“Why should he look as if he had when he hasn’t, and couldn’t have? My dear Foltlebarre, you’re talking bosh!”
“Bosh, if you like, Major,” agreed the ruddy-haired boy good-humoredly; “but such a melancholy customer as that white-haired chap I never yet came across!” He broke off to cry: “By Gad! what a thundering big Government transport! That must be The Realm, going out with the forage and stores and winter clothing to the tune—a fellow I know at Lloyd’s told me—of five hundred thousand pounds. They’ve been keeping her back in Docks at Portsmouth on the chance of the war being over before the winter, and now they’re rushing her out for everything she’s worth!”
She was a great three-masted screw steamship of two thousand six hundred tons, and as, with her Master’s pennant flying from her main top-gallant mast, and the red Admiralty flag with the foul anchor and the Union Jack canton bannering splendidly from her mizzen halyards—she bustled by—hurrying under full steam and every stitch of canvas for her pilotage through the Dardanelles—she was to the inexperienced eye a gallant sight. But the experienced eye saw something else in her than bigness. And the senior officer who had been invited to admire her, being a keen and experienced yachtsman—shook his head.
“My own opinion—supposing you care to have it!—is that your friend at Lloyd’s—take it he belongs to one of the firms of underwriters who’ve insured her?—is likely to find himself in the cart. For I’ve seen some crank Government tubs in my time, and sailed in ’em—very much to my disadvantage. But never a cranker one than this, give you my word of honor! Why, she sits on her keel with a crooked list to port that a bargeman couldn’t miss the meaning of. And she has no more buoyancy than a log of green wood. Look at our skipper shaking his head at the Second Officer as he shuts his glass up. Lay you any money you please he wouldn’t like to have to chaperon her through a November Black Sea squall! By Jupiter! you were right just now, and I beg your pardon, Foltlebarre!”
He had been following the course of the “thundering big transport” through a Dollond telescope, and the face of the white-haired man in the shabby togs, as he leaned upon the taffrail of the passenger deck forward, had come into his field of view.
He said, after another look: “It’s a disease, the existence of which is denied by the Faculty, but he has got it! That man is dying of a broken heart!”
You were right, Major, who were doomed yourself to die so soon in the freezing mud of Balaklava. But the end did not come for many, many years.
A dark-blue haze hung over the Sea of Marmora. Rain fell, soaking those passengers who, owing to the crowding on board the vessel, had been compelled to sleep on deck. Dunoisse was one of these, and, little fitted as he was to endure hardship, he suffered. The cough returned, and with it fever and pain. But he forgot both when a wind from the southwest lifted the fog, rolled it up like a curtain, and showed the cypress-canopy of the great Cemetery of Scutari hanging like a thunderous cloud against the rose-flushed eastern sky. And as the steamer entered the Bosphorus, the dusk shape of Bûlgurlû Daghi, girt about the flanks with snow-white mosques and glittering palaces and fairy gardens, rose into view; and on the grassy slopes that climbed from the water’s edge—where the Brigade of Guards had camped, and where the black and yellow striped tents of the German Legion now dotted the hillside—you saw, as you see to-day, the great quadrangle of yellow stone, flanked with spire-topped square towers—that had been the barracks of the Turkish Imperial Guard.
One traveler drank the vision in with a sense of revived hope and a wonderful thrill of expectation. And as though his unuttered thought had communicated itself to another, an English infantry officer standing near him turned to another man and said, gravely pointing to the building on the green hillside:
“She is there!”