ONLY AN ENSIGN

A Tale of the Retreat from Cabul.

BY JAMES GRANT,

AUTHOR OF "THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "FIRST LOVE AND LAST LOVE,"
"LADY WEDDERBURN'S WISH," ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.

"Come what come may,
Time and the Hour runs through the roughest day."—Macbeth.

LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE ST., STRAND.
1871.
[All Rights Reserved.]

LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

CONTENTS.

CHAP.

I.—[PAR NOBILE FRATRUM!]
II.—[DOWNIE'S REFLECTIONS]
III.—[MR. W. S. SHARKLEY'S PLOT]
IV.—[THE HOPE OF THE DEAD]
V.—[RETRIBUTION]
VI.—[AT JELLALABAD]
VII.—[THE SCHEME OF ZOHRAB]
VIII.—[MABEL DELUDED]
IX.—[BY THE HILLS OF BEYMAROO]
X.—[AGAIN IN CABUL]
XI.—[THE ABODE OF THE KHOND]
XII.—[THE SHADE WITHIN THE SHADOW]
XIII.—[ROSE IN A NEW CHARACTER]
XIV.—[WITH SALE'S BRIGADE]
XV.—[THE BATTLE OF TIZEEN]
XVI.—[TO TOORKISTAN!]
XVII.—[MABEL'S PRESENTIMENT]
XVIII.—[THE GOVERNOR OF BAMEEAN]
XIX.—[THE ALARM]
XX.—[TOO LATE!]
XXI.—[THE PURSUIT]
XXII.—[THE HOSTAGES]
XXIII.—[THE DURBAR]
XXIV.—[THE LAMP OF LOVE]
XXV.—[CONCLUSION]

ONLY AN ENSIGN.

CHAPTER I.
PAR NOBILE FRATRUM!

"So, fellow, I am expected by you to swallow this 'tale of a tub,' which has been invented or revived solely for the purposes of monetary extortion!" exclaimed Downie Trevelyan, with the most intense and crushing hauteur, as he lay back in the same luxurious easy chair in which his uncle died, and played with his rich gold eye-glass and watered silk riband.

"It ain't a tale of a tub, my lord; but of the wreck of a steamer—the steamer Admiral of Montreal," replied Sharkley, meekly and sententiously.

Downie surveyed him through his double eyeglass, thinking that Sharkley was laughing covertly at him; but no such thought was hovering in the mind of that personage, who was not much of a laugher at any time, save when he had successfully outwitted or jockeyed any one. He seemed very ill at ease, and sat on the extreme edge of a handsome brass-nailed morocco chair, with his tall shiny hat placed upon his knees, and his long, bare, dirty-looking fingers played the while somewhat nervously on the crown thereof, as he glanced alternately and irresolutely from the speaker to the titular Lady Lamorna, who was also eyeing him, as a species of natural curiosity, through her glass, and whose absence he devoutly wished, but feared to hint that she might withdraw.

She was reclining languidly on a sofa, with her fan, her lace handkerchief, her agate scent-bottle, and her everlasting half-cut novel—she was never known to read one quite through—lying beside her; and she had only relinquished her chief employment of toying with Bijou, her waspish Maltese spaniel (which nestled in a little basket of mother-of-pearl, lined with white satin), when an aiguletted valet had ushered in "Mr. W. S. Sharkley, Solicitor."

"Leave us, Gartha, please," said her husband; "I must speak with this person alone."

Curiosity was never a prominent feature in the character of Downie's wife, who was too languid, lazy, or aristocratically indifferent to care about anything; so, with a proud sweep of her ample dress, she at once withdrew, followed by the gaze of the relieved Sharkley, who had a professional dislike for speaking before witnesses.

Mr. Sharkley's present surroundings were not calculated to add to his personal ease. The library at Rhoscadzhel—the same room in which poor Constance and Sybil had undergone, in presence of the pitying General Trecarrel, that humiliating interview, the bitterness of which the wife had never forgotten even to her dying hour, and in which Richard had, some time previously, found Downie by their dead uncle's side, with that suspicious-looking document in his hand, the history of which the former was too brotherly, too gentlemanly, and delicate ever to inquire about—the library, we say, was stately, spacious, and elegant enough, with its shelves of dark oak, filled by rare works in gay bindings, glittering in the sunlight; with the white marble busts of the great and learned of other days, looking stolidly down from the florid cornice that crowned the cases; with its massive and splendid furniture, gay with bright morocco and gilt nails; with the stained coats of arms, the koithgath and the seahorse of the Trevelyans, repeated again and again on the row of oriels that opened on one side, showing the far extent of field and chace, green upland and greener woodland, the present owner of which now sat eyeing him coldly, hostilely, and with that undoubted air and bearing which mark the high-bred and well-born gentleman—all combined to make the mean visitor feel very ill at ease.

He mentally contrasted these surroundings with those of his own dingy office, with its docquets of papers, dirty in aspect as in their contents; its old battered charter-boxes filled with the misfortunes of half the adjacent villages—a room, to many a hob-nailed client and grimy miner, more terrible than the torture chamber of the Spanish Inquisition—and the comparison roused envy and covetousness keenly in his heart, together with an emotion of malicious satisfaction, that he had it in his power perhaps to deprive of all this wealth, luxury, and rank, the cold, calm, and pale-faced personage who eyed him from time to time with his false and haughty smile—an expression that, ere long, passed away, and then his visage became rigid and stony as that of the Comandatore in Don Giovanni, for whatever he might feel, it was not a difficult thing for a man who possessed such habitual habits of self-command as Downie Trevelyan, to appear at ease when he was far from being so. Yet Sharkley's mission tried him to the utmost, whatever real pride or temper he possessed.

"My lord," resumed the solicitor, while the revengeful emotion was in his heart—"if, indeed, you are entitled to be called 'my lord'——"

"Fellow, what do you mean by this studied insolence?" demanded Downie, putting his hand on a silver bell, which, however, he did not ring, an indecision that caused a mocking smile to pass over the face of Sharkley, while the iris of his eyes dilated and shrunk as usual. "You are, I know, Sharkley the—aw, well I must say it—the low practitioner who got up by forgery and otherwise—don't look round, sir, we have no witnesses—the case of the adventuress Devereaux against me and my family. So what brings you here now?"

"To tell you what I was beginning to state—the story of the wreck, by which your brother Richard, Lord Lamorna, perished at sea; and to prove that the certificate of his marriage with Miss Constance Devereaux, daughter of a merchant trader in the city of Montreal, has been discovered and safely preserved, and is here in Cornwall now, together with his lordship's will."

Sharkley spoke with malicious bitterness, and Downie paused for a moment ere he said,—

"You have seen them?"

"Yes."

"Well, when I see those documents I shall believe in their existence—till then, you must hold me excused; but even their existence does not prove either their legality or authenticity. This is merely some new scheme to extort money," added Downie, almost passionately; "but it shall not succeed! That unhappy woman is dead—she died of paralysis I have heard—the victim, I doubt not, of her own evil passions. Her son—"

"Your nephew, is with the army in India. Her daughter—"

"Has disappeared," said Downie, almost exultingly, "too probably taking a leaf out of her charming mamma's book; and the army in Afghanistan has been destroyed—my son Audley's letters and the public papers assure me of that."

"Yet your lordship would like to see the documents?"

"Or what may seem to be the documents—certainly; in whose hands are they—yours?"

"No—in those of one who may be less your lordship's friend—Derrick Braddon."

"Braddon!" said Downie, growing if possible paler than usual; "Braddon, my brother's favourite servant, who was in all his secrets, and was with him in the Cornish regiment?"

"The same, my lord."

"D—n—but this looks ill!" stammered Downie, thrown off his guard.

"For your lordship—very," said Sharkley with a covert smile.

Downie felt that he had forgot himself, so he said,

"Of course, this Braddon will show—perhaps deliver them to me."

"You are the last man on earth to whom he will now either show or deliver them. Be assured of that."

"For what reason, sir?"

"The account he received from his sister and old Mike Treherne of your treatment of—well, I suppose we must call her yet—Mrs. Devereaux."

Downie's steel-gray eyes stared coldly, glassily, and spitefully at Sharkley. He longed for the power to pulverise, to annihilate him by a glance. He loathed and hated, yet feared this low-bred legal reptile, for he felt that he, and all his family, were somehow in his power. Yet he could not quite abandon his first position of indignant denial and proud incredulity.

He spread a sheet of foolscap paper before him, and making a broad margin on the left side thereof, an old office habit that still adhered to him, like many more that were less harmless, he dipped a pen in the inkstand, as if to make memoranda, and balancing his gold glasses on the bridge of his sharp slender nose, said, while looking keenly over them,

"Attend to me, sir—please. When was this pretended discovery made?"

"Some nine months ago."

"Where—I say, where?"

"At Montreal, in the chapel where this Latour, of whom we have heard so much, was curate."

"A rascally scheme—a forgery in which you have a share."

"Take care, my lord—I'll file a bill against you."

"You forget, scoundrel, that we are without witnesses."

"Well—there are a pair of us," was the impudent rejoinder; "but what good might such a scheme ever do an old pensioner like Derrick Braddon?"

"I do not pretend to fathom—for who can?—the secret motives of people of that class," said Downie, haughtily.

"Ay—or for that of it, any class," added Sharkley, as he shrugged his high bony shoulders.

"Relate to me, succinctly and clearly, all that this man has told you," said Downie Trevelyan, dipping his pen again in the silver inkstand; and as Sharkley proceeded, he listened to the narrative of his brother's sufferings and terrible death with impatience, and without other interest than that it served to prove his non-existence by a competent witness, who, were it necessary, might bring others of the crew who were present on the wreck, and had escaped in a boat.

Ere the whole story was ended, Downie was ghastly pale, and tremulous with the mingled emotions of rage and fear, doubt and mortification. He felt certain that in all this there must lie something to be laid further open, or be, if possible, crushed; and on being reassured by Sharkley that Derrick Braddon would "surrender the documents only with his life——"

"We must not think of violence, Mr. Sharkley," said he, coldly and mildly.

"Well, it ain't much in my line, my lord—though I have more than once got damages when a client struck me."

"We must have recourse to stratagem or bribery. For myself, I cannot, and shall not, come in personal contact with any man who is so insolent as to mistrust me, nor is it beseeming I should do so. To you I shall entrust the task of securing and placing before me those alleged papers, for legal investigation, at your earliest convenience. For this, you shall receive the sum of two thousand pounds; of this," he added, lowering his voice, "I shall give you, in the first place, a cheque for five hundred."

The eyes of Sharkley flashed, dilated, shrunk, and dilated again, when he heard the sum mentioned; and rubbing his gorilla-like hands together, he said, with a chuckle peculiarly his own,—

"Never fear for me, my lord; I'll work a hole for him—this Derrick Braddon. He spoke insultingly of the profession last night—but I'll work a hole for him."

With an emotion of angry contempt, which he strove in vain to conceal, Downie gave him a cheque for the first instalment of his bribe, taking care that it was a crossed one, payable only at his own bankers, so that if there was any trickery in this matter, he might be able to recall or trace it.

Sharkley carefully placed it in the recesses of a greasy-looking black pocket-book, tied with red tape, and saying something, with a cringing smile, to the effect that he had "in his time, paid many a fee to counsel, but never before received one in return," bowed himself out, with slavish and reiterated promises of fealty, discretion, and fulfilment of the task in hand; but he quitted the stately porte-cochère, and long shady avenue of Rhoscadzhel, with very vague ideas, as yet, of how he was to win the additional fifteen hundred pounds.

So parted those brothers learned in the law.

CHAPTER II.
DOWNIE'S REFLECTIONS.

His odious visitor and tempter gone, Downie sat long, sunk in reverie. He lay back in the softly-cushioned chair, with his eyes vacantly and dreamily gazing through the lozenged panes, between the moulded mullions of the oriel windows, to where the sunlight fell in bright patches between the spreading oaks and elms, on the green sward of the chace, to where the brown deer nestled cosily among the tender ferns of spring, and to the distant isles of Scilly, afar in the deep blue sea; but he saw nothing of all these. His mind was completely inverted, and his thoughts were turned inward. "The wildest novel," says Ouida, "was never half so wild as the real state of many a human life, that to superficial eyes looks serene and placid and uneventful enough; but life is just the same as in the ages of Oedipus' agony and the Orestes' crime."

Doubtless, the reader thought it very barbarous in the fierce Mohammedan Amen Oollah Khan to twist off his elder brother's head, and so secure his inheritance; but had the civilised Christian, Downie, been in the Khan's place, he would have acted precisely in the same way. The men's instincts were the same; the modes of achievement only different.

But a month before this, and Downie, at his club in Pall Mall, had read with exultation, that, of all General Elphinstone's army, his own son, Audley, and Doctor Brydone, of the Shah's 6th Regiment, had alone reached Jellalabad. Little cared he who perished on that disastrous retreat, so that his son was safe, for, selfish though he was, he loved well and dearly that son, his successor—the holder of a young life that was to stretch, perhaps, for half a century beyond his own shorter span. Now it had chanced that on the very morning of this remarkable visit, he had seen, with disgust, in the Times, that, among those alleged to be safe in the hands of an Afghan chief "was Ensign Denzil Devereaux, of the Cornish Light Infantry, an officer, who, according to a letter received from Taj Mohammed Khan the Wuzeer, had succeeded in saving a colour of Her Majesty's 44th Regiment."

The daughter, whose artful plans upon his son's affections he had, as he conceived, so cleverly thwarted—the daughter Sybil gone no one knew whither; the son, a captive in a barbarous land beyond the Indian frontier, and their mother dead, the little family of Richard Trevelyan seemed on the verge of being quietly blotted out altogether; and now here was this ill-omened Derrick Braddon, this Old Man of the Sea, come suddenly on the tapis, with his confounded papers!

General Elphinstone had died in the hands of the Afghans; so might Denzil; or he and the other survivors or hostages might yet be slain or—unless rescued by the troops from Candahar or Jellalabad—be sold by Ackbar Khan (as Downie had heard in his place in the House) to the chiefs in Toorkistan, after which they would never be heard of more. Oh, thought Downie, that I could but correspond with this Shireen Khan of the Kuzzilbashes; doubtless such a worthy would "not be above taking a retaining fee."

By the dreadful slaughter in the Khyber Pass, and the capture of all the ladies and children, the sympathies, indignation, and passions of the people were keenly roused at home; thus if Denzil returned at this crisis, with the slightest military éclat, it would greatly favour any claims he might advance.

If the documents were genuine and could be proved so in a court of Law—or Justice (these being distinctly separate), were his title, his own honour (as Downie thought it), the honour, wealth, and position, privileges and prospects of his wife and children, to be at the mercy of a mercenary wretch like Schotten Sharkley; or of a broken-down, wandering, and obscure Chelsea pensioner, who possessed the papers in question?

It was maddening even for one so cold in blood—so cautious and so slimy in his proceedings, as Mr. Downie Trevelyan. He had no great talents, but only instinct and cunning; barrister though he was, the cunning of the pettifogger. A legal education had developed all that were corrupt and vile in his nature. A country squire, Downie would have been a blackleg on the turf and a grinding landlord; a tradesman, he would have been far from being an honest one; a soldier, he might have been a poltroon and a malingerer; a legal man, he was—exactly what we find him, a master in subtlety, with a heart of stone. In the same luxurious chair in which he was now seated in fierce and bitter reverie, he had sat and regarded his brother's widow, in her pale and picturesque beauty, and watched the torture of her heart with something of the half amused expression of a cat when playing with the poor little mouse of which it intends to make a repast; and now he sat there shrinking from vague terrors of the future, and in abhorrence of suspense; but there was a species of dogged courage which he could summon to meet any legal emergency or danger, if he would but know its full extent. He was in the dark as yet, and his heart writhed within him at the prospect of coming peril, even as that of Constance had been wrung by the emotions of sorrow and unmerited shame.

He knew himself to be degraded by acting the part of a conspirator in all this; yet how much was at stake! No family in ancient Cornwall was older in history or tradition than his, and none was more honoured: yet here by intrigue, fatality, and the debasing influence of association was he, the twelfth Lord Lamorna, the coadjutor of a man whose father had been a poor rat-catcher, and, if report said true, a felon. He felt as if on Damien's bed of steel, or as if the velvet cushions of his chair had been stuffed with long iron nails, and he repeated bitterly aloud,—

"What! am I to be but a locum tenens after all—and to whom? Denzil Devereaux—this filius nullius, this son of an adventuress, or of nobody perhaps!"

The grave, grim, and somewhat grotesque portraits of Launcelot, Lord Lamorna, in Cavalier dress—he who hid from Fairfax's troopers in the Trewoofe; of Lord Henry, with beard, ruff, and ribbed armour, who was Governor of Rougemont in Devon, and whose scruples did not find him favour with the "Virgin" Queen; and even of his late uncle, with his George IV. wig, false teeth, and brass-buttoned blue swallow-tail, seemed to look coldly and contemptuously down on him.

"Pshaw!" muttered Downie, "am I a fool or a child to be swayed by such fancies?—I should think not; the days of superstition are gone!"

Yet he felt an influence, or something, he knew not what, and averted his stealthy eyes from the painted faces of the honester dead.

The irony of the malevolent and the vulgar; the gossip and surmises of the anonymous press; the "Honourable" cut from Audley's name in the Army List, the Peerage, and elsewhere, and from that of his daughter Gartha, who was just about to be brought out, and had begun to anticipate, with all a young beauty's pleasure, the glories of her first presentation at Court, were all before him now.

To have felt, enjoyed, and to lose all the sweets of rank, of wealth, of power, and patronage; the worship of the empty world, the slavish snobbery of trade, to have been congratulated by all the begowned and bewigged members of the Inns of Court, and by all his tenantry, for nothing—all this proved too much for Downie's brain, and certainly too much for his heart. It was intolerable.

He thought of his cold, unimpressionable, pale-faced, and aristocratic wife deprived of her place (not of rank, for she was a peer's daughter), through that "Canadian connection" of Richard's, as they were wont to term poor Constance—an issue to be tried at the bar, every legal celebrity of the day perhaps retained in the cause; money wasted, bets made, and speculation rife; himself eventually shut out from a sphere in which he had begun to figure, and to figure well! Would, he thought, that the sea had swallowed up Braddon, even as it had done his master! Would that some Afghan bullet might lay low this upstart lad, this Denzil Devereaux, and then his claims and papers might be laughed to scorn! Downie had never been without a secret dread of hearing more of Constance and her marriage, and that one day or other it might admit of legal proof, and now the dread was close and palpable.

He cherished a dire vengeance against his dead brother, for what he deemed his duplicity in contracting such a marriage, unknown to all; and in his unjust ire forgot their late uncle's insane family pride, which was the real cause of all that had occurred.

Novelists, dramatists, and humourists, are usually severe upon the legal profession; yet in our narrative, Downie and his agent Sharkley are given but as types of a bad class of men. Far be it from us to think evil generally of that vast body from whose ranks have sprung so many brilliant orators, statesmen, and writers, especially in England; though Lord Brougham, in his Autobiography, designates the law as "the cursedest of all cursed professions," and even Sir Walter Scott, a member of the Scottish College of Justice, where the practice is loose, often barbarous and antiquated, wrote in his personal memoirs, that he liked it little at first, and it pleased God to make that little less upon further acquaintance; for the spirit and chicanery of the profession are liable to develop to the full that which the Irish, not inaptly, term "the black drop" which is in so many human hearts.

Downie Trevelyan sat long buried in thoughts that galled and wrung his spirit of self-love, till the house-bell rang, sleek Mr. Jasper Funnel with his amplitude of paunch and white waistcoat came to announce that "luncheon was served," and Mr. Boxer, powdered and braided elaborately, came to ascertain at what time "her ladyship wished the carriage;" and even these trivial incidents, by their suggestiveness, were not without adding fuel to his evil instincts and passions.

Three entire days passed away—days of keen suspense and intense irritation to Downie, though far from being impulsive by nature, yet he heard nothing of his tool or agent, whom he began to doubt, fearing that he had pocketed the five hundred pounds, or obtained the documents thereby, and gone over with them to the enemy. But just as the third evening was closing in, and when, seated in the library alone, he was considering how he should find some means of communicating with Sharkley—write he would not, being much too eautious and legal to commit himself in that way, forgetting also that the other would be equally so—the door was thrown noiselessly open, and a servant as before announced "Mr. W. S. Sharkley, Solicitor," and the cadaverous and unwholesome-looking attorney, in his rusty black suit, sidled with a cringing air into the room, his pale visage and cat-like eyes wearing an unfathomable expression, in which one could neither read success nor defeat.

"Be seated, Mr. Sharkley," said his host, adding in a low voice, and with a piercing glance, when the door was completely closed, and striving to conceal his agitation, "You have the papers, I presume?"

"Your lordship shall hear," replied the other, who, prior to saying more, opened the door suddenly and sharply, to see that no "Jeames" had his curious ear at the keyhole, and then resumed his seat.

But before relating all that took place at this interview, we must go back a little in our story, to detail that which Mr. Sharkley would have termed his modus operandi in the matter.

CHAPTER III.
MR. W. S. SHARKLEY'S PLOT.

As Sharkley travelled back towards the little mining hamlet, where the Trevanion Arms stood conspicuously where two roads branched off, one towards Lanteglos, and the other towards the sea, he revolved in his cunning mind several projects for obtaining possession of the papers; but knowing that the old soldier mistrusted him, that he was quite aware of their value, and that he was as obstinate in his resolution to preserve them, as he was faithful and true to the son of Richard Trevelyan, there was an extreme difficulty in deciding on any one line or plan for proper or honest action, so knavery alone had scope.

Could he, out of the five hundred pounds received to account, but bribe Derrick Braddon to lend the papers ostensibly for a time, receiving in return a receipt in a feigned handwriting, with a forged or fancy signature, so totally unlike that used by the solicitor, that he might afterwards safely repudiate the document, and deny he had ever written it!

To attempt to possess them by main force never came within the scope of Sharkley's imagination, for the old soldier was strong and wiry as a young bull, and had been famous as a wrestler in his youth; and then force was illegal, whatever craft might be.

Ultimately he resolved to ignore the subject of the papers, and seem to forget all about them; to talk on other matters, military if possible (though such were not much in Sharkley's way), and thus endeavour to throw Braddon off his guard, and hence get them into his possession by a very simple process—one neither romantic nor melo-dramatic, but resorted to frequently enough by the lawless, in London and elsewhere—in fact by drugging his victim; and for this purpose, by affecting illness and deceiving a medical man, he provided himself with ample means by the way.

Quitting the railway he hastened on foot next day towards the picturesque little tavern, his only fear being that Derrick might have suddenly changed his mind, and being somewhat erratic now, have gone elsewhere.

As he walked onward, immersed in his own selfish thoughts, scheming out the investment of the two thousand pounds, perhaps of more, for why should he not wring or screw more out of his employer's purse?—it was ample enough!—the beauty of the spring evening and of the surrounding scenery had no soothing effect on the heart of this human reptile. The picturesque banks of the winding Camel, then rolling brown in full flood from recent rains; Boscastle on its steep hill, overlooking deep and furzy hollows, and its inlet or creek where the blue sea lay sparkling in light under the storm-beaten headlands and desolate cliffs; away in the distance on another hand, the craggy ridges of Bron Welli, and the Row Tor all reddened by the setting sun, were unnoticed by Sharkley, who ere long found himself under the pretty porch and swinging sign-board of the little inn (all smothered in its bright greenery, budding flowers, and birds' nests), where the scene of his nefarious operations lay.

A frocked wagoner, ruddy and jolly, whipping up his sleek horses with one hand while wiping the froth of the last tankard from his mouth with the other, departed from the door with his team as Sharkley entered and heard a voice that was familiar, singing vociferously upstairs.

"Who is the musical party?" asked he of the round-headed, short-necked and barrel-shaped landlord, whose comely paunch was covered by a white apron.

"Your friend the old pensioner, Mr. Sharkley," replied the other, "and main noisy he be."

"Friend?" said Sharkley nervously; "he ain't a friend of mine—only a kind of client in a humble way."

"I wouldn't have given such, house-room; but trade is bad—the coaches are all off the road now, and business be all taken by the rail to Launceston, Bodmin, and elsewhere."

"Has he been drinking?"

"Yes."

"Pretty freely?" asked Sharpley hopefully.

"Well—yes; we're licensed to get drunk on the premises."

"Come," thought the emissary, "this is encouraging! His intellect," he added aloud, "is weak; after a time he grows furious and is apt to accuse people of robbing him, especially of certain papers of which he imagines himself the custodian; it is quite a monomania."

"A what, sur?"

"A monomania."

"I hopes as he don't bite; but any way," said the landlord, who had vague ideas of hydrophobia, "I had better turn him out at once, as I want no bobberies here."

"No—no; that would be precipitate. I shall try to soothe him over; besides, I have express business with him to-night."

"But if he won't be soothed?" asked Boniface, anxiously.

"Then you have the police station at hand."

Meanwhile they could hear Derrick above them, drumming on the bare table with a pint-pot, and singing some barrack-room ditty of which the elegant refrain was always,—

"Stick to the colour, boys, while there's a rag on it,
And tickle them behind with a touch of the bagonet:
So, love, farewell, for all for a-marching!"

As Sharkley entered, it was evident that the old soldier, whose voice rose at times into a shrill, discordant, and hideous falsetto, had been imbibing pretty freely; his weather-beaten face was flushed, his eyes watery, and his voice somewhat husky, but he was in excellent humour with himself and all the world. The visitor's sharp eyes took in the whole details of the little room occupied by his victim; a small window, which he knew to be twelve feet from a flower-bed outside; a bed in a corner; two Windsor chairs, a table and wash-stand, all of the most humble construction; these, with Derrick's tiny carpet-bag and walking staff, comprised its furniture.

"Come along, Master Sharkley—glad to see you—glad to see any one—it's dreary work drinking alone. This is my billet, and there is a shot in the locker yet—help yourself," he added, pushing a large three-handled tankard of ale across the table.

"Thank you, Braddon," replied the other, careful to omit the prefix of "Mr.," which Derrick always resented, "and you must share mine with me. Have you heard the news?"

"From where—India?"

"Yes."

"And what are they that I have not heard—tell me that, Mr. Sharkley—what are they that I have not heard?" said Braddon with the angry emphasis assumed at times unnecessarily by the inebriated.

"Is it that your young master is shut up among the Afghans, and likely, I fear, to remain so?"

"Her Majesty the Queen don't think so—no, sir—d—n me, whatever you, and such as you, may think," responded Derrick, becoming suddenly sulky and gloomy.

"Who do you mean, Braddon?" asked the other, drinking, and eying him keenly over his pewter-pot.

"Did you see to-day's Gazette?"

"The Bankruptcy list?"

"Bankrupts be—" roared Braddon, contemptuously, striking his clenched hand on the deal table; "no—the War Office Gazette."

Mr. W. S. Sharkley faintly and timidly indicated that as it was a part of the newspapers which possessed but small interest for him, he certainly had not seen it.

"Well, that is strange now," said Derrick; "it is almost the only bit of a paper I ever read."

"It ain't very lively, I should think."

"Ain't it—well, had you looked there to-day, you would have seen that young master Denzil—that is my Lord Lamorna as should be—has been gazetted to a Lieutenancy in the old Cornish—yes, in the-old-Cornish-Light-Infantry!" added Derrick, running five words into one.

"Indeed! but he may die in the hands of the enemy for all that—though I hope not."

"Give me your hand, Mr. Sharkley, for that wish," said Derrick, with tipsy solemnity; "moreover, he is to have the third class of the Dooranee Empire, whatever the dickens that may be. I've drawed my pension to-day, Mr. Sharkley, and I mean to spend every penny of it in wetting the young master's new commission, and the Dooranee Empire to boot. Try the beer again—it's home-brewed, and a first-rate quencher—here's-his-jolly good-health!"

"So say I—his jolly good health."

"With three times three!"

"Yes," added Sharkley, as he wrung the pensioner's proffered hand, "and three to that."

Derrick, who, though winding up the day on beer, had commenced it with brandy, was fast becoming more noisy and confused, to his wary visitor's intense satisfaction.

"Yes—yes—master Denzil will escape all and come home safe, please God," said Derrick, becoming sad and sentimental for a minute; "yet in my time I heard many a fellow—yes, many a fellow—before we went into action, or were just looking to our locks, and getting the cartridges loose, say to another, 'write for me,' to my father, or mother, or it might be 'poor Bess, or Nora,' meaning his wife, 'in case I get knocked on the head;' and I have seen them shot in their belts within ten minutes after. I often think—yes, by jingo I do—that a man sometimes knows when death is a-nigh him, for I have heard some say they were sure they'd be shot, and shot they were sure enough; while others—I for one—were always sure they'd escape. It's what we soldiers call a presentiment; but of course, you, as a lawyer, can know nothing about it. With sixty rounds of ammunition at his back, a poor fellow will have a better chance of seeing Heaven than if he died with a blue bagfull of writs and rubbish."

Then Derrick indulged in a tipsy fit of laughter, mingled with tears, as he said,

"You'd have died o' laughing, Mr. Sharkley, if you'd seen the captain my master one day—but perhaps you don't care about stories?"

"By all means, Braddon," replied Sharkley, feeling in his vest pocket with a fore-finger and thumb for a phial which lurked there; "I dearly love to hear an old soldier's yarn."

"Well, it was when we were fighting against the rebels in Canada—the rebels under Papineau. We were only a handful, as the saying is—a handful of British troops, and they were thousands in number—discontented French, Irish Rapparees, and Yankee sympathisers, armed with everything they could lay hands on; but we licked them at St. Denis and St. Charles, on the Chamblay river—yes, and lastly at Napierville, under General Sir John Colborne; and pretty maddish we Cornish lads were at them, for they had just got one of our officers, a poor young fellow named Lieutenant George Weir, into their savage hands by treachery, after which they tied him to a cart-tail, and cut him into joints with his own sword. Well—where was I?—at Napierville. We were lying in a field in extended order to avoid the discharge of a field gun or two, that the devils had got into position against us, when a ball from one ploughed up the turf in a very open place, and Captain Trevelyan seated himself right in the furrow it had made, and proceeded to light a cigar, laughing as he did so.

" Are you wise to sit there, right in the line of fire?' asked the colonel, looking down from his horse.

"'Yes,' says my master.

"'How so?'

"Master took the cigar between his fingers, and while watching the smoke curling upwards, said,

"'You see, colonel, that another cannon ball is extremely unlikely to pass in the same place; two never go after each other thus.'

"But he had barely spoken, ere the shako was torn off his head by a second shot from the field piece; so everybody laughed, while he scrambled out of the furrow, looking rather white and confused, though pretending to think it as good a joke as any one else—that was funny, wasn't it!"

So, while Derrick lay back and laughed heartily at his own reminiscence, Sharkley, quick as lightning, poured into his tankard a little phial-full of morphine, a colourless but powerful narcotic extracted from opium. He then took an opportunity of casting the phial into the fire unseen, and by the aid of the poker effectually concealed it.

"What a fine thing it would have been for Mr. Downie Trevelyan if that rebel shot had been a little lower down—eh, Derrick?" said he, chuckling.

"Not while the proud old lord lived, for he ever loved my master best."

"But he is in possession now—and that, you know, is nine points of the law."

"Yes—and he has a heart as hard as Cornish granite," said Braddon, grinding his set teeth; "aye, hard as the Logan Stone of Treryn Dinas! Here is confusion to him and all such!" he added, energetically, as he drained the drugged tankard to the dregs; "if such a fellow were in the army, he'd be better known to the Provost Marshal than to the Colonel or Adjutant, and would soon find himself at shot-drill, with B.C. branded on his side. But here's Mr. Denzil's jolly good-health-and-hooray-for-the-Dooranee-Empire!" he continued, and applied the empty tankard mechanically to his lips, while his eyes began to roll, as the four corners of the room seemed to be in pursuit of each other round him. "I dreamt I was on the wreck last night—ugh! and saw the black fins of the sea-lawyers, sticking up all about us."

"Sea-lawyers—what may they be?"

"Sharks," replied Braddon, his eyes glaring with a curious expression, that hovered between fun and ferocity, at his companion, whose figure seemed suddenly to waver, and then to multiply.

"Ha, ha, very good; an old soldier must have his joke."

"So had my master, when he sat in the fur-ur-urrow made by the shell. You see, we were engaged with Canada rebels at Napierville—ville—yes exactly, at Naperville, when a twelve-pound shot——"

He was proceeding, with twitching mouth and thickened utterance, to relate the whole anecdote deliberately over again, when Sharkley, who saw that he was becoming so fatuously tipsy that further concealment was useless, rose impatiently, and abruptly left the room, to give the landlord some fresh hints for his future guidance.

"Halt! come back here—here, you sir—I say!" exclaimed Braddon, in a low, fierce, and husky voice, as this sudden and unexplained movement seemed to rouse all his suspicions and quicken his perceptive qualities; but in attempting to leave his chair he fell heavily on the floor.

He grew ghastly pale as he staggered into a sitting posture. Tipsy and stupefied though he was, some strange conviction of treachery came over him; he staggered, or dragged himself, partly on his hands and knees, towards the bed, and drawing from his breast-pocket the tin case, with the documents so treasured, by a last effort of strength and of judgment, thrust it between the mattress and palliasse, and flung himself above it.

Then, as the powerful narcotic he had imbibed overspread all his faculties, he sank into a deep and dreamless but snorting slumber, that in its heaviness almost boded death!

* * * * *

The noon of the next day was far advanced when poor old Derrick awoke to consciousness, but could, with extreme difficulty, remember where he was. A throat parched, as if fire was scorching it; an overpowering headache and throbbing of the temples; hot and tremulous hands, with an intense thirst, served to warn him that he must have been overnight, that which he had not been for many a year, very tipsy and "totally unfit for duty."

He staggered up in search of a water-jug, and then found that he had lain abed with his clothes on. A pleasant breeze came through the open window; the waves of the bright blue sea were rolling against Tintagel cliffs and up Boscastle creek; hundreds of birds were twittering in the warm spring sunshine about the clematis and briar that covered all the tavern walls, and the hum of the bee came softly and gratefully to his ear, as he strove to recall the events of the past night.

Sharkley!—it had been spent with Sharkley the solicitor, and where now was he?

The papers! He mechanically put his trembling hand to his coat pocket, and then, as a pang of fear shot through his heart, under the mattress.

They were not there; vacantly he groped and gasped, as recollections flashed upon him, and the chain of ideas became more distinct; madly he tossed up all the bedding and scattered it about. The case was gone, and with it the precious papers, too, were gone—GONE!

Sobered in an instant by this overwhelming catastrophe—most terribly sobered—a hoarse cry of mingled rage and despair escaped him. The landlord, who had been listening for an outbreak of some kind, now came promptly up.

"Beast, drunkard, fool that I have been!" exclaimed Derrick, in bitter accents of self-reprobation; "this is how I have kept my promise to a dying master—duped by the first scoundrel who came across me! I have been juggled—drugged, perhaps—then juggled, and robbed after!"

"Robbed of what?" asked the burly landlord, laughing.

"Papers—my master's papers," groaned Derrick.

"Bah—I thought as much; now look ye here, old fellow——"

"Robbed by a low lawyer," continued Derrick, hoarsely; "and no fiend begotten in hell can be lower in the scale of humanity or more dangerous to peaceful society. Oh, how often has poor master said so," he added, waxing magniloquent, and almost beside himself with grief and rage; "how often have I heard him say, 'I have had so much to do with lawyers, that I have lost all proper abhorrence for their master, the devil.'"

"Now, I ain't going to stand any o' this nonsense—just you clear out," said the landlord, peremptorily.

Then as his passionate Cornish temper got the better of his reason, Derrick on hearing this suddenly seized Jack Trevanion's successor by the throat, and dashing him on the floor, accused him of being art and part, or an aider and abettor of the robbery, in which, to say truth, he was not. His cries speedily brought the county constabulary, to whom, by Sharkley's advice, he had previously given a hint, and before the sun was well in the west, honest Derrick Braddon was raving almost with madness and despair under safe keeping in the nearest station house.

CHAPTER IV.
THE HOPE OF THE DEAD.

The disappearance of the papers which had so terrible an effect upon the nervous system, and usually iron frame of Derrick Braddon, is accounted for by the circumstance that Sharkley on returning to see how matters were progressing in the room, lingered for a moment by the half-opened door, and saw his dupe pale, gasping, muttering, and though half-senseless, yet conscious enough to feel a necessity for providing against any trickery or future contingency, in the act of concealing the tin case among his bedding, from whence it was speedily drawn, after he had flung himself in sleepy torpor above it; and then stealing softly down stairs with the prize, Sharkley paid his bill and departed without loss of time and in high spirits, delighted with his own success.

Too wary to start westward in the direction of Rhoscadzhel, he made an ostentatious display of departing by a hired dog-cart for his own residence, at the village or small market town (which was afflicted by his presence) in quite an opposite direction. From thence, by a circuitous route, he now revisited his employer, and hence the delay which occasioned the latter so much torture and anxiety.

"Two thousand—a beggarly sum!" thought Sharkley, scornfully and covetously, as he walked up the stately and over-arching avenue, and found himself under the groined arches of the porte-cochère, the pavement of which was of black and white tesselated marble; "why should I not demand double the sum, or more—yes, or more—he is in my power, in my power, is he not?" he continued, with vicious joy, through his set teeth, while his eyes filled with green light, and the glow of avarice grew in his flinty heart, though even the first sum mentioned was a princely one to him.

Clutching the tin case with a vulture-like grasp, he broadly and coarsely hinted his wish to Downie, who sat in his library chair, pale, nervous, and striving to conceal his emotion, while hearing a narration of the late proceedings at the Trevanion Arms; and hastily drawing a cheque book towards him, be filled up another bank order, saying,—

"There, sir, this is a cheque for two thousand pounds; surely two thousand five hundred are quite enough for all you have done in procuring for my inspection, documents which may prove but as so much waste paper after all."

"Their examination will prove that such is not the case," said Sharkley, as he gave one of his ugly smiles, scrutinised the document, and slowly and carefully consigned it to where its predecessor lay, in the greasy old pocket-book, wherein many a time and oft the hard-won earnings of the poor, the unfortunate and confiding, had been swallowed up. When Downie had heard briefly and rapidly a narration of the means by which the papers had been abstracted, he rather shrunk with disgust from a contemplation of them; they seemed so disreputable, so felonious and vile!

He had vaguely hoped that by the more constitutional and legal plans of bribery and corruption Mr. W. S. Sharkley might have received them from the custodier; but now they were in his hands and he was all impatience, tremulous with eagerness, and spectacles on nose, to peruse them, and test their value by that legal knowledge which he undoubtedly possessed.

His fingers, white and delicate, and on one of which sparkled the magnificent diamond ring which his late uncle had received when on his Russian embassy, literally trembled and shook, as if with ague, when he opened the old battered and well-worn tin case. The first document drawn forth had a somewhat unpromising appearance; it was sorely soiled, frayed, and seemed to have been frequently handled.

"What the deuce is this, Mr. Sharkley?" asked Downie, with some contempt of tone.

"Can't say, my lord—never saw such a thing before; it ain't a writ or a summons, surely!"

It was simply a soldier's "Parchment Certificate," and ran thus:—

Cornish Regiment of Light Infantry.

"These are to certify that Derrick Braddon, Private, was born in the Parish of Gulval, Duchy of Cornwall; was enlisted there for the said corps, &c., was five years in the West Indies, ten in North America, and six at Gibraltar; was twice wounded in action with the Canadian rebels, and has been granted a pension of one shilling per diem. A well conducted soldier, of unexceptionably good character." Then followed the signature of his colonel and some other formula.

"Pshaw!" said Downie, tossing it aside; but the more wary Sharkley, to obliterate all links or proofs of conspiracy, deposited it carefully in the fire, when it shrivelled up and vanished; so the little record of his twenty-one years' faithful service, of his two wounds, and his good character, attested by his colonel, whom he had ever looked up to as a demigod, and which Derrick had borne about with him as Gil Blas did his patent of nobility, was lost to him for ever.

But more than ever did Downie's hands tremble when he drew forth the other documents; when he saw their tenor, and by the mode in which they were framed, worded, stamped, and signed, he was compelled to recognise their undoubted authority! A sigh of mingled rage and relief escaped him; but, as yet, no thought of compunction. He glanced at the fire, at the papers, and at Sharkley, more than once in succession, and hesitated either to move or speak. He began to feel now that the lingering of his emissary in his presence, when no longer wanted, was intolerable; but he was too politic to destroy the papers before him, though no other witness was present.

Full of secret motives themselves, each of these men, by habit and profession, was ever liable to suspect secret motives in every one else; and each was now desirous to be out of the other's presence; Downie, of course, most of all. The lower in rank and more contemptible in character, perhaps was less so, having somewhat of the vulgar toady's desire to linger in the presence and atmosphere of one he deemed a greater, certainly more wealthy, and a titled man; till the latter said with a stiff bow full of significance,—

"I thank you, sir, and have paid you; these are the documents I wished to possess."

"I am glad your lordship is pleased with my humble services," replied Sharkley, but still tarrying irresolutely.

"Is there anything more you have to communicate to me?"

"No, my lord."

"Then I have the—I must wish you good evening."

Sharkley brushed his shiny hat with his dusty handkerchief, and the wish for a further gratuity was hovering on his lips.

"You have been well paid for your services, surely?"

"Quite, my lord—that is—but—"

"No one has seen those papers, I presume?" asked Downie.

"As I have Heaven to answer to, no eye has looked on them while in my hands—my own excepted."

"Good—I am busy—you may go," said Downie, haughtily, and as he had apparently quite recovered his composure, he rang the bell, and a servant appeared.

"Shew this—person out, please," said Downie.

And in a moment more Sharkley was gone. The door closed, and they little suspected they were never to meet again.

"Thank God, he is gone! Useful though the scoundrel has been, and but for his discovery of those papers we know not what may have happened, his presence was suffocating me!" thought Downie.

The perceptions of the latter were sufficiently keen to have his amour propre wounded by a peculiar sneering tone and more confident bearing in Sharkley; there had been a companionship in the task in hand, which lowered him to the level of the other, and the blunt rejoinder he had used so recently—"there are a pair of us," still rankled in his memory. Thus he had felt that he could not get rid of him too soon, or too politely to all appearance; and with a grimace of mingled satisfaction and contempt, he saw the solicitor's thin, ungainly figure lessening as he shambled down the long and beautiful avenue of elms and oaks, which ended at the grey stone pillars, that were surmounted each by a grotesque koithgath, sejant, with its four paws resting on a shield, charged with a Cavallo Marino, rising from the sea.

"And now for another and final perusal of these most accursed papers!" said Downie Trevelyan, huskily.

The first was the certificate of marriage, between Richard Pencarrow Trevelyan, Captain in the Cornish Light Infantry, and Constance Devereaux of Montreal, duly by banns, at the chapel of Père Latour. Then followed the date, and attestation, to the effect, "that the above named parties were this day married by me, as hereby certified, at Ste. Marie de Montreal.

"C. LATOUR, Catholic Curé,
"BAPTISTE OLIVIER, Acolyte.
"DERRICK BRADDON, Private
Cornish Light Infantry.

"JEHAN DURASSIER, Sacristan."

About this document there could not be a shadow of a doubt—even the water-mark was anterior to the date, and the brow of Downie grew very dark as he read it; darker still grew that expression of malevolent wrath, and more swollen were the veins of his temples as he turned to the next document, which purported to be the "Last Will and Testament of Richard Pencarrow, Lord Lamorna," and which after the usual dry formula concerning his just debts, testamentary and funeral expenses, continued, "I give, devise, and bequeath unto Constance Devereaux, Lady Lamorna, my wife," the entire property, (then followed a careful enumeration thereof,) into which he had come by the death of his uncle Audley, Lord Lamorna, for the term of her natural life; and after her death to their children Denzil and Sybil absolutely, in the several portions to follow. The reader Downie (to whom a handsome bequest was made), General Trecarrel, and the Rector of Porthellick were named as Executors, and then followed the duly witnessed signature of the Testator, written in a bold hand LAMORNA, and dated at Montreal, about nine months before.

"Hah!" exclaimed Downie, through his clenched teeth; "here is that in my hand, which, were Audley a wicked or undutiful son, might effect wonders at Rhoscadzhel, and furnish all England with food for gossip and surmise; but that shall never, never be; nor shall son nor daughter of that Canadian adventuress ever place their heads under this roof tree of ours!"

And as he spoke, he fiercely crumpled up the will and the certificate together.

Then he paused, spread them out upon his writing table, and smoothing them over, read them carefully over again. As he did so, the handsome face, the honest smile and manly figure of his brother Richard came upbraidingly to memory; there were thoughts of other and long-remembered days of happy boyhood, of their fishing, their bird-nesting expeditions, and of an old garret in which they were wont to play when the days were wet, or the snow lay deep on the hills. How was it, that, till now forgotten, the old garret roof, with its rafters big and brown, and which seemed then such a fine old place for sport, with the very sound of its echoes, and of the rain without as it came pouring down to gorge the stone gutters of the old house, came back to memory now, with Richard's face and voice, out of the mists of nearly half a century? "It was one of those flashes of the soul that for a moment unshroud to us the dark depths of the past." Thus he really wavered in purpose, and actually thought of concealing the documents in his strong box, to the end that there they might be found after his death, and after he had enjoyed the title for what remained to him of life.

Would not such duplicity be unfair to his own sons, and to his daughter? was the next reflection.

And if fate permitted Denzil to escape the perils of the Afghan war, was the son of that mysterious little woman, or was her daughter—the daughter of one whom he doubted not, and wished not to doubt—had entrapped his silly brother into a secret marriage, in a remote and sequestered chapel, and whose memory he actually loathed—ever to rule and reside in Rhoscadzhel?

No—a thousand times no! Then muttering the lines from Shakespeare,—

"Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls.
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:"

he drew near the resplendent grate of burnished steel, and resolutely casting in both documents, thrust them with the aid of the poker deep among the fuel, and they speedily perished. The deed was done, and could no more be recalled than the last year's melted snow!

He watched the last sparks die out in the tinder ashes of those papers, on the preservation and production of which so much depended, so much was won and lost; and a sigh of relief was blended with his angry laugh.

He felt that then, indeed, the richly carpeted floor beneath his feet; the gilded roof above his head, the sweet, soft landscape—one unusually so for bold and rugged Cornwall—that stretched away in the soft, hazy, and yellow twilight, and all that he had been on the verge of losing, were again more surely his, and the heritage of his children, and of theirs in the time to come, and that none "of Banquo's line"—none of that strange woman's blood, could ever eject them now!

Even Derrick's old tin-case—lest, if found, it should lead to a trace or suspicion of where the papers had gone—he carefully, and with a legal caution worthy of his satellite the solicitor, beat out of all shape with his heel and threw into the fire, heaping the coals upon it.

This was perhaps needless in Downie Trevelyan, that smooth, smug, closely shaven, and white-shirted lawyer-lord, that man of legal facts and stern truths, so abstemious, temperate, and regular in his habits and attendance at church, and to all the outward tokens of worldly rectitude. Do what he might, none could, would, or dare believe evil of him!

Yet, after the excitement he had undergone, there were moments when he felt but partially satisfied with himself, till force of habit resumed its sway—moments when he remained sunk in thought, with his eyes fixed on that portion of the sea and sky where the sun had set, while the sombre twilight deepened around, and strange shadows were cast by the oriels across the library floor.

"For what have I done this thing?" thought he; "for my children of course, rather than for myself. I would that I had not been tempted, for nothing on earth remains for ever—nothing!" And as he muttered thus, his eyes rested on the distant Isles of Scilly that loomed like dark purple spots in the golden sea, which yet weltered in the ruddy glory of the sun that had set, and he reflected, he knew not why, for it was not Downie's wont, on the mutability of all human things and wishes, of the change that inexorable Time for ever brought about, and of the futility of all that man might attempt to do in the hope of perpetuity; for did not even the mighty sea and firm land change places in the fulness of years!

"Where now was all the land tradition named as Lyonesse of old—the vast tract which stretched from the eastern shore of Mount's Bay, even to what are now the Isles of Scilly, on which his dreamy eyes were fixed—the land where once, in story and in verse we are told,

"That all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until king Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fall'n in Lyonesse about their lord."

There, where now he saw the sea rolling between the rocky isles and the Land's End, were once green waving woods and verdant meadows, lands that were arable, mills whose busy wheels revolved in streams now passed away, and one hundred-and-forty parish churches, whose bells summoned the people to prayer, but which are all now—if we are to believe William of Worcester—submerged by the encroaching sea; yet whether gradually, or by one mighty throe of nature, on that day when the first of the line of Trevelyan swain his wonderful horse from the north-western isle, back to the rent and riven land, we know not, but so the story runs.

From, these day-dreams, such as he was seldom used to indulge in, Downie's mind rapidly reverted to practical considerations.

"Two thousand five hundred pounds in two cheques!" he muttered; "will not my bankers, and more than all, Gorbelly and Culverhole, my solicitors, wonder what singular service a creature such as this William Schotten Sharkley can possibly have rendered me, to receive so large a sum? If that drunken old soldier, Braddon, tells this story of his last meeting with Sharkley, and the subsequent loss of the papers, and permits himself to make a noise about them, may there not be many who, while remembering the former affair, by putting this and that together, will patch up a scandalous story after all? Bah—let them; there lie the proofs!" he added, glancing with a fierce and vindictive smile at the fragments of black tinder which yet fluttered in the grate.

So perished, at his remorseless hands, all the past hopes of the tender and affectionate dead, and all the present hopes of the living—of Richard and his wife who were buried so far apart—of Denzil and his sister, who were separated by fate, by peril, and so many thousand miles of land and sea!

But our story may have a sequel for all that.

CHAPTER V.
RETRIBUTION.

Greatly to the surprise of the granter, the two cheques for 500l. and 2000l. respectively, were never presented at his bankers, and Mr. Sharkley returned no more to his office; that dingy chamber of torture, with its dusty dockets, ink-spotted table, and tin charter-boxes arranged in formal rows upon an iron frame, and its damp discoloured walls, ornamented by time-tables, bills of sale, and fly-blown prospectuses, knew him never again; and days, weeks, and months rolled on, but he was never seen by human eye after the time he issued from the lodge-gate of Rhoscadzhel, and the keeper, with a contemptuous bang, clanked it behind him.

When Derrick heard of his disappearance, he felt convinced more than ever that he had abstracted his papers; but believed he had started with them to India, perhaps to make capital out of Denzil. Some who knew what the solicitor's legal course had been, thought of a dark and speedy end having befallen him; others surmised that the fear of certain trickeries, or "errors in practice," had caused him suddenly to depart for America; but all were wide of the truth.

Lord Lamorna knew not what to think, but maintained a dead and rigid silence as to his ever having had any meeting or transaction with the missing man in any way; and as many hated, and none regretted Mr. W. S. Sharkley, his existence was speedily forgotten in that district, and it was not until long after that a light was thrown on the mystery that enveloped his disappearance.

Much money, chiefly that of others, had passed through Sharkley's hands in his time, and much of it, as a matter of course, was never accounted for by him; but he had never before possessed so large a sum at once, and certainly seldom one so easily won, as that presented to him by the titular Lord Lamorna. All the exultation that avarice, covetousness, and successful roguery can inspire glowed in his arid heart, and he walked slowly onward, immersed in thoughts peculiarly his own, as to the mode in which he would invest it, and foresaw how it must and should double, treble, and quadruple itself ere long; how lands, and houses, messuages and tenements, mills and meadows, should all become his; and so he wove his golden visions, even as Alnaschar in the Arabian fable wove his over the basket of frail and brittle glass; and as he proceeded, ever and anon he felt, with a grimace of satisfaction, for the pocket-book containing his beloved cheques.

Some miles of country lay between Rhoscadzhel and Penzance, where he meant to take the railway for his own place. As his penurious spirit had prevented him from hiring a vehicle, he pursued the way on foot; but he sometimes lost it, darkness having set in, and yet he saw nothing of the lights of the town. He had, in his mental abstraction, walked, or wandered on, he scarcely knew whither, and he only paused from time to time to uplift his clenched hands, to mutter and sigh in angry bitterness of spirit that he had not extracted more from Downie Trevelyan, when he had it in his power to put on the screw with vigour, and anon he would ponder as to whether he had not been too precipitate, and whether he had done a wise thing in selling to him the interests of young Denzil, as these might have proved pecuniarily more valuable; but then poor Denzil was so far away, and from all Sharkley could hear and read in the newspapers, he might never see England more. For the first time in his life, Mr. Sharkley found himself taking an interest in our Indian military affairs.

Some of the deep lanes bordered by those high stone walls peculiar to Cornwall, were left behind, and also many a pretty cottage, in the gardens of which, the fragrant myrtle, the gay fuchsia with its drooping petals, and the hydrangea, flourish all the year round; and now he was roused by the sound of the sea breaking at a distance round the promontory from which Penzance takes its name—the holy headland of the ancient Cornish men. From a slight eminence which he was traversing, he could see, but at a distance also, the lights of the town twinkling amid the moorland haze, and that at the harbour head, sending long rays of tremulous radiance far across Mount's Bay; then as the pathway dipped down into a furzy hollow, he lost sight of them. He was still within half a mile of the shore, but was traversing a bleak and uneven moorland, and on his right lay a scene of peculiar desolation, encumbered by masses of vast granite rock, here and there tipped by the cold green light of a pale crescent moon, that rose from the wild waste of the vast Atlantic.

Suddenly something like a black hole yawned before him; a gasping, half-stifled cry escaped him; he stumbled and fell—where?

Mechanically and involuntarily, acting more like a machine than a human being, he had in falling grasped something, he knew not what, and clutching at it madly, tenaciously, yea desperately, he clung thereto, swinging he knew not where or how, over space; but soon the conviction that forced itself upon him, was sufficient to make the hairs of his scalp bristle up, and a perspiration, cold as snow, to start from the pores of his skin.

Old mines may seem somehow to have a certain connection with the story or destiny of Sybil Devereaux, if not of her brother Denzil, and the betrayer of both their interests, who now found himself swinging by the branch of a frail gorsebush, over the mouth of the ancient shaft of an abandoned one—a shaft, the depth of which he knew not, and dared not to contemplate! He only knew that in Cornwall they were usually the deepest in the known world.

If few persons who are uninitiated, descend the shaft of an ordinary coal-pit, amid all the careful appliances of engineering, without a keen sense of vague danger, what must have been the emotions of the wretch who, with arms perpendicularly above his head, and legs outspread, wildly and vainly seeking to catch some footing, swung pendent over the black profundity that vanished away into the bowels of the earth below, perhaps, for all he knew, nearly a mile in depth!

It was beneath him he knew; the quiet stars were above; no aid was near; there was no sound in the air, and none near him, save the dreadful beating of his heart, and a roaring, hissing sound in his ears.

In this awful situation, after his first exclamation of deadly and palsied fear, not a word, not a whisper—only sighs—escaped him. He had never prayed in his life, and knew not how to do so now. The blessed name of God had been often on his cruel lips, in many a matter-of-fact affidavit, and in many an affirmation, made falsely, but never in his heart; so now, he never thought of God or devil, of heaven nor hell, his only fear was death—extinction!

And there he swung, every respiration a gasping, sobbing sigh, every pulsation a sharp pang; he had not the power to groan; as yet his long, lean, bony hands were not weary; but the branch might rend, the gorse bush uproot, and then——

Nevertheless he made wild and desperate efforts to escape the dreadful peril, by writhing his body upward, as his head was only some four feet below the edge of the upper rim or course of crumbling brickwork, which lined the circular shaft, and often he felt his toes scratch the wall, and heard the fragments detached thereby pass whizzing downwards; but he never heard the ascending sound of the fall below—because below was far, far down indeed!

The silence was dreary—awful: he dared not look beneath, for nothing was to be seen there but the blackness of utter profundity; he could only gaze upward to where the placid stars that sparkled in the blue dome of heaven, seemed to be winking at him. He dared not cry, lest he should waste his breath and failing strength; and had he attempted to do so the sound would have died on his parched and quivering lips.

In every pulsation he lived his lifetime over again, and all the secret crimes of that lifetime were, perhaps, being atoned for now.

The widows who, without avail or winning pity, had wept, (in that inquisitorial camera de los tormentos, his "office,"), for the loss of the hard-won savings of dead husbands, their children's bread; wretches from under whose emaciated forms he had dragged the bare pallet, leaving them to die on a bed of cinders, and all in form and process of law; the strong and brave spirited men, who had lifted up their hard hands and hoarsely cursed him, ere they betook them to the parish union or worse; the starvelings who had perhaps gained their suits, but only in their last coats; the crimes that some had committed through the poverty and despair he had brought upon them; the unsuspecting, into whose private and monetary matters he had wormed himself by specious offers of gratuitous assistance and advice—a special legal snare—by the open and too often secret appropriation of valuable papers; and by the thousand wiles and crooks of policy known only to that curse of society, the low legal practitioner, seemed all to rise before him like a black cloud now; and out of that cloud, the faces of his pale victims seemed to mock, jibe, and jabber at him.

And there, too, were the handwritings he had imitated, the signatures he had forged, the sham accounts he had fabricated against the wealthy or the needy, the ignorant and the wary alike; but Sharkley felt no real penitence, for he knew not that he had committed any sin. Had he not always kept the shady side of the law? and, if rescued, would he not return to his sharp practice thereof as usual? Yet he felt, as the moments sped on, a strange agony creeping into his soul:

"So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoomed for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death!"

The bush bending under his weight, hung more perpendicularly now, and thus Sharkley's knees, for the first time, grazed till they were skinned and bloody against the rough brickwork. Was the root yielding? Oh no, no; forbid it fate! He must live—live—live; he was not fit to die—and thus, too! The cold, salt perspiration, wrung by agony, flowed from the roots of his hair, till it well nigh blinded him, and tears, for even a creature such as he can weep, began to mingle with them. They were perfectly genuine, however, as Master William S. Sharkley wept the probabilities of his own untimely demise.

He had once been on a coroner's inquest. It sat in the principal room of a village inn, upon some human bones—nearly an entire skeleton—found in an old, disused, and partially filled-up pit. He remembered their aspect, so like a few white, bleached winter branches, as they lay on a sheet on the dining-table. He could recall the surmises of the jurors. Did the person fall? Had he, or she—for even sex was doubtful then—been murdered? or had it been a case of suicide? None might say.

The poor bones of the dead alone could have told, and they were voiceless. All was mystery, and yet the story of some forgotten life, of some unknown crime, or hidden sorrow, lay there; the story that man could never, never know.

This episode had long since been forgotten by Sharkley; and now, in an instant, it flashed vividly before him, adding poignancy to the keen horrors of his situation. Was such a fate to be his?

He could distinctly see the upper ledge of bricks, as he looked upward from where, though he had not swung above three minutes, he seemed to have been for an eternity now; and though he knew not how to pray, he thought that he could spend the remainder of his life happily there, if but permitted to rest his toes upon that narrow ledge, as a place for footing, as now his arms seemed about to be rent from his shoulders. His eyes were closed for a time, and he scarcely dared to breathe—still less to think.

Sharkley was not a dreamer; he had too little imagination, and had only intense cunning and the instincts that accompany it; so he had never known what a nightmare is; yet the few minutes of his present existence seemed to be only such. He had still sense enough to perceive, that the wild and frenzied efforts he made at intervals to writhe his body up, were loosening the root of the gorse-bush, and he strove in the dusky light, but strove in vain, to see how much he had yet to depend upon; and then he hung quite still and pendant, with a glare in his starting eyeballs, and a sensation as if of palsy in his heart.

His arms were stiffening fast, his fingers were relaxing, and his spine felt as if a sharply pointed knife was traversing it; he knew that the end was nigh—most fearfully nigh—and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, though it was dry as a parched pea.

Oh for one grasp of a human hand; the sound of any voice; the sight of a human face ere he passed away for ever!

There was a sudden sound of tearing as the gorse-root parted from the soil; he felt himself slipping through space, the cold air rushed whistling upward, and he vanished, prayerless, breathless, and despairing, from the light of the blessed stars, and then the black mouth of the shaft seemed vacant.

CHAPTER VI.
AT JELLALABAD.

Downie Trevelyan's applications to the War Office, the Horse Guards, to the Military Secretary for the Home Department of the East India Company, and even questions asked in his place in the House of Lords, were unremitting for a time, on the affairs of Afghanistan, as he wished to elicit some information concerning the safety of his son, and the probable non-safety of Lieutenant Devereaux, more particularly; but he totally failed in extracting more than vague generalities, or that one was believed to be safe with Sir Robert Sale's garrison in Jellalabad; and that the other was supposed to be a prisoner of war with many others. How long he might remain so, if surviving, or how long he had remained so, if dead, no one could tell; but dark rumours had reached Peshawur, that the male hostages had been beheaded in the Char Chowk of Cabul, while the females had been sold to the Tartars.

On the assassination of the Shah Sujah, whose ally we had so foolishly become by the mistaken policy of the Earl of Auckland, the prince, his son, had gained possession of the Bala Hissar, the guns and garrison of which gave him for a time full sway over the city of Cabul, when he made the cunning, plotting, and ambitious Ackbar Khan his Vizier.

The latter, however, always on the watch, and by nature suspicious, intercepted a letter written by his young master to General Nott, who commanded our troops in Candahar. This contained some amicable proposals, quite at variance with the inborn hate and rancour which Ackbar bore the English; and hence a quarrel ensued at the new court.

The prince demanded that the hostages, male and female—the fair Saxon beauty of some of the latter was supposed to have some influence in the request—left by the deceased General Elphinstone, should be delivered up to him, without question or delay.

Ackbar sternly refused to comply, and it was on this that the young Shah wrote to General Nott, urging him to march at once on Cabul to release the captives; and, moreover, to free the city from the interference and overweening tyranny of Sirdir, who thereupon resolved to take strong measures, and, with the aid of Amen Oollah Khan, Zohrab Zubberdust, and some others, made his new Sovereign captive. The latter escaped by making a hole in the roof of his prison; a purse of mohurs, a sharp sword, and a fleet horse, enabled him to reach in safety the cantonments of the British General, to whom he gave a sad detail of the miseries to which the prisoners, especially the delicate ladies, were subjected.

This movement was nearly the means of causing the destruction of all who were left at Ackbar's mercy. All communication between them and the troops in Jellalabad was cut off more strictly and hopelessly than ever; and Ackbar Khan swore by the Black Stone of Mecca, and by many a solemn and fearful oath, that "the moment he should hear of the approach of British troops again towards Cabul, the hostages should, each and all, man, woman, and child alike, be sold as slaves to the Usbec Tartars! And remember," he added, with clenched teeth and flashing eyes, to Zohrab the Overbearing, and others who heard him; "that my word is precious to me, even as the Mohur Solimani—the seal of Solomon Jared was to him!"

This was the signet of the fifth monarch of the world after Adam; and the holder thereof had, for the time, the entire command of the elements, of all demons, and all created things.

"Now," he exclaimed, with fierce vehemence, "I cannot violate my oath, for as the sixteenth chapter of the Koran says, 'I have made God a witness over me!'"

Hence, perhaps, the rumour that came to Peshawur, and thus any attempt to save or succour them, would, it seemed, but accelerate their ruin, for if once removed to Khoordistan, they should never, never be heard of more, nor could they be traced among the nomadic tribes who dwell in that vast region of Western Asia, known as the "country of the Khoords."

The last that, as yet, was known of them, was that they were all in charge of an old Khan, named Saleh Mohammed, and shut up in a fortress three miles from Cabul. There they were kept in horrible suspense as to their future fate; and to them now were added nine of our officers who had fallen into Ackbar's hands, when, in the month of August, he recaptured the city of Ghuznee.

How many Christian companions in misfortune were with the Ladies Sale and Macnaghten, the garrisons in Jellalabad and Candahar knew not; neither did they know who, out of the original number taken in the passes, were surviving now those sufferings of mind and body which they all had to undergo. Among them was one poor lady, the widow of an officer, who had the care of eight young children, to add to her mental misery.

The steady and unexpected refusal of Sir Robert Sale to evacuate Jellalabad, completely baulked all the plans of Ackbar Khan, who supplemented his threatening messages by investing the city in person at the head of two thousand five hundred horse and six thousand five hundred juzailchees; but fortunately Sir Robert had collected provisions for three months, and made a vigorous defence, though the lives or liberties of the hostages, among whom were his own wife and daughter, were held in the balance, and he trusted only to his artillery, the bayonets and the stout hearts of his little garrison, who, in addition to the assaults and missiles of the Afghans, had to contend with earthquakes; for in one month more than a hundred of those throes of nature shook the city, crumbling beneath their feet the old walls they were defending.

In daily expectation of being relieved, Sale's stout English heart never failed him, for he had learned through our faithful friend, Taj Mohammed, the ex-vizier, that Colonel Wild, with a force, was marching to his aid from one quarter, while General Pollock was crossing the Punjaub from another. Yet a long time, he knew, must elapse before the latter could traverse six hundred miles; and ere long came the tidings that Wild had totally failed, either by force of arms or dint of bribery, to achieve a march through the now doubly terrible Khyber Pass.

General Nott, however, held out in Candahar, and, on receiving some supplies and reinforcements; he was ready to co-operate with Sale and Pollock in a joint advance upon Cabul, to rescue the hostages at all hazards, or, if too late for that, to avenge their fate and the fate of our slaughtered army by a terrible retribution.

A severe defeat sustained by Ackbar Khan, when Sale, on the 7th of August, made a resolute sortie and cut his army to pieces, taking two standards, four of our guns lost at Cabul, all his stores and tents, relieved Jellalabad of his presence; and in this state were matters while Waller and Audley Trevelyan were serving there, doing any duty on which they might be ordered, foraging, trenching, and skirmishing, for they were unattached to any regiment; and the former was still ignorant as to the fate of his fiancée, the bright-faced and auburn-haired Mabel Trecarrel, and equally so as to that of her sister and his friend Denzil. He had long since reckoned the two latter as with the dead, and mourned for them as such; for he knew nothing of their being retained as special "loot" by Shereen Khan, who now kept himself aloof from Ackbar, of whom he had conceived a truly Oriental jealousy and mistrust.

Though so near them, Waller knew no more concerning the number, treatment, or the safety of the hostages held for the evacuation of the city he had assisted to defend, than those to whom Downie Trevelyan was applying in London—perhaps less.

To the original number of captives were now added thirty more, from the following circumstance, which in some of its details is curiously illustrative of the cunning and avaricious nature of the Afghan mountaineers. A pretended friendly cossid, or messenger, arrived at Jellalabad, bearer of a letter from Captain Souter, of Her Majesty's 44th Regiment, dated from a village near the hill of Gundamuck, detailing the last stand made there by the few unhappy survivors of Elphinstone's army, and adding that he and Major Griffiths, of the 37th Regiment, were the prisoners of a chief who, on a sufficient ransom being paid—a thousand rupees for each—would send them to Jellalabad with their heads on their shoulders. The brave fellows of the 13th Light Infantry instantly subscribed a thousand rupees at the drum-head; a thousand more were collected with difficulty by their now-impoverished officers; and then came a proposal to ransom twenty-eight privates of the 13th and 44th Regiments, who were in the hands of the same chief, for a lac of rupees. By incredible efforts, and by encroachment on the military chest, this sum was sent with certain messengers, who, by a previously concerted scheme, were waylaid and robbed of it by men sent by Ackbar Khan, who, seizing the thirty Europeans, added them to the other hostages whose lives or liberties were to pay for the surrender of Jellalabad!

The poor soldiers had given all they possessed in the world, save their kits and ammunition, to save their comrades from perilous bondage, and had given it in vain. They had but the consolation of having done for the best.

Amid even the exciting bustle of military duty, the reflections of Waller were sometimes intolerable. He could never for a moment forget. Though he was not, as a matter-of-fact young English officer, prone to flights of romantic fancy, imagination would force upon him with poignant horror all that Mabel might be forced to endure at the hands of those on whose mercy she and her companions were cast by a fate that none could have foreseen, especially during the pleasant days of the year that was passed at Cabul, when the race-course, the band-stand, picnics, hunting-parties, morning drives, and rides to see Sinclair's boat upon the lake, tiffin parties at noon, others for whist or music in the evening, made up the round of European social life there, ere Mohammed Ackbar Khan came to the surface again with his deep-laid plots for aggrandisement and revenge.

Mabel Trecarrel, his affianced wife, so gently soft and lady-like—her image was ever before him, her voice ever in his ear, and the varying expressions of her clear grey eyes, with all her winning ways, came keenly and vividly to memory, more especially in the lonely watches of the night, when muffled in his poshteen, with only a Chinsurrah cheroot to soothe his nerves and keep him warm, he trod from post to post visiting his sentinels, or listened for the sounds that might precede an Afghan assault, or perhaps an earthquake; for the troops had both to encounter, though often nothing came but the melancholy howl of the jackal on the night wind, as it sighed over the vast plain around the city of Jellalabad—the Zarang of the historians of Alexander.

He had frequent thoughts of returning to Cabul in disguise as an Afghan. He had already been pretty successful in his Protean attempts to conceal his identity; but Sir Robert Sale would by no means accord him permission to risk his life again in a manner so perilous; so, as partial inactivity was maddening to him, after Ackbar Khan's defeat had left all the avenues from the city open, he volunteered, if furnished with a suitable escort, to ride to Candahar, and urge on General Nott the policy of instantly advancing. Sir Robert Sale agreed to this, and furnished him with a despatch and a guard of twenty Native Cavalry; so Bob Waller departed, actually in high spirits, thankful that even in this small way he was doing something that might ultimately lead to the recapture of Cabul, and, more than all, the rescue of her he loved.

At a quick pace he crossed the arid desert that surrounds the city, and ascended into the well-wooded and magnificent mountain ranges that rise all around it, but more especially to the westward, whither his route lay, and his spirits rose as his party spurred onward. "What pleasure there is in a gallop!" says Paul Ferroll; "the object is before one, at which to arrive quickly; the still air becomes a wind marking the swiftness of one's pace—the fleet horse is his own master, yet one's slave; the bodily employment leaves care, thought, and time behind. One feels the pleasure of danger, because there might be danger, and yet there may be none."

So thought Waller, as he careered at the head of his party, with a cigar between his teeth, the which to keep alight while riding at full speed, he had previously dipped in saltpetre, a camp-fashion peculiar to India.

Candahar is distant from Jellalabad two hundred and seventy British miles, and, considering the state of the whole country, the undertaking, at the head of twenty horse, was a brave and arduous one; but Waller confidently set out on his expedition, after having carefully inspected his escort of picked men, and personally examined their arms, ammunition, and saddlery, as he knew not whom they might meet, or have to encounter.

By a curious coincidence, on the very day he bade adieu to his brother-officer, Audley Trevelyan, and other friends, to urge and effect a junction of the forces, a fresh and loud burst of indignation against the now-desponding Indian Executive was excited in the minds of Sale's troops by the arrival of a messenger with a startling proposal from the Governor-General, Auckland, to the effect that Jellalabad was not a place to retain any longer; that a retreat was to be made from there to Peshawur; that, in effect, the whole of Afghanistan was to be—as Ackbar Khan wished it—abandoned by our forces, and that the helpless women and children, wounded and sick, at Cabul, were to be left at the mercy of irresponsible barbarians until rescued by quiet negotiations or a judicious distribution of money; and thus to have peace at any price, leaving our disgraces without remedy, our revenge unaccomplished, and our prestige destroyed—in that quarter of the world at least!

Even the English women who were captives in Afghanistan knew better than this; for, amid the earnest prayers which they put up for their liberation, they ever seemed to know that it was "not to be obtained by negotiation and ransom, but by hard fighting," and they had more trust in the bayonets of Sale's Brigade than in all the diplomatists in London or Calcutta.

Fortunately, ere all these disastrous arrangements could be made, a new Governor-General in the person of Lord Ellenborough arrived, and to him Sir Robert Sale despatched Audley Trevelyan with a letter descriptive of his plans, and giving details of his force; and on this mission, with a few attendants, our young staff officer and his companion departed by the way of Peshawur, the gate of Western India, on a long and arduous journey of nearly five hundred miles, by Rawul Pindee and Umritsur, to Simla, on the slopes of the Himalayas—a journey to be performed by horse and elephant, as the occasion might suit; for the railway to Lahore had not as yet sent up its whistle in the realms of Runjeet Sing.

Meanwhile Waller was proceeding in precisely an opposite direction. Compelled to avoid Ghuznee, which was now in the hands of the Afghans under Ameen Oollah Khan, he and his escort, the half-Rissallah of Native Horse, travelled among the mountains, unnoticed and uncared for by the nomadic dwellers in black tents, whose temporary settlements dotted the green slopes. His sowars all wore turbans in lieu of light-cavalry helmets; and as he too had one, with it, his poshteen, and now weather-beaten visage, he passed as a native chief of some kind; and the route they traversed was sometimes as beautiful as picturesque villages, long shady lanes overarched by mulberry-trees, orchards of plums, apples, pomegranates, and those great cherries which were introduced by the Emperor Baber, could make it. And so on they rode, by Kurraba and Killaut, till they reached Candahar in safety; and thankful indeed was honest Bob Waller when from the hills, amid the plain, he beheld the city, with its fortress crowning a precipitous rock, its long low walls of sun-dried brick, and the gilded cupola that shrines the tomb of Ahmed Shah, once "the Pearl of his age," the object of many a Dooranee's prayer, and around which so many recluses spend the remainder of their lives in repeating the Koran over and over again without end.

There Waller was welcomed by the gallant General Nott, whom he found full of stern resolution and high in hope for the future, for he was on the very eve of marching with seven thousand well-tried and well-trained troops to the aid of his friend Sale; and on the 15th of August the movement was made, en route recapturing Ghuznee. It was stormed, and the Afghans again driven out at the point of the bayonet. The whole place was dismantled; and, among others, Waller had the pleasure of standing where no "unbeliever" ever stood before, in the tomb of the Sultan Mahmud, which is entirely of white marble and sculptured over with Arabic verses from the Koran. Around it, beneath the mighty cupola stand thrones of mother-of-pearl; and upon the slab that covers his grave lies the mace he used in battle, with a head of iron, so heavy that few men now-a-days can use it. The gates of this tomb were miracles of carving and beauty; they were of that hard yellow timber known as sandal-wood, which grows on the coast of Malabar and in the Indian Archipelago, and is highly esteemed for its fragrant perfume and as a material for cabinet work. Those gates had been brought as trophies from the famous Hindoo temple of Somnath in Goojerat, when sacked by Mahmud in his last expedition during the tenth century; and after hanging on his tomb for eight hundred years, they were now torn down by order of General Nott, and carried off by our victorious troops, for restoration on their original site.

Prior to all this, General Pollock with his army had reached Jellalabad, which he entered under a joyful salute of sixteen pieces of cannon, and then "forward!" was the word heard on all sides, "forward to Cabul!"

Then it was seen how the weather-beaten and hollow faces of our jaded soldiers brightened with joy and ardour, with a flush for vengeance too; for certain tidings came that, prior to this long-delayed* junction having been effected, the relentless Ackbar, true to his oath, had hurried off all his captives, male and female, in charge of Saleh Mohammed towards the confines of savage Toorkistan—tidings heard by many a husband, father, and lover with despair and rage!.....

* It was with something of waggery, perhaps, that the band of the 13th Light Infantry, on this occasion, welcomed Pollock, by playing the old Scottish melody,

"Oh, but you've been lang o' comin',
Lang, lang, lang o' comin'."