CHAPTER LII.--BEFORE SEBASTOPOL STILL.

On the 28th of March, I found myself once more in my old tent, and seeking hard to keep myself warm at the impromptu stove, constructed by my faithful old servant, poor Jack Evans. I was received with astonishment, and, I am pleased to say, with genuine satisfaction by the regiment, even by those who had flattered themselves that they had gained promotion by my supposed demise. I was welcomed by all, from the Lieutenant-colonel down to little Dicky Roll, the junior drummer, and for the first day my tent was besieged by old friends.

I had come back among them as from the dead; but more than one man, whose name figured in the lists as missing, turned up in a similar fashion during the war. My baggage had all been sent to Balaclava, the railway to which was now partly in operation; my letters and papers had been carefully sealed up in black wax by Philip Caradoc, and with other private and personal mementos of me, packed for transmission to Sir Madoc Lloyd, as my chief friend of whom he knew. Many came, I have said, to welcome me; but I missed many a familiar face, especially from among my own company, as the Fusileers had more than once been severely engaged in the trenches.

Caradoc had been wounded in the left hand by a rifle-ball; Charley Gywnne greeted me with his head in bandages, the result of a Cossack sabre-cut; Dynely, the adjutant, had also been wounded; so had Mostyn, of the Rifles, and Tom Clavell, of the 19th, when passing through "the Valley of Death." Sergeant Rhuddlan, of my company, had just rejoined, after having a ball in the chest (even Carneydd Llewellyn had lost a horn): all who came to see me had something to tell of dangers dared and sufferings undergone. All were in uniforms that were worn to rags; but all were hearty as crickets, though sick of the protracted siege, and longing to carry Sebastopol with the cold steel.

"How odd, my dear old fellow, that we should all think you drowned, and might have been wearing crape on our sleeves, but for the lack thereof in camp, and the fact that mourning has gone out of fashion since death is so common among us; while all the time you have been mewed up (by the Cossacks in the Baidar Valley) within some forty miles of us; and so stupidly, too!" said Caradoc, as we sat late in the night over our grog and tobacco in his hut.

"Not so stupidly, after all," I replied, while freely assisting myself to his cavendish.

"How?"

"There was such a girl there, Phil!" I added, with a sigh.

"Oho! where?"

"At Yalta."

"Woronzow's palace, or chateau?"

"Yes; but why wink so knowingly?"

"So, after all, you found there was balm in Gilead?" said he, laughing. "You must admit then, if she impressed you so much, that all your bitter regrets about a certain newspaper paragraph were a little overdone, and that I was a wise prophet? And what was this girl--Russian, Tartar, Greek, a Karaite Jewess, or what?"

"A pure Russian."

"Handsome?"

"Beyond any I have ever seen, beautiful!"

"Whew! even beyond la belle--"

"There, don't mention her at present, please," said I, with a little irritation, which only made him laugh the more.

"If you were love-making at Yalta, with three lance-prods in you, there was no malingering anyhow."

"I should think not."

"And so she was engaged to be married to that Russian bear, Tolstoff," he added, after I had told him the whole of my affair with Valerie.

"Yes," said I, with an unmistakable sigh.

"I think we are both destined to live and die bachelors," he resumed, in a bantering way; for though Phil had in these matters undergone, at Craigaderyn and elsewhere, "the baptism of fire" himself, he was not the less inclined to laugh at me; for of all sorrows, those of love alone excite the risible propensities.

"And so, Phil, the world's a kaleidoscope--always shifting."

"Not always couleur de rose, though?"

"And I am here again!"

"Thank God!" said he, as we again shook hands, "Faith, Harry, you must have as many lives as a cat, and so you may well have as many loves as Don Juan; but, entre nous, and excuse me, she seems to have been a bit of a flirt, your charming Valerie."

"How--why do you think so?"

"From all you have told me; moreover every woman to be attractive, should be a little so," replied Caradoc, curling his heavy brown moustache.

"I don't think she was; indeed, I am certain she was not. But if this be true, how then about Miss Lloyd; and she is attractive enough?"

At the tenor of this retort Phil's face flushed from his Crimean beard to his temples.

"There you are wrong," said he, with the slightest asperity possible; "she has not in her character a grain of coquetry, or of that which Horace calls 'the art that is not to be taught by art.' She is a pure-minded and warm-hearted English girl, and is as perfect as all those wives and daughters of England, who figure in the volumes of Mrs. Ellis; and in saying this I am genuine, for I feel that I am praising some other fellow's bride--not mine, God help me!" he added, with much of real feeling.

"You have heard nothing of the Lloyds since I left you?"

"Nothing."

"Well, take courage, Phil; we may be at Craigaderyn one day yet," said I; and he, as if ashamed of his momentary sentimental outburst, exclaimed, with a laugh,

"By Jove, now that I have heard all your amours and amourettes, they surpass even those of Hugh Price."

"Poor Hugh! his lieutenancy is filled up, I suppose?"

"Yes--as another week would have seen your company, for we could not conceive that you were a prisoner at Yalta. Awkward that would have been."

"Deucedly so."

"But now you must console yourself, old fellow, by seeing what Madame la Colonelle Tolstoff----"

"Don't call her by that name, Phil--I hate to hear it!"

"By what, then?"

"Valerie--anything but the other."

"Then what, as Mrs. Henry Hardinge, she might become, if all this author (whose book I have been reading) says of the Russian ladies be true." And drawing from his pocket a small volume, he gave me the following paragraph to read, and I own it consoled me--a little:--

"The domestic virtues are little known or cultivated in Russia, and marriage is a mere matter of convenience. There is little of romance in the character or conduct of the Russian lady. Intrigue and sensuality, rather than sentiment or passion, guide her in her amours, and these in after-life are followed by other inclinations. She becomes a greedy gamester, and a great gourmande, gross in person, masculine in views, a shrewd observer of events, an oracle at court, and a tyrant over her dependents. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule."

"Ah, Valerie would be one of these!"

"Perhaps--but as likely not," said Phil; "and on the whole, if this traveller Maxwell is right, I have reason to congratulate you on your escape. But we must turn in now, as we relieve the trenches an hour before daybreak to-morrow; and by a recent order every man, without distinction, carries one round shot to the front, so a constant supply is kept up for the batteries."

Soon after this, on the 2nd of April, a working party of ours suffered severely in the trenches, and Major Bell, who commanded, was thanked in general orders for his distinguished conduct on that occasion. As yet it seemed to me that no very apparent progress had been made with the siege. The cold was still intense. Mustard froze the moment it was made, and half-and-half grog nearly did so, too. The hospital tents and huts were filled with emaciated patients suffering under the many diseases incident to camp life; and the terrible hospital at Scutari was so full, that though the deaths there averaged fifty daily in February, our last batch of wounded had to be kept on board-ship.

Phil and I burned charcoal in our hut, using old tin mess-kettles with holes punched in them. We, like all the officers, wore long Crimean boots; but our poor soldiers had only their wretched ankle bluchers, which afforded them no protection when the snow was heavy, or when in thaws the mud became literally knee-deep; and they suffered so much, that in more than one instance privates dropped down dead without a wound after leaving the trenches. So great were the disasters of one regiment--the 63rd, I think--that only seven privates and four officers were able to march to Balaclava on the 1st of February; by the 12th the effective strength of the brigade of Guards was returned at 350 men; and all corps--the Highland, perhaps, excepted--were in a similarly dilapidated state.

The camp was ever full of conflicting rumours concerning combined assaults, expected sorties, the probabilities of peace, or a continuance of the war; alleged treasons among certain French officers, who were at one time alleged to have given the Russians plans of their own batteries; that Menschikoff was dead from a wound, and also Yermiloff the admiral; that General Tolstoff was now in command of the left towards Inkermann. (If so, was Valerie now in Sebastopol? How I longed for the united attack--the storm and capture that might enable me to see her once again!) And amid all these varied rumours there came one--carried swiftly by horsemen through Bucharest and Varna--which reached us on the 7th of April, to the effect that Nicholas the mighty Czar of All the Russias, had gone to his last account; and I do not think it was a demise we mourned much. We sent intelligence of it by a flag of truce to the Russians; but they received it with scorn, as a "weak invention of the enemy."

And now the snow began to wear away; the clouds that floated over the blue Euxine and the green spires of Sebastopol became light and fleecy; the young grass began to sprout, and the wild hyacinths, the purple crocuses, and tender snowdrops, the violet and the primrose, were blooming in the Valley of Death, and on the fresh mould that marked where the graves of our comrades lay.