CHAPTER XXXV.--THE NIGHT BEFORE INKERMANN.

I told Phil Caradoc of the strange meeting with Mr. Hawkesby Guilfoyle, and his emotions of astonishment and disgust almost exceeded mine, though mingled with something of amusement, to think that such a personage should be with the army before Sebastopol in any capacity; and he predicted that he must inevitably do something that would not add to the budding laurels of the Land Transport Corps, which we scarcely recognised as a fighting force, though armed, of course, for any sudden emergency. On this morning, the mail had come in from Constantinople; but there was still no letter for me--no letter from her with whom I had left my heart, and all its fondest aspirations--yea, my very soul it seemed--in England, far away.

Many mails had gone missing; and I strove to flatter and to console myself by the vague hope, that the letters of Estelle were lying perhaps in the Gulf of Salonica, or in the Greek Archipelago, rather than adopt the bitter and wounding conviction that none were written at all. I counted the days and weeks that had elapsed since our detachments sailed from Southampton; the weeks had now become months; we were in November; yet, save when once or twice I had seen her name among the fashionable intelligence in a stray newspaper, I knew and heard nothing of Estelle, of her whose existence and future I so fondly thought were for ever woven up with mine. For a time I had been weak enough to conceal from kind-hearted Phil Caradoc the fact that I had not been getting answers to my letters; and often over a quiet cigar and a bottle of Greek wine I have listened nervously to his congratulations on my success and hopes, blended with his own personal regrets that Winifred Lloyd could not love him. He had sent to her and Dora, from Malta and from Constantinople, some of those beautiful articles of bijouterie, which the shops of the former and the bazaars of the latter can so exquisitely produce to please the taste of women, and they had been accepted with "kindest thanks," a commonplace on which poor Phil seemed to base some hope of future success.

"Winifred Lloyd is very lovely," said I, as we sat in my tent that night over a bottle of Crimskoi; "sweet and pure, happy in spirit, and gentle in heart--all that a man could desire his wife and the mother of his children to be."

"But--"

"But what, Phil?" said I, curtly.

"She cannot love me, and she will never be mine," sighed Caradoc.

"Never despair of that; we have to take Sebastopol yet; and that once achieved, we shall all go merrily sailing home to England."

"That I doubt much; some of the regiments here will be taken for the Indian reliefs--our fighting here will count as service in Europe--but surely the war cannot end with the fall of Sebastopol. A war between three of the greatest countries in the world to dwindle down to the somewhat ill-conducted siege of a fortified town would be absurd."

"Ill-conducted, Phil?"

"Of course.. We leave the city open for supplies of all kinds on the Russian side, and have never, as we should have done, seized the Isthmus of Perecop, and cut off the whole Crimea from the empire."

"Errors perhaps; but by the way, Phil, have you still Miss Lloyd's miniature about you?"

"Yes."

"Do let me have a look at it. I am an old friend, you know."

"I gave her my solemn word that while I lived no man should look upon it, Harry," said Phil, whose colour deepened. "When I am carried to the dead-tent, if that day comes, or to the burial-trench, as many better fellows have been, you may keep it or send it to her, which you will, though I would rather it were buried with me."

His eyes filled with tender enthusiasm, and his voice faltered with genuine emotion as he spoke.

"Pass the bottle, Phil, and don't be romantic--one more cigar is in the box, and it is at your service," said I.

But full of his own thoughts, which were all of her, Caradoc made no immediate reply. He sat with his eyes fixed sadly on the glowing embers of my little fire; for, thanks to the ingenuity of Evans, I had actually a fire in my tent. He had made an excavation in the earth, with a flue constructed out of the fragments of tin ammunition boxes, and the cases which had held preserved meat. This conveyed the smoke underneath the low wall of the tent, outside of which he had erected another flue some three feet high of the same materials, to which were added a few stones and some mud. The smoke at times was scarcely endurable, and made one's eyes to water; but I was not yet "old soldier" enough to heat a cannon-ball to sleep with, so Evans' patent grate had quite a reputation in the regiment, and added greatly to the comfort, if such a term can be used, of my somewhat draughty abode.

"Deuced hard lines, this sort of thing, Harry," said Caradoc, after a pause, as, bearded and patched, unshaven and unkempt, we cowered over the fire in our cloaks and wrappers; "I mean for men accustomed to better things, especially to those of expensive tastes and extravagant habits--your guardsman and man of pleasure, the lounger about town, whose day was wont to begin about two P.M., and to end at four next morning. Yet they are plucky for all that; by Jove! there is an amount of mettle or stamina in our fellows such as those of no other nation possess, the resolution to die game any way."

I fully agreed with him; for among our officers I knew hundreds of men, like Raymond Mostyn and others I could name, who were enduring this miserable gipsy-like life, and who, when at home, had hunters and harriers in the country, a house in town, a villa at St. John's Wood or elsewhere, with a tiny brougham and tiger for some "fair one with the golden locks," a yacht at Cowes, a forest in the Highlands, a box at the Opera, a French cook, perhaps, and vines and pines and other rarities from their own forcing-pits and hothouses, and who were now thankful for a mouthful of rum and hard ship-biscuit and some half-roasted coffee boiled in a camp-kettle; and for what, or to what useful end or purpose, was all this being endured? Perhaps the non-reception of letters from Estelle was making me cynical, and leading me to deem the great god of war but a rowdy, and the goddess his sister no better than she should be, glory a delusion and a humbug after all. But just when Phil, as the night was now far advanced, was muffling himself prior to facing the cold frosty blast that swept up the valley of Inkermann, and proceeding to his own tent, which was on the other flank of the regiment, the visage of Evans, red as a lobster with cold, while his greatcoat was whitened with hoar-frost, appeared at the piece of tied canvas, which passed muster as a door.

"Letter for you, sir--an English one."

"For me! how, at this hour?" I exclaimed, starting up.

"It came by the mail this morning, sir; but was in the bag for the 88th. The address is almost obliterated, as you see, so the 88th officers were tossing-up for it, when Mr. Mostyn--"

"Pshaw! give me the letter," said I, impatiently. "It is from Sir Madoc--only Sir Madoc!" I added, with unconcealed disappointment; and in proportion as my countenance lowered, Phil's brightened with interest.

I tore open what appeared to be a pretty long letter.

"It seems to have a postscript," said Phil, lingering ere he went.

"Kindest regards to Caradoc from Winny and Dora."

"Is that all?"

"All that seems to refer to you, Phil."

Phil sighed, and said,

"Well, a letter is an uncommon luxury here, so I shall not disturb you. Good night, old fellow."

"Good night; and keep clear of the tent-pegs."

Again the canvas door was tied, and I was alone; so drawing the lantern, that hung on the tent-pole, close to the empty flour-cask, which now did duty as a table, I sat down to read the characteristic epistle of my good old fatherly friend, Sir Madoc Lloyd, which was dated from Craigaderyn Court. After some rambling remarks about the war, and the mode in which he thought it should be conducted, and some smart abuse of the administration in general, and Lord Aberdeen in particular, over all of which I ran my eyes impatiently, at last they caught a name that made my heart thrill, for this was the first letter that had reached me from England.

"Lady Estelle's admirer Pottersleigh has been raised to an earldom--Heaven only knows why or for what--his own distinguished services, he says. It was all in last night's Gazette--that her Majesty had been pleased to direct letters patent, &c., granting the dignity of Earl of the United Kingdom, unto Viscount Pottersleigh, K.G., and the heirs male of his body (good joke that, Harry: reckoning his chickens before they are hatched), by the name and title of Aberconway, in the principality of Wales. For some weeks past he has been at Walcot Park, with the Cressinghams--seems quite to live there, in fact. He has been very assiduous in his attentions to a certain young lady there; he always flatters her quietly, and it seems to please her; a sure sign it would seem to me that she is not displeased with the flatterer. People say it is old Lady Naseby whom he affects; but I don't think so; neither does Winny. You will probably have heard much of this kind of gossip from Lady Estelle herself. She certainly got your Malta letter, and one from the camp before Sebastopol--so Winny, who is in her confidence, told me. You only can know if she replied--Winny rather thinks not; but I hope she may be faithful to you as Oriana herself.

"I heard all about poor Caradoc's affair from Dora; but Winny has refused another offer of marriage--a most eligible one, too--from Sir Watkins Vaughan; and since then he was nearly done for in another fashion: for when he and I were cub-hunting last month near Hawkstone, his horse, a hard-mouthed brute, swerved as we were crossing a fence, and rolled over him; so between her blunt refusal and his ugly spill, he is rather to be pitied. I don't understand Winny at all. I should not like my girls to throw themselves away; but hay should be made while the sun shines, and baronets are not to be found under every bush. Beauty fades; it is but a thing of a season; and the most blooming girl, in time, becomes passé and wrinkled, or it may be fat and fusby, as her grandmother was before her. And then Sir Watkins represents one of the best families in Wales, not so old as us certainly, but still he is descended in a direct line from Gryffyth Vychan, who was Lord of Glyndwyrdwy in Merionethshire, in Stephen's time."

(Why should Winifred Lloyd refuse and refuse again thus? As certain little passages between us in days gone by came flashing back to my memory, I felt my cheek flush by that wretched camp-fire, and then I thrust the thoughts aside as vanity.)

"Poor Winny has not been very well of late," the letter proceeded. "When she and Dora were decorating their poor mamma's grave, in the old Welsh fashion, on Palm Sunday, at Craigaderyn church, I fear she must have caught cold; it ended in a touch of fever, and I think the dear girl grew delirious, for she had a strange dream about the ghost of Jorwerth Du--you remember that absurd old story?--but the ghost was you, and the red-haired daughter of the Gwylliad Cochion, who spirited you away, was--whom think you?--but Lady Estelle!

"We had a jolly shooting-season at Vaughan's place in South Wales. With Don and our double-barrelled breech-loader we soon filled a spring-cart, and brought it back in state, with all the hares and the long bright tails of the pheasants hanging over it. Vaughan--who will not relinquish his hope of Winny--and a lot of other fine fellows--old friends, some of them--are coming to have their annual Christmas shooting with me, and I have got two kegs of ammunition all ready in the gun-room. How I wish you were to be with us, Harry!

"Golden plover and teal, too, are appearing here now, and flocks of white Norwegian pigeons in Scotland; all indications that we shall have an unusually severe winter; so God help you poor fellows under canvas in the Crimea! In common with all the girls in England, Winny and Dora are busy making mufflings, knitted vests and cuffs, and so forth for the troops; and I have despatched some special hampers of good things, made up and packed by Owen Gwyllim and Gwenny Davis, the housekeeper, for our own lads of the 23rd to make merry with at Christmas, or on St. David's day."

(The warm wrappers arrived for us in summer, and as for the "special hampers," they were never heard of at all.)

And so, with many warm wishes, almost prayers, for my preservation from danger, and offers of money if I required it, the letter of my kind old friend ended; but it gave me food for much thought, and far into the hours of the chill night I sat and pondered over it. Why did Winny refuse so excellent an offer as that of Sir Watkins, whom I knew to be a wealthy and good-looking young baronet? I scarcely dared to ask myself, and so, as before, dismissed that subject. Why had not Estelle's answers reached me, if she had actually written then? That Lady Naseby had surreptitiously intercepted our correspondence, I could not believe, though she might forbid it. Was my Lord Pottersleigh, now Earl of Aberconway, at work; or had they, like many others, perished at sea? Heaven alone new. His flatteries "pleased her," his, the senile dotard! And he had taken up his residence at Walcot Park; his earldom, too! I was full of sadness, mortification, and bitter thoughts; thoughts too deep and fierce for utterance or description. Could it be that the earldom and wealth on one hand were proving too strong for love, with the stringent tenor of her father's will on the other?

At the opera and theatre I had seen Estelle's beautiful eyes fill with tears, as she sympathised with the maudlin love and mimic sorrow, the wrongs or mishaps, of some well-rouged gipsy in rags, some peasant in a steeple-crowned hat and red bandages, some half-naked fisherman, like Masaniello, and her bosom would heave with emotion and enthusiasm; and yet with all this natural commiseration and fellow-feeling, she, who could almost weep with the hero or heroine of the melodrama, while their situation was enhanced by the effects of the orchestra, the lime-light, and the stage-carpenter, was perhaps casting me from her heart and her memory, as coolly as if I were an old ball-dress! So I strove yet awhile to think and to hope that her letters were with the lost mails at the bottom of the ?gean or the Black Sea; but Sir Madoc's letter occasioned me grave and painful doubts; and memory went sadly back to many a little but well-remembered episode of tenderness, a word, a glance, a stolen caress, when we rode or drove by the Elwey or Llyn Aled, in the long lime avenue, in the Martens' dingle, and in the woods and gardens of pleasant Craigaderyn. The wretched light in my lantern was beginning to fail; my little fire had died quite out, and the poor sentry shivering outside had long since ceased to warm his hands at the flue. The tent was cold and chill as a tomb, and I was just about to turn in, when a sound, which a soldier never hears without starting instinctively to his weapons, struck my ear.

A drum, far on the right, was beating the long roll! Hundreds of others repeated that inexorable summons all over the camp, while many a bugle was blown, as the whole army stood to their arms. It was the morning of the battle of Inkermann!