Chapter V: Dead and Buried in the Sand

How she acquitted herself as hostess, how she got through that dinner, with its many _entrées_ and courses, from the soup to the fruit, she never knew. It passed like a phantasmagoria--a dreadful dream--but it was over at last; and, as one in a dream, while Sir Harry held open the door for her, she passed from the table, not to the drawing-room, as he naturally thought, and where he meant speedily to join her, but swiftly to rush to her dressing-closet, to tear off her ornaments, and fling herself despairingly upon a couch.

She recalled her strong but daily presentiment that something was about to happen, though now the war in Egypt was virtually over, and that terrible something had happened at last.

Could the telegram have been a mistake? Improbable and impossible! Though brief, it seemed too distinct in its grim details.

She felt as if suffocating with grief, and her brain reeled at the feeble prospect of concealing it from the already exasperated Sir Paget.

She recalled Evan's words when he parted with her at Maviswood, and how prophetic they seemed now,

'I am going far away, my darling, and shall never see you again. That I may find a grave in Egypt is the kindest wish you can have for me.'

And now he had found that grave, and he was buried by the hands of her brother Allan, not on the sunny slope of a dear highland hill, or in the grassy glen where his forefathers lay in Stratherroch, within sound of the waves of Lochiel, where the summer breezes and the summer birds would be about his tomb, and the clouds and shadows of a Scottish sky flit over it, but in the desolate sand of cruel and barren Egypt!

There had been no solemn ceremony by his grave; he had not even a coffin, perhaps, but was buried, as she had read of others being buried, in a blanket only, and there to lie in the wilderness, traversed by the antelope and jackal, till the last trumpet sounded.

She remembered his song at Dundargue. Could it be that the manly and bright young face, the love-lit eyes, were dulled by death now, and that his fresh gay voice was hushed for ever?

'Dead!' wailed the girl in her heart. 'Oh, God, that he might be raised up as Lazarus was, even though we should never, never cross each other's paths again. My love--oh, my love!' she murmured, in a hushed voice, as if the walls might hear her.

'Only to the dead,' says the author of 'Mount Royal,' 'to the utterly lost and gone, is given this supreme passion--love sublimated to despair. From the living there is always something kept back, something saved and garnered for an after-gift, some reserve in the mind or heart of the giver; but to the dead, love gives all--with a wild self-abandonment which knows no restraint or measure.'

She had felt at first a dull, vague, sensation which became an acute pang when certainty came upon her; but she dared not as yet shed a tear.

Henceforward, as before, she had a part to act--that of indifference. If possible, there must be no pallid face shown, no haggard eyes; no tell-tale sighs must betray the agony of heart--the great sorrow that consumed her for the loss of her dead love; and wonderingly she looked at her white and already worn countenance in her mirror.

Oh, that Allan were returned! from him she would know all. Allan knew the secret of her heart, sympathised with it, and would relate everything; but she could not divest herself of an awful and haunting fancy that this tragedy--beyond the chances of military life--was her fault; and that in the recklessness and despair of his heart, Evan Cameron had risked his life too rashly and lost it.

When this conviction came upon her, tears streamed down her cheeks--hot salt tears--which she made no effort to restrain; and on suddenly discovering her thus--after the departure of his guests, Sir Harry Hurdell and Mr. Poole--Sir Paget felt his soul stung with jealous fury.

He regarded her sternly rather than lovingly, and puffed out his chest with what he deemed an air of offended dignity. Yet he attempted to take her hand.

'Do not touch me,' said Eveline, imploringly; 'at least not just--just now.'

'Upon my word, madam! Do you understand what your romantic pity for this--this person implies?' he asked, grimly, while polishing his bald head with his handkerchief till it shone like a billiard ball.

'He has no father or mother--no sister to weep for him--none but myself to sorrow for him.'

'Well?'

'And he died like a gentleman, upholding the honour of Queen and country, and the name of Cameron,' said Eveline, a little defiantly.

'Bosh! I suppose he was paid for all that? But enough of this. May I ask, have you no home interests and home ties like other married women?'

Eveline made no reply; so, with a violent jerk of his head, Sir Paget spoke again.

'Listen to me, Lady Puddicombe.'

'I am doing so.'

'To me you seem like one of those oddities or evil spirits one reads of only in novels.'

'How?'

'Having had a romance in your life, or fancying you had one, and believing you have married the wrong man, and all that sort of stuff, you like to live and brood on a memory. Is it so, Lady Puddicombe? Answer me--did you actually love this fellow Cameron?'

'Yes,' she replied, wincing, as he laid his coarse hand rather roughly on her delicate shoulder.

'Indeed. And you love him still?'

'He is dead--he is dead--and perhaps it is a sin to brood over the past.'

'An infernal futility, at all events. All this is pleasant for me, madam,' said he, applying himself to polishing his pate again.

A wiser man might have partly ignored the affair, in the hope that it must in time pass away; but her unmistakable emotion of grief for Cameron's death proved somewhat beyond the patience of Sir Paget, who recurred to it warmly.

'His demise, if untimely, is very natural; to face death and meet it was the trade he chose, and for which the country paid him, and well, too, as we shall find by next year's income-tax. What more would you have? Others quite as good as he--better perhaps--have fallen in this grotesque war, which, the Ministry tell us, is no war at all, though it will be deuced expensive work to us who have to stump-up for it,' he continued, waving his hand as he had done when addressing the same words to his constituents at Slough-cum-Sloggit. 'Moreover, madam, we can only die once, which is just as well. Who is it that likens the race of man to leaves on the trees?'

'But the leaves fall in autumn, not as he has done--my--my----'

'Love?' he suggested, with a gloomy sneer.

'No,' replied Eveline, quivering with anger.

'What then, madam?'

'My dear friend--my brother's comrade, and the saver of his life at Tel-el-Kebir.'

For some days the matter was not referred to; Sir Paget sulked a good deal, and dined often with his friend Hurdell at the club, while Eveline, in her dumb grief, felt like some piece of strange machinery that must go through the evolutions for which it was framed.

To Sir Paget she was an enraging enigma. Dead or alive, what was this Highland fellow now to her? But 'who,' asks a writer, 'in middle age, when the sordid cares of every-day life are paramount, can comprehend the young heart's passionate mystery--the love which, like some bright tropical flower, buds and blooms in a single day--the love which is more than fancy!'

But a fresh impetus was given to Sir Paget's jealous anger, and a keen edge put upon it, when a letter addressed to 'Lady Puddicombe' arrived one morning from Messrs. Horning and Tailzie, W.S., Edinburgh, anent 'the will of the late Evan Cameron, Esq., of Stratherroch,' informing her that by that document, he had bequeathed his estate of that name to her and her heirs, whom, failing, to those of his brother Duncan. The letter then proceeded to detail the encumbrances on the estate, which was rapidly freeing itself; that besides so much arable land there was fine grouse-shooting, extending to about eight thousand acres, yielding in favourable seasons about nine hundred brace of birds, besides black-game, snipe, ducks, and plover; that there was excellent trout-fishing in the river Erroch. It then described the mansion-house, stables, kennels, and so forth, and wound up by asking for 'her ladyship's instructions.'

There was a postscript, saying that 'the late Stratherroch seems to have been a prime favourite with the crofters on the estate, and they all deplore his untimely end, even with tears.'

'Oh, what does it all mean?' sighed Eveline, in utter anguish and bewilderment. The 'late'--how horrid--how awful did that single word look, when she recalled the yearning eyes, the farewell glance of Evan Cameron, as he marched past her on the departing day.

Transported with anger, Sir Paget snatched the letter from her hand, and, adjusting his gold _pince-nez_ on his nose, focussed the lines and glared at them; and after he had read he tossed it from him.

'An insult, by Jove, Lady Puddicombe--a deliberate insult!'

'Sir Paget,' began Eveline, but paused; she knew not what to urge or say, though she knew but too well all the bequest implied.

'Who wants his dirty acres of Highland bog and rock? Not I--the presumptuous fellow!'

'Presumptuous!' repeated Eveline, with a bitter smile, as she thought of the antecedents of the baronet of Slough-cum-Sloggit. 'Cameron's descent is as old as the hills; his ancestors have hunted with James V., and in battle were the comrades of Montrose and Dundee.'

'What the devil is all this to me--or to _you_, for the matter of that?' snarled Sir Paget, puffing out his chest. 'I am at liberty to reject this bequest on my own part.'

'But not on mine,' replied Eveline, quietly yet firmly.

'The deuce--you will accept it?'

'Why should not I--if I do injustice to none?'

'And degrade yourself in the eyes of the world!'

'How, Sir Paget?'

'What was this man to you? every man will naturally inquire.'

'None can know that he was ever even a friend to me,' said Eveline, with difficulty restraining her tears.

'It must be rejected, I say!'

'But the estate is not left to you, Sir Paget.'

'Estate!' said he, scornfully. 'A few acres of bog and heather, and a mansion that probably keeps out neither wind nor weather.'

So no action was taken in the matter for a time, and the letter of Messrs. Horning and Tailzie, W.S., remained unanswered, much to the surprise of these gentlemen (who deemed themselves persons of no small importance), and was to remain so until the return from cub-hunting at Hurdell Hall.

Sir Paget was sorely ruffled by this new event, and felt himself at liberty to sneer vulgarly at Eveline's former lover, and at her shattered fidelity to any vows she made by her marriage with himself; whereas the poor girl had never made one.

She felt that--as a wedded wife--she must stand alone in her secret grief, and beyond the pale of human succour or sympathy, and the sweet words of 'Auld Robin Gray' occurred to her:

'I daurna think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin.'

Times there were when she dreamt of Evan vividly, and that he was with her again. 'Why should it be a miracle that the dead come back?' asks an author; 'the wonder is that they do not. How can one go away who loves you and never return, nor speak, nor send any message--that is the miracle; not that the heavens should bend down and the gates of Paradise roll back and those who have left us return.' At such times he seemed near to her, and his voice was in her ears--more near to her than he had ever been. He loved her, but he was gone--gone, and the grey day was stealing slowly in!

Olive, she thought, she must see Olive; doubtless Allan must have written home to her, and his letters might contain some details of this catastrophe that she would learn nowhere else, so she contrived a visit to Puddicombe Villa at Southsea on their way to Hurdell Hall. But she gained nothing by this.

Lady Aberfeldie had heard of the late event in Egypt, and saw in a moment how it had affected her daughter.

'She is a very sensitive girl, Sir Paget,' said she, deprecatingly, in reply to a somewhat stinging remark of his; 'and thus you see the sudden death of this young man, so recently our guest at Dundargue, and so long her brother's tried friend and comrade, and one to whose courage that brother and all of us owe so much, has--not unnaturally, I think--greatly shocked her.'

'Shocked her rather too much, apparently,' jerked out Sir Paget, with a grimace. 'Who could have supposed that so brief an acquaintance--shall we call it an acquaintance?--could have produced an impression so deep.'

Lady Aberfeldie bridled up a little and crested her handsome head; for, like Sir Paget, she had her own thoughts on the subject.

'Well, he is gone now,' said she, after a pause.

'And a devilish good thing, too,' added Sir Paget, roughly.

She made no rejoinder, conceiving that the less that was said on the matter the better.

Eveline found Olive in a very crushed state.

Allan had never written to her, and, as yet, even his mother's letter of explanation had not been replied to. Perhaps he did not believe in it. He had left her abruptly and passionately and with a sore heart. Many such hearts are caught by others on the rebound, for the void in them is more easily filled up, and often requires to be so.

'Oh, heaven,' she thought, 'if such should be the case with Allan--not in Egypt, for that was very unlikely, but at Gibraltar or Malta, where English ladies were to be met with.'

'Even if married, I fear you would never win the Dunmow Flitch,' Lady Aberfeldie had said to her angrily on one occasion.

'My unfortunate money has been the cause of all this,' replied Olive. 'It excited the cunning and cupidity of that unfortunate man, Holcroft, and has led to the saddest misconceptions and misconstructions from the first between dear Allan and myself,' she added, in tears.

'Most true.'

Olive knew that the doubtful position in which she had been placed with reference to Allan had, as she thought, been fully explained away in writing by his mother, and his father too; but from Allan there came no letter to herself.

What did his silence mean? Even anger were better than nothing.

'My unfortunate money,' she repeated: 'my golden chains have proved a curse to us both. He has ceased to love me now, and, loving him as I do, what can my life be to me? And how shall I live on through all the months and years of it without him? What if we never meet again! He may fall in this war as his friend Cameron fell--oh, my love--not you--not you--not _that_.'

And the luckless girl wept bitterly.