Chapter XVII: At Ismailia

The putrid water he had drunk on many occasions, the stone-fruit on which he had been compelled to feed, the damp sand on which he had lain under the night dews--the watching, fatigue, and depression of spirits he had undergone--had served to prostrate Allan now, and even his magnificent constitution failed to resist such a combination of evils.

At times he was in a burning fever; at others in cold, shivering fits, as if his limbs would go to pieces. These were succeeded by feeble listlessness and indifference to all around him, and then he seemed as if about to die.

He first became quite conscious of where he was on being roused from a species of waking dose by voices near him.

'Captain,' said an Irish Fusilier, one of Sir Garnet's own, 'I want ten shillings from you.'

'For what purpose?' asked the officer, sharply.

'To bury my brother.'

'Bury your brother, d--n it! I gave you ten shillings for that purpose two days ago.'

'To bury his leg that was, your honour.'

'Well!'

'And now I want another ten shillings to bury the rest of him.'

'Have you a non-commissioned officer with you?'

'Yes, sir--Sergeant Carey,'

'Well, you and Sergeant Carey had better be off, or I'll make the place too hot for you. As for your brother, you can bury him for nothing beside the tent-pegs outside.'

Every other morning some poor fellow was reported as dead in the wards, and they were buried in a little strip of ground near the canal, a tent-peg, with a label fluttering from it, alone indicated, in the meantime, the name and rank of the deceased.

As Allan glanced around him, he saw cheeks that were pale, eyes that were sunk, and forms emaciated by wounds, loss of blood, and fever like his own of the worst enteric form.

A somewhat oppressive odour of hot soup and poultices seemed to pervade the wards of the hastily improvised hospital, where, though wounds were dressed on Lister's antiseptic system, with a care and minuteness never before seen on a large scale in war, yet it was reported, and with justice, in the public prints, that through the meanness, economy, and incapacity of the Government, or the Government officials, 'the enormous hospital at Ismailia was opened without drugs, instruments, provisions, or stores, and was unable to supply the front with any medical essentials, and that there was also an extraordinary lack of hospital attendants. Officers who lay in the wards tell stories which are ludicrous though painful, of neglect and want of common food. All acknowledged themselves grateful for the kindness, sympathy, and skill of the doctors. The fault was not theirs; but _red-tape_ finished what incompetence began.'

As Allan looked around him, a familiar figure in the undress uniform of the Black Watch caught his eye--it was that of an officer conversing in a low voice with one of the staff-surgeons, and he gave a nervous start as he muttered and closed his eyes.

'It is a chance likeness, and the world is full of chance likenesses.'

He looked again; the figure--the man was still there, and he could see his full face now, with its light brown moustache and head of close-clipped golden hair.

'Great heavens, it is a day-dream of Evan Cameron!' said Allan to himself in a whisper.

The blood in his veins seemed to congeal or to circulate like water that was icy cold. He had heard that we cannot look upon the supernatural and live, and so Allan believed that his hour had come.

Feeling that it might be only a powerful but optical illusion, he continued to gaze at the figure with incredulity and awful dread.

'Cameron!'

The name escaped him, while a strange sensation crept over Allan, and his voice as he spoke sounded thick in his own ears.

But it was no optical illusion--no disembodied spirit he saw, as he thought he had done before, but his friend and comrade still in the body, but pale now and barely convalescent after the dreadful wound he had received.

He grasped the hand of Allan, and laughed at the mingled expression of blank amazement and dismay he read there, emotions which were gradually replaced by those of satisfaction and delight.

'I was supposed to be dead and buried in the sand, like Lieutenant O'Brien in "Peter Simple," but, unlike Lieutenant O'Brien, I was not discovered by a pretty girl treading on my nose,' said Cameron, laughing, and in reply to some inarticulate words of Allan, on the side of whose bed he seated himself.

'Tell me--tell me about it,' said Allan, huskily.

'You could scarcely have left me ere I began to recover from the syncope--for a syncope it was--only you and Sergeant Farquharson were not doctors enough to discover that it was so. A sense of suffocation made me struggle up and throw off my blanket and the covering of light sand in which you had so kindly tucked me; and as the blanket fell from my face the dew refreshed me, and I perceived in a moment the fatal mistake into which you had all fallen. Dark though it was, the detachment was still in sight, and I could hear your voices; I tried to call out, but lacked the power to do so, and a horror fell upon me, with insensibility after a time, and, when I recovered, I found a group of mounted Bedouins gazing at me in stupid wonder to see a living man half buried in the sand.'

'But how was it that we totally failed to find all trace of the spot where we interred you?'

'How strange the question sounds as you frame it,' said Cameron, smiling. 'A sandstorm came on, and must have obliterated the landmarks.'

'We heard shots as we fell back.'

'The Bedouins fired at something--I know not what. They proved to belong to a friendly tribe--Bedouins of that kind who become petty merchants wandering over the country, trading in such goods as they can easily transport from place to place, and fortunate--most fortunate--was it for me that I fell just then into the hands of men so peacefully disposed.'

'And your wound?'

'Is healing fast, thank Heaven! They carefully redressed it, put me in a camel litter, and conveyed me to Abu Zabel on the canal, from whence I was sent, with others here, by boat to Ismailia on sick-leave for home. I heard of your having been carried off at Matarieh; some of our fellows who are in the wards told me so; but I was powerless to attempt your discovery in any way--too feeble almost to think, but the idea of your peril and too probably helpless butchery cut me to the heart.'

'Any news from home?'

'Home?' repeated Cameron.

'I mean of my people.'

'None, Allan, how should I hear of them?'

'True,' said Allan, wearily and sadly, and in the miserable weakness of his body, as a paroxysm of shivering came over him, almost doubting the evidence of his own senses.

Hawke Holcroft had turned up in the camp of Zeid-el-Ourdeh--that was startling enough in all conscience; but that Evan Cameron, whom he and Sergeant Farquharson had so regretfully buried in the sandy grave--the grave of which no trace could be found--should be alive, well, and chatting with him there, and manipulating a cigar, outheroded fiction!

The wonderful reappearance of the supposed dead Cameron was the intelligence in the papers which Olive Raymond and Eveline did not see.

Little could Cameron imagine that Eveline was so near to him as she was then!

Often had he dreamt of her face--not when he longed to do so, but when visions of it came upon him unbidden while he lay asleep on the deck of the transport, in the bivouacs in the desert, amid the wards of the hospital at Ismailia and elsewhere, and it always came before him with a sweetness, a loving expression, and a strange spiritual charm impossible to define or describe.

After the mutual revelations of the two friends, the intermittent fever of Allan seemed to become more deadly, and by the time that Lord Aberfeldie arrived at the hospital he almost failed to recognise his son, so much had the latter sunk; for, the temporary excitement consequent to the meeting with Cameron having subsided, Allan's health seemed visibly to retrograde, and each fit of shivering rendered him weaker than the last.

A staff-surgeon had prepared Allan for the visit of his father, who was manifestly shocked when he saw how prostrate he was, and, as they pressed each other's hands, Lord Aberfeldie perceived how thin, bony, and wasted those of his son had become.

'My poor boy,' he exclaimed; 'how is this I find you?'

'Not dying, father, but very near it, I fear,' replied Allan, with a sickly smile.

Lord Aberfeldie gazed lovingly and sadly into his son's wasted face, and thought of all his mother, his sister, and Olive would feel on seeing him thus, and in such a squalid place.

Amid the suffering and misery they were enduring, Lord Aberfeldie thought it strange to hear many expressing regret that the war was over so soon, and 'Arabi snuffed out.'

The realisation of Sir Garnet Wolseley's confident prediction that all would be ended by the 16th of September, put an abrupt and speedy end to all chances of promotion and glory, and now everyone thought only of going home as fast as possible.

In the huge improvised military hospital much existed, as in every such place, that proved rather repugnant to the ideas of a fastidious man, so Lord Aberfeldie resolved upon having Allan removed to another place--a hotel or villa--whither, when the surgeon would permit it, he would have him conveyed by soldiers in a dhooley; and, full of this purpose, he rejoined the ladies, who awaited his return with the keenest anxiety.

His hopes of Allan's recovery proved balm to their hearts, though he spoke more confidently of it than his own observations warranted.

At the story of Cameron, Eveline sprang from her seat, while a little gasping cry escaped her, and Lord Aberfeldie was rather sorry to see her mother's face darken.

'Evan Cameron--Evan Cameron alive!' exclaimed Lady Aberfeldie, incredulously.

'Alive, and well! Old Stratherroch, his father, used to say that the men of the Black Watch were deuced hard to kill, and, by Jove! he was right. For the old man's sake, I am glad that God has spared the boy!'

Unable to realise the situation, poor Eveline felt stupefied!