Chapter VI · THE WINTER Of THE YEAR.

When a little more composed they began to consider this catastrophe in its various lights. That he was wounded severely they could not doubt, but that he should be missing was a most perplexing and harrowing thought.* He might be a prisoner in the hands of the Russians; or he might too probably have crept away, as many did, to bleed to death and die unseen—a terrible thought! and thus his fate might never be known.

His pale mother had but one distinct idea—Cyril was wounded and missing too; wounded and suffering she knew not, and might never know, in what fashion or degree; and her motherly hands were not there to nurse and tend him. Her pet boy—the apple of her eye—Cyril, always so tender and loving to her!

All her worst, her darkest, and most terrible anticipations seemed to be fulfilled now—so suddenly too, in the first battle. Oh, that she could fly to him! Oh, that she had acceded to the Ernescleugh scheme of the yacht voyage! Horace had escaped; but why was Cyril missing? Horace could, should, and must know all about it. And, as she wrung her hands she thought, amid all the luxury and splendour of her home, how futile it was to reckon on earthly joys, they were at best so fleeting!

Then as she looked over the lists and saw how many other mothers must be suffering even as she then suffered, she prayed for strength and calmness to bear her cross; and prayed too as only a mother can do, who yearningly supplicates for her son's safety and cure.

A few more anxious days and the same despatch-box which has already figured in our story contained tidings from the seat of war—the letter from Horace to Gwendoleyne Wedderburn. It simply announced that we had won a great victory; and then detailed the mode in which Cyril had been wounded.

This added anger, even an emotion of rage, to the grief of his mother on learning that he had fallen when performing an act of mercy and compassion. How bitterly in her heart she thought of that treacherous Russian! If her son should indeed die of the wounds his hand inflicted, the malediction of a sorrowing mother would follow his assassin to the grave! Never, never would she forget or forgive

"The deep damnation of his taking off."

For Gwenny's behoof Horace could not resist saying a little about himself:

"I had a narrow escape from a shot, nearly the last fired by the Russian artillery. I was in the act of closing up the ranks of my slender company (Probyn by this time was killed), when a round black spot caught my eye. I knew what it was by instinct, Gwenny; for I had heard it said by old soldiers, that you can never see a cannon ball unless you are in its line. I threw myself flat on the turf with a breathless exclamation, and at that instant it cut in two one of my men, and his covering file also. I felt the wind of the shot as it passed over me!

"We are eager to attack Sebastopol before the fortifications are increased, as they are sure to be if any more delay ensues; and when they echo to the drums of the British Grenadiers, the latter will prove better arbiters than those absurd Quaker fellows who lately tried the peace-at-any-price dodge with old Nick, the Emperor. We go in for any amount of shot and shell, risk and danger here; we endure much more than I can describe; but I care little how the time passes as it is not spent with you at home. My very soul seems to go with this to you—all," he felt himself compelled to add, "and my tears are falling on the paper, Gwenny. I know not what I write, or what I have written; I have no time to read it over, for already the bugles are sounding for the advanced guard to fall in, as we move at once when the last of the dead are buried."

And Gwenny's voice broke as she read that letter which poor Horace had penned on a drum-head, amid the harrowing carnage of the field—amid that terrible grey "acre of Russian wounded," groaning for water, tobacco, and sour-krout, while his thoughts travelled forward to the time when the white hands of her he loved would open and read it, and when her dark eyes might look so earnestly and sweetly over the lines his hand had written, perhaps drop a tear on them in secret and unseen.

"It is always of himself, and not of my Cyril he writes," said Lady Wedderburn, almost with anger; "but continue."

"Already Gwenny," she read, "our once gay uniforms are in rags, the lace black, the epaulettes vanished. Our once splendid bands have been turned into the ranks, or are decimated by cholera and the bullet. We have no mess, and all the brilliance of military life in time of peace has gone. We are wretched and filthy, tattered, unkempt and unshaven as gipsies, or the homeless poor of London."

"He calls you simply 'Gwenny,'" said Lady Wedderburn, looking over her gold eyeglasses; "it is scarcely courteous, as I have often said you are not cousins."

Gwenny blushed in silence, but the blush was seen and noted too by Robert.

"He does not seem to have fallen in again with that odious fellow Chesters," said Sir John.

"Horace is frightfully vague about Cyril after the battle," resumed Lady Wedderburn, who could not but resent something in the tone of the letter; "he says that he saw him borne towards the boats, but why did he not see him carried on board of the ship personally? Oh, my boy—my poor boy may have died, or been taken prisoner on the way!"

"Scarcely prisoner, in rear of our lines," said Robert, sententiously.

"And if dead, dear Kate," added Sir John, in a low and husky voice, "he must have been found, and not returned as missing. I cannot understand it."

And so for a time sorrow and perplexity reigned at Willowdean, while all there waited each successive mail in hope and fear; and while letters and cards of condolence poured in from all the county, together with an address from the inhabitants of the little Burgh of Barony, signed by the bailie thereof, and an exhortation from the Reverend Gideon M'Guffog, stuffed with the usual stereotyped crumbs of comfort.

Though she sorrowed for Cyril, and deplored the mystery that seemed to envelope his fate, Gwenny nightly, and on her knees, thanked God for the safety of Horace; but then natural anxiety suggested the fear of what might not have happened since that 22nd of September, when he wrote his hasty letter on the Russian drum, and the bugles were sounding for the advance to the front!

On discovering the mistake in the Gazette, Horace lost no time in telegraphing direct to Willowdean, stating that Cyril was not missing, but was in the hospital at Scutari, and was believed to be doing well. Then he further wrote to mention that the announcement which gave such pain to the family, was caused by his inability to report to the adjutant who made up the lists, that he had seen his cousin carried out of the field by seamen, as he was busy for two entire days with a working party interring the dead; and now the army was before Sebastopol, in the harbour of which, to bar all entrance, the Russians had sunk their splendid fleet, adding the crews, in battalions, to the strength of the garrison.

Some endearing terms to Gwenny were perceptible enough in this letter; but his aunt felt that she could forgive the writer out of the great relief he gave her heart.

Cyril was safe, and, as she hoped, recovering!

The newspapers teemed with harrowing details of the war; the bombardment of Sebastopol began; the terrible slaughter of our Light Brigade at Balaclava made all Britain thrill with sorrow and enthusiasm; the two battles in the valley of Inkerman followed; the carnage of the last saw Horace a captain; but still he escaped without a wound; and then began the protracted sufferings in the trenches and rifle-pits—the horrors of the close siege during a Crimean winter.

The letters of Horace were always cheerful; but he had now learned the policy of writing them to Lady Wedderburn alone.

The winter of the year came on with great severity at home—with greater still by the shores of the Black Sea. Flights of wild Norwegian pigeons were seen on the hills of Fife and Lothian, and such are always a sign of heavy and protracted snows in the north of Europe.

It was Christmas-day at Willowdean, as it was all over God's fair world. A few friends, the minister and his wife, the Baron-Bailie, and so forth, were there; but when Lady Wedderburn saw the luxuries around her, the blazing fire, the glittering crystal, the fine linen, rich china service and massive plate, the chandelier decorated with shining holly and scarlet berries, the various courses at the table, the fish, and beef or mutton; the fowls, puffs, custards, and creams; the rich wines placed before Sir John, after being solemnly and carefully decanted from cobwebby old bottles in secret binns known to Asloane only, she sighed and thought with sorrow of her poor Cyril, lying in his hospital bed, a wretched pallet, fed on meagre broth or bouillon; and she thought too of those who were shivering amid the mud of the frozen trenches, or dying of cold and starvation within sound of the bells of Sebastopol, or crawling back to their huts half dead with exhaustion, bearded, tattered, and squalid; and where their only luxury might be a little half-ground and half-green coffee, boiled on a wretched fire, made of damp wood from the nearest thicket, or the wrecks made by the great hurricane in the Euxine.

Gwenny's astonishment when she found one winter morning her window panes all frosted over in the fashion of thistle leaves, was great indeed, and she wondered if the cold was as great in the Crimea as at Willowdean. And in common with all the ladies in the land, she and Miss M'Caw knitted all manner of worsted things—a labour of love for our poor soldiers.

Crisp lay the snow over all the level park, over all the hills, and nowhere so crisp as in the broad gravelled walks of the garden. Long icicles hung from every eave and cornice; the Leader and even portions of the Tweed were frozen hard, and the linns where erst the torrent roared between rock and scaur, were congealed and white as the beard of Father Christmas.

It was a season when the flakes lingered long on the Lammermuirs. The white snowdrops did not appear till April; and the purple lilacs and gold laburnams, the pink and white hawthorns, did not bloom till after midsummer in the woods of Willowdean; but ere that time came great events had taken place there, as well as elsewhere.

After the first month of spring, mail succeeded mail as usual from the East; but to the terror and grief of Gwenny, the letters of Horace ceased altogether, and a great horror filled the heart of the girl, lest something fatal had occurred!

On the other hand, to give joy to the soul of Lady Wedderburn, there came to her a letter from Cyril himself! He stated that at Scutari all had nearly been over with him; but he had found one of the dearest and most loving little nurses in the world; and that through God's grace and her care, he was now almost well—quite convalescent, able to ride about the streets, to have a sail on the Bosphorus, and bully the extortionate Caïquejees. Then suddenly in one letter he seemed to write in an agitated and disturbed state of mind, saying that a great grief had come upon him, and that he would not—yea, might never—return home on leave as his mother wished and urged; but he was to rejoin his regiment, and be "in at the death of Sebastopol."

The silence of Horace, and the mysterious grief to which Cyril so abruptly alluded, occasioned endless surmise and much perplexity at Willowdean; but now spring had come, and with it came a letter from Lady Ernescleugh, then in England. After the usual details of the gaieties of some friend's country-house where she had spent much of the winter, she wrote thus:—

"The commander of my son's yacht writes to me stating that she is quite ready for sea, and I mean to sail with her for the East next month. Lord Cardigan's yacht and others are now in the harbour of Balaclava. Will you accompany me? Many officers' wives are content to endure the discomforts of a residence at Constantinople, for the purpose of being nearer the scene of those terrible events which are daily occurring; and there, or even at Malta, letters and news will reach one much sooner than when in England. I am sick of London, and Ernescleugh is odious to me without Everard. The doctors have prescribed a change of scene, and I do so long to see my my dear boy, or be near him. As yet, thank God! he has only been slightly wounded at Inkerman; but matters will go hard with me if I do not bring him home in the yacht, and his father also, from Corfu."

This letter, together with her desire to unravel the mystery of Cyril's conduct, which she attributed to a love freak for some Turkish damsel (an odious creature, who wore trousers, sat cross-legged, smoked a chibouk, and ate pilau with her fingers), together with the strange silence of Horace, decided Lady Wedderburn on travelling with her friend.

So slowly had passed the days at Willowdean, that Gwenny hailed with rapture the prospect of a change, and the anticipated voyage. To see those places towards which the thoughts and hearts of all were turned! Perhaps—oh! what joy—to see Horace himself! The girl became wild with delight. Stamboul, Varna, the Crimea, and the Black Sea should no longer be as mere names to her when she had seen and could remember them distinctly, as she did "dear Madras and papa's lovely house in the Choultry."

And so it was arranged that Miss M'Caw was to govern at Willowdean in their absence, and that Robert Wedderburn should escort them to London, whither Sir John—who was in Parliament representing some snug little English borough in the Conservative interest—had preceded them.

"My foolish Kate," he wrote to Lady Wedderburn, "in this proposed Crimean escapade of yours, you will be compelled to behold many a scene of horror you do not reckon upon!"