Part 30

Already the first leaves--the early spoil of the season--were lying in the long, shady avenue, or were gathered in heaps, even as the breeze had swept them, about the well of James V., the yew hedgerows, and the grass walks of the antique Scottish garden, where tradition avers that Anne of Denmark flirted with the bonnie Earl of Gowrie. There the asters and dahlias still contended for a place with the old-fashioned hollyhock. Summer had gone; but the corn-marigold and the gorgeous crimson poppy yet lingered among the yellow stubble, or on the green burn braes; scarlet hips and haws made gay the hedgerows, and the ladybirds were pecking at the sweet apples in the orchard. The shadows of the flying clouds passed over the green mountain slopes, over Largo's lofty cone, the round swelling Lomonds--the Mamelles of Fife, as a French officer not inaptly termed them--the breeze of the German Sea came up the long, fertile Howe, and brought softly to the ear the lowing of cattle from Falkland Woods and many a cosy homestead. The autumn was lovely in Calderwood Glen; but the old manor house seemed empty and silent, and the heart of Cora was sad, for--

Great events were on the gale, And each hour brought a varying tale,

and she knew that the same autumnal sun which was browning the woods of Scotland was lighting her kilted regiments on their path of death and peril by the Alma. There were times when Cora thought that, bitter though it was, this hopeless sorrow for the absence of one she loved, how sweet it might have been--how sadly sweet--had Newton loved her in return. Ah! it had not been hopeless then; but Newton loved another, who loved him too. Yet, did that other love him so well as she, poor quiet Cora, did? And would she love him always? Then, when she heard the thistlefinch, with its golden wings, singing among the linden trees, the words of the old, old song seemed to come home truly to her heart as she hummed them over.

There sat upon the linden tree A bird, and sang its strain; So sweet it sang, that, as I heard, My heart went back again; It went to one remembered spot, It saw the rose-trees grow, And thought again the thoughts of love There cherished long ago.

A thousand years to me it seems Since by my love I sate, Yet thus to have been a stranger long, Was not my choice, but fate; Since then I have not seen the flowers, Nor heard the bird's sweet song, My joys have all too briefly passed, My griefs have been too long!

Ladies were setting forth to join the army of the East as nurses! An idea occurred to her, and then she shrank from it, for Cora was not one of our strong-minded British females but a good and kind-hearted, earnest and high-souled Scottish girl; and it is a peculiarity of the women of Scotland ever to shrink from publicity; and, somehow, public life seems neither their _forte_ nor their _role_.

"Ah, oh!" thought Cora; "what if this is not merely a separation, but a loss for ever!"

No battle had yet been fought; but already many men had perished at Varna, at Scutari, and elsewhere, of fever and cholera. And so, often as she wandered alone in the garden walks, by the old Battle Stone in the woods, by the Adder's Craig, or King James's Well, she wept, as she thought of the lively young lancer whom she had last seen marching for the East, and still more for her early playmate and cousin, who in boyhood so petted her at home.

And when Cora would say, or old Willie Pitblado would read, that the lancers had embarked, that they had touched at Gibraltar, at Malta--that they were at Varna or elsewhere--he would pause, and look up wistfully, saying--"Nae word yet o' my Willie?"

"But the papers don't mention Captain Norcliff either."

"Ay, ay, true, Miss Cora," the old man would mutter, and shake his head at omissions so strange.

Anxiety, love, and fear injured the poor girl's health. She was alternately resigned and gentle, or short-tempered and irritable. Though frequently self-absorbed and pre-occupied, she strove, by affected gaiety, to prove to those about her that she was neither. By turns she was grateful for sympathy or irritated by it, while her craving for news about the army of the East became a source of speculation--shall we call it friendly?--among such sharp-witted visitors as the Mesdames Spittal and Rammerscales, the wife of the parish minister, or the slavishly suave Mrs. Wheedleton, the rib of the village lawyer.

To add to her annoyances, she had a new admirer in young Mr. Brassy Wheedleton--a newly-fledged legal prig--who had in his hands a dispute concerning a bond over a portion of the Calderwood property, and whom, as Sir Nigel patronized him, being the son of a neighbour, a dependent, and beginner at the bar, she saw rather oftener than she cared for as a visitor at the Glen. Cora was always most irritable when a letter came from her English friends in Kent. However, her correspondence with Chillingham Park had lessened every day since the regiment left England, why neither could exactly say. Louisa's missives were generally full of gaiety and the world of fashion, with all its tinsel glitter and heartless frivolity. As for the war, and our poor soldiers in the East, she heeded them no more than the clock of St. Paul's, or the last year's snow. Her last letter had been all concerning the elevation of my Lord Slubber to a marquisate (skipping the intervening titles of viscount and earl,) and enclosing a slip from a fashionable morning paper, which announced that the garter king had given to the noble peer "a coat of augmentation, in addition to the three guffins' heads mange, of the grand Anglo-Norman line of De Gullion, with the cage in chief granted to the fourth baron of that illustrious name, by the greatest of the Plantagenets, when that chivalrous monarch hung the Scottish Countess of Buchan outside the walls of Berwick for four years in an iron cage, and when 'ye potente and valyant Lord Slobbyr de Gulyone was captain yairof with CCC archeris.'"

This afforded her father the first hearty laugh in which he had indulged for some time past, for he, too, had become somewhat dull and peevish.

"Three guffins' heads; Cora, this is excellent!" said the old baronet, laughing still; "it is very droll how the English snob of high family boasts of his descent from the rabble of William the Norman, just as our Scotch snob likes to deduce his pedigree from those Saxon _hildings_ who fled from Hastings, or the savage Danes we licked at Luncarty and elsewhere. There were Calderwoods in the Glen before either of those times! What says the old rhyme?

Calderwood was fair to see, When it gaid to Cameltrie; But Calderwood was fairer still, When it grew owre Crosswood Hill."

Sir Nigel's old chum, General Rammerscales, was laid up with the gout and jungle fever, and their political friend, Lickspittal, was absent in Parliament--where, like a true Scottish M.P., he served to fill the house, to vote with the lord advocate or the majority, to work on all committees (which paid); but, of course, remaining as oblivious of Scottish interests as of those of the Sioux Indians.

Now that he was residing almost permanently at the old manor house--the Place of Calderwood, as it was named _par excellence_--Sir Nigel became somewhat infected by his daughter's melancholy. Thoughts of his two dead sons--Nigel, who fell at Goojerat, of his pet boy Archie, and also of his nephew, his favourite sister's only son, exposed to all the perils of disease and war in Turkey--recurred to him again and again, as he wandered through the rooms and under the old linden trees that had often echoed to their voices in infancy; and he thought of how the old estates, and the title first granted by King Charles to Sir Norman Calderwood, _Primus Baronettorum Scotiae_, would go after his death, an event which he knew must happen some day; for, though hale and hearty yet, he felt that he rode a stone or two heavier now, was apt to "funk" at a sunk fence, and was finding that noble brute Splinterbar a trifle hard in the mouth for his bridle-hand now.

Even Cora's old song of "The Thistle and Rose" only served to make him sad--to make him think of those who had sung it long, long ago; and then he would order another bottle of that rare, creamy old claret, that Mr. Binns kept among the cobwebs, in a particular corner of the cellar, for _themselves_.

Faithful old Davie Binns! He had grown grey, white, and bald in the service of the Calderwoods, like his fathers before him, and like many other servants in that kind old Scottish household--one, indeed, "of the olden time." If he had been dismissed for a dereliction of duty, he would have thought the world was coming to an end, and doubtless would have flatly refused to go; for Davie was one of a class of servitors that are passing away, even in Scotland and Ireland; and from the sister-kingdom I fear they have long since vanished.

Accompanied by old Willie, Sir Nigel and a friend or two had occasionally a shot at the partridges in the stubble or the turnip-fields; but when the first meet of the hounds took place their master was absent.

In vain the horns were blown by Largo's slopes and Balcarris Wood; in vain the dogs gave mouth, and yelped, and wagged their upright tails. The cover was drawn, and every spur struck deep, as the huntsmen sped over dyke and ditch, by loch, and moor, and mountain; but Sir Nigel was sorrowing at his house in the Glen, and his favourite hunters, Saline and Splinterbar, were forgotten in their stalls.

Why was this?

On a Sunday towards the end of September--a Sunday which many must recall with sorrow--mysteriously, as if borne in the air, there passed a whisper over all the land of a great event that had happened far, far away; and that whisper found an echo in many a heart and home in England--in many an Irish mud cabin and Scottish glen--in many a high and many a humble dwelling.

In the quaint old village kirk of Calderwood, during the morning service, it passed along the pews from ear to ear among the people, even to the old haunted aisle of St. Margaret, where Cora sat (her sweet, earnest eyes intent on the preacher, though her thoughts were far away) beside her father in his carved oak seat, with all its armorial bearings overhead; for he was lord of all the glen and manor--a little king, but a very kind one, among the peasantry there.

So, on this calm, sunny summer morning, when no sound disturbed the preacher's voice but the rustle of the oak woods without, or the twittering of the martins in their nests among the Gothic carvings, there came vaguely to the pastoral glen--vaguely, wildly, no one knew how--news that a great battle had been fought far, far away in the East, and that we had lost four, five, some said even six thousand men; but that we were, thank God, _victorious_.

Pausing in his sermon, while his eyes kindled and his cheek flushed as they had never done when detailing the bloody wars of the Jews and Egyptians, the aged minister announced the tidings from the pulpit, adding (the first false rumour) "that the Duke of Cambridge had fallen at the head of the Guards and our own Highland lads, as he led them, sword in hand, up the braes of the Alma."

Every eye turned to St. Margaret's aisle, where, through the painted windows, the yellow sunshine streamed on Sir Nigel's silver hair and Cora's smooth dark braids, for all knew that they had a dear kinsman in that distant field, and when the minister asked the people to join with him in prayer for those who might fall, and for the widows and orphans of the slain, it was with earnest, humble, and contrite hearts that the startled and anxious rustics added their voices to his.

Cora covered her face with her handkerchief; and old Pitblado looked round him, grim and sternly as any Covenanter who ever wore a blue bonnet; but the poor man's heart was full of tears, as he prayed to heaven that his Willie might be safe. Besides, as a native of Fife, he had much of the old and inbred horror of soldiering peculiar to that peninsula, since those dark days when the Fifeshire infantry found their graves on the field of Kilsythe.

Ere the red autumn sun went down beyond the green hills of Clackmannan, the electric wire had announced the passage of the Alma over all the length and breadth of the land--flashing over all Europe, from the shores of the Bosphorus to those of the Shannon.

But in reply to a message sent by Sir Nigel to the War Office--a telegram despatched to soothe the agony of love--came the brief but terrible answer--

"_The name of your nephew is among the killed!_"

"Papa--papa--among the killed--among the killed!" Cora exclaimed, after the first stunning paroxysm of her grief was past.

"Yet I do not despair, Cora," said the old man, in his bewilderment, caressing her, and not knowing what to say, while remembering the keen bitterness that the gazette of Goojerat brought to his heart, when there he read the name of his eldest son and hope--his dark and handsome Nigel.

"Oh, do not speak of hope to me, papa. Poor Newton, I did so love him! I cannot dare to hope!"

"Dearest Cora, we have no details. He may be missing. I have heard of many returned so in the old Peninsular times. My old friend, Jack Oswald, of Dunnik, among others; but he was always found under a heap of dead men, or so forth."

"But the telegram says distinctly, among the killed--his body, his poor, mangled body, must have been seen----"

"Colonel Beverley will write to me. In a few days we shall know all the particulars."

"Even were he only wounded, I should be miserable; but to know that he is dead--dead--Newton dead--buried far, far away by strangers, and among strangers, and that I shall never, never see him more! Oh, papa--my dear papa!" she exclaimed, as she flung herself upon his breast, "I loved Newton dearly--far more dearly than life!"

And so the great secret escaped her in her grief.

*CHAPTER XXXVIII.*

The fight's begun;--in momentary blaze Bright o'er the hills the volleying lightning plays, Bursts the loud shell, the death shots hiss around, And the hoarse cannon adds its heavier sound, Till wide the gathering clouds that rise between Clothe in a thicker gloom the maddening scene; And as the billow's wild and angry crest, That swells in foam on Ocean's lurid breast, Through each long line the curling volumes spread, And hang their white wreaths o'er the column's head.

After the troops crossed the Bulganak, strict silence was enjoined, and no drum was beaten or bugle blown. Scattered parties of Russian cavalry scoured all the ground before us; and as they galloped to and fro, the gleam of Cossack lances, the flash of a carbine, or the steady glitter of sword-blades and cuirasses, shone at times from among the groves of the turpentine trees, and between the rocky undulations of the landscape. Thus we, the British, could not make ourselves quite aware of the nature of the ground we were approaching, while the French marched straight and confidently towards certain great cliffs, which had been carefully reconnoitred from the sea on the extreme right, and which they were to storm, with the village of Almatamack, at the point of the bayonet. At nine o'clock, the French on our right--Bosquet's column--halted, and quietly cooked their coffee, while our troops were still moving laboriously over rough ground, to bring our flank closer to theirs; and now, far beyond the extended columns of the allies--those long, bright lines of bayonets, sloped barrels, and waving colours that shone in the sun of a lovely morning--we saw the dark smoke of the war-steamers towering into the clear air, as they crept in-shore, seeking opportunities to open fire upon the Russian's lofty position; and at twenty minutes past ten we heard the first cannon booming, as they threw their shot among the imperial troops in rear of the telegraph station, which was distant nearly five thousand metres from the shore. Two more protracted halts took place, while final consultations were made between Lord Raglan and Marshal St. Arnaud; but still we were drawing nearer the scene of the coming conflict.

Before us rolled the Alma--a picturesque river--which takes its rise among the western slopes of the Chatyrdagh, in Crim Tartary, and falls into the Euxine, about twelve miles from Sebastopol. High rises its southern bank into picturesque rocks, that in some places are precipitous, and terminate in a lofty cliff which overhangs the sea; and this formidable position was to be defended against us by more than thirty-nine thousand Russians and one hundred and six pieces of cannon, led by Prince Alexander Menschikoff, one of the Emperor's most distinguished generals, who had entered the world as the son of a poor pastrycook, but who now held the supreme civil and military command in the Crimea. A round shot from a Turkish cannon had mutilated him severely at the siege of Varna, and hence the hatred he bore the race and faith of the Osmanlis was deep and fierce. His skill was not equal to his presumption, for he fully thought--as a letter found in his carriage by Captain Travers of ours, after the battle, asserted--that if the three invading armies were not routed at the Alma, he would be fully able to defend its hills for three weeks, until the Emperor sent him reinforcements from the steppes of Bessarabia.

Two miles from the mouth of the Alma stood the picturesque little village of Burliuk. It was now in flames, and the smoke of the conflagration was rolling among the vineyards, which covered the slope that extended between the stream and the base of those cliffs along which glittered the hostile lines of the Russian army. Two miles in length those lines extended along the hills, which were intersected by deep ravines. On every ridge strong batteries of cannon swept the approaches to these; deep trenches were dug along the mountain slopes, and therein were posted the infantry. Constructed on the side of the Kourgane Hill, which rises to the height of six hundred feet above the Alma, was an enormous battery, forming two sides of a triangle, and mounting fourteen heavy guns, thirty-two pounders, and twenty-four pound howitzers. The ascent to this was commanded by three other batteries, mounting twenty-five guns. To assail the Kourgane Hill--the right wing of the Russian army--with all its cannon, howitzers, and trenches, was the task assigned to the Light Division under Sir George Brown, supported by the Duke of Cambridge, with the Guards and Highlanders; and so intent was Menschikoff on its defence, that he had there concentrated sixteen battalions of regular infantry, two battalions of sailors, and two brigades of field-pieces. Near them were many ladies in carriages from Sebastopol, and elsewhere, waiting to see the "English curs" beaten.

During one of the protracted halts referred to, I could not help thinking how lovely was the morning for the unholy work we had in hand! The sun was without a cloud, and the soft breeze of the September morn played along the grassy slopes, rustling the leaves of the olive and turpentine groves, and the broader foliage of the vineyards, till at last even its breath died away upon the summit of the hostile hills. "It was then that in the allied armies there occurred," says Kinglake, "a singular pause of sound--a pause so general as to have been observed and remembered by many in remote parts of the ground, and so marked that its interruption by the mere neighing of an angry horse seized the attention of thousands; and although this strange silence was the mere result of weariness and chance, it seemed to carry a meaning; for it was now that, after nearly forty years of peace, the great nations of Europe were once more meeting for battle!"

The French steamers were now shelling the heights, the Russians making but a poor response; and just as a bomb, splendidly thrown by the former, among the smoke wreaths that curled round the brow of the cliffs, unmasked an ambush which had been prepared for the advancing Zouaves, after the smoke cleared away, showed by the prostrate forms of the riflemen it slew, how well it had done its fatal work--just as I was watching this episode, through my glass, I heard Studhome say, "Norcliff, we are to go to the front."

"Ours, alone?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Can't say; but you see the danger of having a reputation, Newton," said Jack, laughing, for he was in unusual high spirits. "We lancers served against the Pindarees in Central India, at Neerbudda, and elsewhere--the men and horses, poor nags, change; but the name and the number remain. Thus, you see what the honour of having a good name and gallant number costs us. The lancers must advance."

"Only your squadron, Captain Norcliff," said Colonel Beverley, cantering up to where we were halted in brigade; "you will advance and extend to double the usual skirmishing distance, simply to feel the enemy."

I saluted and gave the command, "Threes right--left-wheel--forward," and away we went at a swinging trot, with plumes and pennons glittering in the air.

"If they hit you, Bill?" cried one of our men to Sergeant Dashwood, of Wilford's troop, which formed the left of my squadron.

"Bah! I escaped often enough in India," said the sergeant, laughing; "and, please Heaven, were it only for my poor wife's sake, I shall do so again."

It did not please Heaven, however, for within one hour after this worthy Sergeant Dashwood was lying on his back, pale and stiff, with a bullet in his heart.

As we halted, formed line to the front, and extended from the right at full speed, I heard Jocelyn of ours, a wild and extravagant fellow, say to Sir Henry Scarlett, "I wonder how many infernal _post obits_ will be cancelled to-day!"

We now advanced slowly over the open ground, halting at times, and every moment gave us a clearer and nearer view of the enemy's position.

I looked to the rear. How steadily they were coming on, those splendid lines of British infantry--the Royal and the Welsh Fusiliers, the 19th, and 33rd, and Connaught Rangers--stretching far away from flank to flank, in scarlet--that glorious and historic colour, which fills at once the eye and the mind--their bayonets flashing in the sun, and their colours threateningly advanced, but hanging listless, for the wind had died away. Thousands of those who were now marching there, in youth, and pride, and health--whose place at home was still vacant in many a parent's heart--were doomed to fatten the earth with their bones, and make the grass of future summers grow greener on the slopes of the Alma. Strong memories of my early youth, of my dead mother's face and voice, were with me now, and tears came too--I scarcely knew why; but I felt somewhat as if in a dream. I had a strong yearning also to see the proud Louisa, the tender Cora Calderwood, and my kind old uncle--those I might never see again.