Chapter X: Going to the Front

So they were solemnly engaged at last, plighted to each other, these cousins, and to be married; but when? For Colville had now to face the perils of the war in Afghanistan ere that event could come to pass.

He was going straight and almost immediately to the scene of strife among the savage passes there, and for Mary to accompany him was impossible just then, and as Ellinor could not be left alone she would have to go too; so the idea was not considered for a moment.

They could but wait the future in trust and hope, and amid the brief joy of the present time was a dread of that future, for he who was departing might never--_return_.

'All is unchanged at Birkwoodbrae, and old Elspat is there in charge, dearest Mary,' said Colville, 'so you and Ellinor may return if you will, and live there till I come back from the East.'

The temptation to do so was strong--the crave to be at home again, to see the faces of old friends, the dear familiar hills, the silver birks, and the fast-flowing May. But though understanding each other fully as the cousins did now, and though their positions as such were changed and strengthened, Mary in her independence of spirit and character thought she would prefer to struggle on as they were, till he could take her there as his wife.

For her kindness to the sisters, Colville slipped quietly into Mrs. Fubsby's hand a cheque for an ample sum, saying, after he had heard her story, that it would help her in her plans to prove herself Lady Sleath and punish her wrong-doer.

This was on the following day, when Mary told him the simple story of all their recent troubles, while he gazed down upon her with eyes full of truth and tenderness, and her heart was beating tumultuously with its new-found joy. She knew that he loved her now, he whom she felt inclined to adore.

Yet the future seemed to loom darkly before her. There was this terrible campaign in Afghanistan, with its certain and far separation, its remote and fearful contingencies to be faced, endured, and undergone; so Fate seemed still to be cruel to her.

When, in broken accents and with mingled emotions of anger and shame, while her head reclined upon his breast, Mary told Colville of Sir Redmond Sleath's systematic attempts, though secretly married, to lure away her unsuspecting sister Ellinor, great was the wrath and fury of her lover.

Whip in hand, he would assuredly have taken condign vengeance on the back and limbs of the parvenu baronet, but that the latter had to quit London--even England--just about that time, in some haste and in dire disgrace.

At his club he had gambled deeply with Lord Dunkeld and others, from whom he had won great sums of money--more than the peer especially could well afford--and before it was discovered that his wonderful success was due to the use of _marked_ cards.

During a game of _quinze_ one of the players--a brother-Guardsman of Colville's--noticed that several of the cards were in some way indicated, and, after a careful examination, it was found that all the fives and the court cards were marked by the prick of a needle at the corners, and some in the centre, too.

These marks, though almost invisible to the eye, were recognisable by the sense of touch. A storm of indignation burst over Sleath. He was flung down the club stairs, had to eat very 'humble pie' indeed, and was now gone to the Continent, none knew or cared precisely where, with a congenial friend, Mr. Adolphus Dewsnap (of whom more anon); so whatever legal plans Mrs. Fubsby meant to adopt to relinquish her maiden name and insist upon the adoption of that of Lady Sleath, were partially frustrated or delayed for a time by the baronet's disappearance.

On the very day after the engagement, Mary and Ellinor bade her farewell--it could scarcely be said with regret, though the good woman shed abundance of tears on the occasion.

Colville, who resented as absurd and _infra dig._ Mary's desire of maintaining herself and adding to the slender patrimony their father had left them, brought an invitation from Mrs. Deroubigne, in whose care they were to be left for the future--certainly for a time at least; and she received them with open arms, and a welcome all the more warm that she was just then alone, her two little daughters being absent at a boarding establishment; and, amid the new comforts and ease that surrounded her in Grosvenor Square, Mary forgot for a time the old wish of her heart to go 'home,' as she ever considered Birkwoodbrae her home.

At the commencement of the present century, Malcolm says 'that this square is the very _focus_ of feudal grandeur, religion, fashion, taste, and hospitality, and that the novel-reader must be intimately acquainted with the description of residents within it, when the words "Grosvenor Square" are to be found in almost every work of that species written in the compass of fifty years past.'

Before the house of Mrs. Deroubigne were still to be seen iron link-extinguishers, a remnant of the past, when links were carried before carriages at the West-End till 1807. Though old-fashioned, the mansion was a lofty and stately one; and Mary, when she gazed upon the tall windows on the spacious square and the landscape garden in the centre, with its old trees planted by Kent, wondered if she was the same Mary Wellwood who for so many weeks past had contemplated the frowsy view from the windows of her late abode.

In her regard for Colville, and inspired no doubt by memories of the past and the dead, Mrs. Deroubigne, to do her justice, was unwavering in her kindness and hospitality to her new friends; and times there were when she actually, amid her dream-thoughts, seemed to forget her own married life, and her heart yearned, warmly and strangely, to the two orphan girls of her old lover--the girls who might, she averred laughingly, have been her own daughters, had fate so arranged it.

'Your face, Mary, always reminds me of your father,' she would say, taking the girl's dimpled cheeks caressingly between her hands; 'but yours, Ellinor, suggests to me more of your mamma--you have the same dreamy hazel eyes. And you are romantic, no doubt?' she added, with a fond smile.

'Perhaps; every girl has, it is said, at least one romance in the course of her life,' said Ellinor, thinking of poor Robert Wodrow and the wretched Sleath.

'And, certainly, I have had mine!' said Mrs. Deroubigne, kissing Mary, while old memories floated through her mind, known and clear to herself alone.

Mary thought that though it might be delightful in summer to visit Birkwoodbrae, with Mrs. Deroubigne as a chaperone, she would never go back to it as a home on sufferance--on that she was resolved; and until she was a wedded wife she could but wait in hope, love, and confidence; besides, Mrs. Deroubigne, at Colville's suggestion, had a plan for a little tour on the Continent to occupy some of the time of his absence, and to make the sisters forget some of the mortifications they had recently undergone.

Though the temporary loss of Mary and the mystery involving her movements--her very fate after leaving Perthshire--had so tortured the heart of Colville that he had resolved to seek for change amid the stirring scenes of Eastern war once more, he felt that he could now leave England with emotions of comparative happiness and content.

He knew that she was in safety--surrounded by every comfort, even by splendour--and had been saved from much he could not quite foresee, by the slender but blessed chance of her meeting with Mrs. Deroubigne!

To him and Mary the few meetings before his departure seemed heaven-sent--though a sorrowful separation was at hand--the happiest of all their past existence.

Neither seemed to question, as yet, how they would feel or could exist during the months--perhaps the more than year--of separation that had to come.

Never, never would she forget the time when he placed the engagement-ring upon her engaged finger, and when their eyes met in one long and deep glance--a glance that, though no word was uttered, proved the silent compact of his avowed and her accepted love.

So the fatal day came inexorably at last; after a farewell dinner to him at the Guards' Club in Pall Mall.

'Good-bye, dear girls,' said he, cheerily; 'good-bye, love Mary--another kiss and another. I'll bring you back such wonderful things from India--tiger-skins, and tiger claws set in gold; Delhi jewellery from Chandney Chowk; ivory carvings, and I know not what more,' he added, and, in spite of himself, strove to be cheerful; 'and when I do come back, Mary, you will be my own darling little wife till death parts us.'

So the hour, the supreme moment, had come at last, and Leslie Colville was gone!

His letters were Mary's only solace after that; long letters full of loving and passionate expression, to be read and re-read again; from Suez, burning Aden, and beautiful Bombay; they came regularly, but became fewer and further between as he proceeded up country by railway, and his last, before they left London for the Continent, informed her that he had been appointed to the staff at Jellalabad, where Sir Samuel Browne was concentrating his forces prior to an advance on Cabul. Thus he would soon be going to the Front.