A Rent In A Cloud Part 25

"She knows you, Joseph. She is trying to thank you," said Emily.

"Her lips are moving: can you hear what she says, Milly?"

The girl bent over the bed, till her ear almost touched her sister's mouth. "Yes, darling, from his heart he does. He never loved you with such devotion as now. She asks if you can forgive her, Joseph. She remembers everything."

"And not leave me," sighed Florence, in a voice barely audible.

"No, my own dearest, I will not leave you," was all that he could utter in the conflict of joy and sorrow he felt A weak attempt to thank him she made by an effort to press his hand, but it sent a thrill of delight through his heart, more than a recompense for all he had suffered.

If Emily, with a generous delicacy, retired towards the window and took up her work, not very profitably perhaps, seeing how little light came through the nearly closed shutters, let us not show ourselves less discreet, and leave the lovers to themselves. Be a.s.sured, dear reader, that in our reserve on this point we are not less mindful of your benefit than of theirs. The charming things, so delightful to say and so ecstatic to hear, are wonderfully tame to tell. Perhaps their very charm is in the fact, that their spell was only powerful to those who uttered them. At all events, we are determined on discretion, and shall only own that, though Aunt Grainger made periodical visits to the sick-room, with frequent references to the hour of the day, and the departures and arrival of various rail trains, they never heard her, or, indeed, knew that she was present.

And though she was mistress of those "asides" and that grand innuendo style which is so deadly round a corner, they never paid the slightest heed to her fire. All the adroit references to the weather, and the "glorious day for travelling," went for naught As well as the more subtle compliments she made Florence on the appet.i.te she displayed for her chocolate, and which were intended to convey that a young lady who enjoyed her breakfast so heartily need never have lost a man a pa.s.sage to Calcutta for the pleasure of seeing her eat it. Truth was, Aunt Grainger was not in love, and consequently, no more fit to legislate for those who were than a peasant in rude health is to sympathise with the nervous irritability of a fine lady! Neither was Milly in love, you will perhaps say, and _she_ felt for them. True, but Milly might be--Milly was const.i.tutionally exposed to the malady, and the very vicinity of the disease was what the faculty call a predisposing cause. It made her very happy to see Joseph so fond, and Florence so contented.

Far too happy to think of the price he paid for his happiness, Loyd pa.s.sed the day beside her. Never before was he so much in love! Indeed, it was not till the thought of losing her for ever presented itself, that he knew or felt what a blank life would hereafter become to him.

Some quaint German writer has it that these little quarrels which lovers occasionally get up as a sort of trial of their own powers of independence, are like the attempt people make to remain a long time under-water, and which only end in a profound conviction that their organisation was unequal to the test But there is another form these pa.s.sing differences occasionally take. Each of the erring parties is sure to nourish in his or her heart the feeling of being most intensely beloved by the other! It is a strange form for selfishness to take, but selfishness is the most Protaean of all failings, and there never was seen the mask it could not fit to its face.

"And so you imagined you could cast me off, Florence!" "And you, Master Joseph, had the presumption to think you could leave me," formed the sum and substance of that long day's whispering. My dear, kind reader, do not despise the sermon from the seeming simplicity of the text There is a deal to be said on it, and very pleasantly said, too. It is, besides, a sort of litigation in which charge and cross charge recur incessantly, and, as in all amicable suits, each party pays his own costs.

It was fortunate, most fortunate, that their reconciliation took this form. It enabled each to do that which was most imminent to be done--to ignore Calvert altogether, and never recur to any mention of his name.

Loyd saw that the turquoise ring was no longer worn by her, and she, with a woman's quickness, noted his observation of the fact I am not sure that in her eyes a recognition of his joy did not glisten, but she certainly never uttered a word that could bring up his name.

"So I am your guest, Madam, for ten days more!" said Loyd to Miss Grainger, as they sat at tea that night.

"Oh, we are only too happy. It is a very great pleasure to us, if--if we could feel that your delay may not prove injurious to you."

"It will be very enjoyable, at all events," said he, with an easy smile, and as though to evade the discussion of the other "count".

"I was thinking of what your friends would say about it."

"It is a very limited public, I a.s.sure you," said he, laughing, "and one which so implicitly trusts me, that I have only to say I have done what I believed to be right to be confirmed in their good esteem."

The old lady was not to be put off by generalities, and she questioned him closely as to whether an overland pa.s.sage did not cost a hundred pounds and upwards, and all but asked whether it was quite convenient to him to disburse that amount She hinted something about an adage of people who "paid for their whistle," but suggested some grave doubts if they ever felt themselves recompensed in after time by recollecting the music that had cost so dearly; in a word, she made herself supremely disagreeable while he drank his tea, and only too glad to make his escape to go and sit beside Florry, and talk over again all they had said in the morning.

"Only think, Milly," said she, poutingly, as her sister entered, "how Aunt Grainger is worrying poor Joseph, and won't let him enjoy in peace the few days we are to have together."

But he did enjoy them, and to the utmost Florence very soon threw off all trace of her late indisposition, and sought, in many ways, to make her lover forget all the pain she had cost him. The first week was one of almost unalloyed happiness; the second opened with the thought that the days were numbered. After Monday came Tuesday, then Wednesday, which preceded Thursday, when he was to leave.

How was it, they asked themselves, that a whole week had gone over? It was surely impossible! Impossible it must be, for now they remembered the ma.s.s of things they had to talk over together, not one of which had been touched on.

"Why, Joseph dearest, you have told me nothing about yourself. Whether you are to be in Calcutta, or up the country? Where, and how I am to write? When I am to hear from you? What of papa--I was going to say, our papa--would he like to hear from me, and may I write to him? Dare I speak to him as a daughter? Will he think me forward or indelicate for it? May I tell him of all our plans? Surely you ought to have told me some of these things! What could we have been saying to each other all this while?"

Joseph looked at her, and she turned away her head pettishly, and murmured something about his being too absurd. Perhaps he was; I certainly hold no brief to defend him in the case: convict or acquit him, dear reader, as you please.

And yet, notwithstanding this appeal, the next three days pa.s.sed over just as forgetfully as their predecessors, and then came the sad Wednesday evening, and the sadder Thursday morning, when, wearied out and exhausted, for they had sat up all night--his last night--to say good-bye.

"I declare he will be late again; this is the third time he has come back from the boat," exclaimed Miss Grainger, as Florence sank, half fainting, into Emily's arms.

"Yes, yes, dear Joseph," muttered Emily, "go now, go at once, before she recovers again."

"If I do not, I never can," cried he, as the tears coursed down his face, while he hurried away.

The monotonous beat of the oars suddenly startled the half-conscious girl; she looked up, and lifted her hand to wave an adieu, and then sank back into her sister's arms, and fainted.

Three days after, a few hurried lines from Loyd told Florence that he had sailed for Malta--this time irrevocably off. They were as sad lines to read as to have written. He had begun by an attempt at jocularity; a sketch of his fellow-travellers coming on board; their national traits, and the strange babble of tongues about them; but, as the bell rang, he dropped this, and scrawled out, as best he could, his last and blotted good-byes. They were shaky, ill-written words, and might, who knows, have been blurred with a tear or two. One thing is certain, she who read, shed many over them, and kissed them, with her last waking breath, as she fell asleep.

About the same day that this letter reached Florence, came another, and very different epistle, to the hands of Algernon Drayton, from his friend Calvert It was not above a dozen lines, and dated from Alexandria:

"The Leander has just steamed in, crowded with sn.o.bs, civil and military, but no Loyd. The fellow must have given up his appointment or gone 'long sea.' In any case, he has escaped me. I am frantic. A whole month's plottings of vengeance scattered to the winds and lost! I'd return to England, if I were only certain to meet with him: but a Faquir, whom I have just consulted, says, 'Go east, and the worst will come of it!' and so I start in two hours for Suez. There are two here who know me, but I mean to caution them how they show it; they are old enough to take a hint.

"Yours, H. C.

"I hear my old regiment has mutinied, and sabred eight of the officers. I wish they'd have waited a little longer, and neither S. nor W. would have got off so easily. From all I can learn, and from the infernal fright the fellows who are going back exhibit, I suspect that the work goes bravely on."

CHAPTER XVIII. TIDINGS FROM BENGAL.

I am not about to chronicle how time now rolled over the characters of our story. As for the life of those at the villa, nothing could be less eventful All existences that have any claim to be called happy are of this type, and if there be nothing brilliant or triumphant in their joys, neither is there much poignancy in their sorrows.

Loyd wrote almost by every mail, and with a tameness that shadowed forth the uniform tenor of his own life. It was pretty nigh the same story, garnished by the same reflections. He had been named a district judge "up country," and pa.s.sed his days deciding the disputed claims of indigo planters against the ryots, and the ryots against the planters. Craft, subtlety, and a dash of perjury, ran through all these suits, and rendered them rather puzzles for a quick intelligence to resolve, than questions of right or legality. He told, too, how dreary and uncompanionable his life was; how unsolaced by friends.h.i.+p, or even companions.h.i.+p; that the climate was enervating, the scenery monotonous, and the thermometer at a hundred and twenty or a hundred and thirty degrees.

Yet Loyd could speak with some encouragement about his prospects. He was receiving eight hundred rupees a month, and hoped to be promoted to some place, ending in Ghar or Bad, with an advance of two hundred more. He darkly hinted that the mutinous spirit of certain regiments was said to be extending, but he wrote this with all the reserve of an official, and the fear that Aunt Grainger might misquote him. Of course there were other features in these letters--those hopes and fears, and prayers and wishes, which lovers like to write, almost as well as read, poetising to themselves their own existence, and throwing a rose-tint of romance over lives as lead-coloured as may be. Of these I am not going to say anything. It is a theme both too delicate and too dull to touch on. I respect and I dread it. I have less reserve with the correspondence of another character of our tale, though certainly, when written, it was not meant for publicity. The letter of which I am about to make an extract, and it can be but an extract, was written about ten months after the departure of Calvert for India, and, like his former ones, addressed to his friend Drayton:

"At the hazard of repeating myself, if by chance my former letters have reached you, I state that I am in the service of the Meer Morad, of Ghurtpore, of whose doings the _Times_ correspondent will have told you something. I have eight squadrons of cavalry and a half battery of field-pieces-- bra.s.s ten pounders--with an English crown on their breech.

We are well armed, admirably mounted, and perfect devils to fight. You saw what we did with the detachment of the --th, and their sick convoy, coming out of Allenbad. The only fellow that escaped was the doctor, and I saved his life to attach him to my own staff. He is an Irish fellow, named Tobin, and comes from Tralee--if there be such a place--and begs his friends there not to say ma.s.ses for him, for he is alive, and drunk every evening. Do this, if not a bore.

"By good luck the Meer, my chief quarrelled with the king's party in Delhi, and we came away in time to save being caught by Wilson, who would have recognised me at once.

By-the-way, Baxter of the 30th was stupid enough to say, 'Eh, Calvert' what the devil are you doing amongst these n.i.g.g.e.rs?' He was a prisoner, at the time, and, of course, I had to order him to be shot for his imprudence.

How he knew me I cannot guess; my beard is down to my breast, and I am turbaned and shawled in the most approved fas.h.i.+on. We are now simply marauding, cutting off supplies, falling on weak detachments, and doing a small retail business in murder wherever we chance upon a station of civil servants. I narrowly escaped being caught by a troop of the 9th Lancers, every man of whom knows me. I went over with six trusty fellows, to Astraghan, where I learned that a certain Loyd was stationed as Government receiver. We got there by night, burned his bungalow, shot him, and then discovered he was not our man, but another Loyd. Bradshaw came up with his troop. He gave us an eight mile chase across country, and, knowing how the Ninth ride, I took them over some sharp nullahs, and the croppers they got you'll scarcely see mentioned in the government despatches. I fired three barrels of my Yankee six- shooter at Brad, and I heard the old beggar offer a thousand rupees for my head. When he found he could not overtake us, and sounded a halt, I screamed out, 'Threes about, Bradshaw, I'd give fifty pounds to hear him tell the story at mess: 'Yes, Sir, begad, Sir, in as good English, Sir, as yours or mine, Sir; a fellow who had served the Queen, I'll swear.'

"For the moment, it is a mere mutiny, but it will soon be a rebellion, and I don't conceal from myself the danger of what I am doing, as you, in all likelihood, will suspect.

Not dangers from the Queen's fellows--for they shall never take me alive--but the dangers I run from my present a.s.sociates, and who, of course, only half trust me.... Do you remember old Commissary-General Yates--J.C.V.R. Yates, the old a.s.s used to write himself? Well, amongst the other events of the time, was the sack and 'loo' of his house at Cawnpore, and the capture of ais pretty wife, whom they brought in here a prisoner. I expected to find the poor young creature terrified almost out of her reason. Not a bit of it! She was very angry with the fellows who robbed her, and rated, them roundly in choice Hindostanee, telling one of the chiefs that his grandfather was a scorched pig. Like a woman, and a clever woman, too, though she recognised me-- I can almost swear that she did--she never showed it, and we talked away all the evening,-and smoked our hookahs together in Oriental guise. I gave her a pa.s.s next morning to Calcutta, and saw her safe to the great trunk road, giving her bearers as far as Behdarah. She expressed herself as very grateful for my attentions, and hoped at some future time--this with a malicious twinkle of her gray eyes--to show the 'Bahadoor' that she had not forgotten them. So you see there are lights as well as shadows in the life of a rebel."

I omit a portion here, and come to the conclusion, which was evidently added in haste.

"'Up and away!' is the order. We are off to Bithoor. The Nana there--a staunch friend, as it was thought, of British rule--has declared for independence, and as there is plenty of go in him, look out for something 'sensational.' You wouldn't believe how, amidst all these stirring scenes, I long for news--from what people call home--of Rocksley and Uncle G., and the dear Soph; but more from that villa beside the Italian lake. I'd give a canvas bag that I carry at my girdle with a goodly stock of pearls, sapphires, and rubies, for one evening's diary of that cottage!

"If all go on as well and prosperously as I hope for, I have not the least objection, but rather a wish that you would tell the world where I am, and what I am doing. Linked with failure, I'd rather keep dark; but as a sharer in a great success, I burn to make it known through the length and breadth of the land that I am alive and well, and ready to acquit a number of personal obligations, if not to the very fellows who injured me, to their friends, relatives, and cousins, to the third generation. Tell them, Algy, 'A duel's amang ye, cutting throats,' and add, if you like, that he writes himself your attached friend,

"Harry Calvert?"

This letter, delivered in some mysterious manner to the bankers at Calcutta, was duly forwarded, and in time reached the hands of Alfred Drayton, who confided its contents to a few "friends" of Calvert's--men who felt neither astonished nor shocked at the intelligence--s.h.i.+fty fellows, with costly tastes, who would live on society somehow, reputably, if they could--dishonourably if they must; and who all agreed that "Old Calvert," as they called him--he was younger than most of them--had struck out a very clever line, and a far more remunerative one than "rooking young Griffins at billiards"--such being, in their estimation, the one other alternative which fete had to offer him.

This was all the publicity, however, Drayton gave to his friend's achievements. Somehow or other, paragraphs did appear, not naming Calvert, but intimating that an officer, who had formerly served her Majesty, had been seen in the ranks of the insurgents of Upper Bengal.

Yet Calvert was not suspected, and he dropped out of people's minds as thoroughly as if he had dropped out of life.

To this oblivion, for a while, we must leave him; for even if we had in our hands, which we have not, any records of his campaigning life, we might scruple to occupy our readers with details which have no direct bearing upon our story. That Loyd never heard of him is clear enough.