MISS CHEYNE OF ESSILMONT

BY

JAMES GRANT

AUTHOR OF

"THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "THE CAMERONIANS,"
"THE SCOTTISH CAVALIER,"
ETC., ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. III.

LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1883.

All rights reserved.

Contents

Chap.

I. [The Battle of Amoaful]
II. [The Scarabœus]
III. [The Lost One]
IV. [A Year of Joy]
V. [In Hampshire Again]
VI. [Thoughts that often lie too deep for tears]
VII. ['Oh, for a Horse with Wings!']
VIII. [A Birthday Gift]
IX. [Cadbury Redivivus]
X. [At Cape Coast]
XI. [The Old Warning]
XII. ['Ashes to Ashes']
XIII. [Events Progress]
XIV. [Bella's Dot]
XV. [In Bayswater]
XVI. [The Four-in-Hand Club]
XVII. [Humiliation]
XVIII. [Miss De Jobbyns' Admirer]
XIX. [The Foreclosure Effected]
XX. [Homeless]
XXI. [Conclusion]

MISS CHEYNE OF ESSILMONT.

CHAPTER I.
THE BATTLE OF AMOAFUL.

The firing proved a mistake—the result of a false alarm—so the night passed without any other alerte or disturbance, and all remained quiet during the temporary halt at Prahsu; but the troops heard of many strange things as occurring at Coomassie, all deemed by the natives portentous of its coming fate.

In its market-place—that scene of daily blood and murder—where the predecessor of King Koffee devoted three thousand victims 'to water the grave' of his mother—an aërolite fell, to the terror of the people; but there came still a greater prodigy. A child was born which instantly began to converse, and, to prevent it having intercourse with supernatural visitors, it was placed alone in a room under guards, who in the morning found that it had vanished, and that nothing lay in its place but a bundle of withered bones; and on this the fetish men argued 'that Coomassie itself would pass away, and nothing remain thereof but dead leaves;' and on the same day and hour that Lieutenant Grant of the 6th—the first white man—crossed the Prah, there sprang up a mighty tornado, that levelled the great tree under which the king used to sit, surrounded by his warriors. This caused a profound sensation among the Ashantees, who gathered by thousands around it in the market-place, which at that time was described by one who saw it as 'a den of reeking corpses, shrieking and tortured victims—men and women butchered by hundreds—where skulls and human bones lay about as oyster-shells do at home!'

By order of the king's fetishmen two prisoners had knives run through their cheeks, and were tied up in the woods to die, as a test of whether our invasion would be successful. The idea of the fetishmen was that, if the victims died soon, all would be well with Ashantee; but they lived, one for four and the other for nine days—so the nation gave itself over for lost.

On the 6th of January—the day the fetish-tree fell—we shed the first blood in that land of horrors, when Lord Gifford, at the head of fifty men, captured a village occupied by an Ashantee outpost, and killed many of its defenders.

And so, till the forward movement began, the troops were impatient during the halt at Prahsu, the soldiers making wry faces at their daily doses of quinine, and still more so at their weak ration of grog—only half a gill per man, or a gallon of rum to sixty-four men—and the officers missing sorely the pleasures of the long, glittering, flower-laden mess-table, and the charms of the girls they had left behind them, and of whom they were reminded by Du Maurier in some old stray numbers of our friend Mr. Punch.

After the troops advanced, the 25th of January saw our posts pushed as far forward as the Bahrien river, and a slight brush which they had there with the Ashantees showed that they were making vigorous efforts to concentrate their forces for a fierce resistance; and on the 31st was fought the battle of Amoaful, which took place in the morning, and by eight o'clock the white smoke of the musketry and the red flashes of the latter, were spouting in every direction, amid the dark green and wondrous leafy luxuriance of the bushy jungles.

The Rifles were in the reserve, 580 strong, under Colonel Warren. Thus Dalton, Jerry, and others were for a time almost spectators while the fight went on, and the leading column—consisting of the Black Watch, eighty of the Welsh Fusiliers, and two rifled guns, led by Sir Archibald Alison (son of the historian), extending as it advanced with loud cheers at a quick run—attacked, before the rest of the troops came up, the village of Egginassie, upon the slope of the hill that rises to Amoaful.

Prominent amid the greenery could be seen the red tufts on their tropical helmets, then the representation of their famous historical scarlet plumes.

The firing here was tremendous, so much so that all sound of individual reports was lost, and the din of the conflict became one hoarse roar. The enemy used slugs, not bullets. Had it been otherwise, not a man of the Black Watch—many of whom were severely hit—would have remained to tell the tale. Major Macpherson (young Cluny) was wounded in several places, but remained under fire, propped upon a stick.

In five minutes a hundred and five Highlanders, nine being officers, had blood pouring from their wounds; but 'Onward' was the cry, and as the Rifles came up in support, amid the ceaseless clatter of the breechloaders, 'for three hours after the Scottish and Welsh infantry had carried the village,' says the Daily Telegraph, 'the contest was obstinately maintained in the jungle, where it was difficult to see or reach the enemy, and quite as hard for him to know how the fight went upon other points. Assailed in their own wilderness, followed up foot by foot, the Ashantees fought well, but never gave a fair opportunity for the shock of a real charge.'

As the Rifles advanced through the jungle in extended order, over ground which the fire of the 42nd had strewed with killed and wounded Ashantees, one of the latter, a colossal black savage, clad only with a middle cloth and string of beads, propping himself upon his elbow, shot Jerry's servant O'Farrel, in the back and killed him on the spot, as the ball passed through his heart.

It was, perhaps, the last effort of expiring nature; but Jerry responded promptly with his revolver, and sent a bullet whistling through the brain of the Ashantee, who, as he was a man of fine proportions, was soon after eaten by the Kossos or wild cannibals of Colonel Wood's regiment, who, as Jerry said, 'felt peckish' after the fight.

A Highlander lost himself in the bush, and came suddenly upon a cluster of retiring Ashantees, who shot him down by a volley and instantly cut off his head, which they carried away, as no trophy is more prized by this people than human heads, which formed the chief ornaments of the king's palace, and even of his bed-chamber in Coomassie.

In the first days of February the passage of the Ordah followed, and on the night the troops bivouacked by its shore they were without tents, and the rain fell in merciless torrents, as if the windows of the sky had opened again, while thunder bellowed in the echoing woods, and green forked lightning lit up incessantly the bosom of the foaming river; yet more than ever were our troops anxious when day broke to begin the weary march—to reach Coomassie and grapple with the dusky enemy.

The first human blood Jerry Wilmot had ever shed was when he pistolled the Ashantee who murdered—for murder it was—poor O'Farrel. He had handled his revolver then promptly, if mechanically, and thought afterwards—strange to say—with a little sense of disgust over the episode, and the aspect of the dead negro, his yellow eye-balls turned back within their sockets, his fallen jaw, and oozing brain, had actually haunted him.

But since then, in skirmishing, both in the bush and open, Jerry had, as he phrased it, 'potted three or four more of the beggars,' as coolly as if they had been black-cocks on a Highland moor.

While the Naval Brigade halted at Ordashu, the Black Watch, with half a battalion of the Rifles, pushed on towards Coomassie.

Soon tidings came from Sir Archibald Alison, saying briefly,

'We have taken all the villages, but the last, before entering Coomassie; support me with the Rifles, and I hope to enter it to-night.'

Fortunately he had been anticipated: the half battalion was close upon his own, and with it were Dalton and Wilmot.

The slugs were coming out of the bush as thick as hail, and the advance of the Highlanders and Rifles along the road that led to Coomassie was in a form never before seen in war. Colonel M'Leod led the former.

Along the well-ambushed road they proceeded quietly and steadily, as if upon parade, but by two abreast in file, so narrow was the forest path.

'Forty-Second, fire by successive companies—front rank to the right, rear rank to the left,' shouted Colonel M'Leod.

'A company—front rank, present! rear rank, present!'

'So on,' says the correspondent of the New York Herald, 'and thus vomiting bullets two score to the right and two score to the left, the companies volleyed and thundered as they marched past the ambuscades, the bag-pipes playing, the cheers rising from the throats of the lusty Scots, till the forest rung again with the discordant medley of musketry, bag-pipe music, and vocal sounds. Rait's artillery now and then gave tongue with an emphasis and result which must have recalled to the Ashantees memories of the bloody field of Amoaful, where Captain Rait and his subalterns, Knox and Saunders, signalised themselves so conspicuously. But it was the audacious spirit and true military bearing on the part of the Highlanders, as they moved down the road to Coomassie, which challenged admiration this day.'

So great was the roar of musketry in the echoing woods that, scared by the terrible and unusual sound, the very birds of the air—and brightly plumaged birds they were—grovelled in terror, with outspread wings over the dying and the dead.

Many were borne rearward disfigured for life and frightfully wounded by the missiles of their hidden antagonists; but the regiment never halted—the Rifles following close—nor wavered, but moved steadily on with its national music playing, until the Ashantees, conceiving it to be useless to continue against men who advanced thus, heedless of all ambuscades, rose from their coverts and fled in yelling hordes towards Coomassie.

'The cool, calm commands of Colonel M'Leod,' says Mr. Stanley, whom we cannot help quoting, 'had a marvellous effect on the Highland battalion—so much so that the conduct of all other white regiments pales before that of the 42nd.' Frequently during the hot and rapid march to Coomassie the Highlanders saw emerging from the bushes several scores of fugitives, who found their movements accelerated by the volleys they received on such occasions. Village after village along the road heard the disastrous tidings which the fugitives conveyed, and long before the Highlanders approached the place where the king remained during the battle, he had decamped because of these reports.

King Koffee never for a moment anticipated a complete defeat, and believed that he would only fall back in good order to give us battle at the head of all his warriors in front of Coomassie itself, and thus obtain a peace which would at least spare his palace—on which he set a great store—from destruction.

When Sir Garnet Wolseley, with the main body, was drawing near that place, he received another despatch from the front. Sir Archibald Alison wrote to say that he had given some time to treat.

Thus a delay occurred in consequence, and of this delay the circumstances are not very clear to the outer world. It does not appear from some accounts to have been Sir Garnet's wish, yet it undoubtedly took place, and put the troops to some inconvenience by allowing night to fall before they entered the place.

'Coomassie at last!' exclaimed Dalton, as he threw himself, panting with heat, among the luxuriant grass that bordered the now bloody and corpse-strewn pathway. 'Let us but take it, lay it in ashes, and then hey for home!' he added, hopefully. Yet he had had two narrow escapes; one ball had knocked off his helmet, and another had scarred his left cheek.

'Yes, hey for home,' said Jerry, proffering his cigar-case; but poor Dalton little knew all that had to be dared and done before he saw the last of Coomassie!

All knew that when the final attack was made there would be a fierce resistance to encounter—a great slaughter pretty certain to ensue—no quarter given or taken; and, like several others in the corps, during the unexpected halt, Dalton and Jerry were writing what might prove to each a last letter to those they loved at home; and as the former wrote there came curiously and persistently to memory the last verse of the song Laura was wont to sing to him of old:

'Then think of me! for withered lies
The dearest hope I nursed;
And I have seen, with bitter sighs,
My brightest dream dispersed.'

Is it strange that, after the peculiar manner of their parting, Jerry's first and longest letter was not to his mother, but to Bella Chevenix?

'Poor Bella!' said he, in a broken voice, almost to himself, as he closed the epistle.

'You did not part on bad terms?' asked Dalton.

'No, thank God! What made you think so?'

'Something in your tone.'

'I am writing to her, though she gave me no hope.'

'No hope—you—why?'

'She quite misunderstands the real love I bear her, and evidently suspects that I wish to secure her hand, not because I am the squire of Wilmothurst, but because she is in reality the heiress of it.'

'She—what riddle is this?' asked Dalton, taking the cigar from his lips, and eyeing his friend.

'Did I not make you understand all that before, old fellow?'

'Not quite.'

'Well, old Chevenix has no end of mortgages over my inheritance—it is well nigh all his property now; I can't even pay the interest—the mater cannot realise how heavily the old place is burdened, and what a task my father had to keep it together—so times there are when I don't care if I should be knocked on the head—bowled out here.'

'Don't talk that way, Jerry,' said the older man, reprehensively; 'death is too close to be lightly spoken of thus.'

Death was indeed closer than either perhaps thought.

'But there is your mother,' urged Dalton, after a pause.

'She! It wouldn't break her "noble" heart, even were it so with me, and I were lying stiff, as hundreds are now, in yonder bush,' replied Jerry, with an irrepressible gust of bitterness, as he snipped the end off a cigar with his teeth, and, lighting it, proceeded to smoke, silently and sorrowfully, while re-charging his revolver for the coming attack; 'though, if we are to believe the newspapers, the grief of the "upper ten," like that of royalty, is something unfathomable as compared with that of any of the vulgar herd!'

CHAPTER II.
THE SCARABŒUS.

Before the troops, on the side of a large, rocky hill, and in the red fiery light of the setting sun, setting in a sky where it flamed like a vast crimson globe amid an orange and amber space that blended into green and blue overhead, lay Coomassie, with all its long spacious streets of wigwam-like houses, built of wattlework and mud, plastered and washed with white clay, ornamented with rows of beautiful banyan trees, and having before the door of each dwelling a special tree, at the foot of which were placed idols, calabashes, and human bones, as fetishes for protection against evil.

It was four miles in circumference, and its most important edifice was the palace from which King Koffee had fled—a central stone building of European architecture, in the chief thoroughfare, so spacious that it included two or three small streets, besides piazzas for the royal recreation, with arcades of bamboo, the bases of which were ornamented with elegant trellis work of an Egyptian character. The accommodation was most ample, as befitted a monarch whom the State required to possess 3333 wives.

'There go the bugles at last, Dalton!' shouted Jerry, cheerfully, as he sprang up and drew his sword, when the advance was sounded, just as the sun went down, and the troops began to approach this terrible place, through ground the atmosphere of which was made appalling by the awful stench from exposed corpses which lay about in every direction, and over which great vultures flapped their wings—the dead of past days of local slaughter for various royal reasons; thus it was dark when the 42d and the Rifles reached the edge of the swamp which nearly surrounds the place—on three sides at least—that horrible and pestilential swamp, with floating bones and the rotting flesh of the victims.

The first man through it, and actually in Coomassie, was young Lord Gifford, who led the way with his scouts till he was wounded, when the enemy opened fire for a time; but as the king had fled with his warriors, the resistance was merely nominal, and tremendously hearty was the cheer of the 42d as they entered the place, and the pipes sent up a skirl of triumph, which announced that fact to all the troops who were coming on.

Excitement over now, Jerry Wilmot felt his soul sicken as he marched at the head of his company up one of the principal streets, with the awful odour of dead flesh everywhere around—victims never being buried, but left where they were killed, or cast into the adjacent swamp. Over all that town, as a writer has it, the odour of death hung everywhere, and came on every sickly breath of hot wind—'a town where here and there a vulture hops at one's very feet, too gorged to join the filthy flock, preening itself on the gaunt dead trunks that line the way; where blood is plastered like a pitch coating over trees, floors and stools—blood of a thousand (fetish) victims yearly renewed; where headless bodies make common sport; where murder pure and simple—the monotonous massacre of bound men—is the one employment of the king and the one spectacle of the populace.'

Amid such surroundings the troops piled arms in the market-place, guards were posted, and the rest sat down to their rations, amid the light from blazing houses, which the native levies began to loot and then set aflame; while many Ashantee warriors, who had been but recently fighting with our men, lingered near the groups quietly, with their muskets in their hands, saying ever and anon, 'Tank you, tank you'—an attempt at the only English they knew.

The Fantee prisoners the troops had come so far to release were found chained to logs; and one European, an Englishman, who was found free, displayed like them the most extravagant joy on finding himself saved from death at the hands of King Koffee.

'Is there a drop in your flask, Dalton?' said an officer, propping himself on his sword. 'The odour here is literally awful.'

'You are welcome to what remains, but a strong cigar is best, my boy,' replied Dalton, as he wrenched open a tin of preserved meat with the blade of his sword.

'Now that we are here,' said Jerry, 'what will the next move be?'

'Burn the whole place, no doubt, and then be off like birds,' was the reply of more than one.

'And so end the most hideous and uninteresting war in which British soldiers have been engaged.'

'What the devil is that? Trundle it out of sight,' cried Jerry to a rifleman, who was dragging near them an object which he had found, and which proved to be one of the king's war-drums, ornamented with sixteen human skulls and thirty-two thigh bones, and in the cords of which were stuck three war-trumpets, made each to imitate a throat, with a tongue of red cloth, and jaws but too real to form the mouthpiece. 'Take away the d——d thing! Who could sup with that beside them?' exclaimed Jerry, in great disgust, as the soldier laughed, saluted, and dragged away the ghastly trophy, on the resounding head of which some of his comrades were ere long beating while they sang some familiar music-hall ditty.

As it was expected that King Koffee might still come to terms, his capital was not yet given to the flames. Indeed, he had sent messengers to Sir Garnet Wolseley with missives to the effect that he would be early with him next day and arrange for peace; but the morning of the next day passed and noon without any sign of his coming, though the general and staff were in readiness to receive him, and all were restless and uneasy, as it was impossible to linger long in such a vast charnel-house as Coomassie.

A dreadful tempest of rain made the adjacent country a swamp, giving a hint that the fatal and pestilential wet season was at hand, and the words, 'We must be off,' were in everyone's mouth.

When five o'clock on that day came, and there were no tidings from King Koffee—now that he had betaken himself into the interior, thus proving himself unworthy of trust—it was resolved to leave marks of our power and vengeance that would never be forgotten.

The troops knew that the streams in their rear would be swollen, that the mere runnels in the ravines would soon become brawling torrents, so there was no time to be lost in getting back to the coast, where the ships awaited the army, which had only five days' provisions, so it was requisite that the campaign should end sharply, surely, and sternly.

The royal state umbrella and various gold ornaments were taken as presents for the Queen from the palace, in which the Highlanders were much exercised in their minds to find, framed upon the wall of a room, an engraving of 'Burns and Highland Mary' beside a bird organ, and various old clocks, pots, and kettles; stools wet with the blood of recent human victims, the royal couch garnished with human skulls—and skulls, indeed, adorned most of the rooms, the floors of which were full of graves. In fact, the whole palace, as Mr. Henty wrote, appeared to be little better than a cemetery, though in its cellars were found bottles of brandy, palm wine, and even champagne, which the discoverers thereof were not slow to fully appreciate, and drain off to 'The girls we've left behind us.'

At last orders were given that the palace was to be blown up, the whole town reduced to ashes, and a start was to be made for the sea; then the five past days of continued toil and incessant fighting were forgotten, and every heart beat happily and every bronzed face grew bright.

On the day the Engineers began to mine the palace, Dalton and Jerry Wilmot paid it a visit, and the latter made very merry about the three thousand three hundred and thirty-three wives of the fugitive king.

Unluckily for them both, the former saw a gold scarabœus, about the size of a goose-egg, among the many strange ornaments at the head of the king's bed, and with some force contrived to wrench it off, saying to Tony as he did so, 'An article of bijoutric for Laura's boudoir—a souvenir of Coomassie!'

The words were hardly out of his mouth when two tall and powerful savages, who had been quietly—if sullenly and resentfully—watching the 'looting' of much royal paraphernalia and rubbish by officers and men, threw themselves upon him with yells, while brandishing long straight daggers that were minus guards or proper hilts, and who wore each at his neck a human jaw, polished clean and white, as a kind of order of valour perhaps.

Gesticulating violently, they seemed to demand the surrender of the scarabœus, which proved eventually to be a famous fetish—famous even as the skull of the murdered Sir Charles MacCarthy, which the king had carried off with him as the chief palladium of Ashantee.

Fortunately Dalton had his sword in his hand, and kept them at bay till they were expelled at the bayonet point by some of the Royal Engineers, but when he and Jerry came forth they were conscious that these two Ashantees with the jaw-bones were watching them and dogging their footsteps, and were menacing them; but anon they slunk away when Dalton put his hand to his revolver case.

Then they re-appeared again and again to his great annoyance and irritation.

'This looks ill,' said Jerry; 'it is some state fetish. Throw the confounded thing away. Chuck it at their woolly heads ere worse comes of it.'

'What can come of it?' asked Dalton.

'Your assassination or mine before we reach the coast, perhaps.'

'As for their menaces,' said Dalton, laughing, 'I value them as little as an old troop horse might a pistol-shot.'

But not long after he had cause to regret not taking Jerry's advice.

In a wattle-built house, of which they had taken possession merely as a shelter from the heat of the sun by day and the baleful dew by night, the two friends were partaking of a kind of 'tiffin' of tinned beef and biscuits, with a glass of grog, before the march, when, at an opening which served as a window, they became suddenly conscious of two woolly heads and two dark faces, the gleaming eyes of which were stealthily watching them, but vanished the moment Dalton started up.

'Look here, Dalton,' said Jerry, 'I don't like this business at all. I am not a timid fellow, nor a very thoughtful one perhaps, but I have an unpleasant presentiment that there is more in this matter than you think.'

'More in what?' asked Dalton, testily.

'This confounded gold beetle that you've bagged. Perhaps it is brass.'

'Not at all. Well?'

'It is said to be some great fetish, and you may be followed, tracked to the bitter end—to Cape Coast, for all I know—till it is recaptured, or you, perhaps, made away with. You remember the story of the "Moonstone," published about ten years ago, and how the possessor of it was followed about till it was re-won?'

'Pshaw!—that was in a novel.'

'And this is reality. Novels are supposed to represent real life.'

'There go the bugles; the advance guard is falling in,' said Dalton, as he put the gold scarabœus in his haversack, and they hurried forth.

At six o'clock in the evening the advanced guard moved off, and the main body followed in the dusk, about an hour after. The Black Watch remained as a rear-guard to cover the Engineers and burning party, which consisted of about a hundred men of the latter corps.

Furnished with palm-leaf torches, they began the work of stern and deliberate destruction, and, although grave fears were expressed that the late tempests of rain would prevent the streets of thatch and wood from burning, ere long the retiring troops saw, with cheers, mighty volumes of smoke rolling from end to end of Coomassie, and there was but one regret expressed, that the flames did not consume the Bantama (or burial-place of the kings), with the temples of their hideous and atrocious paganism, made terrible by the gore of a myriad human victims.

The pipers struck up, and merrily the Highlanders began their homeward march, after the officer commanding the Engineers had reported the total destruction of the palace, which he mined at four corners, and brought down like a house of cards.

Around it all was in flames, and, owing to the dampness of the materials of which the town was built, astounding were the columns, vast and dense, of black smoke that rolled, not only over the whole site of Coomassie, but the adjacent country, while ever and anon clear, bright pyramids of flames shot skyward as the retiring troops toiled round the margin of the corpse-strewn swamp on their homeward way, with their arms at 'the slope,' as all were loaded.

And so the dire portents of the fetishmen, that Coomassie—the City of the Tree—would pass away, and nothing remain of it but dead leaves, were being realised to the fullest extent.

From the nature of the narrow path, the country through which it lay, and the obscurity caused by the smoke enveloping the scenery, the march of the troops was of a somewhat straggling nature, and proved a terrible one. They had barely proceeded a hundred yards before they had every reason to rejoice that the rains so greatly dreaded had not set in three days earlier than they did.

In some parts through which the line of march lay, the district had become an entire morass, and in one place, through which—in advancing—they had passed nearly dry-shod there was a sheet of water nearly five hundred yards broad, and in another, over which a narrow wooden bridge had been thrown, there was a depth of six feet. 'So King Koffee had calculated on these spring rains, as the Emperor Nicholas did on the winter snows, to destroy our troops; but, happily, both calculated in vain.'

It was during the straggling march, caused by some of these obstructions, that the catastrophe we have to narrate took place.

Again the troops were at times marching almost in file, and in rear of the last company of Rifles were the two friends, Jerry and Dalton, and, leaving their men to be led by their senior subalterns, they paced on together, laughing from time to time, and talking of home and those who awaited them there, now that the brief campaign was over, for homeward now went the thoughts of all; but these two were unaware that their steps were dogged and watched surely and stealthily.

As they made a little detour to avoid a more than usually deep pool surrounded by some straggling palm-trees, they suddenly found themselves face to face with at least a dozen of Ashantees—notably two of them the fellows with the jawbones. They seemed to have sprung out of the earth, so suddenly did they appear amid the eddying smoke and misty vapour; and they at once struck Dalton down before he could utter a word.

Jerry instantly shot three in quick succession with his revolver, and, knowing the reports would at once summon succour, he shouted cheerily, and dragged Dalton to his feet, but at the same moment was struck down senseless by a tremendous blow on the head, and falling—falling, he knew not where—remembered no more...

In short, he had tumbled into a species of nullah or hollow, completely fringed round with enormous boughs and luxuriant greenery, where he lay hidden and undiscovered by the riflemen whom his pistol-shots summoned, and who searched the whole vicinity in vain, till they could delay no longer, as the waters were rising fast. They carried off with them Dalton, who was severely wounded by dagger-blades, and whose haversack had been cut away, and taken, and with it, of course, the unlucky scarabœus.

And so, while poor Jerry lay where we have described, the army pushed on its homeward way, and ere long found the obstructions increase as the night advanced. Where there had been a small stream at one place the water was three hundred yards wide and five feet deep. With great toil the Engineers bridged this by felling a huge tree, over which the white troops defiled slowly, while the carriers and others had to splash their way through as best they could, and many of the shorter men disappeared under the surface more than once.

A worse obstruction still was encountered at Ordah, where the water had risen two feet above the bridge built by the Engineers, and was more than five feet deep in the mid-channel, and there the shorter men had all to be assisted by their comrades who could swim. Another day crept on, and by five o'clock in the afternoon the whole of the white troops had succeeded in crossing the half-hidden bridge; but darkness was coming on, the river was rising fast, and for all they knew the Ashantees, infuriated by the destruction of Coomassie, might be pouring in wild hordes upon their rear!

Dalton's wounds had been dressed, but ere that was done he had lost so much blood that his chances of recovery seemed very precarious; and meanwhile how fared Jerry Wilmot?

When he struggled back to consciousness, and half raised himself out of the place in which he lay by grasping the branch of a bush, he found himself alone, and surrounded by dead silence. Not a sound fell on his ear, and at a little distance he could see the red smouldering flames of Coomassie. But where were the troops?

'Oh, God, help me!' he wailed out. 'Gone—gone, and I am left alone and helpless behind them!'

There was a gleam of moonlight now, and after several futile efforts, for his senses reeled like those of one intoxicated, he made out the hour on his watch.

'Midnight—and they have been six hours on the march!'

He had been in a state of semi-unconsciousness for some two hours. The sense—the conviction that he must instantly do something—attempt to overtake them, made him struggle up desperately, feebly, and half blinded in his own blood.

'Oh, Lord,' thought Jerry, 'I shall lose the little reason I have left! Why did Dalton covet that infernal beetle!'

Alone—alone at Coomassie. Was not this some horrible nightmare, and not a reality, crushing and bewildering? for but two fates seemed to await him. If he did not die of hunger in the wilderness, he would be sure to be tracked and taken; and then, if not killed at once, he would be doomed to a lingering death by torture in Coomassie, or what remained of it—tortures such as devils alone could devise.

He made an attempt to stand, but all power of volition seemed to have left him; he fell again into the leafy hollow, and for a time remembered no more.

CHAPTER III.
THE LOST ONE.

And where all this time was Alison Cheyne, after whom—as the chief of our dramatis personæ—we must needs look now?

When consciousness returned to her, after wildly grasping the bell in the porte-cochère of a large house on that night of snow and terror, and when, fluttering, her white eyelids unclosed, after what seemed a long sleep, she looked round her like a little scared bird, in utter bewilderment, and, believing that she was dreaming, closed them again.

A bell ringing at a distance roused her, and she looked again, and became convinced that what she looked on was no dream, and her eyes wandered about with a dazed expression.

She was in a little room, with whitewashed walls, and a floor of plain polished wood, on which lay a tiny patch of faded carpet. The sunbeams were creeping through the closed blinds, and a fire burned cheerfully in a little black iron stove. She lay in a pretty bed, with the softest of pillows and sheets; it was of plain iron, and without curtains.

Above the mantelpiece, in a simple frame, hung an engraving from Rubens' picture of 'St. Theresa interceding for the Souls in Purgatory,' the three principal souls being—in a spirit of waggery—faithful portraits of the artist's three wives. On one side of this was a little Madonna on a bracket, with a red crystal lamp hung before it; on the other a crucifix, below which was a tiny font of Antwerp china.

Other ornaments—save a few flowers in a vase—the apartment had none, and its furniture—two cane-seated chairs and a deal table—was of the simplest kind.

In one of the chairs sat a young woman dressed like a nun, with a black robe and white hood, a large bronze crucifix and wooden beads at her cord girdle; her down-cast face had a sweet, placid, and even beautiful expression, and she was sedulously working, with the whitest of hands, at a large piece of gold embroidery on cloth of silver—a portion of a priest's vestments apparently, while glancing attentively from time to time down on her patient or up at two pretty little love-birds in a brass cage.

Alison took in all these details at one rapid glance, and great terror seized her that something strange had befallen her, that she was in the care of a nursing sister.

'Where am I?' she said, faintly.

'Thank heaven, you speak, and rationally at last,' said her attendant, casting aside her embroidery and coming softly to her side, laid her cool hand gently on Alison's forehead. 'Pauvre enfant! pauvre enfant!' she repeated, caressingly.

'But where am I, and who are you?' asked Alison, in a weak but impatient manner.

'I am Sister Lisette, and you are safe, safe with friends, and ere long your own people will soon be here to inquire for you.'

'My friends,' she murmured, with a puzzled expression, as her thoughts now went back to her father's sick-room in the Hôtel St. Antoine; to Cadbury, at the thought of which she shivered; to the Bal Masqué at the theatre; the Café au Progrès, and the insolence of 'Captain Smith;' her flight through the snowy streets; her fall at the door of a house, the nature of which she knew not; all these things floated dimly and dreamily before her now, though they seemed to have happened but a few hours ago.

'How fortunate that you had the power to ring our bell before you fainted, child,' said the nun, caressing her and kissing her cheek. 'You might have died in the snow otherwise.'

'Last night?'

'No—child—it was several nights ago.'

'Several?'

'Yes.'

'Oh, papa, papa! has he been here?' cried Alison, feebly, in great anguish of mind, yet unable from weakness to raise her head from the pillow.

'No, for doubtless he knew not where you were.'

'Oh, he will be dead—dead with terror!' wailed Alison. 'Am I in a hospital?'

'No, child, in my house,' said the nun, sweetly.

'Your house?' queried Alison, with very open eyes.

'In the Beguinage, in the Rue Rouge.'

Thus it was that both Sir Ranald and Lord Cadbury had utterly failed to trace her, and fortunate it was indeed for Alison that she had fallen into such good hands as those of the Beguines, who are a religious order, altogether peculiar to Belgium, each nun having a private residence of her own within the general enclosure.

The clatter of the ponderous bell, as the pull left her hand, had soon brought aid to her. She was denuded of her wet and sodden attire, put to bed in the little mansion occupied by Sister Lisette, and, before the angelus bell rang in the chapel next forenoon, she was in a highly feverish state, and in a delirium which lasted several nights and days, with intermissions of fretful sleep, during all of which time nothing coherent could be gleaned from her as to her name, or where she resided, whence she came, and how it was that she was abroad in the streets alone and in such a night.

Her little ravings led them to know that she was English; her costume, and the delicacy and beauty of her person, that she was undoubtedly a lady; but, save a ring or two, she had no purse, card-case, or aught to indicate who she was; but the name of 'Alison' worked upon some of her clothing at once interested deeply Sister Lisette, who was also an Alison, but adopted the French diminutive of it.

The poor Beguines were quite uncertain what else they could do with her, but keep her till she grew well enough to be questioned; so she remained there in her little iron bed, tended by Lisette, unconscious and fever-stricken, while the lengthening days passed slowly over her aching head.

Nearly a fortnight passed before she began mentally to drift back to consciousness, so terribly had all she had undergone of late—the collision at sea with the Black Hound of Ostend, the nursing of her querulous father, her separation from Bevil Goring, and the worry incident to Cadbury's wooing, culminating in that night of terror in the streets—told upon her sensitive nature and delicate frame.

A sweet picture she made, in her little white bed in the plain bare room of the kind Beguine, who never left her even for prayers, but said them by her side on her knees when the angelus or elevation bells rang. Among the huge, soft pillows the slight figure of Alison was half buried, yet the soft tints of her face and hair came out in a species of relief from them; the former was pale—very pale—and there were dark circles under the eyes; and the gentle young Beguine who watched her thought she had never looked on anyone so lovely, and often sat on a tabourette at the side of the couch, keeping her hand caressingly within her own, and counting the jewels in her rings one by one as a child might have done.

'She has a gentle expression in her eyes, such as I have often seen in those of a Sœur de Charité, and other nursing sisters,' was the dictum of the reverend mother of the establishment, who came from time to time to visit the fair waif who had been so suddenly cast upon their tenderness; and, truth to tell, there was a great touch of melancholy about the eyes and features of Alison Cheyne now, though certainly melancholy was by no means one of her characteristics naturally.

The Beguines, we have said, are a religious order peculiar to Belgium, and totally unlike any other in so far that they are bound by no vows; they may return to the world whenever they please; but it is their boast that no sister has ever been known to quit the order after having once entered it. They attend to the sick in the Beguinage, and frequently go out as nurses in the hospitals.

They were among the few religious communities not suppressed by Joseph II. or swept away by the furious torrent of the French Revolution. Each Beguinage—more especially in Ghent, where the sisterhood averages six hundred in number—is a species of little town by itself, with streets and squares, having gates, and sometimes surrounded by a moat as well as a wall, especially at Bruges.

The sisters live generally in separate houses, on the doors of which are inscribed, not the name of the occupant, but of some saint adopted as her patron or protectress; and many of them are persons of rank and wealth; hence it was in the private house of Sister Lisette that Alison found herself now.

Many writers ascribe the institution of the Beguines to St. Begga, widow and abbess, daughter of Pepin of Landen, whose husband, mayor of the palace, was killed while hunting, after which she dedicated herself to a penetential state of retirement, and built seven chapels on the Meuse, in imitation of the seven great churches of Rome; and, according to the martyrology, she died so long ago as 698. Others assert that the Beguines were founded by Lambert de Begue or Balbus, a pious priest, of Liege, in 1170, and derive their name from him; but all this lies apart from our story. Suffice it that, fortunately for herself, it was in the spacious Beguinage of Antwerp that Alison found succour, shelter, and protection.

Alison had often seen nuns, but never spoken to or been intimate with one before, and, as all she knew of such recluses was derived through the medium of novels and romances, when strength returned to her she began to invest Sister Lisette with the halo of fiction, and to suppose that she must have some story—that a lost lover or a broken heart accounted for her sweet sadness of face and her present vocation; and she was nearer the truth in her guess than she imagined, for Sister Lisette had once been—for a brief time—a happy wife, of which more anon; and when Alison grew stronger, and was taken as far as the chapel, she was greatly impressed by all she saw and heard there at vesper time, though the chanting of female voices only—some of them from age far from melodious—was pleasing, and the sight of such a large assemblage of recluses in black robes with white veils—the ancient Flemish faille, which they yet retain—dimly illuminated by a few votive lamps, had a strange, weird, and, to her eyes, mysterious effect.

The novices are distinguished by a different costume, and those who have just taken the veil wear a chaplet round their heads.

But in all this we are anticipating, for at present Alison was weak as a child, and prostrate with the effect of the short, sharp fever that had left her, though it was apparent to those who watched her that the lines of her face were fine, and they could see that, when well and happy, she must look very beautiful.

In Sister Lisette Alison found an able nurse, for she had served as one in the German war under the Red Cross; her soft, white hand had dressed many a ghastly wound and closed many a glazing eye, and often amid the horrors of Sedan and elsewhere the heads of the dying had rested on her bosom, and with low, loving words she had soothed their moments of death and agony—words that were sometimes taken for those of mother, or wife, or some young love that was far, far away.

Sister Lisette seemed about five-and-twenty years of age; her face was delicately fair, but the rich tint of her lips and the peach-like bloom of her cheeks relieved it of all paleness. Her features were small and regular, but very soft in their lines, and, at times, a singular sadness stole over them.

Her eyes were of the clearest and darkest hazel, and full of 'soul's light,' imparted to her face a world of expression; but what the colour of her hair (or what remained of it) was, it would be impossible to say, as every vestige of it was closely hidden by her tightly-fitting white wimple.

'And I have been here for days and nights ill,' said Alison, faintly, as consciousness came fully back to her, and Lisette, while propping her pretty head upon her own breast, gave her soothing drink. 'Oh, what a trouble I must have been to you!'

'No trouble at all, ma sœur,' replied the other, letting her head tenderly down on the pillow, and smoothing out the latter.

'So long, so long, and without papa being informed,' exclaimed Alison, as tears of dismay started to her eyes.

'Child, we know not his name—his address—even of his existence.'

Alison sighed deeply. She was too prostrate in body and even mind to regard anything as very extraordinary, even her unusual surroundings in the convent; yet she longed for her father to come to her, or to have tidings of him; of aught else she said nothing.

'Oh, if I should die without seeing papa again!' said she, wringing her hands.

'One can die but once,' said Sister Lisette, placidly. 'You are too strong and too young to die, though those who die are sometimes better off than those who are left in the world. You, at least, have all your life to look forward to.'

'And you?'

'Mine is ended.'

'Ended!'

'In the world at least, as I shall go back to it no more.'

Seeing that Alison was in a fever of impatience to hear tidings of her father, Sister Lisette, on obtaining his name and address at the Hôtel St. Antoine, at once sent a messenger with that letter which, as we have described, so greatly startled and agitated the old man; and Alison remained in a fever of impatience, awaiting the return of that messenger who might perhaps bring her very crushing tidings.

'Dearest papa will not lose a moment in coming to me,' she murmured, partly to her nurse and partly to herself; but how, if he were too weak to come or in despair at her loss had left Antwerp, or perhaps—oh Heavens!—have sunk under it, and—died! And to see him again would be, of course, to see that odious Lord Cadbury; and so she tormented herself till the messenger returned with tidings that her father was well and had been out and about for days, despairingly searching for her, and would be with her very soon.

'Oh, thank God for that!' said Alison, and a hot shower of joyful tears relieved her; and now she started up at every sound, and inquired again and again the exact distance between the Beguinage and the Marche aux Souliers.

'Ma sœur Alison, you must not speak so much and be so impatient,' said the Beguine, holding up a finger.

'What—you know my name?'

'Yes, it is mine also.'

'But how?'

Then the Beguine told her how she had become aware of it; and that she too was an Alison, Lison or Lisette—it was all one—and as she spoke her hearer's memory went back to that day with the buckhounds on which our story opens, when Bevil Goring expressed some surprise at her name, and she had explained that it was an old Scoto-French one, and common to the Cheynes of Essilmont; and as she thought of him she pressed his ring to her lips, as if it had been some sacred relique.

'How well you speak English,' said Alison.

'Because I was educated in the English convent at Bruges,' replied the sister; 'but hark, there is a voiture at the gate—monsieur has come!'

'Papa,' murmured Alison, in a choking voice, as she felt herself become a very child again, and another minute saw his arms around her, and her face upon his breast, while she indulged in a passionate fit of weeping, and he with difficulty restrained his tears.

Alison then, after a little time, looked earnestly in his face, and was shocked to see how wan, and thin, and pinched it had become; for indeed, during the mystery that enveloped her disappearance, he had undergone terrible mental agony and much bodily fatigue, for with all his selfishness he loved Alison as the only link that bound him to earth.

Her narrative of how she missed Lord Cadbury in that crowded place, the Théâtre des Variétés, to which she should never have gone, tallied completely with that of the former; but it was not until next day that she detailed fully the manner in which she had been lured by 'Captain Smith' to the Café au Progrès, and the terror with which she had fled from that place into the snowy street.

'Captain Smith!' exclaimed Sir Ranald through his set teeth, while his eyes sparkled with rage. 'Could I but meet that person, old as I am, I would give him cause long to remember the weight of my cane, the scoundrel. I must write to Cadbury on the subject and inquire.'

'Write!—is Lord Cadbury gone?' asked Alison, timidly and hopefully.

'Yes, back to London; he was telegraphed for.'

Alison gave a sigh of relief.

'Shall we go home now, papa—I mean when I am well enough to be about?'

Sir Ranald paused before replying. Had she relented towards Cadbury with a desire to see him, or was it a longing to be near 'that fellow Goring' which prompted the question? One fact seemed pretty evident, that she and the latter knew nothing of each other's movements, and that she was utterly oblivious of his being or having been in Antwerp.

'Home—to where?' he asked.

'Chilcote, papa.'

Her reply was perfectly straightforward, though it again suggested ideas of Bevil Goring, but Sir Ranald deemed that he must have 'effectually crushed that fellow's presumption by the rough tenor of their last meeting.'

'Chilcote it shall be then, perhaps,' said he.

'Oh, yes, papa; it is so quiet there, even amid our little troubles,' said she, as he left her, when the Beguinage gates were closed for the evening; 'and all I want is peace and rest—peace and rest.'

'Shall you ever get them in this world?' asked Sister Lisette.

Alison regarded her wistfully, and said,

'Why not? Can you have led a stormy life?'

'Far from it. My life in the world was a happy one till one dire calamity fell upon me, and drove me to find peace for ever here; but how true it is "that it is vain to try to knit up the present with the past; each part of our lives has its own pleasures and hopes." But now my pleasure is to do good—my only hope to die soon and well.'

'And the calamity to which you refer?' asked Alison, softly, while greatly interested by the singularly sweet and subdued manner of the young Beguine.

'Was the death of my dear, dear husband,' replied the sister; and so, while she sat stitching away at the shining garment, resplendent with gold—a priest's vestment—for old Père Leopold of the Church of St. André, she told Alison some of her experiences in life, and amid them, curious to relate, there occurred repeatedly a name with which the reader is already familiar.

Alison had a sweetly sympathetic way with her, and her namesake was seized by one of the unaccountable fits of confidence that, come to most of us at times to speak about herself, and tell the story of her own sorrows.

CHAPTER IV.
A YEAR OF JOY.

A very simple circumstance—an occasion of every-day life—a railway journey, brought about the awful tragedy in her life, by which she was left a widow at twenty, after being wedded a year—which she called a year of joy, left without a near relation in the world but her brother, Victor Gabion, a captain of Artillery, who, strange to say, was the source of all her sorrow.

'After leaving the English convent at Bruges, I returned to the house of my guardian, M. Hoboken, a merchant in the Avenue du Commerce here. My parents were dead; I had but one brother, Victor Gabion, to whose brother officer Lucien I had been betrothed by them, and whom I had known from his early boyhood, when we had been playmates together, and before we came to those restrictions in intercourse peculiar to French and Belgian society in later years.

'We had learned to love each other very much, Lucien and I, though now we could only see each other at given times, and always in presence of a third party; and each time I seemed to discover some fresh trait in his disposition which rendered him more worthy of love and more worthy of the tenderest affection.

'He was so handsome, my Lucien, so kind, so tender; and so good, so religious and true! He had that dark southern beauty which makes a man so attractive to a fair woman, and, moreover, he possessed that charm which is more attractive and dangerous still—he was interesting.'

Alison thought of her own fiancée, Bevil Goring, and believed she could understand all this to the fullest extent.

'His means were ample and his position good, for, apart from his rank in the artillery, he was the representative of the Volcarts, one of the seven Families Patriciennes d'Anvers, whose seven coats-of-arms, all bearing a fesse checky you may see at this hour carved in the ancient Steyne of Antwerp. But why think of or boast of such things, when life, we are told, is but a dream, and often a very painful and feverish one!

'I have told you that I was educated in the convent at Bruges with English girls and English ladies. Hence I picked up among them some of that genuine and honest freedom of action which they understood and enjoyed; so when my betrothal to Lucien was fully known, and even the time of our marriage stated, we contrived to have more than one pleasant meeting unknown to my grim guardian, M. Hoboken, whose absorption in business, and often long absence at the Bassin du Kattendyk, and even at Flushing, afforded us facilities we could not otherwise have had.

'But in all this there was a dire fatality, and I shall never forget the day that brought it about.

'M. Hoboken was to be absent at Flushing for two days, and madame was an invalid—unable to go abroad. I met Lucien by appointment in one of the solitary walks, in the quiet park near the Avenue du Commerce, with a gift I had procured for him, when within a week of our marriage.

'"Look what I have brought for you!" said I, as I opened a morocco case containing an armlet of silver, like an Indian bangle—you know what I mean—flat and broad, and closed by a spring lock. In raised letters on the outside was my name, Alison, with the date of our coming marriage.

'"You are my prisoner already," said I, laughingly, as I fitted the band round his wrist, and the spring closed with a snap, thus it could neither fall off nor pass over his hand.

'"My dear love!" he exclaimed, and pressed me passionately to his breast.

'"Now, you are most completely mine," I whispered; "fettered for life—as without my aid you can never get it off."

'"Why?"

'"Because I shall keep the key," said I, and coquettishly dropped it into my bosom.

'"Even as you have the key to my heart," he added,

'After a pause he said,

'"M. Hoboken is still at Flushing?"

'"Yes—and does not return till to-morrow."

'"Très bien!" said Lucien, "by what hour, at the utmost, may Madame Hoboken miss you—or require you?"

'"By seven certainly, and she supposes me to be at the Beguinage—and so will ask no questions, to put me in a false position."

'"Seven—it wants eight hours of that time. See, Lisette, how lovely the day is— how bright the sun, and how beautiful the white and pink hawthorn that load the air with fragrance."

'"Well, what of that?"

'"Does not such a day make you long to leave dusty Antwerp behind you, and to roam in the country?"

'"It does indeed; but I dare not think of such a thing—till—till next week," I replied, coyly.

'"Lisette," said he, "were you ever at the village of Elewyt, where the old château of Rubens stands, between Malines and Vilvorde? It is a lovely place, and wild as lovely; not a soul would see us there. Come with me, darling, and let us spend one happy day together."

'"I dare not—I dare not," as a vision of Madame Hoboken, grim, prim, and full of proprieties, oppressed me, though I was secretly overwhelmed with delight at the suggestion of this stolen and, to me, new kind of pleasure—a whole beautiful summer afternoon to be spent hand in hand with Lucien—hand in hand, as we were wont to be when children in the Place Verte or on the Boulevards.

'"Come with me, sweet one," he whispered, "it will never—can never be known. It is less than an hour by railway, and, amid the bosky thickets and gardens of the old château we shall seem to leave the world behind us."

'So strong was the temptation to spend an untrammelled afternoon with my betrothed—he who within a week was to be my husband—that I yielded. I knew that I ran a dreadful risk in being seen alone with him, for Antwerp is one of the most scandalous and gossipy towns in Belgium. In this country the rules are very strict as regards the daily intercourse of ladies and gentlemen, in the mere matters of meeting or conversing, as compared with you in England, where the perfect freedom of the innocent is so great; and hence, I doubt not, your happier marriages; for in Belgium, as in France, we are forced to espouse those to whose inner lives we are strangers, and to whose hearts, before marriage, we can have no key, if it is ever found at all.

'A voiture took us to the train, and we took seats in separate carriages. Already the simple, child-like expedition had an air of guilt, and a tremulous fear possessed me as the train glided out of the station, through a cutting in the fortifications at the Rue du Rempart—the wet fosse was left behind, and we sped through the open country.

'Glorious was the summer day; exhaled by heat, the silvery mist was curling up from the rich pastures, amid which the drowsy cattle stood knee-deep, and from the fertile arable lands, over which the giant sails of the windmills cast their shadows; but my heart—now that I was alone, though separated from Lucien by only a carriage or two—sank lower and lower with vague apprehension, and I restrained my tears with difficulty. I was full of terrors, scruples, and fears an English girl, circumstanced as I was, would fail to comprehend, and after traversing miles of dairy farms, where the summer breeze played so sweetly on the long ripples of verdant grass, we reached the little roadside station, where a path diverged to Elewyt. I gathered courage when Lucien Volcarts joined me, and we found ourselves indeed alone, for we were the only persons who quitted the train, which steamed slowly—as all Belgian trains do—on its way to Vilvorde, and our short but delicious day of rambling and planning, scheming and dreaming out our future, hand clasped in hand, began.

'We saw the old château of Rubens, now falling fast to decay, amid its trees, on the land of which he was seigneur, but we did not go near it, and contented ourselves with wandering amid the sylvan scenery, all of which had the charm of extreme novelty to me. The birds that flew overhead or sung in the hedgerows; the thickets of beech and oak, casting shadows over pools where the trout rose to catch the floating fly; the white, waxen-like lilies floating also on their surface; a little stream pouring slowly between gravel banks and sandstone rocks; deep water-cuts in which the Cuyp-like cattle stood midleg for coolness; the quaint cottages, few and far apart; the carillons playing in a distant spire, were all sources of delight to me—delight all the more that I could turn from them ever and anon to look into the tender and loving eyes of Lucien.

'At one of the cottages, which quite approached the dignity of a small farm, we got some refreshment—bread, milk, and cheese—just as we had been wont to do when children in charge of the same bonne, and the recollection of that made us laugh and all the more enjoy such simple fare; and truth to tell, though so near our marriage day, in the freedom of the hour we felt very much as if we were happy children again; and long we lingered in one spot, I remember, on a grassy bank under a bower of hawthorn, where the flies buzzed and the bees hummed, and the village bells rang softly out, but now it was their evening chime.

'Evening—that suggested thoughts of home and the necessity for returning, and we had some miles to walk to the railway-station at Elewyt.

'"It is only five, dearest Lisette," urged Lucien, looking at his watch; "and the train, which deposits us at Antwerp, is not due for an hour yet. In a little time we shall go, petite."

'The die was cast, for a day of pleasure but marred by secret fears. I was content to remain a little longer, and then we set out for the station. More than once did my apprehensive heart, full of undefined forebodings, suggest the sound of a coming train upon the air, and once, perhaps, it was real, for, on reaching the hamlet of Elewyt, we found the station-gate shut and the platform untenanted.

'Lucien looked at his watch and grew pale. The hands still stood at five o'clock—it was now past seven, the hour at which I should have been at Madame Hoboken's, and the last train had gone some minutes before.

'"Gone!" replied Lucien, in a bewildered tone, to his informant; "and the next?"

"'Not till seven to-morrow morning—from Brussels viâ Vilvorde."

'Both of us were filled with dire dismay as we heard this. Could a voiture, a vehicle of any kind, be procured? Alas! there was not such a thing at Elewyt.

'We turned away with sickening hearts, and I must own that mine died within me. How was I ever to face grim and grave Madame Hoboken? I felt as if I had committed a terrible crime; I shed the bitterest tears, and I cannot tell you, here at least, how sweetly Lucien strove to console and soothe me.

'"I must find you shelter for the night at yonder cottage, where we got the milk, till train time to-morrow," said Lucien; "for myself, I must find it where I may. Come, petite, take courage; a little time, and we shall be blessedly independent of everyone."

'On seeing Lucien's well-filled purse, the woman at the cottage was willing enough to accommodate us, especially on learning that we had lost the train; but she filled me with fresh dismay on informing me, with a cunning and penetrating glance there was no mistaking, that she had "but one chambre à coucher, which she sometimes let to passing English people and others who wished to avoid strangers; and you, monsieur——"

'"Oh! I will sleep in the stable, or anywhere, madame, provided you can accommodate mademoiselle ma sœur," interrupted Lucien, colouring at the necessary falsehood which he told for the first time in all his blameless life, but it was one to protect me.

'Whether the landlady believed him or not I cannot say; but there was a strange and saucy twinkle in her eyes, and while in attendance upon us she provoked me by an air of discretion she adopted; from past experience apparently she was far too discreet to make sudden irruptions on our tête-à-tête evening, however innocent it was, in outward seeming as she no doubt thought, and Lucien twisted his dark moustache angrily, as he muttered,

'"Sapristi! this hag does not live mid-way between Brussels and Antwerp for nothing."

'"Darkness must be closing over Antwerp now, and all the lamps in the Avenue du Commerce will be lighted throughout its spacious length and breadth," was then my thought; "what would Madame Hoboken be thinking and saying of my non-appearance? Had Monsieur Hoboken returned by train from Flushing? Doubtless he had. Where would they be anxiously and angrily suspecting I was?" If they supposed me to be remaining—as I had more than once done if a night proved wet—when visiting here at the Beguinage all would be well; but the morning might ere long produce untoward revelations, and I wept as if my heart would break when once again I was left alone, as my poor Lucien betook him to sleep in a loft above the stables, deploring the malheur in which he had involved us both; but he had no one to scold him save his colonel if he missed a parade, while my life and whole future might be made a burden to me.

'Anyway, I was, from a Belgian point of view especially, in a dreadfully false position. 'There could have been no mistake as to the hour of the fatal train, though all public clocks in Belgium strike the hour half an hour beforehand, thus at half-past eleven the clock announced twelve; and luckily for me Lucien was in plain clothes, not en grande tenue as he usually was, with sword and epaulettes on; consequently he would be less remarked, and fortunately the rain fell heavily that night, which might account for my remaining for shelter at the Beguinage.

'When morning came my spirits rose a little, and I was up betimes to meet the early train. How lovely looked the opening summer day. The grass in the fields, the herbs and flowers in the gardens all glittered in the rays of the sun, as if the dew that moistened them had been diamonds, and the tops of the firs seemed edged with silver. A golden and purple glow filled all the eastern sky, and between it and earth the vapours of night were floating. The birds were awake, and the bees hummed and the butterflies flitted about.

'To me the country seemed new and charming, and its continuity of horizontal lines, each rising beyond the other to the level horizon, where in the distance rose the spires of Antwerp, gave a sense of vastness and novelty.

'In different carriages Lucien and I returned to the city. We parted with but a glance at the station, and with a palpitating heart I sought my temporary home in the Avenue du Commerce—my mind a prey to dire misgivings, full of the stolen summer day at Elewyt, the lost train, the cottage amid the pastures, and Madame Hoboken to be confronted!

'My innocent secret made a very coward of me. Never had I told a falsehood, and I felt as if I would rather die than tell one now. I had done nothing to be ashamed of, and yet the inferences were terrible, especially in society constituted as it is in Belgium.

'"You were, of course, at the Beguinage?" said madame, interrogatively, as she came in from early mass.

'"Yes; I went there in the forenoon," I replied, with a sinking heart, though such was precisely the case.

'"And doubtless the rain detained you all night?"

'"The rain," said I, assentingly.

'"Yet it did not begin to fall till after you should have been at home."

'I hurried to my own room to avoid further questioning, happy in the conviction that in six days now I should be the wife of Lucien, and a free woman.

'Let me hasten over all that followed.

'How my brother Victor—cold, proud, and stern—discovered our escapade I never exactly knew, nor ever shall know probably till that day when all things shall be revealed, but he became, fatally for us, aware of it all.

'"You were not at the Beguinage on the night you said you were?" said he, in a low concentrated voice, two days after, while grasping my wrist like a vice, and eyeing me with eyes that sparkled with fury.

'"How do you dare to say so?" I exclaimed, but in a low and agitated voice.

'"Sapristi!" said he. "You shall learn in time."

'My heart died within me, for there was the blackness of a thundercloud in Victor's face as he flung me from him, and matters progressed quickly after that. I was confined to my own room, but Madame Hoboken informed me that several officers came to and fro after Lucien—that there were long and grave conferences—that Lucien seemed terribly disturbed, and she feared there was to be a duel on the subject, and a duel there was, but not with swords or pistols. Oh, mon Dieu! In the agony of my heart I am anticipating.

'I grew nearly mad with terror till my marriage morning came, and I found that no catastrophe had taken place, for Victor came to conduct me to church, and I wept tears of thankfulness, joy, and gratitude, as one who had escaped the shipwreck of a whole life (through no fault of my own), when I was united by Père Leopold to Lucien in the Church of St. André—the church in which we had both been baptised, where we had made our first communion together—that church with its wonderfully carved pulpit, representing Andrew and Peter called from their nets and boats by the Saviour, all as large as life; and the altar of St Anthony, with his little pig; and the black devil, with a long, red tongue, that used to frighten me in childhood.

'The moment the ceremony was over Victor quitted the church without a word, and I never saw him again. He never visited or came near us, but remained sullenly aloof, as the months of the first, and alas, last, year of our married life—my year of joy—rolled swiftly on. His mood would change, I hoped, in time. Meanwhile, Lucien, my husband, was all the world to me; and how proud and pleased I used to be to see our names united, Volcarts-Gabion, as is the custom in Antwerp.

'Looking back to that time I fear that, in our excessive love for each other, Lucien and I were a little selfish. We seemed to have so much to do in our new home—a pleasant house in the Avenue Van Dyck, overlooking the wooded mounds and beautiful lakes of the park—we had ever so much to say to each other, that we seemed to have no leisure for making friends, or even acquaintances, and we forgot to return, or did so grudgingly, the visits of our hospitable neighbours.

'If I am to speak from personal experience no woman was ever more superlatively happy than I, or more blessed in her husband, and every hour that Lucien could spare from his military duties at the Caserne de Predicateurs was devoted me; and so my year of joy stole swiftly away, and the first anniversary of our marriage drew near.

'At last I became painfully conscious of a new and unusual gloom, restlessness, and depression of manner in Lucien, even when he was caressing me, which he began to do more tenderly and frequently than ever. There was something unfathomable in the expression of his eyes, and unaccountable in the sadness of his voice, and in vain I pressed him to tell me what grieved him.

'"Every human heart has some secret which it longs to keep hidden from all," said he one day at last.

'"But you, dearest Lucien, should have none from me," I urged, with my face on his breast, which was heaving painfully under my cheek.

'"That to which I refer you will learn in time—most terribly—my darling Lisette," said he.

'"Oh, why not now?" I urged; "how cruel this is of you, Lucien!"

'"In old tales," said he, kissing away my tears, "you have read of persons who sold themselves to the devil?"

'"Yes," said I, breathless with wonder and apprehension at his manner.

'"And whose time on earth was hence allotted?"

'"Yes."

'"Do you think that after such a bond was signed—perhaps in blood—life would be pleasant?"

'"No, Lucien; but what do you mean?"

'"That I seem to have so sold myself," he replied, wildly, with his eyes closed.

'"Oh, explain—what do you—what can you mean?" I asked him, imploringly, as a dreadful fear came over me that his brain was affected.

'"I have sold myself to an evil spirit, and now come remorse and misery—remorse for what you will suffer, misery for my own future."

'"Oh, Lucien—my husband!" I exclaimed, folding him in my arms, a what do these dreadful words mean?"