CHAPTER XV.

CHRISTMAS AT CABUL.

The state of suspense endured by our whole force in Cabul, especially those men who had wives and families, was fully shared by Waller, whose chief anxiety was Mabel Trecarrel; yet it could not repress his great flow of animal spirits, and thus his bungalow was always the resort of a few happy heedless fellows, who had no particular care but to kill time when not killing the Afghans, a resource that was yet to come.

Somehow the world reproduces itself everywhere, and though provisions were scant and short, and shot and shell were in plenty and to spare, in the crowded cantonments of Cabul, there were yet space and leisure for fun and flirtation--even scandal and gossip.

It was Christmas-time there too, but, save the blasts of snow that came from the hills of Kohistan, how unlike our Christmas-time at home!

There was no Christmas cheer, to begin with: plum-pudding and roast goose were thought of and remembered, certainly; but no such things were to be found in that fortified camp between the Black Rocks and the Hills of Beymaru; neither were there dark green holly with scarlet berries and mistletoe to dance under, nor Christmas bells to usher in the morn, for even our humble mission-house had been fired by the Afghans; no Christmas gifts, or boxes, or trees full of shining toys to make happy the hearts of those little ones whose parents looked forward with intense dread to the future, and thought regretfully of Christmas in happy England--the merry meetings of parents and home-returning boys. Christmas, we say, was remembered with all its happy and hearty associations of yule, festivity, and wassail, the pledge old as the days when Hengist's Saxon daughter drank _Waes Hael_ to Vortigern; but now, on the anniversary of that day when the star shone over Bethlehem, and a Babe was born to die for all mankind, our half-starved troops were giving shot and shell, grape and canister, with right good will, and the sombre night closed down upon red flames in the towering city, and its silence was broken, not by music, or carols, or chimes, but the voice of many a jackal and hyæna as they preyed on the corpses that lay unburied by the Cabul river.

Waller's bungalow had several visitors on the following evening; among others, Jack Polwhele and Denzil, who had returned from the village of Beymaru, where they had partly purchased and partly looted, and most successfully brought into camp at the point of the bayonet, a vast quantity of ground wheat and dhal or split peas, from the stores of a bunneah or corn-contractor. With these they also brought in several head of cattle for the use of the troops.

"Supplies but for which," as Waller said, "the morrow might have found us starving, or having only the resort of the Polar bears, who, in time of scarcity, find a pleasure in licking their paws. You'll come to my bungalow," he added, as the foraging party came in double quick through the Kohistan gate. "Trevelyan's coming--he and Polwhele; Trevelyan is one of ours now, so we four Cornishmen shall make a night of it. I have a round of beef that is getting small by degrees and beautifully less, a gallant jar of Cabul wine that I looted in the house of a kussilbash, and no end of cheroots. Deuce! I'll take no excuse," said Waller, on seeing how flushed and sombre Denzil became on hearing Audley's name.

"I shall take care to bring him, Waller," said Polwhele, as he went off to his quarters, full of excitement with his recent success, and singing the refrain of the old song,--

"And will Trelawney die? And will Trelawney die? Then thirty thousand Cornishmen Shall know the reason why?"

"I wish we had but the third of those thirty thousand here to help us out of this beastly place where it has pleased her Majesty we should set up our tent-poles," said Waller. "I expect Burgoyne also to-night, and he will be sure to bring us the last news from the city, as he has accompanied Brigadier Shelton to another conference with those children of the prophet."

"Another conference?" said Denzil.

"Yes, by Jove! risky and plucky, is it not?"

"Awfully so, after what has happened to poor Burnes, Macnaghten, and the rest."

"But needs must, for we cannot choose now."

For on this evening fresh and, as the event proved, nearly final negotiations had been opened between the General and Ackbar Khan, to whom he had sent Brigadier Shelton, Major Pottinger, and Burgoyne. Thus the ladies in camp and all the white women, whose persons had been demanded as _hostages_, were in no ordinary state of anxiety to learn the result.

Polwhele and Denzil were betimes in Waller's quarters, where two officers of the 37th and two of the 54th had dropped in. Trevelyan had not arrived, and Denzil in fancy saw him hanging over the chair of Rose, as he had seen him last. He was nervously jealous, somewhat afraid of his own temper, and hoped the night should pass without an unseemly quarrel. He was in wretched spirits, for Sybil's letter and her future weighed upon his mind. This air of gloom was unheeded by his companions. What was the demise, so far away, too, of one whose face they never saw, to them, who were daily and hourly front to front with death himself? Yet he strove to join in their conversation, while cigars were lit and Waller's jar of wine passed briskly to and fro, and the cold round, with flour chupatties, was in great request.

"As things go now," said the host, who lounged on a couple of bullock-trunks, "we are thankful to get even the leg of a wild sheep--a regular Persian doomba, with a tail a foot broad, and can only think regretfully of choice entrées, of pâtés de foie gras from beautiful Strasburg, of boned larks and truffled turkeys of Paris--croquettes, côtelettes, and kidneys stewed in Madeira, caviare from the Don, and ortolans from Lombardy, and a thousand other nice little things we shall never see, till the cold white cliffs of the South Foreland are rising on our lee bow. Oh! soul of Lucullus and of the noble science of gastronomy!"

"Waller, you are irrepressible," said Polwhele. "Devereaux, how is the General? have you heard?"

"Trecarrel?" asked Denzil, colouring.

"No. You think, perhaps, there is no other General in the world. I mean poor Elphinstone."

"The old man is going fast."

"And the evening of his life is full of dark clouds, without a single star," added Waller.

"You grow quite poetic, Bob."

"Then it is amid the veriest prose of life."

"I had a narrow escape from a juzail ball," said Denzil, rather pensively. "It passed through my forage-cap, and I have no wish to be killed as a subaltern."

"A bullet won't feel a bit the more pleasant if it hits you as a captain," said a 37th man, laughing.

Would Rose regret him? had been Denzil's secret thought; and now amid the gay clatter of tongues around him, the speculations as to the treaty on the tapis, the chances of a peaceful retreat, the pros and cons of why Sale did not cut his way back from Jellalabad, and some of that banter about women which seems inseparable from the conversation of young men--more than all, of military men--he was startled by some of the things that were said of Rose Trecarrel, and which, though bitter to hear, served to divert his grief. His self-esteem--his _amour propre_ had been severely wounded, and he had to conceal these emotions from Waller and Polwhele; yet they suspected that "something was up," by his ceasing to go near the Trecarrels, at whose villa near the Residency he had been almost a daily visitor.

Could the young man have foreseen it, in his bitterness he might have rejoiced that the Afghan sabre was ere long to cut the Gordian knot of all his difficulties.

Jack Polwhele, who had been eyeing him silently with a comical twinkle in his black eyes, said, in a low voice--

"So, Devereaux, the mistress of your destiny has proved slippery after all! Laugh at the whole affair, and you'll soon forget all about it. Were I in your place, she might--as the song has it--go to Hong Kong for me."

Denzil knit his brow and reddened with irritation; but, tipping the ashes of his cigar and watching the smoke thereof as it ascended to the straw-roof of the bungalow, Jack resumed, in a voice so low as to be unheard by Waller--

"With a vast amount of _espièglerie_, Rose, I must admit, has many physical attractions; and, Denzil, you were her pet flirtation for the nonce--every fellow saw that--nothing more. It is a fine thing to talk to a handsome girl about 'elective affinities and the union of souls,' that 'marriages are made in heaven, and not in the money-market' or the shop of some sharping lawyer; but it often grows perilous work for a griff, with a girl like Rose, who cannot care very much for any one."

Denzil still sat smoking in silence, and felt somewhat perplexed by the extreme candour of his brother-officer. In short, he knew not quite how to take it.

"Could she only have been flirting with me?" thought he, and we fear Rose would have answered in the affirmative. "No two persons, I have heard, have exactly the same or correct idea of what flirting is (he had not): talking a deal to a pretty girl, or laughing much with her, are called so; but surely there may be deeper flirting, at times, in silence. Oh! we were not flirting: I loved her--I love her yet--and thought she loved me, when glance met glance, and eye answered to eye the unasked question!"

"I know her style perfectly," resumed Polwhele, oddly enough proceeding to crush the unuttered thought; "so does Burgoyne; so do Grahame and Ravelstoke, of the 37th, and ever so many more. She asked you tenderly about animal magnetism--showed you the whiteness of her ungloved hand, and asked you, no doubt, about the trimming of her dress; but you were to be friends--the dearest friends only, and all that sort of thing."

Poor Denzil was petrified; but these words were partly effecting a cure, and he strove to laugh.

"Don't quiz me, Jack," said he; "but, upon my soul, I could be guilty of any folly for that girl--yet it would be madness, you know. What would the General say, and the mess think and say, too?"

"I don't precisely catch your meaning,--folly and madness are pretty synonymous in a matrimonial sense; but what did you think of committing yourself to? a proposal--eh?"

Denzil did not reply; he could only sigh and smoke viciously.

"Take your wine, old fellow, and don't bother about it," said Waller, who had just begun to listen. "I nearly went mad for love myself in my first red coat; but the Colonel saved me by detachment duty; and when last I saw my inamorata, after seven years of matrimony, her figure quite spoiled for waltzing, and a squad of little squalling infantry about her, I laughed at my escape."

Denzil remembered the bantering remarks of the cavalry officer at the band-stand; and their estimate of Rose seemed to tally unpleasantly with that of Polwhele.

"Fool that I have been!--yet could I help it?" he thought. "Could I help doing so again--though she is one that makes of love a jest and a scoff?"

He felt that she had lured him into a passionate declaration merely to cast him off wantonly and laugh at him, perhaps, with Audley Trevelyan. She might not care for him, and yet dislike to see him, care for _another_. Hence rage prompted him one moment to try and fall in love with some other girl (there was not much choice in the cantonment, certainly), and the next he felt cynically disposed to hate her and all womankind. Anon that emotion would pass away, and he felt himself still her very slave, who would plead for a word, a glance, or smile.

To abstain from visiting as before would soon excite remark; and yet to resume his visits would be to see, with bitterness and humiliation, another too palpably preferred, where he had deemed himself the chosen favourite.

"And is it actually true that Waller is booked at last?" said Polwhele.

"Deuce! how can I tell?" replied Denzil, curtly, blowing away a ring of smoke.

"It may be all gossip--for he is one whom hitherto the female world have found impossible to entrap; but here comes Trevelyan," he added, as the Hindoo servant placed lighted wax candles on the table, and Audley entered, looking, as Denzil thought, provokingly handsome, cool, self-possessed, and fashionable in bearing.

The first questions asked were, whether any tidings had come from the city, for after late events, the risk of death and decapitation run by those who ventured to confer with Ackbar and the insurgent Khans was indeed a painful and terrible one. Neither Brigadier Shelton, Major Pottinger, nor Burgoyne had returned as yet; so the conversation speedily fell back into its channel of light-heartedness.

"So, Trevelyan," said Waller, quite forgetting the presence of Denzil, and blundering on a most unlucky topic, "I heard that you have been flirting furiously all day with Rose Trecarrel; but then, as the aide-de-camp, you are quite a friend of the family."

"Oh! ours is an old affair," replied Audley, laughing heartily, as he selected a cheroot; "like the 'Belle of the Ball,'" he added, profoundly ignorant of Denzil's regard for her, "Miss Rose

'Has smiled on many, just for fun-- I knew that there was nothing in it; I was the FIRST, the ONLY one, Her heart had thought of for a minute; I knew it, for she told me so, In phrase that was divinely moulded; She wrote a charming hand, and oh! How sweetly all her notes were folded!'

We were old friends at home in Cornwall; besides, she is so lady-like and pretty--almost beautiful."

"That I grant you," said Polwhele, who saw--that which Denzil did not--that Audley's tone and manner had nothing of the lover in them; "but Rose has always more strings than one to her bow."

"Or, more beaux than one to her string," said Waller, laughing.

"Never puts all her money on one horse anyway. Bagging a sub. is to her like snipe-shooting in an Irish bog; poor sport after all; but a power sight better than none," said Ravelstoke, of the 37th Native Infantry, at whose freedom of speech Waller frowned.

And this was the consolation to which Denzil was treated.

How little he knew that at that very time, Audley Trevelyan, in his heart, was contrasting Sybil's pure and loving prattle, her genuine enthusiasm in poetry, art, and all that was beautiful in nature, with the occasional rantipole of this garrison belle.

"What is that?" said Waller, suddenly, as a drum was beaten hurriedly outside.

"The guard of ours, at the Kohistan gate, getting under arms," replied Ravelstoke; "Brigadier Shelton has come with tidings, and his head on his shoulders--we shall soon know our fate now!"

The sound of hoofs trotting fast through the Cantonments was heard, as the gate was closed and secured; and in a minute or less, Burgoyne, of the 37th, came in with his sword under his arm, and a brace of loaded pistols in his waistbelt.

He looked pale, excited, and weary indeed!

"Now, Burgoyne, for your news?" said Waller; "but take a pull at that wine-jar first."

Burgoyne did so, with an air of thirst and lassitude, though the atmosphere was intensely cold.

"Is the Brigadier safe?" said Polwhele.

"Yes."

"And Pottinger, too?"

"Yes; we have come back unharmed."

"And no attempt was made to assassinate or detain you?"

"None; but what think you is the proposal now--nearly the same as before--for we are checkmated here, and these insurgent scoundrels know it. Lawrence, Mackenzie, Conolly, and some other Europeans are still alive in their hands, and kept as hostages. These they offer to exchange, if the General will leave in their place all our married officers and their families; the entire treasure in the military chest; all our cannon, except six; and that we depart at once; our rear to be covered by four hundred armed Kohistanees, who, if handsomely paid, will march with us so far as Jellalabad, where, according to the news brought by a cossid, Sir Robert Sale is so closely besieged that those among us who survive to reach the plains, will have to cut their way in with the cold steel."

Mingled expressions of rage and indignation were uttered by all save Waller, who looked singularly pale and calm.

"And what was the reply to these degrading proposals?" he asked, while quietly selecting and lighting a cigar.

"It was answered that a British General might, if he chose, leave or give certain officers as hostages, but that he had no power over their wives and families. That without the full consent of husbands and parents, the ladies and children would not be left behind."

"I should think not--left, d--n it, to certain destruction!" exclaimed Polwhele, his dark eyes flashing fire. Burgoyne resumed:

"It was then that Ackbar said to us, mockingly, 'If you save your lives, what do the lives or honour, as you call it, of your wives or sisters matter? They are only women, and, as women, are spoil, like your horses and camels, yaboos, shawls, pipes, and gunpowder. Allah! you Kaffirs are strange dogs.' And there, for to-night, the matter rests. News came, however, that the Queen's 16th Lancers, the 9th, and 31st Regiments have come up country, as far as Peshawur; but that is fully two hundred miles distant; the defiles are full of snow, and they cannot be here in time either to assist or save us."

These details, which are matters of history, now filled all in that isolated camp with extreme dismay. Every hour provisions were growing more scarce; every hour the snow was falling more heavily, and thus the tremendous mountain gorges through which the route lies to Jellalabad or Peshawur, were hourly becoming more and more impassable.

To move or quit the fortified Cantonments without the solemn promise of safe conduct from the vast hordes in arms, was perilous in the extreme. To remain was but to die by slow starvation or the sword. So the question asked by the Khan of Khelat, was likely to have a terrible answer.

"Major Thain," writes Lady Sale, "was now sent round to ask all the married officers if they would consent to their wives staying, offering those who did so a salary of 2000 rupees a month! Lieutenant Eyre said, that if it was to be productive of good, he would stay with his wife and child. The others all refused to risk the safety of their families. Captain Anderson said that he would rather put a pistol to his wife's head and shoot her; and Sturt declared that his wife and mother should only be taken from him at the point of the bayonet; for himself, he was ready to perform any duty imposed upon him."*

* "Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan." Major Thain belonged to H.M. 21st Foot, but was then on the Staff.

Sturdy old General Trecarrel swore that he would take his Company of the Cornish Light Infantry, put Mabel and Rose in the centre, and force a way through the Passes at all hazards, rather than leave them to a fate which none could foresee. At the worst, they could all die there together, and there could be little doubt of the event if we marched without terms, for tidings came from Taj Mahommed, the Wuzeer, that Aziz Khan, with 10,000 Kohistanees, had beset the road at Tezeen; and that the warriors of the Ghilzie tribe (which numbers 600,000 souls) were in possession of all the heights overlooking it.

Tears and distress were visible on all hands now; sickness and suffering increased rapidly, while every night the bugles sounded to arms, and cannon and musketry were discharged at the armed bands of horse and foot which menaced the front and rear gates, or sought plunder in the now abandoned Residency, and the villas previously occupied by General Trecarrel, Captain Trevor, and others.

Pale women clasped their children to their breasts, and men their wives, as if the parting hour of all was already come. The eyes of the soldiers filled and flashed with honest pity and manly indignation at the idea of yielding up civilized women, tender English ladies and helpless little children, to such barbarians as these; while the sick and wounded in hospital were full of horror and dismay at their own helplessness.