"A verse of an old song may best explain it:
"'A plague on ill luck, now the ready's all gone, To the wars poor Pilgarlick must trudge; But had I the cash to rake on as I've done, The devil a foot I would budge!'
"And so Pilgarlick is serving his ungrateful country," he added, with the mocking laugh that I remembered of old.
"You can actually laugh at your own--"
"Don't say anything unpleasant," said he, shortening his reins; "I do so, but only as Reynard, who has lost his brush, laughs at the more clever fox who has kept his from the hounds," he added, with a glance of malevolence. "So you were not at the Alma? Doubtless it was pleasanter to break a bone quietly at home than risk all your limbs here in action."
Disdaining to notice either his sneer or the inference to be drawn from his remark, I asked, "What has become of that unhappy creature--your wife?"
"As you call her."
"Georgette Franklin--well?"
"It matters little now, and is no business of yours."
"That I know well--I only pitied her; but why do I waste words or time with such as you?"
"So you would like to know what has become of her, eh?"
"Very much."
"Well," said he, grinding his teeth with anger or hate, perhaps both, "there is a den in the Walworth-road, above a rag, bone, and old-bottle shop, the master of which was not unknown to the police, as apt to be roaming about intent to commit, as no doubt he often did, felony; for a few articles of bijouterie, such as a bunch of skeleton-keys, a crowbar, a brace of knuckle-dusters, and a 'barker,' with a piece of wax-candle, were found upon his person, after an investigation thereof, suggestive that his habits were nocturnal, and that the propensities of his digits were knavish; and the landlord of this den gave her lodgings--and there she died, this Georgette Franklin, in whom you are so interested--died not without suspicion of suicide. Now are _you_ satisfied?" he added, holding a cigar between the first and second fingers of his right hand, and gazing lazily at the smoke wreaths as they curled upward in the chill morning air.
There was something sublimely infernal--if I may be permitted the paradox--in the gusto with which the fellow told all this, and in the sneering expression of his face; and I could see his green eyes and his white teeth glisten in the light of a great rocket--some secret signal--that soared up from Fort Alexander, and broke with a thousand sparkles, curving downward through the murky morning sky.
"Pass on, sir," said I, sternly; "and the best I can wish you is that some Russian bullet may avenge her and rid the earth of you."
And with his old mocking laugh, he galloped after his wagon, as he turned back in his saddle, "Compliments to old Taffy Lloyd, when you write--may leave him my brilliant in my will if he behaves himself."
CHAPTER XXXV.--THE NIGHT BEFORE INKERMANN.
I told Phil Caradoc of the strange meeting with Mr. Hawkesby Guilfoyle, and his emotions of astonishment and disgust almost exceeded mine, though mingled with something of amusement, to think that such a personage should be with the army before Sebastopol in any capacity; and he predicted that he must inevitably do something that would not add to the budding laurels of the Land Transport Corps, which we scarcely recognised as a fighting force, though armed, of course, for any sudden emergency. On this morning, the mail had come in from Constantinople; but there was still no letter for me--no letter from her with whom I had left my heart, and all its fondest aspirations--yea, my very soul it seemed--in England, far away.
Many mails had gone missing; and I strove to flatter and to console myself by the vague hope, that the letters of Estelle were lying perhaps in the Gulf of Salonica, or in the Greek Archipelago, rather than adopt the bitter and wounding conviction that none were written at all. I counted the days and weeks that had elapsed since our detachments sailed from Southampton; the weeks had now become months; we were in November; yet, save when once or twice I had seen her name among the fashionable intelligence in a stray newspaper, I knew and heard nothing of Estelle, of her whose existence and future I so fondly thought were for ever woven up with mine. For a time I had been weak enough to conceal from kind-hearted Phil Caradoc the fact that I had not been getting answers to my letters; and often over a quiet cigar and a bottle of Greek wine I have listened nervously to his congratulations on my success and hopes, blended with his own personal regrets that Winifred Lloyd could not love him. He had sent to her and Dora, from Malta and from Constantinople, some of those beautiful articles of bijouterie, which the shops of the former and the bazaars of the latter can so exquisitely produce to please the taste of women, and they had been accepted with "kindest thanks," a commonplace on which poor Phil seemed to base some hope of future success.
"Winifred Lloyd is very lovely," said I, as we sat in my tent that night over a bottle of Crimskoi; "sweet and pure, happy in spirit, and gentle in heart--all that a man could desire his wife and the mother of his children to be."
"But--"
"But what, Phil?" said I, curtly.
"She cannot love me, and she will never be mine," sighed Caradoc.
"Never despair of that; we have to take Sebastopol yet; and that once achieved, we shall all go merrily sailing home to England."
"That I doubt much; some of the regiments here will be taken for the Indian reliefs--our fighting here will count as service in Europe--but surely the war cannot end with the fall of Sebastopol. A war between three of the greatest countries in the world to dwindle down to the somewhat ill-conducted siege of a fortified town would be absurd."
"Ill-conducted, Phil?"
"Of course.. We leave the city open for supplies of all kinds on the Russian side, and have never, as we should have done, seized the Isthmus of Perecop, and cut off the whole Crimea from the empire."
"Errors perhaps; but by the way, Phil, have you still Miss Lloyd's miniature about you?"
"Yes."
"Do let me have a look at it. I am an old friend, you know."
"I gave her my solemn word that while I lived no man should look upon it, Harry," said Phil, whose colour deepened. "When I am carried to the dead-tent, if that day comes, or to the burial-trench, as many better fellows have been, you may keep it or send it to her, which you will, though I would rather it were buried with me."
His eyes filled with tender enthusiasm, and his voice faltered with genuine emotion as he spoke.
"Pass the bottle, Phil, and don't be romantic--one more cigar is in the box, and it is at your service," said I.
But full of his own thoughts, which were all of her, Caradoc made no immediate reply. He sat with his eyes fixed sadly on the glowing embers of my little fire; for, thanks to the ingenuity of Evans, I had actually a _fire_ in my tent. He had made an excavation in the earth, with a flue constructed out of the fragments of tin ammunition boxes, and the cases which had held preserved meat. This conveyed the smoke underneath the low wall of the tent, outside of which he had erected another flue some three feet high of the same materials, to which were added a few stones and some mud. The smoke at times was scarcely endurable, and made one's eyes to water; but I was not yet "old soldier" enough to heat a cannon-ball to sleep with, so Evans' patent grate had quite a reputation in the regiment, and added greatly to the comfort, if such a term can be used, of my somewhat draughty abode.
"Deuced hard lines, this sort of thing, Harry," said Caradoc, after a pause, as, bearded and patched, unshaven and unkempt, we cowered over the fire in our cloaks and wrappers; "I mean for men accustomed to better things, especially to those of expensive tastes and extravagant habits--your guardsman and man of pleasure, the lounger about town, whose day was wont to begin about two P.M., and to end at four next morning. Yet they are plucky for all that; by Jove! there is an amount of mettle or stamina in our fellows such as those of no other nation possess, the resolution to die game any way."
I fully agreed with him; for among our officers I knew hundreds of men, like Raymond Mostyn and others I could name, who were enduring this miserable gipsy-like life, and who, when at home, had hunters and harriers in the country, a house in town, a villa at St. John's Wood or elsewhere, with a tiny brougham and tiger for some "fair one with the golden locks," a yacht at Cowes, a forest in the Highlands, a box at the Opera, a French cook, perhaps, and vines and pines and other rarities from their own forcing-pits and hothouses, and who were now thankful for a mouthful of rum and hard ship-biscuit and some half-roasted coffee boiled in a camp-kettle; and for what, or to what useful end or purpose, was all this being endured? Perhaps the non-reception of letters from Estelle was making me cynical, and leading me to deem the great god of war but a rowdy, and the goddess his sister no better than she should be, glory a delusion and a humbug after all. But just when Phil, as the night was now far advanced, was muffling himself prior to facing the cold frosty blast that swept up the valley of Inkermann, and proceeding to his own tent, which was on the other flank of the regiment, the visage of Evans, red as a lobster with cold, while his greatcoat was whitened with hoar-frost, appeared at the piece of tied canvas, which passed muster as a door.