CHAPTER V.

TIFFIN WITH THE TRECARRELS.

Situated between the Residency of the Queen's Envoy and the square fort of Kojah Meer, near the high road leading to the city past the base of the Hills of Behmaru, the house of General Trecarrel partook somewhat of the character of a European villa, and had been built about a year before for a wealthy staif officer, who had been transferred to Ceylon almost before it was finished; for so do men change about in an army which is scattered over all the habitable globe.

It was two-storeyed, with a spacious dining-room and another apartment, which Mabel and Rose had made a decided attempt to affect as a drawing-room, with rich draperies and many pretty ornaments and suitable decorations brought up country, or purchased in the great bazaar of Cabul. Punkahs were not required in that temperate climate; but a broad verandah, covered with luxuriant creepers, afforded a sufficient shade for the windows, or to promenade under on wet days, or in the sunny summer season.

As in India, the arrivals were announced by a stroke on a gong. A few guests were already assembled in the drawing-room, where the General, more erect in bearing, and a little more emphatic in tone, than when last we saw him, and his daughters looking as bright, as showy and as handsome as ever, received Denzil and Waller with a cordiality that made the heart of the former to beat lightly and happily; for he had already begun to find more than pleasure--a joy, in the society of the charming Rose.

He knew not how far this emotion was reciprocated; but he longed with all the desire of impassioned youth for some conviction, that, at least, he was not without interest in her eyes; and Rose was precisely the kind of girl to keep him long in the dark on that point, and to give him serious doubts, unless it suited her capricious fancy to act otherwise.

He hoped that on this afternoon he might have an opportunity of testing the matter--for learning somewhat of his fate; and felt that a glance he could read, a whispered word, a touch of her hand, would make him happy--oh, so happy!

Polwhele was already there, and looking somewhat weary and excited after his early morning tour among the hills after the Ghazees, whom he had completely routed from their haunts, after killing or wounding a dozen or so; Burgoyne of the 37th Native Infantry was there too, and both were talking over their skirmish with the General.

Two or three ladies from the cantonments, Elphinstone, the general commanding (an old and worn-out man), with some half dozen other officers, all in blue surtouts or scarlet _raggies_, _i.e._, shell-jackets and white vests, with their regimental button, were present; and cloudy though the political horizon around them, and with the recent insurrection and assassinations in the city fresh in their minds, they were all conversing as merrily and as heedlessly, as if quartered at Canterbury in lieu of Cabul. The younger men crowded about the chairs of Mabel and Rose; thus Denzil, so far from having an opportunity of doing more than once touch the hand of the latter, found himself obliged to listen to her father, who being a major-general without a brigade now, was resorting to the old soldier's privilege of grumbling.

"Yes, sir!" said he, grimly, to Denzil, assenting to some thought of his own, rather than any remark of the latter; "I served throughout the whole of that victorious campaign, which saw my old friend and comrade, Keane--he who presented me with this splendid watch--created Baron Keane of Ghuzni and Cappoquin; while all that _I_ have gained has been a gold medal from the Shah Sujah, and the Cross of the Bath from Her Majesty."

"Keane's peerage was the just reward of merit, papa," urged Rose.

"Merit, in the service, is nothing."

"How so, General?" asked an officer.

"Merit is just _one_ man's opinion of another," said Trecarrel, with a cynical laugh, "as some one writes, somewhere."

"Is the Envoy to be here, General?" asked Waller, in a low tone.

"No; he is still at the Bala Hissar with the Shah."

"Most unlucky," whispered Waller to Denzil; "I should like that message of the Wuzeer's off my conscience at least."

"Nor are we to have the pleasure of Lady Sale's presence," continued Trecarrel; "unpleasant rumours have been brought in by an Arab hadji, of an attack on Sale's brigade in the Passes; but luckily they are as yet unconfirmed."

"I do not believe in them," said General Elphinstone, who was seated in an easy-chair, being almost too feeble to stand; "for after we restored Shah Sujah to his throne, we made, as you all know, a solemn agreement with the Ghilzie Chiefs, that, for a yearly sum, they should keep the Khoord Cabul, and other mountain passes, open between this and Jellalabad, and offer no molestation to our troops on the march; consequently, I repeat that I do not believe in the story of the hadji."

"That old fellow never believes anything; nor will he give credence to the discontents around us, till the Afghan knives are at his throat," whispered Waller to Polwhele; "poor Elphinstone! he is failing fast, Jack."

"Yes; but he was busy all summer planting peas and cabbages, like Cincinnatus, when he should have been getting the Shah's Gholandazees trained to their guns."

"And will you believe it," added Burgoyne, a smart and sunburnt young officer, "Lady Sale told me that he actually ordered Sir Robert's regiment to march from this with flint-locks,* instead of eight hundred percussion muskets which he requested from the store; an error which may be most fatal by this time, if the Passes are beset."

* Fact.

Waller gazed with something of pity at the old man, who was long past the years for command; he was orthodoxly attired in his blue undress surtout, with a gold sash over his shoulder, and a ribbon at his breast, with the Order of the Dooranee Empire, but death seemed already imprinted in his anxious eyes and haggard face, which was all wrinkles, lines, and hollows. His voice was feeble, and he had a husky cough; yet his face seemed to brighten when he mumbled hopefully of "getting home at last to die in old Scotland," though fated never to issue from the Khyber Pass, save as a corpse. And it was to him that the perilous task of keeping our little force at distant Cabul was assigned by the Government of India!

Waller mentioned to him the story of Taj Mohammed's visit; but it was treated as an illusion; for was not the atmosphere of Cabul full of such rumours, and was not the hereditary enmity between Taj Mohammed and the Sirdar (or general), as Ackbar Khan was named, proverbial? Each would ever do his utmost to injure the other, even unto death. Then the roar of the gong announced that "tiffin was served," ending the matter; the probable fate of Her Majesty's Envoy was thought of no more for the time; for Mabel Trecarrel, with a bright smile on her upturned face, slipped her white arm through that of the aged General, and all moved towards the dining-room, between close ranks of native servants, whose white turbans, jackets, and dhotties, contrasted strongly with their dark visages and gleaming eyes.

Rose fell to the care of Burgoyne, there were no ladies for either Waller or Denzil (and some other subalterns), who brought up the rear; and the latter, to his infinite annoyance, found himself seated at a distance from her, and barely able at times to catch a glance beyond a gigantic plated epergne, filled with fruit and false flowers. From his junior rank and years, he could scarcely have expected anything else, for ladies were still scarce up country, and scarcer still beyond the Khyber Pass; but Denzil felt that somehow his day had begun inauspiciously.

The khansamah (or butler), and a dozen of other Hindoo servants, were in attendance; and the business of luncheon proceeded rapidly. Polwhele and Burgoyne were still talking of their morning march into the hills of Siah Sung, and made light of killing so many of the natives, having only two rank and file killed, and one wounded severely, partaking the while of what was set before them with as much unconcern and heartiness, as if they had been snipe-shooting, or pig-sticking, in the jungle, for in that part of the world danger became a pastime.

"So one of Burgoyne's sepoys was wounded?" asked Elphinstone.

"Yes, General; his legs are scarcely quite to the regimental pattern now."

"How so, Polwhele?"

"A ball from a juzail smashed the knee; so the limb was amputated."

This elicited a little chorus of commiseration from the ladies, but as the sufferer was a native, it soon subsided.

"Any word, General, of your aide-de-camp Trevelyan of ours?" asked Waller.

"None--save that he was off the sick list, and soon to leave Bombay and join us here," replied Trecarrel; "but if this news about the passes be true, I hope he will be in no hurry to come this way; he is a fine fellow, Trevelyan."

(The name found an echo in Denzil's heart, which sank for a moment.)

"I knew him when in the 14th Hussars, at Agra," said Burgoyne to Rose; "he was not then the heir to a title."

She coloured perceptibly. Denzil did not see this, but Mabel did, and she laughed.

"If the passes are actually closed, it is deuced lucky we got up those nine-pounder guns in time," said Trecarrel to Elphinstone.

"I wrote--ugh--ugh--for--ugh--_three_ eighteen pounders," replied the other, coughing feebly.

"And the mistake was that of the military Board?"

"Exactly," said Jack Polwhele; "they made it a case of arithmetic; and in lieu of three eighteen pound guns, sent you six long nines, which are useless for the battery-work that Ackbar Khan may ere long cut out for us."

"Oh that hideous Ackhar Khan!" exclaimed Rose, with young ladylike horror; "I have seen him once, and his mouth, when he laughed, reminded me of nothing so much as two rows of piano keys."

"Hideous!" said Burgoyne; "pardon me, is he not thought very handsome?"

"But think of his beard; it flows to his girdle, and birds might build their nests in it, as they did in the beard of Tregeagle; you remember our Cornish giant, Mr. Devereaux?" added Rose, with a glance at Denzil, whose colour rose, like that of a girl, with pleasure.

Denzil was undoubtedly a very handsome lad, verging on manhood now; he had his mother's perfect regularity of features, with eyes of a blue so dark that at times they seemed black; yet they were wonderfully soft, especially when they turned to those of Rose Trecarrel; and his hair was very fair and curly, having almost a golden tint when the sunshine fell on it. The Indian summer, and the keen breeze from the hills of Kohistan, had already browned his boyish cheek; but some of England's bloom was lingering in it still; and to Rose, a regular "man-slayer," a naturally born flirt, the temptation to entangle him, when she felt intuitively how imperceptibly to himself he was allured by glances into loving her, was too great to resist, for Rose Trecarrel had all the art to win a heart, and yet retain her own entire and untouched.

She and Denzil had many Cornish reminiscences, topics, and sympathies in common; and these afforded a grand basis of operations for Rose, though perilous enough for one so inexperienced as he in _affaires du coeur_, especially with one so beautiful, so gay, and, we grieve to say it, so artful; but "when gallantry becomes mingled with conversation, affection and passion come gradually to mix with gallantry, and queens, like village maidens, will listen longer than they should," so we shall see how it fared with Rose in the sequel.

The intense, but too often silent devotion of a lad so handsome, flattered her; it was so different from the half-laughing love-making of such men of the world as Waller and Polwhele; yet she had as much idea of going further--in fact, of wedding an ensign--as of espousing a dancing dervish, or an Arab faquir. Of course, she thought in her heart that the Devereaux and Lamorna affair was very strange; but what did it matter there--beyond the Indus?

His mother's unhappy story, his father's untimely fate, and, for some time past, the absence of all tidings from his sister Sybil, rendered Denzil at times intensely thoughtful, or, as Rose Trecarrel was inclined to deem it, interesting; and thus, in his craving for gentle sympathy from some one, (and from whom could it be more welcome than a bright-eyed young flirt?) made him an easy and a willing victim.

Denzil had a nervous jealousy of all who approached her; and he envied the free and easy--to some it might seem half-impudent--bearing of Waller, Burgoyne, and others, when hovering about the sisters at the band-stand, in the bazaar at Cabul, when riding or driving near the cantonments, and elsewhere. He was not old enough, or experienced enough, to know that there could be no love in the hearts of those heedless fellows, if they were so self possessed and free in the presence of the object of that love; and as little did he know the jealous fear that Rose had cost his sister at home!