CHAPTER XXXIX.--A MAIL FROM ENGLAND.

THE dreamy conviction or thought with which the last chapter closes,

proved, perhaps, but a foreshadowing of that which was looming in the

future. On the day after that terrible storm of wind, rain, and hail

in the Black Sea, when some five hundred seamen were drowned, and when

so many vessels perished, causing an immense loss to the Allies; a

terrific gale, such as our oldest naval officers had never seen; when

the tents in camp were uprooted in thousands, and swept in rags before

the blast; when the horses broke loose from their picketing-ropes, and

forty were found dead from cold and exposure; when every imaginable

article was blown hither and thither through the air; and when,

without food, fire, or shelter, even the sick and wounded passed a

night of privation and misery such as no human pen can describe, and

many of the Light Division were thankful to take shelter in the old

caverns and cells of Inkermann--on the 15th of November, the day

subsequent to this terrible destruction by land and water, there

occurred an episode in my own story which shall never be forgotten by

me.

Singular to say, amid all the vile hurly-burly incident to the storm,

a disturbance increased by the roar of the Russian batteries, and a

sortie on the French, a mail from England reached our division, and it

contained one letter for me.

Prior to my opening it, as I failed to recognise the writing, Phil

Caradoc (wearing a blanket in the fashion of a poncho-wrapper, a

garment to which his black bearskin cap formed an odd finish) entered

my tent, which had just been re-erected with great difficulty, and I

saw that he had a newspaper in his hand, and very cloudy expression in

his usually clear brown eyes.

"What is up, Phil?" said; "a bad report of our work laid before the

public, or what?"

"Worse than that," said he, seating himself on the empty flour-cask

which served me for a table. "Can you steel yourself to hear bad

news?"

"From home?" I asked.

"Well, yes," said he, hesitating, and a chill came over my heart as I

said involuntarily,

"Estelle?"

"Yes, about Lady Cressingham."

"What--what--don't keep me in suspense!" I exclaimed, starting up.

"She is, I fear, lost to you for ever, Hardinge."

"Ill--dead--O, Phil, don't say dead!"

"No, no."

"Thank God! What, then, is the matter?"

"She is--married, that is all."

"Married!"

"Poor Harry! I am deuced sorry for you. Look at this paper. Perhaps I

shouldn't have shown it to you; but some one less a friend--Mostyn or

Clavell--might have thrown it in your way. Besides, you _must_ have

learned the affair in time. Take courage," he added, after a pause,

during which a very stunned sensation pervaded me; "be a man; she is

not worth regretting."

"To whom is she married?" I asked, in a low voice.

"Pottersleigh," said he, placing in my hand the paper, which was a

_Morning Post_.

I crushed it up into a ball, and then, spreading it out on the head of

the inverted cask, read, while my hands trembled, and my heart grew

sick with many contending emotions, a long paragraph which Phil

indicated, and which ran somewhat as follows, my friend the while

standing quietly by my side, manipulating a cheroot prior to lighting

it with a cinder from my little fire. The piece of fashionable gossip

was headed, "Marriage of the Right Hon. the Earl of Aberconway and the

Lady Estelle Cressingham;" and detailed, in the usual style of such

announcements, that, on a certain--I forget which day _now_--the

lovely and secluded little village of Walcot, in Hampshire, presented

quite a festive appearance in honour of the above-named event, the

union of the young and beautiful daughter of the late Earl of Naseby

to our veteran statesman; that along the route from the gates of

Walcot Park to the porch of the village church were erected several

arches of evergreen, tastefully surmounted by banners and appropriate

mottoes. Among the former "we observed the arms of the now united

noble houses of Potter and Cressingham, and the standards of the

Allies now before Sebastopol. The beautiful old church of Walcot was

adorned with flowers, and crowded to excess long before the hour

appointed. The lovely bride was charmingly attired in white satin,

elegantly trimmed with white lace, and wore a wreath of orange

blossoms on her splendid dark hair, covered with a long veil, _à la

juive_. The bridesmaids, six in number, were as follows:" but I omit

their names as well as the list of gifts bestowed upon the noble

bride, who was given away by her cousin, the young earl. "Lord

Aberconway, with his ribbon of the Garter, wore the peculiar uniform

of the Pottersleigh Yeomanry."

"Rather a necessary addition," said Phil, parenthetically; "his

lordship could scarcely have figured in the ribbon alone."

"--Yeomanry, of which gallant regiment he is colonel, and looked hale

and well for his years. After a choice _déjeûner_ provided for a

distinguished circle, the newly-wedded pair left Walcot Park, amid the

most joyous demonstrations, for Pottersleigh Hall, the ancestral seat

of the noble Earl, to spend the honeymoon."

"A precious flourish of penny whistles!" said Phil, when I had read,

deliberately folded the paper, and thrust it into the fire, to the end

that I might not be troubled by the temptation to read it all over

again; and then we looked at each other steadily for a minute in

silence. Forsaken! I remembered my strange forebodings now, when I had

ridden to Walcot Park. They were married--married, she and old

Pottersleigh! My heart seemed full of tears, yet when seating myself

wearily on the camp-bed, I laughed bitterly and scornfully, as I

thought over the inflated newspaper paragraph, and that the _sangre

azul_ of the Earl of Aberconway must be thin and blue indeed, when

compared with the red blood of my less noble self.

"Come, Harry, don't laugh--in that fashion at least," said Caradoc.

"I've some brandy here," he added, unslinging his canteen, "I got from

a confiding little vivandière of the 10th Regiment, Infanterie de

Ligne. Don't mix it with the waters of Marah, the springs of

bitterness, but take a good caulker neat, and keep up your heart.

_Varium et mutabile semper_--you know the last word is feminine. That

is it, my boy--nothing more. Even the wisest man in the world, though

he dearly loved them, could never make women out; and I fear, Harry,

that you and I are not even the wisest men in the Welsh Fusileers. And

now as a consolation,

"'And that your sorrow may not be a dumb one,

Write odes on the inconstancy of woman.'"

"I loved that girl very truly, very honestly, and very tenderly,

Phil," said I, in a low voice, and heedless of how he had been running

on; "and she kissed me when I left her, as I then thought and hoped a

woman only kisses _once_ on earth. In my sleep I have had a

foreshadowing of this. Can it be that the slumber of the body is but

the waking of the soul, that such thoughts came to me of what was to

be?"

"The question is too abstruse for me," said Caradoc, stroking his

brown beard, which was now of considerable length and volume; "but

don't worry yourself, Harry; you have but tasted, as I foresaw you

would, of the hollow-heartedness, the puerile usages, the petty

intrigues, and the high-born snobbery of those exclusives 'the upper

ten thousand.' Don't think me republican for saying so; but 'there is

one glory of the sun and another of the moon,' as some one writes;

'and there is one style of beauty among women which is angelic, and

another which is _not_,' referring, I presume, to beauty of the

spirit. We were both fated to be unlucky in our loves," continued

Caradoc, taking a vigorous pull at the little plug-hole of his

canteen, a tiny wooden barrel slung over his shoulder by a strap; "but

do take courage, old fellow, and remember there are other women in the

world in plenty."

"But not for me," said I, bitterly.

"Tush! think of me, of my affair--I mean my mistake with Miss Lloyd."

"But she never loved you."

"Neither did this Lady Estelle, now Countess of Aberconway" (I ground

my teeth), "love you."

"She said she did; and what has it all come to? promises broken, a

plight violated, a heart trod under foot."

"Come, come; don't be melodramatic--it's d--d absurd, and no use.

Besides, there sounds the bugle for orders, and we shall have to

relieve the trenches in an hour. So take another cigar ere you go."

"She never loved me--never! never! you are right, Phil."

"And yet I believe she did."

"Did!" said I, angrily; "what do you mean now, Caradoc? I am in no

mood to study paradoxes."

"I mean that she loved you to a certain extent; but not well enough to

sacrifice herself and her--"

"Don't say position--hang it!"

"No--no."

"What then?" I asked, impatiently.

"Her little luxuries, and all that she must have lost by the tenor of

her father's will and her mother's bad will, or that she should have

omitted to gain, had she married you, a simple captain of the 23rd

Foot, instead of this old Potter--this Earl of Aberconway."

"A simple captain, indeed!"

"Pshaw, Harry, be a man, and think no more about the affair. It is as

a tale that is told, a song that is sung, a bottle of tolerable wine

that has become a marine."

"_L'infidelité_ du _corps_, ou l'infidelité du _c[oe]ur_, I care not

now which it was; but I am done with her now and for ever," I

exclaimed, with a sudden gust of rage, while clasping on my sword.

"Done--so I should think, when she is married."

"But to such a contemptible dotard."

"Well, there is some revenge in that."

"And she could cast me aside like an old garment," said I, lapsing

into tenderness again; "I, to whose neck she clung as she did on that

evening we parted. There must have been some trickery--some treachery,

of which we are the victims!"

"Don't go on in this way, like a moonstruck boy, or, by Jove, the

whole regiment will find it out; so calm yourself, for we go to the

front in an hour;" and wringing my hand this kind-hearted fellow,

whose offhand consolation was but ill-calculated to soothe me, left

for his own tent, as he had forgotten his revolver.

I was almost stupefied by the shock. Could the story be real? I looked

to the little grate (poor Evans' contrivance) where the charred

remains of the _Morning Post_ still flickered in the wind. Was I the

same man of an hour ago? "The plains of life were free to traverse,"

as an elegant female writer says, "but the sunshine of old lay across

them no longer. There were roses, but they were scentless--fruits, but

they were tasteless--wine, but it had lost its flavour. Well, every

created being must come to an hour like this, when he feels there is

nothing pleasant to the palate, or grateful to the sense, agreeable to

the ear, or refreshing to the heart; when man delights him not and

woman still less, and when he is sick of the dream of existence."

To this state had I come, and yet I had neither seen nor heard the

last of her.

"Estelle--Estelle!" I exclaimed in a low voice, and my arms went out

into vacancy, to fall back on the camp-bed whereon I reclined.

Abandoned for another; forgotten it might too probably--nay, must be.

I stared up, and looked from the triangular door of the tent over the

wilderness of zigzags, the sand-bags, and fascines of the trenches;

over the gun-batteries to the white houses and green domes of

Sebastopol, and all down the long valley of Inkermann, where the

graves of the dead lay so thick and where the Russian pickets were

quietly cooking their dinners; but I could see nothing distinctly.

The whole features of the scenery seemed blurred, faint, and blended,

for my head was swimming, my heart was sick, and all, all this was

the doing of Estelle! Did no memory of sweet Winifred Lloyd come

to me in my desolation of the heart? None! I could but think of the

cold-blooded treachery of the one I had lost. My letter! I suddenly

remembered it, and tore it open, thinking that the writer, whose hand,

as I have said, I failed to recognise, might cast some light upon the

matter; and to my increasing bewilderment, it proved to be from

Winifred herself. A letter from her, and to _me_; what could it mean?

But the first few words sufficed to explain.

Craigaderyn, . . . .

"My dear Captain Hardinge,--Papa has sprained his whip hand when

hunting with Sir Watkins Vaughan, and so compels me to write for him."

(Why should compulsion be necessary? thought I.) "You will, no doubt,

have heard all about Lady Estelle's marriage by this time. She was

engaged to Lord Pottersleigh _before_ she came here, it would seem,

and matters were brought to an issue soon after your transport sailed.

She wished Dora and me to be among her bridesmaids, but we declined;

nor would papa have permitted us, had we desired to be present at the

ceremony. She bade me say, if I wrote to you, that you must forgive

her, as she is the victim of circumstances; that she shall ever esteem

and love you as a brother, and so forth; but I agree with papa, who

says that she is a cold-hearted jilt, undeserving of any man's love,

and that he 'will never forgive her, even if he lived as long as

Gwyllim ap Howel ap Jorwerth ap Tregaian,' the Old Parr of Wales.

"We are all well at Craigaderyn, and all here send you and Mr. Caradoc

kindest love. We are quite alone just now, and I often idle over my

music, playing 'The Men of Harlech,' and other Welsh airs to papa.

More often I wander and ride about the Martens' dingle, by Carneydd

Llewellyn's hut--you remember it?--by Glendower's oak, by the Elwey,

Llyn Aled, and the rocking stone, and think--think very much of you

and poor Mr. Caradoc, and all that might have been." (Pretty pointed

this--with which--Phil or me? Could I be uncertain?) "Next to hearing

from you, our greatest pleasure at Craigaderyn is to hear about you

and our own Welsh Fusileers, of whose bravery at Alma we are so justly

proud; so we devour the newspapers with avidity and too often with

sorrow. How is my dear pet goat?"

And so, with a pretty little prayer that I might be spared, her letter

ended; and hearing the voices of the adjutant and sergeant-major, I

thrust it into my pocket, and set off to relieve the trenches, with

less of enthusiasm and more recklessness of life than ever before

possessed me, and without reflecting that I did not deserve to receive

a letter so kind and prayerful as that of the dear little Welsh girl,

who was so far away. It was cold that night in the trenches, nathless

the Russian _fire_--yea, cold enough to freeze the marrow in one's

bones; but my heart seemed colder still. In the morning, four of my

company were found dead between the gabions, without a wound, and with

their muskets in their hands. The poor fellows had gone to their last

account--slipt away in sheer exhaustion, through lack of food, warmth,

and clothing--and this was glory!