CHAPTER XIII.

ROSE IN A NEW CHARACTER.

Lovers are more interesting to each other than they can ever possibly prove to third or fourth parties; yet we cannot preserve the unity of our story and lose sight of Denzil and Rose Trecarrel, whose case and circumstances were altogether exceptional; for, certainly, few lovers have been precisely situated as they were, in this age of the world at least.

Yet the course of their love was not fated to "run smooth," though, in the care of Shireen Khan, no such perils menaced them as those which beset Mabel and her companion, or, still more, those who were the immediate prisoners of Ackbar, unless we refer to the watch kept on the Kuzzilbash fort, by some of the fanatical Ghazees, who, on discovering that Feringhee prisoners were there, thought to add to their own chances of salvation by cutting them off.

In this late affair with Zohrab, Shireen had permitted Denzil to go, armed and mounted, with a party of twenty Kuzzilbashes in search of him and Mabel, round by the hills of Beymaru, the borders of the Lake of Istaliff, and other places over which he and Waller had hunted and shot together, often in the more peaceful time that was past. After his months of seclusion and useless inactivity, Denzil, apart from the natural excitement and anxiety resulting from the object in view--the rescue of Mabel and reunion of the sisters--felt a joyous emotion on finding himself once more an armed man, astride a magnificent horse, and spurring like the wind along the steep mountain slopes, through fertile valley and foaming river, at the head of twenty soldierly fellows, in fur caps with red bags, flaming scarlet chogahs, and glittering lances.

Shireen had perfect confidence in according to him this unusual liberty, knowing, as he said drily to the Khanum, his wife, that "while they retained the hen in the roost, the cock-bird would not go far off." He was surprised, however, that Denzil, when on this expedition, could by no means be persuaded to wear his remarkable yellow silk robe, with the embroidered letters and sphynxes, which was supposed to be his war dress, or to indicate his rank as a great Nawab or Bahadoor of the Queen of England.

In the ardour of the chase, Denzil took a wrong direction, and over-exerted himself to repair the error; he rode with his party beyond Loghur, and the reach of all probable places where the abductor was likely to be found; and then, at a time when the midsummer sun was intensely hot, and the atmosphere filled with steamy and miasmatic exhalations from the rice-fields, he swam his horse through three rivers, at points where the water rose nearly to his neck.

A fever and ague--nearly regular jungle-fever--combined with some other ailment, were the result of this rashness; and on the second day after, Denzil found himself prostrate on a bed of sickness.

By the Khan, he and Rose had been duly informed of the narrow escapes of her sister; of the wile by which she had been lured from the fort of Saleh Mohammed, at whose rage and want of circumspection the more wary Shireen laughed heartily; of the trickery and reckless valour of Zohrab Zubberdust, and the horrible schemes of the Khond, happily averted by the timidity and avarice of the Hindoo schroff; and Rose felt grateful to Heaven--intensely so in her heart--that her "dear, dear Mab" was safe once more, or comparatively so, in the companionship of sorrow--for such she knew it must inevitably be, with Lady Sale, her widowed daughter, the widow of the Envoy, and other captives of Ackbar; though, by chances she had not foreseen, their meeting was delayed--she could only hope and pray, for a time.

These episodes and the tenour of the life they all led in the sequestered fort, with the daily looking forward to some startling event or catastrophe, a battle, a revolution, even an earthquake, as a means to set them free, seemed to tame down and sadden much of Rose's constitutional heedlessness; besides, the illness of Denzil was a genuine source for present sorrow and growing anxiety.

He was alternately in a burning fever and then in icy perspirations; he had intense pains in the head and loins, a heavy sickness, a weariness over all his limbs, a listlessness of spirit, a general sinking and rapid wasting of the whole system, with a thirst that at times could not be alleviated by the simple sangaree or sherbet, i.e., lime-juice and sugar, prepared for him by the Khanum. Denzil inherited from his mother, Constance Devereaux, a more delicate physique and nervous organisation than that possessed by his hardier father; hence he was the more calculated to succumb to the subtle ailment that had fastened on him now; but neither he nor those about him thought of danger yet.

The old white-bearded and black-robed Hakeem, Aber Malee, who attended the inhabitants of the fort, and came thither from the city every other day, on his donkey, prescribed decoctions of honey, which is recommended by the Koran as a sovereign "medicine for man." He did more: with intense solemnity, he copied many texts or prescriptions from the pages of the same book, on strips of parchment, then washed them off into a cup of water from the holy well at Baher's tomb, and gave it to his patient to swallow; but whenever he departed, Rose or Denzil tossed them over the window; so, left thus, altogether without medical attendance, the disease took a deeper and more permanent root.

Rose had now gladly relinquished the Afghan female dress. Amid the plentiful supply of plunder of every kind gleaned up by the Kuzzilbashes in the track of the retreating army, were several overlands bullock-trunks and portmanteaus filled with clothing. Among these, some of which had doubtless belonged to her own lady friends, Rose was fain to make selections; thus, one evening in June, when the sun was setting behind the black mountains, throwing across the broad green valley where the Cabul winds, their shadows to where the old cantonments lay, and tipping with fire the conical hill that overhangs the distant city, while Denzil, who had been dosing uneasily on his hard native bed, was looking with a haggard eye about him, he saw Rose seated near, at an open window, on a low divan, dressed in a most becoming fashion, and consequently looking much more like her former self.

And as his bed, in the usual Afghan fashion, lay simply on the floor, which had no covering but a _satringee_, or piece of cotton carpet, he could see the whole of her handsome figure, as she reclined a cheek upon her dimpled hand, showing one lovely taper arm bare to the white elbow, while alternately idling over the pages of a European book and furtively watching him, as he had slept, lulled over by the drowsy hum of myriad insects at the open casement, and among the brilliantly flowered creepers that clambered round it, a sound like the murmur of distant water, or of the wind in an ocean shell, but very suggestive of heat, of lassitude, and repose; yet Denzil, though he had slept, felt more weary than ever.

"Rose," said he, faintly.

"Dear Denzil--you are awake again, my poor pet; you sleep but by snatches," said the girl, closing her book and sinking on her knees beside his pillow, which, with ready and gentle hands, she noiselessly rearranged.

"I have been thinking, Rose--that--that----" he paused.

"What? Do not exert yourself."

"That my presence must be full of peril to you!"

"To me---how?"

"This illness may be an infectious one."

"I scarcely think so, Denzil; and if it were," she added, with a smile of inexpressible tenderness, "if it were--what then?"

"It might seize on you, darling Rose. Let one of those Kuzzilbash fellows attend me; their lives are of no consequence, while yours----"

"Is of value only to myself."

"And to me, Rose--to me; how unkind!"

He raised himself feebly on his elbow, and gazed at her with eyes expressive of love and admiration.

"Why, Rose, how well you are looking this evening--quite a belle too, or a 'swell,' if one may speak slang," said he, with affected cheerfulness.

"And you, too, Denzil," said she in the same manner, kindly assumed, but with an arrested sob in her throat, for she saw that in reality he was more and more wasted, hollow-cheeked, and large-eyed than ever, and that the tendons of his hands stood sharply out in ridges, distinct to the eye, quite like those of an old man.

His full, deep, dark blue eyes had in them an unnatural lustre; his fair, curly hair had the same golden tint as usual, when the falling sunlight touched it; but the Indian brown and the jolly English bloom had left his once-rounded cheeks together, and they were now pale and hollow indeed; and though he was very fair, and his mother had been dark in eye and jetty in tress, something in his face and expression recalled her now to Rose's memory, as she had seen her on that day, when she and Mabel had visited the villa at Porthellick, and, in the vanity of the hour, flattered themselves that they had condescended mightily in so doing. Could they then have foreseen the present time and circumstances?

She gazed at him with great sadness, and great love, too, in her eyes and in her heart; while he, in turn, looked up to her with love and admiration too, and with somewhat of anxiety for her future.

She was attired so prettily and suitably; for the season was summer, and the month was June.

No longer hanging dishevelled in the Afghan fashion, the splendid ripples of her bright auburn hair were coiled up by her own clever fingers in the European mode, and smoothly braided, as she was wont to have them in happier times, showing all the contour of her fine head, her slender neck, and delicate ears. She wore a simple loose dress of white muslin, spotted with the tiniest of red rose-buds; and through the delicate texture of this fabric the curved outline of her shoulders and her tapered arms could be traced, whiter than the gauzy muslin itself--a piquant species of costume, which made old Shireen stroke his beard and mutter, "_Barikillah!_" (excellent!), as expressive of great satisfaction, not unmixed with more admiration than the Khanum relished.

Rose was destitute of all ornaments, for everything she once possessed of that kind had long since been lost or taken from her. Her feet were cased in tight silk stockings and beautiful little kid boots, laced up in front, and they peeped from amid a wilderness of white-edged petticoats, that lay wreath upon wreath like the leaves of a rose in full bloom; and, altogether, she was such a figure as Denzil had not seen since the jovial days when he and Bob Waller had smoked the calumet of peace together in the old cantonments, and were wont to promenade at the band-stand which stood in the centre thereof; certainly she was quite unlike what one might expect to see in the residence of the Khan of the Kuzzilbashes, where the ideas of the middle ages, and darker epochs still, have not passed away, and things are pretty much as they were in the days of Timour the Tartar.

Rose seemed intuitively to read something of all this in the expression of Denzil's face; for she smiled, and, with one of her old coquettish glances, kissed the tips of her fingers to him.

Circumstanced as they were, Rose, no doubt, in time past had talked a great deal of nonsense, and, seeing how necessary she was to Denzil's happiness, Shireen Khan had relinquished much of her society at chess in his favour; but who ever scrutinises very closely all that a pretty girl talks about, or what male listener, or lover especially, would care to analyse the logic thereof? The parting of charming lips is ever pleasant to look upon, and the music of a sweet English female voice is ever pleasant to hear, and never so sweet or so seductive as when far away from home. And so thought Denzil, as he lay upon his pillow, with heavy eye, with aching temples, and throbbing pulses, listening to the prattle of Rose Trecarrel.

Some books, picked up in the burned cantonments, had also been brought to Rose by the Khan, though he suggested that the Koran, with its hundred and fourteen chapters, ought to suffice for all the literary, legal, and medical necessities of mankind, and womankind too. Among those stray volumes was a copy of "Lalla Rookh," with poor Harry Burgoyne's autograph on the fly-leaf, and with this she had read Denzil asleep, reading steadily on afterwards, and kindly fearing to stop, lest by doing so she might awake him; but now, without her ceasing, he had restlessly stirred and roused himself.

He grudged, even by necessary sleep, to lose by day a moment of her society; for they could converse silently, eye with eye, without speaking; for to lovers there is a dear companionship, an eloquence even, in silence; and now the girl gazed upon her care with her eyes and her heart full of love and tenderness, all the more that he, by perfect isolation, was so completely her own, and that she could minister unto him, as only a woman, a loving and tender one, can tend and minister to the suffering.

It was very strange, all this!

To Rose Trecarrel it had seemed as if, once upon a time, the world was quite running over with lovers. Now, her world was, oddly enough, narrowed to the boundary wall and grassy fausse-braye of Shireen Khan's fort. That a girl, in her extreme youth, chances to have been, like Rose, a flirt, is no proof that she is incapable of a very deep and enduring affection; it is often quite the contrary, and Rose was just a case in point. Here, with her and Denzil, the pretty biter was _bitten_. "A flirt," says one, who wrote long ago, "is merely a girl of more than common beauty and amiability, just hovering on the verge which separates childhood from womanhood. She is just awakening to a sense of her power, and finds an innocent pleasure in the exercise of it. The blissful consciousness parts her ripe lips with prouder breath, kindles her moist eyes with richer lustre, and gives additional buoyancy and swan-like grace to all her motions. She looks for homage at the hands of every man who approaches her, and richly does she repay him with rosy smiles and sparkling glances. There is no passion in all this." It is the first trembling, unconscious existence of that sentiment which will become love in time. And Rose's time had come!

So had it been with her, though her flirtations had bordered too often on actual coquetry, thereby overacting the flirt, incurring the sneers of the piqued, and accusations of heartlessness and vanity, as one who loved the love-making, but _not_ the lover. She had now become a veritable Undine--the type of everything that is amiable and beautiful, tender and true, in her sex. Yet we are constrained to admit that much of this sudden change might have been brought about by the dire pressure of unforeseen events and calamities. In her late term of bitter experiences, she, and all about her, had learned palpably, that those they loved most on earth were merely mortal, and might be, or had been, torn from them by cruel and sudden deaths.

In her new phase of life, how completely her former had passed away--been forgotten, with its balls, parties, picnics, dejeuners, and promenades; its selection of dresses and colours, flowers and perfumes; its promenades and drives; its fun and jollity; its gossips, flirtations, and folly! All existence seemed merged or narrowed now in two circles or hopes--the health of Denzil, and their mutual restoration to liberty and safety!

All her girlish foibles had passed away, and the genuine woman came to the surface, when perhaps too late; for Denzil seemed too surely to be sinking fast, and unwittingly, when his mind wandered in the delirium of fever, he murmured things that he had heard amid the banter of the mess-bungalow, and elsewhere, that stung her repentant heart, and drew tears from her eyes.

"Rose--oh Rose," he would say, "it can't be true all that Jack Polwhele said, and Harry Burgoyne, of the 37th, too--but they are dead, poor fellows!--and Grahame, and Ravelstoke, and ever so many more."

"What did they say, Denzil?"

"That you flirted with them all--oh, no, no, no! And then there is my cousin Audley--if indeed he is my cousin," he added, through his chattering teeth, "he cannot love you as I love you! He must have made a fool of many a girl in his time, while I--I love but you--even as I told you on that day by the lake, when you--you said--what did she say?--ask her, Sybil," he would add, looking up vacantly, yet earnestly; and then the conscience of the listener would be stirred to find that her thoughtless follies were remembered at such a time.

"In his soul, he doubts me still," she thought. "My poor Denzil, I was only flirting, as most girls do. It was only fun," she added, aloud.

"Yes, I am poor, and junior in rank, I know," he replied, catching a new idea from her words, "too poor for her to love me, Sybil; I heard her tell that fellow, Audley, so; and he--ah! he is the heir of Lord Lamorna!"

"Denzil, dearest Denzil!" then Rose exclaimed, in a low and earnest whisper, putting an arm caressingly round his neck, and her tremulous lips close to his ear, "you are certain to have been promoted by this time, and doubtless the Queen will give you the Order of the Dooranee Empire. I feel sure of it," she added, little knowing that all this had already taken place.

But, at the moment she spoke, an access of fever and weakness came over poor Denzil; his bloodshot eyes moved, but he made no response; and a fear began to come over her that he was passing away--slipping from her love and her care--perhaps already far beyond caring now either for promotion or "a ribbon at the breast."

How she repented the past pangs her heedlessness had cost this honest heart, we need not say; but as her eyes fell on a verse of "Lalla Rookh," underlined in some old flirtation of Burgoyne's, she applied it to herself; for now

"Far other feelings love hath brought; Her soul all flame, her brow all sadness; She now has but the one dear thought, And thinks that o'er almost to madness."

On one occasion he became almost insensible; but whether he slept or had swooned, she knew not in her despair of heart; and none of Shireen's household could aid her, by advice or otherwise. At dressing a sabre-cut with myrrh, or stanching a bullet-hole with a bunch of nettle-leaves as a styptic, any of them would have been ready and skilful enough; but with such an ailment as that of Denzil, they were as useless as children, and apt to attribute it to magic, or the spell of some unseen and offended genii; while, as fatalists, they were disposed to commit the event to God alone.

So the sorrow and apprehension of the lonely girl grew daily greater.

"And this is the only man I ever loved; yet through me, or my sister's cause--through _us_--has death, perhaps, come untimely upon him!" Rose would say, wildly and passionately, and in a low, concentrated voice, as she flung herself at the foot of Denzil's bed; while all the horror of anticipated loneliness, if he should be taken away, and she left, came upon her. How bitterly now she felt punished for all the little follies of the past!

His ailment was, certainly, one under which a patient may linger a long time--nay, may seem to get well, and then again be worse than ever, but which, in the end, too often slays. Hence, it is no wonder that the humble Hakeem, Abu Malec--who believed that a verse of the Koran written, washed off, and swallowed with reverence, must form a sovereign remedy, even for an obstinate and benighted infidel--should stroke his beard in sore perplexity and great wonder, and mutter--

"Thus it is that Allah seals the hearts of those who are steeped in ignorance! Their doctrines are as a worthless tree, the roots of which run on the surface of the ground, and hath no stability, and the blast of heaven will overturn."

"A tiresome old pump! For Heaven's sake, keep him away, Rose!" would be the comment of the sick subaltern.

And the latter had at times a secret presentiment that he would never leave the fort of Shireen Khan alive; yet the conviction was sweet that Rose had loved him, ere he passed away. She would never forget him now: he felt sure of that. She might love _another_ in time; but would that matter to him? To die, ere she was restored to the society and protection of Europeans, was to leave her most lonely and widowed in heart, and was his keenest affliction; yet he kept it to himself, having no desire to distress her unnecessarily, though his ravings sometimes indicated the prevailing thought, and the fear he saw was in her.

"I don't think I shall die this bout, Rose darling. I cannot have a very deadly fever! I rode only forty miles--twenty to Loghur, and twenty back--on Shireen's old brute of a Tartar horse, and smoked about ten cheroots; but they were execrable--picked up among the lost baggage; and--and you know, dear mother, they are thorough disinfectants any way. Oh, no--I can't have a deadly fever. I shall soon be better, dear, dear mother!"

Thus, Rose would learn that his wandering thoughts had flashed far, far from her, till the clouds that oppressed his brain would pass away, and, all ignorant of past delirium, he would welcome her presence with loving jet forced smiles, and seek to assure her, in a voice that grew more husky and more weak daily, "that he was better--oh, so very much better;" adding, "Ah, if we had but Sybil here--or, rather, if we did but know what has become of her!"

"Sybil--ah, would that I could but know of her! But she shall be my sister, Denzil; for too surely, I fear, we shall never see Mabel more!"

"Don't say so. You and Mabel shall both be happy, I hope, long, long after----" he paused.

"After what, darling?"

"After all these sorrows have passed away," said he; and though it was not thus he had meant to close the sentence, Rose read his secret meaning in his mournful eyes.

There were times when he lay quiet, breathing hard and shortly, but quite apathetic to all around him; and other times when he moaned and muttered of his broken and desolate home--a home now no more; of Cornwall, its moors and cliffs; of wanderings in Italy--the peaks of the Abruzzi and the banks of the Arno; of his parents and sister; of Rose--ever and anon it was Rose, and the day by the Lake of Istaliff; all oddly confused together, till the listener's heart was crushed, and she prayed on her knees, with bowed head, that he might be spared for her, or that, while her unfelt kisses were pressed upon his brow and cheek, she too might catch the same fever, and that they might die and be buried together under the green turf, outside the Afghan fort, where the acacia-trees were tossing their light, feathery foliage in the wind.

So thus would the sleepless hours of many a weary night of watching pass away; the boom of brass cannon, mellowed by distance, would come from the far-off Bala Hissar, indicating that dawn was breaking, and pale Rose Trecarrel would know that the slow lingering hours of another day of heartless sorrow were before her.

One noon, however, a little hope dawned in her breast! The Hakeem, Abu Malec, arrived with a stranger, whose fair European face belied his Afghan camise and brown leather boots.

"A Feringhee doctor Sahib has come from Cabul," said Abu Malec, not without a spice of professional jealousy in his tone, while, to the infinite joy of Rose, he introduced Doctor C----, of the 54th Infantry, one of those gallant and devoted medical officers, who volunteered by lot cast on the drum-head, to remain behind in that place of peril, and attend to the wants of our sick and wounded soldiers; so now she devoutly hoped that Denzil would have some better treatment than that which resulted from mere superstition and a dogged belief in that fatalism which is eminently Mohammedan.

The doctor, an old friend, greeted Rose kindly, and with genuine warmth--to exist was cause for congratulation then; next he turned to Denzil, and, after a brief examination, shook his head despondingly, to the intense satisfaction of the Hakeem, Abu Malec.