Chapter XXI · UNDER ARREST.

Meanwhile Horace Ramornie was in his little cabin (nearly one half of which was filled by a 24-pounder), ignorant of the strange event that had transpired in the saloon; and anticipating only the evils, the affront, and shame of a court-martial, before which he knew not in what artful fashion the charge of Chesters might be framed against him; and in which, perhaps, spitefully, and for the mere purpose of annoyance, the name of Gwendoleyne Wedderburn might appear as the cause of quarrel, and this itself might ruin him with her for ever.

Knowing but too well that for the maintenance of discipline, the authorities at the Horse Guards generally supported—even to injustice, seniors against juniors—he passed the hours that remained of the morning in a most unhappy mood, fearing that ruin stared him in the face, and resolving—for he was full of desperate and bitter thoughts—that if he were cashiered, he would join some regiment as a volunteer, if permitted, and still serve, to perish, if he won not honour, in the war!

What would Sir Edward Elton and the regiment—those Royal Fusileers, of whom he was so proud to be one, and among whom he was so well thought of—say, when they heard of his being placed under arrest, close arrest too, a double degradation, when on his way out to the seat of war, for an unmeaning gambling row (such it might be called) with his senior officer?

Gwenny and the Wedderburns too! His heart grew sick when he thought of her and of them; the disappointment his good uncle must feel; the indignation of Lady Wedderburn and Cyril; and the cold, legal, and reprehensive comments of Robert. So his ideas became a mere tumult, a chaos of rage; for the catastrophe his fears foreshadowed had come to pass sooner than he expected.

Separated from Ramornie only by a bulkhead or two, Chesters was in his more spacious cabin, in a frame of mind that was still more unenviable; for he had yet the hollow and conventional feeling of honour, or knew the necessity of affecting to have it, for outward purposes. As to what people at home might say he cared little, for there he was forgotten by all, save his creditors; but here, in the Allied Army, he would have to face exposure, disgrace, and, too probably, a court-martial, if not summary dismissal from the Turkish Contingent; for even the singularly recruited ranks of the Bashi Bozooks might decline to receive him.

Deep were the blasphemies against Fate, and bitter the curses against Louis De la Fosse that fell from his lips! He drank brandy and seltzer water as if he had a consuming fire within him; his features, all save the grog-blotches, were pale and livid; his hands trembled and moved by convulsive twitches—all the more so when a message came from the Frenchman, through young Elton.

"Tell him, Monsieur le Lieutenant," said the former to the latter, cuttingly, "that I can neither be bullied nor jockeyed like some of his boy ensigns; and that I will fight with sword or pistol, or both, on the first land we sight, even were it no larger than this table."

"Something must be done," replied the rather bewildered Elton; "but I fear arrest also, if I become the bearer of a challenge. Duelling is fairly put down in our service."

"But not in ours. People cant and talk of steam and telegraphy, of progress and civilization, but the science of human destruction keeps pace with them, for human nature never changes. We shall never be without crime and passion. And tell this man—if he is not what I should blush to call any man who wears an epaulette?—I shall fight him, if he will come, a duel à mort, though I fear that my old comrade, St. Arnaud, would resent such a fracas. And yet he does not always keep his own temper under control. Mon Dieu! I was close by his side on that terrible morning in the Tuileries, when General Cormeneuse accused him of extracting a valuable document from the portfolio of Napoleon; and before one of us could speak, the sword of St. Arnaud was plunged to the hilt in his heart."

Chesters strove again and again to write an insulting acceptance of the challenge from the Frenchman, but his fingers failed to guide the pen. And when he remembered that, too probably, not an officer on board the troopship would become his messenger or second, he dashed his desk against the cannon in his cabin, with blind and impotent wrath.

A jockey, a gambler, a roué, he had never before been so openly and publicly stripped of the character of "gentleman;" and now he knew and felt himself to be exposed, lost, disgraced, perhaps beyond redemption, and all through the means of that quiet, stern, and observant Frenchman, whom he resolved that he would yet shoot like a dog, if he had the opportunity. How he loathed and literally cursed him!

Well, if he escaped dismissal, which he could scarcely hope, he should in future scrupulously avoid his own countrymen, and fraternize with the Orientals—perhaps turn Turk altogether, like the Croat, Omar Pasha; for this gambling scrape would not, he conceived, injure him much in the estimation of Osmanli officers, whom he knew to be but an indifferent set of fellows, often originally the azancoglans, or men who do the meaner offices of the Seraglio, or attendants of the pashas, such as tiruaktzys (nail cutters), carpet-spreaders, chiboukgis or pipe-bearers, and so forth.

But being literally covered with merited shame, he became seriously ill, and his uninterrupted libations of brandy increased his ailment, so that a few hours saw him in a raging fever and placed on the sick-list.

The next officer in command, a Captain of the Rifle Brigade, ignoring alike his past authority and the whole affair, released Horace from arrest, and restored to him his sword. The incident, however ugly, had a salutary influence among the youngsters. Dread of a court of inquiry still existed; so the gambling in the cabin ceased, and a vast number of bets were cancelled, and IOU's that had been interchanged were, by mutual consent, destroyed, torn to pieces, and sent whirling over to leeward.

To do him justice, amid all the contempt he had for his character, the soldierly Louis De la Fosse felt some pity on learning that Chesters was so crushed in spirit.

"My own life has not been always couleur de rose," said he to Ramornie, as they promenaded on deck one evening, while the little green coloured isle of Pantellaria, with Il Bosco, its volcanic cone, were faintly visible on their weather beam; "it has been cloudy enough at times—such as that when this same Chesters reduced me to the verge of starvation and despair; and when for months I was a prisoner among the Arabs in the mountains of Auress, which look down on the sandy waste of Sahara, and when every morning I had the pleasant anticipation of dislocation of the neck, by having my head twisted one way and my body another, like a pigeon in a poulterer's shop. Ma foi! un bon coup d'épée I have struck many a time, but for you young fellows, the best I ever struck was that with your sword blade through yonder trickster's hidden card!"

Save through the surgeon on board, nothing was known of Chesters, who only began to recover his senses one evening when he could see through the open port-hole near his bed the waves careering past before the pleasant breeze that fanned his throbbing brow, and land visible a few miles off; but he gazed at it dreamily, for what shore it proved he knew little, and cared less.

The ocean was all of a very light blue; but the bases of the mountains were of a dark indigo tint, while their peaks were tipped with crimson and purple, as they started in outline against a sky of gold and amber, that gradually turned to fiery red as the sun went down behind the land. Then blending tints of opal and crimson began to steal across the sea; while darkness deepened on the shore of Sicily, for such it was, and the cape—some call it the isle—which terminated near Passaro. The chargers were whinnying on board as they gladly snuffed the land—the Pachynum Promontorium of the classic ages; but it might have been the coast of Bulgaria or of Baffin's Bay for all that Chesters cared, as he closed his blood-shot eyes, and dozed wearily off in slumber.

When next morning he awoke a little calmer, and looked forth once more, he knew instantly where he was. Around the open port-hole swarmed a flotilla of little boats, full of tawny, black-haired and keen-eyed men and lads, almost in a state of nudity, looking like great monkeys as they clamoured for money to be thrown over, that they might dive for it. He recognised the streets of stairs ascending to the Strada Reale; the solid batteries rising tier above tier, and bristling with a thousand cannon over the freestone rocks, on which the glittering sea was dashing; the Cathedral of St. John, where the keys of the Holy Cities hang; the Castle of St. Elmo; the harbour full of shipping, chiefly war vessels and transports, crowded with troops, the boats in hundreds shooting to and fro, full of seamen and marines, food and warlike stores, coals, powder, shot, and cannon. He heard the occasional drum and bugle-call in the garrison, and the tolling of those solemn bells that whilom had rung for mass and prayer in Rhodes; and as Chesters turned wearily in his bed, he knew that the Blenheim swung at her moorings in the harbour of Valetta.

A great French line-of-battle ship, the Ville de Paris, crowded with Zouaves, lay near her. They were swarming about her decks, and even out upon her booms, laughing, singing, and chattering like marmosets, in their short blue jackets, and baggy red breeches, and ever and anon their long brass trumpets rang shrilly out upon the ambient air.

For all these he had no eyes: he was feverish, and though, in a moral sense, not naturally courageous, at that moment he actually longed for death. He could remember his father, a gallant and irreproachable veteran officer, whose ideas of honour were based on the old military school, when men entered the service, not as a lounge, but for the duration of their lives, and when the standard maxims were, never to give, but never to take an insult, and to be ever prompt with your pistol! He could recall this fine old officer, scarred with many an honourable wound, his breast decorated with the medals he had won in Egypt, at Corunna, and Waterloo, commanding his regiment in yonder citadel of Valetta; and he felt that if the dead are conscious, his father would be regarding him with sorrow, if not with shame!

And shame and rage Chesters felt keenly, but no dread of the future and no regret for a misspent past; no thought of reformation for the time to come, and short enough that might be. He was devoid of all religion, yet, strange to say, not entirely destitute of a species of superstition; and in times of danger, was wont to recall with confidence the prediction of a gipsy woman at Yetholm, who, when he crossed her hand with silver, had predicted, "That he should neither be drowned, nor die a violent death—yet that he should not die in a bed, as his father had done."

So he began to gather a little hope. He might survive the present disgrace, and be a Bimbashi or Colonel yet—ay, a Pasha with two tails, or a Brigadier; and thus, while trembling in his heart lest the late affair should recall fully to memory the half-forgotten play-transaction, in which his name was once involved before, compelling him to quit the Queen's service, he schemed, in fancy, out the future.

The saloon of the great ship was empty, voiceless, and he knew that every officer who was not on duty would be on shore, to see the wonders of Malta, to smoke cigars at the Auberge de Provence, have tiffin with sliced melons and Maltese oranges at Spark's in the Strada San Paoli, and a donkey ride as far as Monte Benjemma, or the wood of Boschetto, where the knights of St. John kept their game of old, for he had done all that himself in happier and more innocent days.

Suspense and hope, the heaven and the hell of the systematic gambler, he had endured and triumphed over; but to be pointed at by the finger of scorn, for what he had been discovered to be—he, who had alternately bullied or chaffed and rooked the boy-subs of his detachment—all proved too much, however, for the brain. The cognac was again appealed to in absence of the assistant-surgeon, and again a raging fever seized him.

He became oblivious of everything and everybody now, save his close attendant, Bill Trayner, whom he never failed to recognise, and to anathematize most freely—a circumstance which excited only a smile from that well-trained jockey, who was already looking to the reversion of his effects, and taking the opportunity of dividing the contents of a well-filled purse, with great fairness, between himself and his master with whom he was left in charge, for when the Blenheim got up her steam for the Archipelago, Chesters was in the Military Hospital at Malta, where we shall gladly leave him to recover at leisure from the results of his own folly and debauchery.

It was generally supposed that he would die, or resign and slip quietly home; so, as if by common consent, the officers on board the troop-ship resolved to commit his story to oblivion.