Chapter XIII · FATE.

Cyril was still full of his project—his most earnest desire to remove Mary Lennox from the perilous atmosphere of the Hospital at Scutari, and place her in the care of an officer's wife, whom he knew, and who resided in Misseri's Frankish establishment, the Hotel d'Angleterre; if not there, in the pension of Madame Giuseppino Vitale, so famous for the views from her windows, though that there was an awkwardness in a young unmarried officer procuring quarters for a young unmarried lady, he could not but admit; however, ere he had quite decided what to do, there occurred an event which he had dreaded, yet could not bring his mind to anticipate.

He had recovered with marvellous rapidity, having suffered more from loss of blood than from actual severity of the wounds inflicted by Galitzin, though that near the lung had been certainly dangerous; but what astonished and distressed him for a day or two was that Mary, who had long since ceased to attend or visit him, had entirely disappeared, and his servant, the soldier of the Black Watch, could tell him nothing about her. He could no longer meet with her light figure in its sombre dress, flitting about the passages that led to the wards, crossing the square from the laboratory or soup kitchen, and he began to fear that she had left the place for some reason or purpose known to herself alone.

Could she be ill? Alas! that was likely enough. He remembered that since he had first seen her in Scutari, she had been daily growing thinner, even as he waxed in strength and flesh. Her figure, once so fair and round, had seemed to be fading away; her cheeks had become hollow, and her white temples too. Her hands had become painfully attenuated and almost transparent, all bespeaking what some one terms "the lingering decay of the delicate physique."

Cyril Wedderburn was sorely distressed by the recollection and conviction of all this; and, blaming himself for remissness in not having her removed sooner, after three days had elapsed without seeing or hearing of her, he went forth to make inquiries.

"Depend upon it," thought he, "inspired by an emotion of false delicacy, or something of that kind, she has given me the slip and bolted for England perhaps, by the steamer from Galata."

Alas! he little knew that poor Mary had not a sixpence in the world she could call her own.

"I was anxious, of course, to get her out of this horrid place; but I hope she has not anticipated the move by any rash plan of her own," thought he; "but anything is better than being here," he added, for with something akin to terror, he had seen her hovering in the cholera wards, where the patients were in all stages of collapse, with cold extremities, rigid muscles, and faces white or blue; and yet among them she had gone cheerfully, gliding about, with her doses of opium, brandy, soda and calomel; and old Doctor Riversdale, who was now there on duty, affirmed that she was worth any dozen nurses put together.

"It is all very fine, but by Jove, a fellow don't like the girl who is to be his wife doing all that sort of thing among the rank and file," said Cyril to her one day when he expressed his genuine astonishment and grief to find her thus occupied. "It may be enthusiastic, self-sacrificing, and so forth, but it is not the work for an English lady. In the French Sisters of Charity it seems somehow altogether different, but in our Protestant folks I can't understand it."

"Oh, Cyril," she had replied, gently, "we must bear patiently—I at least have learned that now—and with proper fortitude and resignation, the ills and the work that Fate has marked cut for us."

But Mary's frame was ill-suited for such tasks and for such an atmosphere; and now Cyril learned, with horror and dismay, from a passing staff-surgeon, that "the poor girl was down with cholera, and was in that wing where the women's ward lay; have a cigar, old fellow," he added, proffering his case, "and don't go near that place if you can avoid it."

The medical officer said all this quite in an offhand way, little dreaming that he was planting a sword in the heart of his hearer, who hurried away, stunned and overwhelmed, to the place he indicated.

It was a great rambling Turkish house, which had once been the residence of some wealthy merchant of Stamboul. Some Turks were on duty that day about the Hospital, and a stolid-looking Mahommedan soldier, in his scarlet fez, blue jacket and red knickerbockers, stood sentinel under a sunshade, leaning on his musket and smoking a cherrystick chibouque. He started and saluted Cyril, and something expressive of astonishment that a man not a hakim should come to visit women, escaped him; but Cyril pushed him aside and strode in; for all our notions are reversed in that peculiar land where the ladies wear trousers and the gentlemen often petticoats; where the ladies ogle through the eyelet-holes of their yashmacs, and the gentlemen look demure and abashed; where the men wear all the gay colours and women the sombre.

An English soldier's widow who had acted as nurse there since her husband died of his wounds, soon led Cyril to the room where Mary lay—a small apartment that opened off the stately Divan Hanée, having walls painted white and the roof a flaming red, lighted by pointed windows of stained glass; and in this kiosk (a term signifying a room, or a house indifferently) she was stretched on the floor, the occupant of an hospital straw-pallet and covered by a coarse brown military rug, on which were stamped in tar, the broad arrow and the inevitable letters B.O.

The only furniture in this comfortless room was a tandour, the Turkish substitute for a fireplace, being like the brasero of the Spaniards, a wooden frame holding a copper vessel full of charcoal, covered by a wadded cloth.

She was dashing her head against the wall and the pillow alternately as she rolled about in pain or delirium; her beautiful silky hair hung all dishevelled over her snowy shoulders, which were quite exposed. Her lips were parched and black, while her face was deadly pale and her eyes unnaturally bright and dilated. Her voice was changed, yet the sound of it thrilled through Cyril to his heart's core. She was raving, and she knew him not.

"God help us—God help us!" moaned Cyril, as he knelt by her side in a passion of tears, and sought caressingly to smooth her tangled tresses and reclose her night-dress which she had rent at the neck.

"Poor young lady," said the soldier's widow, commiseratingly, "she's done a power o' good among our poor fellows! Is she your sister, Captain Wedderburn?"

"No."

And in his agony and answer, the woman seemed instinctively to know all; for after a pause she said—

"Doctor Riversdale says, sir, it's more fever than cholera, and so there might be hopes if—"

"If what? Oh, speak out."

"If her system wasn't so low—but she can't stand the shock. I saw two children of mine die at Varna—die when the blue cholera mist rose like a tide about the tent-pegs, and I saw my poor Tom die here, after his leg were ampertated, and—and," she continued, bursting into tears, "I knows a look when I sees it in the eye now, and I see it here—so she can't last long, poor thing!"

"How long has she been thus?" asked Cyril, in a choking voice.

"Some hours, sir."

"And before that?"

"She was as calm as a lamb, sir, wishing for a clergyman, and expressing fears that a Captain Wedderburn—you, I suppose, sir—might visit her, and catch the infection."

And this was his Mary—his plighted wife—she whose nature was so full of those charms which are more attractive than the most brilliant or classic beauty—such winning and pretty ways! Oh how, as he knelt by that wretched bedside, and sought to capture and keep the quick small hand that eluded or repelled him, while her eyes sparkled dangerously—through the mists of the past and horror of the present, memory went back to many a happy, happy day, and to episodes all gone for ever now!

She was raving by turns of her father, of her dead brother Harry, of Cyril himself—and his reproachful heart seemed to bleed as he heard her—of little Mrs. Primer, of the Alderman in London, of the prison, and of a host of persons and places whose names bewildered him; then starting into a sitting position, she pressed her hands on her temples, threw back her hair, and with eyeballs starting from their sockets, uttered a piercing shriek, as she sprang into an imaginary river, and then lay back calm and still, with her arms by her side as the fancied waters closed over her head.

"Please Captain Wedderburn, do leave us for a little, and when she is a little more composed and sensible, I'll fetch you;" and the female nurse half led him out into the Divan Hanée, which is the central hall of every great Turkish house, and off which all the other rooms open. She closed the door—dropped the curtain we should rather say—and Cyril wearily, and as one in a nightmare, seated himself on the divan, or luxurious sofa, which is placed all round this apartment, and there he remained for a time, like a man in a dream—but a dream which, with all its bitterness, did not pass away.