CHAPTER XXI.

THE PURSUIT.

The same evening of this event saw the Union Jack floating on the summit of the Bala Hissar, and our troops in or around Cabul, in the narrow and once-crowded thoroughfares of which--even in the spacious and once-brilliant bazaar--the most desolate silence prevailed. The houses of Sir Alexander Burnes, of Sir William Macnaghten, and all other British residents were now mere heaps of ashes, and their once-beautiful gardens were waste. Human bones lay in some; whose they were none knew, but they remained among the parterres of flowers as terrible mementos of the past.

Having, among many other trophies, the magnificent and ancient gates of Hindoo Somnath with them, the victorious troops of General Nott were encamped around the stately marble tomb of the Emperor Baber, where the British were watering their horses at the Holy Well, quietly cooking their rations of fat-tailed dhoombas or of beef, newly shot, flayed, and cut up, after a long route; and the natives were gravely boiling their rice and otta; while the staff officers, Generals Pollock, Sale, Nott, Macaskill, and others, some on foot and some on horseback, were in deep conference about a map of Western India, and Bokhara, and as to where the hostages were, and what was to be done for their relief, if they still lived.

Waller, who in his energy and anxiety had come on with the advanced guard of cavalry, looked around him with peculiar sadness. Save Doctor Brydone and one or two others, he alone seemed to survive of all the original Cabul force; and every feature of the place before him was full of melancholy memories and suggestions of those he could never see again, and of the past that could come no more.

To Sir Richmond Shakespere, his new friend, he could not resist the temptation of speaking affectionately and regretfully of the dead, and the places associated with them. He found a relief to his mind in doing so.

"A time may come," said he, as they sat in their saddles twisting up cigarettes, and passing a flask of Cabul wine between them, while the syces gave each of their unbitted nags a tobrah of fresh corn, "when these Passes of the Khyber Mountains may be as familiar to the English tourist as those of Glencoe and Killycrankie are now--for there was a day when even the land beyond them was a terra incognita to us; and a time may come when the lines of railway shall extend from Lahore even to Peshawar--ay, and further--perhaps to the gates of Herat--though it may not be our luck to see it; but I can scarcely realise that in our age of the world, an age usually so prosaic and deemed matter-of-fact, men should see and undergo all that we have undergone and seen, and in a space of time so short too!"

Would a quiet home, a peaceful life, after a happy marriage, ever be the lot of him and Mabel? Loving her fondly and tenderly, with all the strength that separation, dread, and doubt and sorrow, could add to the secret tie between them, he had almost ceased to have visions of her associated with admonitions and prayer from a lawn-sleeved ecclesiastic; a merry marriage-breakfast; a bride in her white bonnet and delicate laces, and smiling bridesmaids in tulle. Such day-dreams had been his at one time; but amid rapine and slaughter, battle and suffering, they had become dim and indistinct, if not forgotten!

"Yes, Waller," replied his companion, after a pause, "a British army--we have actually seen a British army, with all its accessories and appurtenances, exterminated at one fell swoop!"

"All this place is full of peculiarly sad memories to me, Sir Richmond."

"Doubtless; and, like me, you won't be sorry when we all turn our backs on it for ever, as we shall do soon."

"True. See! yonder lie our cantonments, ruined walls and blackened ashes now; beyond them are the hills where, with my company--not one man of which is now surviving, myself excepted--I scoured the fanatical Ghazees from rock to rock, and far over the Cabul river, so victoriously! Here, by that old tomb and ruined musjid, we once had a jolly picnic: half the fellows in the garrison, and all the ladies were there--the band of the poor 44th too. By Jove! I can still see the scattered fragments of broken bottles and chicken bones lying among the grass."

"I have felt something of this regret when coming on the remembered scene of an old pig-sticking party or bivouac," replied Sir Richmond, with a half-smile at the unwonted earnestness of Waller, who had seemed to him always a remarkably cool and self-possessed man of the world; but he knew not the deeper cause he had for feeling in these matters. "You may say, as an old poem has it--

'Now the long tubes no longer wisdom quaff, Or jolly soldiers raise the jocund laugh; The scene is changed, but scattered fragments tell Where Bacchanalian joys were wont to dwell.'

Is it not so, Waller?"

"By this road I smoked a last cigar with Jack Polwhele, of ours, and Harry Burgoyne, of the 37th," resumed Waller. He remembered, but he did not care to add, how broadly they had bantered him about Mabel Trecarrel on the evening in question. "And all round here," he resumed, pursuing his own thoughts aloud, "are the scenes of many a pleasant ride and happy drive. Here I betted and lost a box of gloves with the Trecarrels."

"You seem to have always been betting on something with those ladies, and with a gentleman's privilege of losing."

"It was on the Envoy's blood mare against Jack Polwhele's bay filly, in the race when Daly, of the 4th Dragoons, won the sword given by Shah Sujah," said Waller, colouring a little. "There, by those cypresses, I once met the sisters half fainting, one day, with heat, their palanquin placed in the shade by the gasping dhooley-wallahs; so, at the risk of a brain fever, I galloped to the Char-chowk for a flask of Persian rose-water, fans, and so forth."

"The Trecarrels again! By the way, it seems to me," said the other, "that of all the friends you have lost, those two young ladies--one especially----"

What the military secretary of General Pollock was about to say, with a somewhat meaning smile, we know not, save that he was heightening the colour of Waller's face by his pause; but a change was given to the conversation by the opportune arrival of Shireen Khan, of the Kuzzilbashes, mounted, as usual, on his tall camel, and accompanied by a few well-appointed horsemen. He had ascertained that "Shakespere Sahib" was the _katib_, or secretary, to the victorious Feringhee general, and had come to tender, through him, his services to the family of the fallen Shah, to the conquerors, to the Queen they served, and, generally, to the powers that were uppermost.

Many of the Afghan chiefs, who, with their people, had acted most savagely against us, were now extremely anxious to make their peace with General Pollock; and though it can scarcely be said that towards the end (after his own jealousy of Ackbar's influence, fear of his growing power that curbed all private ambition, caused a coolness in the Sirdir's cause) Shireen and his Kuzzilbashes had been our most bitter enemies, yet he and they were among the first now to meet and welcome the conquerors of Ackbar, against whom they had turned, not as we have seen Saleh Mohammed meanly do, in the time of his undoubted humiliation and defeat, but when in the zenith of his power; and now this wary old fellow, who played the game of life as carefully and coolly as ever he played that of chess, knew that the protection he had afforded to Rose Trecarrel and to Denzil--the supposed Nawab--must prove his best moves on the board--his trump cards, in fact; and as a conclusive offer of friendship, he now offered six hundred chosen Kuzzilbash horsemen to follow on the track of Saleh Mohammed, and rescue the whole of the prisoners, a duty on which Shakespere and Waller at once joyfully volunteered to accompany them.

"Shabash!" he exclaimed, stroking his beard in token of faith and promise, "punah-be-Kodah!--it is as good as done; and the head of the Dooranee dog shall replace that of the Envoy in the Char-chowk!"

Waller soon divined that the lady now residing in Shireen's fort must be no other than the younger daughter of "the Sirdir Trecarrel," who was spirited away on the retreat through the Passes, on that night when the Shah's 6th Regiment deserted; but of who "the Nawab" could be he had not the faintest idea, until he and Shakespere galloped there, saw the living and the dead, and heard all their sad story unravelled.

With her head, sick and aching, nestling on the broad shoulder of Bob Waller, as if he was her only and dearest brother, Rose told all her story without reserve, and it moved Waller and his companion deeply, to see a handsome and once-bright English girl so crushed and reduced by grief and long-suffering; yet her case was only one of many in the history of that disastrous war. She ended by imploring them to lose no time in following the track of those who had borne off her sister and the other hostages.

No words or entreaties of hers were necessary to urge either Waller or Shakespere on this exciting path; and instant action became all the more imperative when Shireen announced that he had sure tidings from Taj Mohammed Khan, and also from Nouradeen Lal, the farmer, who had been purchasing horses on the frontier, that all the lawless Hazarees were in arms to cut off the entire convoy; and that if a junction were once effected between them and the Toorkomans of Zoolficar Khan, all hope of rescue would be at an end.

The permission of the general was, of course, at once asked and accorded, and it was arranged, that, immediately upon their departure, a body of cavalry and light infantry should follow with all speed to second and support them.

Kind-hearted Bob Waller waited only to attend the obsequies of his young comrade (while the Kuzzilbashes were preparing); and over these we shall hasten, though of all the Cabul army he was, perhaps, the only one interred with the honours of war; the battle-smoke had been the pall, the wolf and the raven the sextons, of all the rest!

The spot chosen was a little way outside the Kuzzilbashes' fort, on the sunny and green grassy slope of a hill, where a grove of wild cherry-trees rendered the place pleasant to the eye. From her window Rose could alike see and hear the rapid ceremony; for by the stern pressure of circumstances it was both brief and rapid. No prayer was said; no service performed; no solemn dropping of dust upon dust; no requiem was there, but the drums as they beat the "Point of War," after the last notes of the Dead March had died away.

The quick, formal commands of the officer came distinctly to her overstrained ear, as the hurriedly constructed coffin of unblackened deal, covered by the colour of the 44th Regiment, was being lowered, as she knew, for ever, into its narrow bed; the steel ramrods rang in the distance like silver bells, and flashed in the sunshine; then a volley rang sharply in the air, finding a terrible echo in her heart, while the thin blue smoke eddied upward in the sunshine; another and another succeeded, and Rose--the widowed in spirit--as she crouched on her knees, knew then that all was over, and the smoke of the last farewell volley would be curling amid the damp mould that was now to cover her lost one.

Anon the drums beat merrily as the firing party, after closing their ranks, wheeled off by sections, with bayonets fixed, and Denzil Devereaux was left alone in his solitary and unmarked grave, just as the sun set in all his evening beauty; and a double gloom sank over the soul of Rose Trecarrel.