succeeded in its purpose; and our hero, Master Tom, as one of its component parts, may be said to have gone, and seen, and conquered like one of the rest, and was, after a time, on his way home again.
Tom Hartshorne was ignorant of most that had occurred since he left home. He had read and grieved over the intelligence of his sister Susan’s death, which he had come across in a stray copy of the Times at Zoulla; but his grief was of very short duration, for the very next day after he read the announcement he received a letter from Mr Trump, telling him that it was all a mistake, and Susan was not dead at all, although his mother, the dowager, was seriously ill. Beyond this—and puzzled he was, too, with the conflicting accounts—Tom knew nothing of the chops and changes brought about at The Poplars and in its neighbourhood during his absence; he had no one to correspond with him, and although he had written frequently to his mother in the meanwhile, the lawyer’s letter was the only communication he had received about home matters since he left England, and home, and Lizzie, the year before, for the far East.
His means of information being thus so scant, you may be sure that Tom’s imagination was additionally busy; and Tom had plenty to occupy his mind in thinking of a past most important episode in his life, which you may guess was connected with somebody—“you know who”—and allowing his thoughts to dwell on the future, his future, so pregnant for him of joy or sorrow. Which was it to be?
Time alone could tell; and Time, that ill-featured old gentleman, who will persist in playing with edged tools, decided favourably, in spite of his usual malevolence.
Tom came home at last, to find his way smooth, and his lot cast in pleasant places; but it was some time before he did so.
You see he was connected with the staff, and had to return to Bombay with the major portion of the expeditionary army; and there he was detained, arranging this thing and that, until it was waxing late in the summer, when he gazed on the Sunderbunds behind him; late in the summer when he beheld again the donkey boys of Cairo; still latter when he steamed down the Mediterranean and past “The Rock,” and up the Bay of Biscay, and landed at Southampton; but he came at last, although the month of August had again come round ere Tom set foot on British soil, and revisited his native place.
The dowager had been “picking up,” as Doctor Jolly said, all this time; and although she could not walk about—one of her sides was paralysed still—yet she was very cheerful, and could speak fluently enough.
Lizzie was in the room—the parlour where his mother had told him “Fiddle-de-dee!” when he told his love—with her when he came home—and you may guess the meeting between the three. How the mother sobbed over her darling boy; how she grieved over the change in him; how Lizzie’s face wore little tell-tale blushes when he spoke to her; and how he, too, blushed, when his mother called out to him, when he was going to shake hands with her politely—