Part 39

Doubled up, a dead and ghastly heap, under a dying and mangled charger! The next who fell was my friend Wilford. If he was somewhat of a dandy in England, there was no want of pluck in him here. Leading his troop, he fell close by me, and I leaped my horse over him as he rolled past, churning a mouthful of grass and earth, his features awfully convulsed, and his limbs trembling in their death agony. Poor Fred Wilford!

On and on yet! Many a familiar face is gone now; the gaps are fearful, and men who were on the flanks now find themselves in the centre. Yet, withal, it is impossible not to feel how--

One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.

On we still gallop towards that mouth of fire--on, and fearlessly. The best blood of the three kingdoms is in our ranks, all well and nobly mounted, the flower of our gallant cavalry--on yet like a whirlwind, the hearty British "Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!" ringing in our ears; the heart's blood seems mounting to the brain; and _now_ we are upon them!--now the red flashing muzzles of the cannon are passed; the gunners are throwing themselves under the wheels and limbers, where we cut them down, and spear or pin them to the turf. Others are rushing for shelter to their squares of infantry, under whose rifles they lie flat and securely, while sheets of lead are tearing through us!

Oh, the superlative bitterness of that moment, when, with all our horses blown, I look back and see that we are without supports!

The guns are taken--the gunners almost annihilated; our horses are breathless. We have no aid, and no resource but to ride back, under such a concentrated fire as troops were never before exposed to.

"It's all up--threes about--retire!"

A single trumpet feebly gives the call, and away we go.

Shot--in the heart, perhaps--my Arab steed sank down gently beneath me; but I received a severe blow from something, I know not what--the splinter of a shell, probably, which crushed my lancer cap, and almost stunned me. I must have remounted myself mechanically, for when we hacked our way back, and reached the rear, I was riding a bay horse of the 11th Hussars, the saddle and holsters of which were slimy with blood. The horse fell with me soon after, as it had been disembowelled by a grape shot.

Of all those glorious regiments who formed the Light Brigade, there came back but one hundred and ninety-eight men; many of these were wounded, and many dismounted; and when the rolls were called over at nightfall, it was found that one hundred and fifty-seven were dead, one hundred and nineteen were wounded, and that three hundred and thirty fine horses were killed, leaving more than one hundred and thirty dragoons unaccounted for.

I had not the heart to number the forty men who represented the two squadrons which followed Lionel Beverley. There, on the green sward of that Valley of Death, lay our gallant colonel, cut in two by a round shot; Travers, torn to pieces by grape shot; Scriven, slain by three lance wounds; Howard, "the only son of his mother, and she was a widow;" Frank Jocelyn, our old sergeant-major, and an incredible number of others killed. The flower of our lancers were there, and among them my faithful follower, Pitblado, with a rifle bullet in his leg.

Hot, breathless, stiff, sore, and covered with bruises, I now discovered that in the _melee_--though I was unconscious of having struck a blow--there were, at least, twenty notches in the blade of my sword, that I had received three very severe lance prods, two sword cuts, and that my uniform was torn to rags. When we halted to girth up, I threw myself on the rich grass of the valley, and, taking off my battered lancer cap, felt the cool breeze most grateful, as it came from the distant sea. Then I buried my face among the verdure, less for coolness than from excess of weakness, and to hide the sorrow that consumed me for the losses we had sustained.

From a distance came the cheers of the Heavy Brigade, avenging us, and completing the work we had begun. Then the fierce excitement--the devil that had possessed me--passed away, and I thought only of the dying and the dead.

* * * * *

"Is that you, Lanty?" said a voice near me.

"Ov coorse it is--barrin' the tip of an ear."

"Well, thank God, there are at least two of our troop left."

"And the captain here!"

I must have fainted from exhaustion and loss of blood, for after a time I was surprised to find my jacket open at the neck, and that I was propped against my dead horse by Dr. Hartshorn, who was binding up my cuts and scars, while Lanty O'Regan attended, with a short black dudeen in his mouth, which had been enlarged by a sword cut, and then roughly patched with plaster, which did not, however, prevent poor Lanty from talking.

"Me mouth, is it, I'm to take care ov, docthor dear? Sure, if it is only for the sake ov the girls, I'll do that same; but, be gorra! I wish that dirty Roosian had been holdin' on the horns of the new moon wid his fingers well greased, before I came across him."

"Are you sure the farrier-sergeant is dead?"

"Quite sure, docthor."

"You saw him get the sleeping draught?"

"Sure, the draught it was that finished him right off?"

"What the deuce do you mean? I took orf his leg successfully in the Turkish hospital."

"And sure, afther ye war gone, the Turkish Hospital sergeant, who was blazing drunk with raki, made up a prescription of all the dhrugs in the place, saying some o' them would surely compose him."

"Well--well?"

"The farrier-sergeant took it, sir; and he's now composed enough, poor man, and laying in the trinches, waitin' to be covered up wid green sods, if they can be got in that red valley ov blood and murder."

Some brandy given by Hartshorn now rallied me a little, and I inquired for Willie Pitblado. Lanty informed me that he was in a hospital tent, and enduring great pain.

Pitblado's sword had broken in his hand; he was looking wildly round him for another, when poor Studhome, who lay dying beneath ahorse, placed his own sword in Willie's hand, saying--

"Use it, and wear it for my sake. All's over with me!"

Pitblado cut down two Russian gunners, and actually bore Studhome for some paces in his arms, before he discovered that he was dead, and then a rifle bullet stretched him on the field.

A few men were now crawling back from the valley, where several dismounted guns and dead bodies were all that remained of the Russian host, which had now fallen back.

Numbers of horses, many of them severely wounded, with bridles hanging loose, and saddles all bloody, careered along the green ridges, where they were caught by the Turks. Some came trotting quietly into quarters, when they heard the trumpet sound for "corn"; others cropped the bloody herbage in the Valley of Death; and not a few who remained beside their fallen riders were found by the burial parties.

Beverley's body was discovered, terribly mutilated, stripped, and deprived of the locket which contained the hair of his intended--the girl who was shot in his arms on the retreat through the Khyber Pass.

On surveying the horrors of that day, I asked myself--was it for such work as this that heaven created us?

But such was that glorious and disastrous episode of the war--the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava.

In foreign armies--as I once heard a brother officer remark--one would have found plenty of officers to lead such a charge, but in what other army would one find soldiers to follow as ours did? Though surrounded on every side by the enemy, though apparently all was over with them, though suffering under a withering fire, and seeing their comrades falling in heaps around them, not a man flinched, or thought of shifting for himself; but all looked to their officers, and followed them as if they had been on an ordinary parade.

"There are eighty-one of ours, sir, to be buried in yonder pit," said a trumpeter named Jones, as he came to my tent next morning.

"Eighty-one!--my God!--the poor fellows!"

"Yes, sir--eighty-one," repeated Jones, sadly.

"Where are they?"

"Some are in the trenches--others coming."

They were borne from the field, where they had lain all night, and where the only tears that fell on them were the dews of heaven, and then they were half lowered, half flung in--eighty-one! all handsome young men--and the Highlanders began to cover them up.

"God rest them," said I, lifting my cap, as I leaned on the trumpeter's arm.

"Ay, sir," said he, sadly; "the next trumpet they hear will be a louder one than Bill Jones's!"

*CHAPTER LII.*

Then I thought of one fair spring-time, When she placed her hand in mine, And, half-silent, said she loved me, And, half-blushing, seemed divine.

Then I thought of that same winter, When the earth was dead and cold; Fit time, in sooth, to marry one She worshipped for his gold.

I had been some days in Messirie's Hotel, at Pera, before I realized or quite became reconciled to the idea that I was going home on sick leave, worn in mind and body, and smarting still with many wounds, for some of the lance prods had gangrened, the iron having been, perhaps, rusty. Many other officers were also at Messirie's, on their way home, some with amputated limbs, but all leaving the army with regret. All were pale and lean enough, with bronzed faces and bushy beards, their red shell-jackets or blue surtouts out-at-elbows, threadbare, patched, and stained by the mud of the trenches, and there were one or two lisping idiots, with flyaway whiskers, hair divided in the centre, and yaw-haw tones, whose "pwivate affairs had become wemawkably urgent!"

I had with me poor Willie Pitblado, whose left leg was well-nigh useless now. No surgeon had succeeded in extracting the ball; their attempts had produced torture, which brought on a low fever, and Willie was going home with me now--only, I feared, to die.

And now, on the last evening of this most memorable year, I sat alone, muffled in my cavalry cloak, looking from the hotel window down a long and narrow street, paved with rough, round stones, where the _humauls_, or Turkish porters, British tars, half-furious with raki, Zouaves, with cigar in mouth and hands in pockets, dragomans, with pistol and sabre, indolent, sensual, and brutal Osmanli soldiers, and other nationalities and costumes, made up a strange and varied scene. From another window I could see Stamboul, its flat roofs, round domes, its mosques and minarets, stretching in the distance far away; the Golden Horn; with the three-deckers of the _Sultan_ lying idly at anchor; and the new bridge that spans the harbour; and, over all, the weird-like glories of a crimson moon.

The December twilight stole on, and, as I mused, it seemed but yesterday since all those lancers who had died of cholera at Varna or elsewhere, and those whom I had seen cast into the great trench, had been alive, and riding by my side.

The embarkation of the wounded at Balaclava harbour, whither they had been borne on stretchers, minus legs and arms, hands and feet, with faces pale, slashed, gashed, and battered; our British men-of-war, the _Sanspareil_, _Tribune_, _Sphinx_, and _Arrow_, ranged in line, with open ports to sweep the valley; all the episodes of our departure--the somewhat mournful cheers given by the seamen as our transport, the _Napoleon III._, of Leith, got up her steam and cleared the harbour--cheers to which we could scarcely respond; the receding shores, where the iron voice yet rang the knell of many a human life from battery and bastion; the last rays of the sun, as they lit up the impending bluffs of Cape Aya, and ruddied all the rocks of red and white marble that guard the rugged coast, and repel the storms of the Euxine; all these, as they had melted into sea and sky, seemed like an old dream now, and, battered in body and broken in spirit, I was seated alone in Messirie's Frankish hotel, on my way home!

Well, well! For weeks past I had been as useless at Balaclava as at the Hospital of Scutari, from whence I had been transferred to the suburb of Pera. I had been unable to share in the two battles of Inkermann, in both of which the Russians were totally defeated, and in the last of which our losses were fearful; and I had no share in the battle of the Ovens, on the 20th of November. By landing at Scutari on the 13th, I escaped the terrible hurricane by which so many of the shipping perished in the Black Sea, and by which the survivors of their crews were subjected to be mercilessly massacred by the Russians.

My poor comrades! Be a soldier but for six months, and you will never forget the new world that is opened to you--a respect for your brother officers and soldiers, and a kindly feeling for the _old number_ of the corps; it lasts with life.

But that ghastly trench in the green valley, and the pale, moustached, and upturned faces! God bless all who lie there, and green be the graves of our people in the Crimea!

It was on the second day of the new year that we--Pitblado and I--sailed in H.M.S. _Blazer_ for Southampton, with many other invalids, and, as we steamed round the Seraglio Point, and stood away into the Sea of Marmora, I thought of that day twelvemonth, when I was at Calderwood Glen, sharing the contents of my good old uncle's ancestral wassail-bowl. How much had passed since then!

Trebitski's Cossacks had taken the miniature, the ring; even Louisa's lock of hair was gone too, and luckily now I had nothing to remind me of the beautiful traitress by whom I had been galled, befooled, hoodwinked, and so cruelly abandoned!

And Lady Chillingham could witness this horrible sacrifice, this English _suttee_, or act of immolation, quietly and approvingly. She had married without love herself--so had her mother before her--and both had been happy enough in their own heartless and stupid way. Such alliances, made on mere worldly grounds, were part of the system of that society in which they moved; so Lady Chillingham viewed the whole affair as a matter of course.

As for Louisa Loftus, why should she be different from other women of the world, and of her aristocratic class? I must have been deluded--mad indeed, to think otherwise for a moment! And yet she could crash my hope for the future recklessly, as a child breaks the glittering soap-bubble he has so carefully developed, or casts aside the plaything he once treasured. She could cruelly trample on the best love of a true and honest heart, to make a marriage that was advantageous only in point of rank and wealth, both of which she already inherited in the fullest degree.

Yet something of pity mingled with my fierce and bitter scorn of Louisa--pity for the dreary years she would have to spend, while tending a senile dotard, whom she could neither respect nor love. She would suffer in secret, or perhaps console herself by some scandalous flirtation, that Sir Bernard Burke would never record in his usually flattering pages, though he might have to chronicle the unexpected appearance of an heir to the noble old Anglo-Norman line of Slubber de Gullion.

While Louisa, plunged in all the gaiety of London life, forgot all but it and herself, Cora--I learned this after--had thought it a crime to be even happy, while I was suffering or absent. Such was the difference in the nature of those two girls.

At Stamboul I had procured an inlaid Turkish rifle, a high-peaked saddle, a cherry-pipe stick, and some yataghans, as trifles for Sir Nigel; slippers, all sewn with pearls, a shawl, a veil, a little trunk of essences, and other pretty things, for Cora.

Our homeward voyage was rapid and pleasant, so we steamed steadily on, passing many a transport hurrying to the seat of war, with her human freight, ardent and eager to replace the fallen; on by Malta and old Gib. I was too ill to land at either; but I was well cared for on board, for the officers treated me as if I had been their brother, and were never weary of extolling the terrible charge of the Light Brigade on the fatal 25th of October.

On an evening about the end of January, we were off Southampton, and ran into the tidal dock, which has such peculiar advantages for first-class steamers. There out of the general traffic, and in the basin of quiet water, the _Blazer_ could easily land her melancholy freight of wounded men. Many poor fellows whom she had embarked had died on the way home, and found a grave under the waves of the Mediterranean.

We were landed by gaslight. I must have been very weak at that time. I remember the cheers of welcome and the genuine commiseration of the kindly English folks assembled on the crowded quays as we were borne tenderly ashore in the arms of our good sailor comrades; and my wasted appearance was not the least exciting, for I was so worn now that my face was not unlike the Death's head on the appointments of the 17th Lancers--but with a goodly Crimean beard appended to it.

The lieutenant of marines conducted me to a fashionable hotel.

At Southampton I was separated from poor Willie. With all the other wounded soldiers, he was transmitted, per third-class train, to Fort Pitt, at Chatham. Save once, I never saw the poor affectionate fellow again. He became a confirmed invalid, and months passed away, during which he was neither discharged nor cured, though he longed to get home--home, that he might die where he first saw the light, in his father's cottage, and be laid beside his mother's grave in the glen.

But there is no cure for the home-sickness in the pharmacopoeia of Her Majesty's medical department, at No. 6, Whitehall Yard.

For many days I remained at the hotel, careless how the time passed. I had become perfectly listless, and lay on the sofa for hours, less to nurse my wounds than from pure inertia, and heedless of what might happen.

Thus, one evening, when the snow lay deep in the streets without, muffling the footsteps of the passengers and the wheels of the cabs and omnibuses--when the fire was burning cheerily in the bright bars of the polished grate--the crimson curtains drawn across the windows--the crystals of the gaselier glittering with a thousand prisms, and thus when, after Crimean experiences, it was impossible not to feel intensely comfortable in the well-carpeted room of a fashionable English hotel, I was dozing off to sleep, and to dream, perhaps, of other scenes, when a sound roused me.

An arm--a soft and warm one--was round my neck, and two bright, sad, earnest, and tearful eyes were beaming affectionately into mine; a smooth cheek, rendered cold as a winter apple by the frosty air without, just brushed mine, and a kiss was on my forehead, as a beautiful and blushing girl threw back her veil, and I found my hands were clasped by those of Cora Calderwood.

"Dear, dear Cora!" I exclaimed, and pressed her to my breast.

I had longed for sympathy, companionship, friendship--for some one with whom to share the secret burden that crushed my heart; but I rapidly found the impossibility of doing this with my beautiful cousin, for now, as I embraced her, all her long-treasured and long-hidden love gushed up in her heart.

She smoothed back her thick dark hair with her pretty and tremulous hands, and then, placing them on my temples, surveyed me again and again, with eyes full of pity and delight, while half-kneeling beside me on the low _fauteuil_ on which I lay.

"Cora!"

"Newton!"

She was too full of pure joy to speak; she could only throw her arms round my neck and whisper, with her rosy lip close to my ear--

"Newton--Newton--my poor Newton! my own love at last--and--and--here comes papa."

As if to relieve me from a situation that was as embarrassing as it was pleasing, the affectionate old gentleman hurried forward to meet me. He had been less agile than his daughter in springing upstairs, and threading the mysterious corridors of an English hotel. He took me in his sturdy arms. His eyes were sparkling with pleasure; his ruddy cheeks were now rendered redder than ever by the frosty wind; his white locks glittered in the light; and his handsome old face was beaming with pleasure, as it always did when he saw me. Warmly he shook my hands again and again. He surveyed my hollow cheeks with commiseration, as Cora now did with tears; and then, with prodigious bustle, he proceeded to divest himself of numerous overcoats and wrappers, until he appeared at last in his black cut-away, with white corded breeches and top-boots, as of old the _beau ideal_ of the master of the Fifeshire hounds.

"So we have found you at last, my dear boy--fairly run you to earth, eh? You must come home with us now----"

"To-night, papa?"

"Not exactly to-night, Cora; but as soon as he is fit for travelling. And a rare cooper of old port Davie Binns shall set abroach when again Newton is beneath the roof of the house in which his mother was born, and where she died, too, poor girl!"

My mother was more than forty when she died; but the old baronet only remembered his favourite sister as "the girl," of whose beauty he was always so proud.

Cora had now removed her bonnet and cloak. She was beautiful as ever, but paler, I thought, for the flush that dyed her soft face at first had now passed away, and she lowered her dark lashes at times when I looked at her. But her secret was out now. I knew all, but could scarcely foresee how matters were to end.

Cora wore at her breast the silver crescent and lion I had sent her from India. She had more. She had on her finger my Rangoon diamond, which the Marchioness had sent to her, and which I desired her to retain for my sake, till I replaced it by one more valuable still.

We were very happy that night in Southampton; and, with more alacrity than I thought remained in me, I prepared at once to return to Scotland.

My health was not now what it had been; but my native air in Calderwood Glen would restore it. To repine now would have been ungrateful to heaven and my kind kinsfolk.

I had passed through that dreadful ordeal, the Valley of Death, and had returned with life and youth before me, when so many better and braver than I had perished by my side. So I resolved to return thankfully and joyfully home, to water my laurels among the heath-clad hills and grassy glens of my native place.

*CHAPTER LIII.*

Away with my firelock! Here, take my red coat! On danger and glory No longer I'll dote. A train of soft passions Now rise in my breast; The soldier subsides, And ambition's at rest. And no more shall the sound Of the trumpet or drum Forewarn the poor shepherd Of evils to come. SOLDIER'S SONG.

Poor Willie Pitblado sank fast after the extraction of the ball, and the subsequent amputation of his leg.

In the pleasant month of June, when he knew that the golden laburnums and the hawthorns, pink and white, would be wearing their loveliest hues among the green hills and burnsides where he had played in boyhood, and when the summer breeze would be rustling the thick foliage that shaded his father's humble cottage in Calderwood Glen, Willie felt that his hour was coming nigh, and he grew very sad and restless.