CHAPTER XXXIX.--A MAIL FROM ENGLAND.

THE dreamy conviction or thought with which the last chapter closes, proved, perhaps, but a foreshadowing of that which was looming in the future. On the day after that terrible storm of wind, rain, and hail in the Black Sea, when some five hundred seamen were drowned, and when so many vessels perished, causing an immense loss to the Allies; a terrific gale, such as our oldest naval officers had never seen; when the tents in camp were uprooted in thousands, and swept in rags before the blast; when the horses broke loose from their picketing-ropes, and forty were found dead from cold and exposure; when every imaginable article was blown hither and thither through the air; and when, without food, fire, or shelter, even the sick and wounded passed a night of privation and misery such as no human pen can describe, and many of the Light Division were thankful to take shelter in the old caverns and cells of Inkermann--on the 15th of November, the day subsequent to this terrible destruction by land and water, there occurred an episode in my own story which shall never be forgotten by me.

Singular to say, amid all the vile hurly-burly incident to the storm, a disturbance increased by the roar of the Russian batteries, and a sortie on the French, a mail from England reached our division, and it contained one letter for me.

Prior to my opening it, as I failed to recognise the writing, Phil Caradoc (wearing a blanket in the fashion of a poncho-wrapper, a garment to which his black bearskin cap formed an odd finish) entered my tent, which had just been re-erected with great difficulty, and I saw that he had a newspaper in his hand, and very cloudy expression in his usually clear brown eyes.

"What is up, Phil?" said; "a bad report of our work laid before the public, or what?"

"Worse than that," said he, seating himself on the empty flour-cask which served me for a table. "Can you steel yourself to hear bad news?"

"From home?" I asked.

"Well, yes," said he, hesitating, and a chill came over my heart as I said involuntarily,

"Estelle?"

"Yes, about Lady Cressingham."

"What--what--don't keep me in suspense!" I exclaimed, starting up.

"She is, I fear, lost to you for ever, Hardinge."

"Ill--dead--O, Phil, don't say dead!"

"No, no."

"Thank God! What, then, is the matter?"

"She is--married, that is all."

"Married!"

"Poor Harry! I am deuced sorry for you. Look at this paper. Perhaps I shouldn't have shown it to you; but some one less a friend--Mostyn or Clavell--might have thrown it in your way. Besides, you must have learned the affair in time. Take courage," he added, after a pause, during which a very stunned sensation pervaded me; "be a man; she is not worth regretting."

"To whom is she married?" I asked, in a low voice.

"Pottersleigh," said he, placing in my hand the paper, which was a Morning Post.

I crushed it up into a ball, and then, spreading it out on the head of the inverted cask, read, while my hands trembled, and my heart grew sick with many contending emotions, a long paragraph which Phil indicated, and which ran somewhat as follows, my friend the while standing quietly by my side, manipulating a cheroot prior to lighting it with a cinder from my little fire. The piece of fashionable gossip was headed, "Marriage of the Right Hon. the Earl of Aberconway and the Lady Estelle Cressingham;" and detailed, in the usual style of such announcements, that, on a certain--I forget which day now--the lovely and secluded little village of Walcot, in Hampshire, presented quite a festive appearance in honour of the above-named event, the union of the young and beautiful daughter of the late Earl of Naseby to our veteran statesman; that along the route from the gates of Walcot Park to the porch of the village church were erected several arches of evergreen, tastefully surmounted by banners and appropriate mottoes. Among the former "we observed the arms of the now united noble houses of Potter and Cressingham, and the standards of the Allies now before Sebastopol. The beautiful old church of Walcot was adorned with flowers, and crowded to excess long before the hour appointed. The lovely bride was charmingly attired in white satin, elegantly trimmed with white lace, and wore a wreath of orange blossoms on her splendid dark hair, covered with a long veil, à la juive. The bridesmaids, six in number, were as follows:" but I omit their names as well as the list of gifts bestowed upon the noble bride, who was given away by her cousin, the young earl. "Lord Aberconway, with his ribbon of the Garter, wore the peculiar uniform of the Pottersleigh Yeomanry."

"Rather a necessary addition," said Phil, parenthetically; "his lordship could scarcely have figured in the ribbon alone."

"--Yeomanry, of which gallant regiment he is colonel, and looked hale and well for his years. After a choice déje?ner provided for a distinguished circle, the newly-wedded pair left Walcot Park, amid the most joyous demonstrations, for Pottersleigh Hall, the ancestral seat of the noble Earl, to spend the honeymoon."

"A precious flourish of penny whistles!" said Phil, when I had read, deliberately folded the paper, and thrust it into the fire, to the end that I might not be troubled by the temptation to read it all over again; and then we looked at each other steadily for a minute in silence. Forsaken! I remembered my strange forebodings now, when I had ridden to Walcot Park. They were married--married, she and old Pottersleigh! My heart seemed full of tears, yet when seating myself wearily on the camp-bed, I laughed bitterly and scornfully, as I thought over the inflated newspaper paragraph, and that the sangre azul of the Earl of Aberconway must be thin and blue indeed, when compared with the red blood of my less noble self.

"Come, Harry, don't laugh--in that fashion at least," said Caradoc. "I've some brandy here," he added, unslinging his canteen, "I got from a confiding little vivandière of the 10th Regiment, Infanterie de Ligne. Don't mix it with the waters of Marah, the springs of bitterness, but take a good caulker neat, and keep up your heart. Varium et mutabile semper--you know the last word is feminine. That is it, my boy--nothing more. Even the wisest man in the world, though he dearly loved them, could never make women out; and I fear, Harry, that you and I are not even the wisest men in the Welsh Fusileers. And now as a consolation,

"'And that your sorrow may not be a dumb one,
Write odes on the inconstancy of woman.'"

"I loved that girl very truly, very honestly, and very tenderly, Phil," said I, in a low voice, and heedless of how he had been running on; "and she kissed me when I left her, as I then thought and hoped a woman only kisses once on earth. In my sleep I have had a foreshadowing of this. Can it be that the slumber of the body is but the waking of the soul, that such thoughts came to me of what was to be?"

"The question is too abstruse for me," said Caradoc, stroking his brown beard, which was now of considerable length and volume; "but don't worry yourself, Harry; you have but tasted, as I foresaw you would, of the hollow-heartedness, the puerile usages, the petty intrigues, and the high-born snobbery of those exclusives 'the upper ten thousand.' Don't think me republican for saying so; but 'there is one glory of the sun and another of the moon,' as some one writes; 'and there is one style of beauty among women which is angelic, and another which is not,' referring, I presume, to beauty of the spirit. We were both fated to be unlucky in our loves," continued Caradoc, taking a vigorous pull at the little plug-hole of his canteen, a tiny wooden barrel slung over his shoulder by a strap; "but do take courage, old fellow, and remember there are other women in the world in plenty."

"But not for me," said I, bitterly.

"Tush! think of me, of my affair--I mean my mistake with Miss Lloyd."

"But she never loved you."

"Neither did this Lady Estelle, now Countess of Aberconway" (I ground my teeth), "love you."

"She said she did; and what has it all come to? promises broken, a plight violated, a heart trod under foot."

"Come, come; don't be melodramatic--it's d--d absurd, and no use. Besides, there sounds the bugle for orders, and we shall have to relieve the trenches in an hour. So take another cigar ere you go."

"She never loved me--never! never! you are right, Phil."

"And yet I believe she did."

"Did!" said I, angrily; "what do you mean now, Caradoc? I am in no mood to study paradoxes."

"I mean that she loved you to a certain extent; but not well enough to sacrifice herself and her--"

"Don't say position--hang it!"

"No--no."

"What then?" I asked, impatiently.

"Her little luxuries, and all that she must have lost by the tenor of her father's will and her mother's bad will, or that she should have omitted to gain, had she married you, a simple captain of the 23rd Foot, instead of this old Potter--this Earl of Aberconway."

"A simple captain, indeed!"

"Pshaw, Harry, be a man, and think no more about the affair. It is as a tale that is told, a song that is sung, a bottle of tolerable wine that has become a marine."

"L'infidelité du corps, ou l'infidelité du c[oe]ur, I care not now which it was; but I am done with her now and for ever," I exclaimed, with a sudden gust of rage, while clasping on my sword.

"Done--so I should think, when she is married."

"But to such a contemptible dotard."

"Well, there is some revenge in that."

"And she could cast me aside like an old garment," said I, lapsing into tenderness again; "I, to whose neck she clung as she did on that evening we parted. There must have been some trickery--some treachery, of which we are the victims!"

"Don't go on in this way, like a moonstruck boy, or, by Jove, the whole regiment will find it out; so calm yourself, for we go to the front in an hour;" and wringing my hand this kind-hearted fellow, whose offhand consolation was but ill-calculated to soothe me, left for his own tent, as he had forgotten his revolver.

I was almost stupefied by the shock. Could the story be real? I looked to the little grate (poor Evans' contrivance) where the charred remains of the Morning Post still flickered in the wind. Was I the same man of an hour ago? "The plains of life were free to traverse," as an elegant female writer says, "but the sunshine of old lay across them no longer. There were roses, but they were scentless--fruits, but they were tasteless--wine, but it had lost its flavour. Well, every created being must come to an hour like this, when he feels there is nothing pleasant to the palate, or grateful to the sense, agreeable to the ear, or refreshing to the heart; when man delights him not and woman still less, and when he is sick of the dream of existence."

To this state had I come, and yet I had neither seen nor heard the last of her.

"Estelle--Estelle!" I exclaimed in a low voice, and my arms went out into vacancy, to fall back on the camp-bed whereon I reclined. Abandoned for another; forgotten it might too probably--nay, must be. I stared up, and looked from the triangular door of the tent over the wilderness of zigzags, the sand-bags, and fascines of the trenches; over the gun-batteries to the white houses and green domes of Sebastopol, and all down the long valley of Inkermann, where the graves of the dead lay so thick and where the Russian pickets were quietly cooking their dinners; but I could see nothing distinctly. The whole features of the scenery seemed blurred, faint, and blended, for my head was swimming, my heart was sick, and all, all this was the doing of Estelle! Did no memory of sweet Winifred Lloyd come to me in my desolation of the heart? None! I could but think of the cold-blooded treachery of the one I had lost. My letter! I suddenly remembered it, and tore it open, thinking that the writer, whose hand, as I have said, I failed to recognise, might cast some light upon the matter; and to my increasing bewilderment, it proved to be from Winifred herself. A letter from her, and to me; what could it mean? But the first few words sufficed to explain.

Craigaderyn, . . . .

"My dear Captain Hardinge,--Papa has sprained his whip hand when hunting with Sir Watkins Vaughan, and so compels me to write for him." (Why should compulsion be necessary? thought I.) "You will, no doubt, have heard all about Lady Estelle's marriage by this time. She was engaged to Lord Pottersleigh before she came here, it would seem, and matters were brought to an issue soon after your transport sailed. She wished Dora and me to be among her bridesmaids, but we declined; nor would papa have permitted us, had we desired to be present at the ceremony. She bade me say, if I wrote to you, that you must forgive her, as she is the victim of circumstances; that she shall ever esteem and love you as a brother, and so forth; but I agree with papa, who says that she is a cold-hearted jilt, undeserving of any man's love, and that he 'will never forgive her, even if he lived as long as Gwyllim ap Howel ap Jorwerth ap Tregaian,' the Old Parr of Wales.

"We are all well at Craigaderyn, and all here send you and Mr. Caradoc kindest love. We are quite alone just now, and I often idle over my music, playing 'The Men of Harlech,' and other Welsh airs to papa. More often I wander and ride about the Martens' dingle, by Carneydd Llewellyn's hut--you remember it?--by Glendower's oak, by the Elwey, Llyn Aled, and the rocking stone, and think--think very much of you and poor Mr. Caradoc, and all that might have been." (Pretty pointed this--with which--Phil or me? Could I be uncertain?) "Next to hearing from you, our greatest pleasure at Craigaderyn is to hear about you and our own Welsh Fusileers, of whose bravery at Alma we are so justly proud; so we devour the newspapers with avidity and too often with sorrow. How is my dear pet goat?"

And so, with a pretty little prayer that I might be spared, her letter ended; and hearing the voices of the adjutant and sergeant-major, I thrust it into my pocket, and set off to relieve the trenches, with less of enthusiasm and more recklessness of life than ever before possessed me, and without reflecting that I did not deserve to receive a letter so kind and prayerful as that of the dear little Welsh girl, who was so far away. It was cold that night in the trenches, nathless the Russian fire--yea, cold enough to freeze the marrow in one's bones; but my heart seemed colder still. In the morning, four of my company were found dead between the gabions, without a wound, and with their muskets in their hands. The poor fellows had gone to their last account--slipt away in sheer exhaustion, through lack of food, warmth, and clothing--and this was glory!