Chapter IV: The Telegram

'By Jingo, there is old Pudd's carriage at the door, and his wife in it--a deuced fine girl, a stunning girl indeed!'

'Queer time this, to bring her up to London, when there is not a soul in town.'

'Perhaps that is the very reason he has done so.'

'I'll invite old Pudd down to the cub-hunting, and, if he brings her with him, won't I improve the shining hour!'

The speakers were two very _blasé_ but good-looking young men, who were lounging in the bay window of the otherwise empty room of a stately club-house overlooking Pall Mall, then lonely, dusty, rather sun-baked, and the chief figures in which were the sentinels of the Guards at the War-Office and Marlborough House, and who, with no small interest, had seen Sir Paget Puddicombe's open carriage drop him at the door, where he waved his hand to Eveline as she drove away to shop or go round the park.

Now, Sir Harry Hurdell, a sporting baronet, well known on the turf and at Tattersall's, and his chief chum, Mr. Pyke Poole, a famous hand at billiards, more skilled with the cue than any marker in London, were not Sir Paget's style of men, for both were horsey, fast, given to gambling and loose living, but both were anxious to stand in the good graces of one who, as they phrased it, 'was proprietor of such a devilish handsome girl.'

They had not seen him since his marriage, on which both complimented and congratulated him in such well-chosen terms that he felt quite flattered, and his heart warmed to them.

It flashed upon him that by the society of other young men it was possible to neutralise--if he did nothing more--the recollection of Evan Cameron in the mind of Eveline, and thus it was that he said,

'We are quite alone in town, but will you dine with us to-day?'

'With pleasure--delighted--charmed to be introduced to Lady Puddicombe,' said Sir Harry, with a swift glance at his friend Poole.

'Sharp eight, then. I daresay our chef will not fail us.'

'All right.'

'Good-morning,' and away he went.

The friends looked at each other, each with an eye half closed, and then laughed heartily.

'I'll have him down at the Hall for the cub-hunting,' said Sir Harry, 'and have other sport than that. She'll soon get tired of her fogie--is bound to do so. What young girl could tolerate such an old pump, and why shouldn't I go in and win at a canter?'

'Hawke Holcroft knew her people, didn't he?'

'Yes--before he came a cropper altogether. When last I heard of him he was actually a visitor at their place, Aberfeldie, wherever that may be.'

Eveline heard with total indifference that they were to have guests that evening, and with all his admiration of her Sir Paget thought,

'What a fool I was to marry her, knowing or suspecting what I did--that she loved that fellow--loved him first (me she never loved at all) and last, and loves him now, no doubt. They say no woman ever forgets her first love, simply because he was her first. Pleasant for me!'

Like the hero of a recent novel, 'he could not forget that his wife had loved another man better than she ever loved or even pretended to love him. It was her _candour_ he felt most keenly. Had she been willing to play the hypocrite, to pretend a little, he would have been much better pleased.'

She loved Evan still; but it was with a love purified of every sensuous thought, of every earthly hope.

To Sir Paget the story of how Allan's life had been saved at Tel-el-Kebir by Cameron was a source of profound irritation, annoyance, and mortification, as he knew but too well how the event must enhance the latter in the estimation of Eveline, in whose heart gratitude and admiration for high courage would now be added to love. He would rather have heard that the two friends had been shot down together.

With all her secret love for Evan, she was too wise and modest to desire ever to be face to face with him again. She felt that they had parted in the belvidere at Maviswood never to meet again; that henceforward he was as if dead to her; but it was a delicious privilege to hear of him and of his bravery, and that her dear brother owed his life to Evan's courage and Evan's sword.

She felt that a change had come over the tenor of Sir Paget's ways of late, more especially since the episode of Tel-el-Kebir.

Not a day--scarcely an hour--passed over her head in which she was not made to feel keenly the utter want of sympathy that existed between herself and the man to whom she had been married by her parents--sold by them--as in the bitterness of her heart she thought it.

He said sharp things to her, and made bitter asides when Egypt or the war there was casually mentioned, as, of course, it constantly was; he shot many a poisoned arrow; but Eveline never blushed, though she felt a calm, cold scorn at the cruelty and injustice of such conduct.

So here were a couple bound together by the strongest of all the legal ties, yet utterly unsuited to each other by age, thought, and habits; yet most punctilious was poor Eveline in the performance of every wifely duty she owed her captious old man; but a sickly dread of coming sorrow pervaded the girl's mind every morning she quitted her pillow, and it came sharply and surely at last.

To dare to look at a newspaper was sufficient to worry him.

'So, so,' he would say; 'thus it is--is it? Egypt and the Black Watch. D--n the Black Watch, I say! Where is the affection that you as a good woman----'

'I am only a girl,' she urged, piteously.

'As a good woman, say I, should feel for her husband after marriage, even if she felt none of it for him before that little ceremony--for little and trivial doubtless it may appear to you, madam--and your regard for me should be all the deeper and more lasting that no vain protestations preceded it.'

Eveline made no response, but resumed her occupation of gazing listlessly from the back window of the drawing-room into one of those dull and flowerless London gardens which a writer has truly described as looking 'like a burial place without any graves;' so Sir Paget returned to the charge.

'It is said, when love fails to beget love, it often engenders hatred. Is it so, madam?'

'Not in our case, I hope,' said Eveline, wearily, as she sighed, and her slender foot in its satin shoe began to tap the carpet with nervous impatience. 'Why did you marry me--buy me from papa?' she asked, with a tone and bearing a little unusual in her, she was ever so gentle and meek.

'I married you because I admired your beauty, and believed in the love that would come after marriage--the love that is grounded not on childish fancy, but on tried friendship and esteem.'

'Then you believed in too much,' said Eveline, driven desperate.

'Too much?' he repeated, changing colour, and jerking his head forward.

'Yes, Sir Paget.'

'Indeed! I asked you to be my wife in full assurance that I should never find my confidence in you misplaced.'

'You asked mamma rather, and your confidence has not been misplaced.'

Then she paused and coloured deeply for the first time, as she recalled that painful and passionate interview in the belvidere at Maviswood, and Evan Cameron's farewell glance; two episodes that seemed to have happened years ago.

Thus had a life of jealousy and 'nagging' begun for poor Eveline--a life that was ere long to become almost insupportable--for the most trivial matter was liable to misconstruction, or to excite suspicion.

If her eye followed a soldier in the street, which, as the daughter of a line of soldiers, was in her not unnatural; if she ventured to speak of the news of the day, or glance at a public journal, he watched her; it was 'Egypt again!' that she was thinking about; and, sooth to say, in that suspicion he was not far wrong.

Punctually a few minutes before eight, Sir Harry Hurdell and his friend Mr. Pyke Poole were ushered into the drawing-room, and she received them with as much sweetness, ease, and grace as if no gloomy conversation had preceded their appearance, and she and Sir Paget billed and cooed from hour to hour.

Fresh from the clever hands of Clairette her toilet was perfection, and her appearance excited the admiration of her husband's friends, who were both connoisseurs of female beauty, and disposed to be all the more appreciative that the husband was, as they thought, 'such a devil of a fogie.'

'I mean to have Sir Paget down at my place for a little cub-hunting,' said Sir Harry, glancing in a mirror at his accurately-parted fair hair and pointed moustache; 'and, if so, I hope you will accompany him. My sister Lucretia will make you most welcome, Lady Puddicombe.'

Ere Eveline could respond, Sir Paget warmly accepted for both, again believing much in change of scene and change of society.

'I can mount you to perfection, Sir Paget, or you may send down your own horses,' said Sir Harry, his eyes wandering in secret admiration over the fair face, the soft, hazel eyes, and delicate contour of Eveline's head, neck, and little white ears.

Sir Paget thought he would prefer his own. Strange horses had often tricks that might prove troublesome to a cavalier of his years and proportions, and it was carried that the first week of October was to find him and Lady Puddicombe at Hurdell Hall. But Sir Paget could little foresee the terrible and startling events to which the apparently simple acceptance of a hospitable invitation was to lead.

'You have just come from the club, I presume?' said Sir Paget to his brother baronet.

'Yes; just waited to see the last telegrams in the reading-room.'

'Anything fresh from Egypt?' lisped Mr. Poole, with his glass wedged in his eye.

'Only a single telegram, which, by the way, must interest you. Lady Puddicombe,' said Sir Harry, with a most serious inflection of his Voice.

'Me--how?' faltered Eveline, feeling herself grow paler, if possible, than she really was.

'It refers to your brother.'

'My brother!'

She was pale to her quivering lips now.

'Yes; it states that an officer of the Black Watch had been killed in action with the Bedouins, and was buried in the sand of the desert by his friend, the Master of Aberfeldie.'

'And the officer's name?' said Sir Paget, icily.

'Was Evan Cameron.'

'Cameron!' repeated the dry lips of Eveline, who suddenly felt as one in a dreadful dream.

Dead and buried; buried in the sand of the Egyptian desert! Did she hear aright--was this happening to herself or to some one else? She made an effort to speak, but her tongue had lost its power.

'Eveline,' she heard her husband say, 'your wits have gone wool-gathering.'

'I beg your pardon, Sir Paget. What is it?' she asked, faintly.

'_Sir_! Can't you call me Paget?' said he; and the two guests exchanged glances as much as to say,

'What is up now?'

At that moment the dinner-gong sounded, and giddily and mechanically she took the proffered arm of Sir Harry.

Never while life lasted would Eveline forget the grotesque horror of that little dinner, with the solemn servants in attendance, and all its splendid yet, to her, sickening details and talk, the references to marriages and races--hurdle, steeple, and others--on the _tapis_, of flirtations and gossip--how terrible, how ghastly they all sounded to her, who felt as if in a mist, out of which their voices seemed to come hollowly, and from a vast distance, and she was compelled to listen with one face--a dead face--coming out of that mist before her!