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GEORGE ROUTLEDGE <S< SONS.
I
JACK CHALONER.
JAMES GRANT'S NOVELS,
Price 2s. each, Fancy Boards.
The Romance of War
The Aide-de-Camp
The Scottish Cavalier
Bothwell
Jane Seton : or, the Queen's Advo-
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Philip Rollo
The Black Watch
Marv of Lorraine
Oliver Ellis : or, the Fusileers
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The Girl he Married
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Only an Ensign
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jack chaloner
OR
THE FIGHTING FORTY-THIRD
BY
JAMES GRANT
author of 'the romance of war '
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS
Broadway, Ludgate Hill
NEW YORK: 9, LAFAYETTE PLACE
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ON THE SOUTH DOWNS - - - "9
II. AT OAKHURST PRIORY - - - - 21
III. A JOB'S COMFORTER - - - - 30
IV. SEPARATED - - - - - - 39
V. AMY CAPEL - - - - - "49
VI. IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW - - - 56
VII. DOUBTS CRUELLY ENDED - - - - 6l
VIII. A STRANGE REVELATION - - - - 67
IX. I.INA'S TWO VISITORS - - - "75
X. OLIVER PIERREPOINT - - - - 84
XI. MEETING BUT TO PART - - - * 93
XII. 'THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND HIM' - - 104
XIII. LOVED AT LAST - - - - - 11S
XIV. ON BOARD H.M.S. 'UNICORN' - - "133
XV. CHRISTMAS UNDER THE TROPIC OF CAPRICORN - 148
XVI. THE CASTAWAYS - - - - - 163
XVII. EVENTS PROGRESS RAPIDLY - - - 172
XVIII. PLAYING WITH EDGED TOOLS - - - 184
XIX. LIKING, NOT LOVING - - - - 192
XX. THE ISLE OF ST. PAUL - ? ? - 201
v!
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
xxi. 'land ho!' - - - - - 212
xxii. doubt and grief- .... 223
xxiii. going to the front ... - 233
xxiv. lina's tormentor - - - - 239
xxv. the gate pah of tauranga - - - 248
xxvi. how the repulse occurred - - - 257
xxvii. the redoubt on the waitara - - 265
xxviii. skirmish in the bush . - - - 273
xxix. amy's letter - - - - - 281
xxx. the opal ring - - - - 284
xxxi. the muffled drum - - - - 291
xxxii. the pah of paora .... 299
xxxiii. escape and flight .... 309
xxxiv. conclusion - - - - - 318
JACK CHALONER;
OR,
THE FIGHTING FORTY-THIRD.
CHAPTER I.
ON THE SOUTH DOWNS.
' It seems that we have come out to ride, and not to
hunt.'
' You have come out apparently to do neither,' said
the girl, pouting.
' What, then ?'
4 To sulk at poor me.'
' And so,' said he, after a pause,' before you loved
me you loved this man, as you tell me ?'
' Yes, Jack,' replied the girl, repressing a sob in her
white, slender throat; * or—or—thought I did so.'
' And parted from him ?'
'Yes—I thought it right that I should tell you,
Jack, lest some one else might do so.'
lO
JACK CHALONER.
' I would rather that you had not, Lina,' he replied,
letting the reins drop on the neck of his horse with a
sorely disconcerted and disappointed air, and his fair
companion eyed him anxiously.
'Second thoughts are often best, Jack,' said she,
after a pause; ' why not second love ?' she added,
with a little laugh.
But Jack did not seem to see it. He pulled his
dark moustache dubiously, and looked at the blue sky
overhead; so the girl spoke again, while reducing the
speed of her horse to a quiet walk.
'To be jealous nowadays is foolish.'
'Why especially now?'
' Because people are supposed to be too well-bred
to indulge in such an emotion.'
' Or in any other, probably/
' Did you never love before this—you, a soldier ?'
' Fancies I have had, Lina, as what man has not ?
but,' he added emphatically, ' as I have one day to
answer to Heaven, I never loved till I met you !'
' Darling Jack!' whispered the girl under her
breath, and her eyes sparkled with joy.
The speakers were an engaged couple—engaged
for at least a month past—John Percy Chaloner, a
Captain in a Line Regiment, and Lina Capel, one of
three sisters, whose beauty made them actually one
ON THE SOUTH DOWNS.
Ii
of the attractions of Brighton, and on the day referred
to they had been having a scamper together with the
Eastbourne Harriers over the South Downs.
The girl, in her twentieth year, was gay and joyous
in manner, yet her eyes were soft and thoughtful, like
her hair, of a deep brown, but shaded by lashes, that,
like her brows, were nearly black. Her complexion
was surpassingly fair and pure, and her figure, above
the general height, was slender, graceful, compact,
and perfect.
But she possessed in herself that element which, far
beyond beauty, is attractive, and will make even a
plain girl prove so—a wonderful archness, subtlety,
and playfulness of manner, with graceful little ways
of using her hands and eyes, and making at times
wild, even daring speeches to provoke laughter, and
hence the rashness, or candour (which you will) that
had just led her to make an admission to her lover
that both regretted now—i.e., that she had loved
before.
Her rich brown hair, which seemed shot with gold
when the sunlight struck it, was coiled in a massive
knot under a smart hat, which this coil thrust some-
what forward over her broad, low brow, and the blue
veil that was tied round it floated over her left
shoulder. Her habit of dark blue fitted her slender
12
JACK CHALONER.
bust and graceful figure to perfection. Every way
her riding costume was complete in taste, even to the
tips of her tight-fitting yellow gauntlets ; and she sat
erect and square in her saddle.
Jack Chaloner presented in himself a very good
combination of the polished gentleman and the trained
soldier. Nearer his thirtieth than his twentieth year,
Jack was well set up, and square-shouldered. He
had a handsome and haughty head, the black hair of
which was closely shorn to the regimental pattern;
thick, dark, and pointed moustaches ; eyes keen and
clear as a falcon's; a well-shaped brow, and lips that
expressed a disposition that was firm and indomitable,
yet good-natured withal.
He wore the Hunt costume, that sombre green,
which looks almost black by the side of the scarlet;
and he sat his horse, a deep bay hunter, sixteen
hands high, with a small head, thin neck, and ample
chest, with the perfect air of a gentleman and a
rider.
The closing day was bright and clear, one in the
middle of October, when everywhere the leaves were
failing, and when openings in the stripped hedges re-
veal sweet and sudden bits of distant landscape
hidden before, and far away spots seem close and
nigh, and some hardy apples linger in the orchards to
ON THE SOUTH DOWNS.
*3
ripen by the coming frost, when the cherry trees are
covered with scarlet leaves, and elders overhang the
watercourses, dark with purple berries.
Over the same ground, where whilom, as Mr. Blaine
tells us in his ' Rural Sports,5 the Prince Regent and
Mrs. Fitzherbert, in the close of the last century, were
wont to hunt the hare with a favourite pack of lap-
dog beagles, when the Prince supposed himself to be
commanding 'the ioth Light Dragoons' at Brighton,
Jack Chaloner and his fiancee, Miss Capel, had
followed the field, and joined in the work with zest,
for few hounds dash with more perseverance after
their quarry than a well-trained pack of harriers.
Well had they enjoyed the ride to the meet, gallop-
ing side by side, ascending one green swelling down
to descend another as steep, testing to the full the
forelegs of the animals they rode, for some of these
downs have an altitude of four hundred feet, and the
roads between them are as steep as they well can be.
' Oh Jack !' cried Lina on one occasion, as, breath-
less, she near lost her seat.
'You nearly came a cropper just then, my darling !'
he exclaimed, as he adroitly caught her bridle and
arrested the speed of her horse.
' My nag shied at the flying shadows made by the
arms of that horrid windmill!'
14
JACK CHA LONER.
4 He is a Scotch horse, perhaps, and not accustomed
to such things. But be careful, dearest, for my sake.?
4 And a little for my own, too,' she added, with one
of her silvery little laughs, as the speed was resumed
over those delightful Downs, where fresh breezes are
always blowing, and the eye can follow the long
undulating line of the chalky cliffs that stretch away
westward to Brighton and the height of the Steyne ;
and the pair rode side by side to their destination,
that prime landmark on the Downs, Friston Mill, on
its height visible for many a mile around.
4 How close we seem to it, Jack!' cried Lina
breathlessly, as she swept on with her handsome head
bent forward, her veil and skirt streaming behind her,
the latter revealing more than usual of a slender
^nkle and a shapely little foot planted firmly in its
glittering stirrup.
But the road was deceptive, as it plunged down to
the lonely little hamlet of East Dean, at the bottom
of a valley, where, within sound of the sea, its farm-
houses and cottages lie scattered in picturesque con-
fusion on the slope of a hill round the little church,
in the yard of which lies many a smuggler's grave.
'No sign of Amy or Vane,' said Lina Capel, refer-
ring to her youngest sister and her admirer (of whom
more anon), as she and Jack Chaloner came breasting
ON THE SOUTH DOWNS. 15
gallantly up to the little grass plateau which lies
between the mill and ancient church of Friston, and
where but a small number of the Hunt, including two
field masters, some thirty riders, and a few young
ladies, were gathered.
' Surely no accident can '
' Don't think of it, Lina ; they are only loitering to
please themselves in some green lane.'
And now, with a wave of the hand, the pack was
set to work !
A hare that had been lurking in the furrow of a
ploughed field fled like a flash of light, with the pack
on her track in a moment; and after the pack, in
pursuit of this most timid and defenceless of quadru-
peds, were the field—leaping, hallooing, galloping,
spurring, and whipping, as if in pursuit of the most
ferocious animal in the world.
On they swept, horsemen and harriers, appearing
and disappearing, closing and scattering again, as
obstacles had been surmounted or avoided, some oc-
casionally dropping to the rear and out of the hunt,
yet others keeping close on the trail.
jack and Lina Capel thought more of keeping by
each other's side, as they rode on past the old Tudor
manor of Friston, buried deep amid its 'apple
bowers,' near which the hare popped through a hole
i6
JACK CHALONER.
in a wall into a park; but over the wall went the pack
and the field, Jack and Lina lifting their horses to the
flying leap together, and puss was driven into a corner
from which there seemed no escape; but she doubled
on them, vanished through the paddock gate, and was
lost for a time, till a shout of the hunters announced
that the hounds had her in sight again, and they
' made music' as she cleared a little wood, and one
dog gained so close upon her that her fate seemed
sealed, and already her plaintive cry of aunt, aunt}
aunt, would be heard at times.
But now she distanced the dogs, and led the whole
field in a circle round Friston Mill, involving an hour
of rough and tedious work, till a shout announced
that a fox had been unearthed, but vanished as soon
as seen, and once again, after a pause, the harriers and
huntsmen were after a hare, over stubble and turnip-
fields, over wild, open country, and over away towards
Irvington, streaming onward so close that the hunts-
men were heard more than once to shout:
' Give the hounds a chance, gentlemen—keep back
—run in!'
'Do pull up, Jack, please, I am so blown!' en-
treated Lina, and Chaloner pulled up, a little reluc-
tantly, for the thorough English spirit of racing and
hunting inspired him now, and as they halted on the
ON THE SOUTH DOWNS.
17
crest of a down over-looking Seaford Bay, where a wild
sea was rolling in-shore, he could hear in the distance
the full chorus of the pack ringing out, as they followed
the hare, over height and hollow, leaving huntsmen
and field far, far in the rear; and ultimately puss was
captured by one gallant old hound on the verge of
Crowlink Cliffs, over which more than one of the pack
went headlong, after a run of several miles over ter-
rible ground.
Weary now, after looking in vain for her sister and
Jocelyn Vane, Lina proposed that" they should turn
their horses' heads homeward, and it was when riding
leisurely towards Brighton that the ill - omened
conversation with which this chapter opens took
place.
True it was that just after Lina Capel had left a
fashionable West-End finishing school, she had—being
without a mother to advise or control her actions—
been engaged to a young Lancer Captain, quartered
at Hounslow; but after a few months the affair died
a natural death, or was broken off, chiefly, and wisely,
through the instrumentality of Constance, an elder
married sister (Mrs. Annerley), whose husband, also
an officer, had discovered in time some of the dissi-
pated proclivities of .his brother of the sword, and
considered him a most unwise custodian of a young
JACK CHALONER.
girl's happiness; so they were parted, and never met
again, as he sailed with his regiment for India.
The narrative of this little episode in her life
seemed to fill the present lover of Lina with much
disappointment, if not bitterness.
' In the matter I have so foolishly confided to you,
dear Jack, my vanity—my very school girl's vanity—
was interested, not my heart; you believe me, don't
you ?' said the girl, sweetly and softly, distressed by
his silence, while her eyes looked at him imploringly.
Sad eyes they were, sweet and pure as those of'a child,
yet sunny and at times full of womanly witchery.
But he, as he looked at them and her lips, was
shivering at the thought of how another's kisses had
been welcomed there; that another's hand had caressed
her hands and hair, and been caressed by her in turn.
' Speak to me, Jack, or you will give me a heart-
ache!' she urged.
' Heart—I don't believe the Capel family have any-
thing of the kind among them,' he replied.
f How pleasant you are!'
' Look how Amy flouts honest Jocelyn then ! Why
does she not put a silver collar round his neck, as she
does with her poor terrier, to show his meekness and
her proprietary ?'
'You can actually say these things of us, while you
ON THE SOUTH DOWNS.
19
see and know that poor Conny is dying by inches for
the loss of Annerley!'
' True—by Jove! poor thing, perhaps she is an ex-
ception,' he added, for he was in a resentful mood of
mind.
' I did not think it was in you to be so absurdly
jealous, Jack ! and yet at the last ball at the Pavilion
you looked black as a thunder-cloud if I did a second
round dance with any one but yourself—even with
poor Vane, who is you know so devoted to Amy.'
'Well, I cannot with temper see another man's arm
round you.' 1
' Stuff! Who ever thinks of that in a dance ?'
' I do, Lina.'
' Then you should think of something else. And all
men say I dance so lightly.'
' Do they ?'
' And with truth, I think.'
'Well may you dance lightly, for as a song has it,
" My heart lies under your feet, love." '
She laughed and tried to tickle his neck with her
riding switch.
' But,' he resumed, ' suppose, after we are married,
that the fellow you referred to '
' Don't speak of him so—especially to me.'
4 Oh—indeed ! Well, suppose Captain what's—his
2
20
JACK CHALONER.
—name—Pierrepoint turned up again, you could not
fail to feel an interest in him.'
4 Of course, after the high compliment he paid me,'
was her incautious reply ; ' but,' she added so sweetly,
' all my love would be yours, Jack.'
' The logic of the heart suggests something else,'
said he gloomily again.
'" The logic of the heart is not always the wisest or
the best," a writer tells us. We should then want but
an Iago to turn you into a veritable Othello! Why, I
might as well be jealous of Fanny. Arnand; you flirted
enough—furiously, indeed—with her before you knew
me, I have heard.'
' Flirted ? We were but acquaintances; and a flirta-
tion, even of the most advanced kind, is very different
from what your affair was—an engagement!'
Tears now welled up in the girl's flashing eyes, and
she said, emphatically—
' If you worry thus, I'll rush my horse over yonder
chalk cliff, and I'll come a fatal cropper then, if I do !'
' Lina!'
' What would you say then —that is, if—if you love
me?'
She was sobbing now, and of course Jack relented
for the time. There was but one way of consoling her;
but Lina would not be consoled just then, and bade
ON THE SOUTH DO INNS. 21
him farewell at the gate of Oakhurst Priory, the house
of her widowed sister; and while she was repenting
her too perfect confidence and her communicativeness,
Jack Chaloner galloped back to his hotel, dissatisfied
alike with himself and her.
Of the Fanny Arnaud, with whom she half playfully
taunted him, we may have more to say anon.
CHAPTER II.
at oakhurst priory.
This abode, 'the abode of the Three Graces,' as Jocelyn
Vane was wont to term it, was a lovely little villa, all
oriels and verandas, half hidden amid blossoms in
summer and flowering trees, between which would be
had glimpses of those grassy coombs so peculiar to
Sussex scenery, with wood and water at every point.
It had the daintiest drawing-room and boudoir in the
world, both hung with light blue silk and silver and
lace.
Though called a Priory, it was no Priory at all, but
a very handsome modern villa, built by the Annerleys
upon the site of an ecclesiastical edifice that has long
since passed away, a Cluniac house founded at the
conclusion of the thirteenth century by the Earl de
2—2
22
JACK CHALONER.
Warenne, and Gundreda his wife, and possessing in
those days no less than thirteen churches ; and near it
was a mound, now covered with rhododendrons, said
to have whilom been a Calvary, where the pious monks
of old were wont to exhibit annually a representation
of the crucifixion of our Saviour.
Of the original edifice no vestige had been seen
since the days of Queen Anne, called grotesquely 'the
Good' by the English people, though she deserted
her father at his utmost need, and robbed him of his
crown.
Oakhurst Priory was beautiful in its surroundings
at all times, but more especially in spring, when the
coppices were putting forth their first tender green
leaves, when the verdant turf was spotted with yellow
primroses, and when the hyacinths, the purple violets
and anemones made it all brilliant with colour and
blossom.
But now the odour of the hop-fields came on the
passing breeze with the sound of falling leaves ; the
singing birds had all departed to sunnier lands across
the seas, and the shrubberies and coppice around Oak-
hurst Priory had become faded and many-coloured in
their foliage.
The aspect of nature affected the spirits of Lina,
causing additional sadness, for she was a tender,
AT OAKHURST PRIORY.
*3
sensitive and very impressionable girl; and now, when
thinking of all that had recently passed after the
joyous hunt, she would with difficulty restrain her
tears, as she resigned her horse to the groom, threw
her skirt over her left arm, and entered the house of
Constance Annerley, which had been the home of her-
self and Amy since their parents died.
The girl's heart and memory went back to the first
night on which she had met Jack Chaloner—to the soft
caressing homage of his voice and eyes, when he de-
voted himself entirely to her, and the first emotion of
love grew into their hearts, and that which seemed a
momentary and passionate impulse that might never
ripen, did ripen, and fast in the ejnd—the night of a
ball at the Pavilion.
Amid all her balls, how well she remembered that
one ! It was a summer night, but the lights were soft
and subdued in the great conservatory. The winter
garden, we may call it, of the Pavilion seemed a very
paradise of exotic flowers and trees, as they wandered
through it, flushed with the last dance, while
diamonds and sapphires glittered among the rich
hair and on the soft bosoms of lovely women, and the
murmur of the pleasant voices mingled with the
distant music of the Hussar band playing ' La Reine
de Saba *
24
JACK CHALONER.
Since that night, how she had worshipped him in
her heart, and lived on the breath of his admiration
and love.
4 He had no mistrust of me then; but his nature
will never let him trust me now !' she thought, with
growing alarm in her heart.
She had excited this too ready suspicion herself, and
yet she loved him so fondly!
Why had she spoken to him about Pierrepoint and
the past at all ? But she had done so by the
advice of Constance—the gentle, affectionate and
dying Constance, to whom she trusted implicitly in
all things.
Lina felt intensely annoyed and unhappy, conceiv-
ing that she had injured herself and lowered herself
in the estimation of her intended husband ; so, with-
out taking off her riding habit, she at once sought her
elder sister, who, though only two years or so older
than herself, was, by her position as a widow and. by
her natural character, a kind of monitress and mother
to her and Amy.
All the three sisters were more than ordinarily'
handsome. In England, the land that teems with
lovely women, there were few that could excel each in
her own particular style.
AT OAK HURST PRIORY.
•25
Constance Annerley was cast in the same mould as
Lina, but the eyes of the latter were a deep brown,
while those of the former were darkest grey—the
violet grey that looks black at night, and she had all
the alluring delicacy given by the consumption into
which she had fallen ; she had a singularly wasted
form now, a sweet, soft sadness in all her expressions,
in every motion and utterance.
Lina softly entered the room in which she lay
pillowed on a couch, with a soft but ample shawl of
Berlin wool-work spread over her, a forgotten book in
her hand, and her hollow, lustreless eyes turned to the
red October sunset.
Lina stooped over her, kissed her tenderly, and
drawing a low chair near, sat down by her side,
retaining her thin hand between her own caress-
ingly.
Since the first tidings reached Constance that her
husband, Captain Annerley, had fallen in an affair of
outposts on the frontier of Afghanistan, she had never
been the girl she was before. All life and love of life
seemed to have passed out of her.
A wasting grief and sorrow preyed upon her, a
morbid grief, certainly, and as she was by nature
delicate, she was dying slowly and surely ; for some
time, each morning found her weaker than she had
26
JACK CHA LONER.
been the night before, and each night weaker than
she had been in the morning.
This mysterious ailment took the form of consmnp-
tion at last. It baffled all the best medical skill that
could be brought to bear upon it; yet, somehow, Lina
shrunk from conceiving it possible that the sister she
so idolized should die.
A purely frail and fragile creature she looked, white
and delicate, calm and motionless ; she was dressed in
a long, loose black dress, like a mediaeval monastic
weed. Full of sad repose, her chiselled features be-
trayed rapid and sudden decay, yet suggested how
great had been their beauty in her bloom.
Her nose was straight, with pink transparent nos-
trils ; her lips exquisite in form as those of Lina, but
pale and colourless ; her eyes were dull and vacant,
though full of unnatural lustre at times ; yet the out-
lines of youth lingered over all.
She smiled sweetly on seeing Lina, who said:
f Conny, darling, this room which faces the westward
is too chill for you now.'
' In all the house it is my favourite. It was dear
Annerley's too, and his presence seems to haunt it
still,' replied Constance. ' Besides,' she added, ' I do
so love to see the sunset.'
4 Why I'
AT OARHURST PRIORY.
27
' It tells rrie that another day has gone.'
Una's heart trembled. She knew this meant, as
each day passed, she was drawing nearer him.
'You have enjoyed your run with the harriers, of
course ?' said Constance, after a pause.
' Oh yes ! so much ! And I have followed your
advice at last, Conny.'
' In what ?'
' In telling Jack all about—about Pierrepoint. But
do you really think it was a wise proceeding ?'
< I do.'
' But why, Conny dear ?'
' Sometime or other, somebody would have men-
tioned it, in jest, perhaps ; and now he knows that
nothing more can be known.'
' I only fear he knows too much.'
' How ?'
' When I told him, his manner to me changed very
much,' said Lina, in an agitated voice.
' Changed ?'
'Yes; he evidently disliked the revelation, gently
and reluctantly though I made it.'
' Did he say much ? It is so completely a thing of
the past, and you were little more than a child.'
' He did not say much ; but the little that he said
was unpleasant, and left more to be suspected.'
JACK CHALONER.
'I grieve to hear this, Lina, and do hope that I
have not acted unwisely in my advice. But, if he is
so jealous by nature now, think of the long and untried
future 1'
' You see, Conny/ continued Lina, almost with tears
in her eyes, c I fear that he views it thus : Pierrepoint
and I did not quarrel, or separate because we were
weary of our engagement; we were parted by
others.'
' And most wisely. We have all much to thank
my poor dead darling for, in that matter. With
Pierrepoint your life would have been one of wretched-
ness, Lina. He is one of those men who should never
marry ; for he is too universal a lover of the sex to
adhere long to one, even though that one was his wife,
so that you had a most fortunate escape, my pet. And
Jack's manner was, you say—'
' Cold, constrained, unpleasant.'
' I would allow no man to treat me so,' said the
haughty little Amy, who had joined them now, also in
her riding habit, and with a sparkle of mischief in her
coquettish eyes, for to dazzle and tease her admirers
was the study of her life ; 41 would simply drive him
wild.'
4 And away, perhaps,' said Lina.
* With what, Amy ?' asked Constance.
at oakhurst priory.
29
' Flirtation, all round.'
' Oh,you silly girl!'said the invalid,with a fond smile.
' I would shower Cupid's darts in all directions till I
taught Jack to be wise.'
'But Cupid's darts are sometimes mixed with those
of Death, as I have found to my cost, Amy,' said
Constance, with a sad kind of smile.
' I do not understand,' replied Amy.
' I have read, somewhere,' said Constance, ' that on
a sultry summer's eve, Cupid went into a grotto which
proved to be the Cave of Death, and flung himself 011
the grassy floor, and as he did so, all the arrows fell
out of his quiver, mingling with the fatal darts of
death that strewed all the mournful place.'
'And what happened ?'
' In gathering up his sheaf he knew not which was
which; and this is the cause, says the monitor, why
we sometimes see the hearts of the old transfixed by
the arrows of Love ; and behold the young and the
beautiful struck down by the bolts of Death, as my
handsome darling was in Afghanistan. But the first
bell has rung for dinner, dears. Change your dresses,
and don't let me detain you.'
Meanwhile Lina's communication to Jack concern-
ing Captain Pierrepoint was being discussed else-
where.
30
JACK CHALONER.
CHAPTER III.
a job's comforter.
' Why, Jack—what is up, or what is down with you ?'
exclaimed Vane, as the pair sat over their wine and
cigars after dinner, in the recess of an hotel window,
overlooking the Marine Parade, the sea and the pier,
at Brighton.
' In what way do you mean ?' asked Chaloner.
4 Well, simply that during dinner you have been as
mute as a fish, but I suppose it must be as "Bon
Gaultier " has it:—
4" It is the most Infernal bore,
Of all the bores I know,
To have a friend who's lost his heart,
A short time ago." '
41 think we are both in the same case, so far as
that goes,' said Chaloner drily. 4I hope you enjoyed
the sport to-day.'
4 Rather,' replied Vane, tipping the ashes off his
cigar into a little china dish.
4 Lina and I saw little of you in the field, though.'
4 We were in at the death on Crowlink Cliff, how-
ever.'
4 Hope you made your innings, in that quarter—
you know what I mean—to-day ?'
a job's comforter.
3x
'As usual—no,' replied Vane, rather gloomily, as
he drained and refilled his glass.
Jocelyn Vane was a well-sized, handsome young
fellow, with a capital tone and bearing about him, a
clear cut English face, blue grey eyes, and tawny
long moustache. He was without a profession, was a
graduate of Oxford, had moderately good means, and,
like most other Oxonians, fairly excelled in all manly
sports ; and he was intensely devoted to Amy Capel,
but what success he made with her was unknown
even to himself.
The room in which they sat—a stately one—was
ablaze with gas; their table was near an open
window, though the month was October, for the wind
was off the land ; the atmosphere was pure, clear,
and warm, and a brilliant moon was up ; thus, there
was a great deal of company on the Parade and
gaily - lighted pier, where the strains of the band
mingled with the incessant boom of the breakers on
the shingle.
The fortunes of the day's hunting were naturally
referred to from time to time ; but the two friends,
after lapses of silence, always returned to what was
uppermost in the minds of both—the subject of the
two sisters.
' Though there are no fences on the Downs,' said
J A CK C HA L ONER.
Chaloner, 'good riding is required ; their sides are so
steep and slippery in many places; and then, worst
of all, there are those treacherous wheel-ruts that are
always overgrown with grass ; and I never ride there
without thinking of Punch's sketch of Mr. Briggs,
descending one hill breathlessly, just to ascend an-
other.'
' Amy referred to that to-day/ said Vane. ' What
a seat that girl has in her saddle !'
'But not better than her sister's,' said Chaloner,
with a smile; and there was again a lapse in the
conversation, which was fated ere long to take a
rather unpleasant turn for Chaloner, and give him
some food for annoying reflections. Like Lina, he
too was thinking of that night at the Pavilion—the
ball to which he had gone ostensibly to meet Fanny
Arnaud, and from which he came away so dazzled,
so bewitched by the rare beauty of Lina Capel, that
he forgot everything else ; and now even, as if to
give greater reality to the dreams of memory, the
band on the pier, and another before the hotel—all
Germans in semi-uniforms—were playing the very
airs of Strauss to which he and she had glided to-
gether for hours in the waltz.
Jocelyn Vane had his own thoughts and memories
too.
A jorfs COMFORTER.
33
'There has been one great mistake in the scheme
of creation,' said he, with a kind of sigh.
' Indeed—and you have found it out ?'
' Personally, yes.'
' And that is '
' The fact of my not being born a millionaire. It
would smooth matters with me amazingly.'
' I don't think that Amy Capel values money
much; and with all her coquetry you are sure to win
her favour in the end.'
' You think so,' said Vane, brightening; ' why ?'
' Love so usually begets love.'
' But does not always secure it.'
' The girl is young—very young, and full of vivid,
abundant and glowing life.'
' And fortunately there has been no previous attach-
ment,' was the second unlucky comment of Vane,
which made Jack wince ; ' yet I am far from being on
the same basis you so speedily won with Miss Capel.
After that night at the Pavilion you made vast pro-
gress with the whole of the sisters.'
' I had been intimate with poor Annerley, up
country in India, which was an ample recommenda-
tion to all the three—to Constance especially ; so I—
an idler on leave of absence—soon became an ami
du maison at Oakhurst Priory.'
34
JACK CHALONER.
4 But I, to Amy, am only a privileged dangler, who
may see any man preferred to him to-morrow.'
41 can scarcely think so ; I am sure that in her
secret heart the girl loves you.'
4 Takes a deuced queer way of showing it,' grumbled
Vane, tugging at his long fair moustaches, yet pleased
nevertheless by his friend's assertion.
Full of the subject, and warmed by the wine he had
imbibed, Jack: Chaloner now confided to his friend
Lina's innocently-made revelations as he and she rode
homeward from Eastbourne.
'There is said to be great freshness in a young
girl's first love,' was the third unlucky comment of
jocelyn Vane.
41 thought Lina's was mine,' said Chaloner, with a
look of chagrin ; 41 would have preferred the bud to
the after-bloom.'
4 Was your first love hers ? Come-—don't be ab-
surd! What about little Fanny Arnaud, eh ?'
4 She was nothing to me, I swear to you, but a
pleasant girl to dangle after and dance with.'
4 Young girls' first loves are very often foolish,' said
Vane. 4 Pierrepoint—I knew him well—he had a
brother at Trinity ; he is a handsome fellow and very
attractive, though too gay, to say the least of it; and
Miss Capel was well quit of him, for he has a wonder-
ful way with women.'
a yon's Cl)JTFOA'TK/'.
35
'Indeed !' muttered Jack Chaloner, viciously biting;
the end off a carefully selected havana.
' Yes—I hear he is coming home on leave.'
' The deuce he is ? Where do his friends live ?'
' In Brighton.'
' Brighton !'
'Well—at Hove ; it's the same thing, you know.'
'Then he will be sure to see Lina!'
' Certain—everybody meets everybody else on the
Marine Parade, at some time or other; but he could
not have the bad taste to renew the acquaintance,
unless ' Vane paused,
' Unless what ?'
' She were married. The genii of the wedding ring
makes all square—he is a great protector.'
'What a Job's comforter you are,' growled Jack
Chaloner.
Vane eyed him narrowly and closely.
' When that girl accepted you, Jack, you were so
overwhelmed with joy, that you displayed what Whyte-
Melville calls "all the reckless abandonment of a
paid-off-man-of-war's-man on a spree," and now you
seem distrait, dark, and full of doubt. Did you quarrel
over her silly little revelation ?'
'Quarrel—thank God, no!' replied Jack empha-
tically.
3
36
JACK CHALONER.
41 heard a huntsman say of her to-day " she was
the belle of the last drawing-room—the best thing of
the year, and that infantry devil (meaning you, Jack)
absorbs her all to himself, against the field, by Jove !"'
Chaloner did not smile, but said, after a pause—
4 There is a rumour that our regiment is soon going
on foreign service.'
' Where ?'
4In New Zealand.'
4 The devil—you couldn't go much further off. Send
in your papers.'
4 Impossible with such a rumour abroad—and a row
going on among the Maories.'
4 And what about Lina ?'
' She must go with me, of course.'
4 And leave her dying sister ? I don't think the
girl will do that.'
' Fancy me in New Zealand, and Pierrepoint here,'
said Jack Chaloner, partly to himself.
4 Going into action, with No. 43 on your buttons,
and the light of battle in your countenance, as the war
correspondents have it.'
4 Vane, please don't chaff—I am in no mood for it.'
4 Will you go with me to the theatre ?'
4No, excuse me, there will be nothing but "a beg-
garly account of empty boxes," which always proves
depressing.'
a job's comforter.
So when Vane departed, Chaloner was left to his
own reflections, which were far from soothing, and
amid them he smoked heavily, and in his ideas became
quite unreasonable, and he stigmatised Vane mentally
as a regular 'Job's comforter.'
' Right!' he muttered ; ' what says a female novelist,
and surely she must know her own sex ?—" Whoever
said that we cannot love two at once ? It is the easiest
thing in the world to love half a dozen." So, in the
end, Lina may love me and that fellow Pierrepoint
too. I wish she had kept her secret to herself; where
ignorance is bliss, etc. I have heard and read,' thought
he, 'that in the heart of a young girl there is a won-
derful amount of worship and adoration for her first
love; and that these are emotions which she cannot
share with a second. So am I not a fool to love a girl
who cannot yield these emotions to me ? And yet
Lina is so sweet, so seductive and attractive!'
She was right, too; for he had the making of a very
Othello in him, if he fell into the. hands of a mischief-
maker.
He remembered that he had one day seen an ' Army
List' in her hand, and could also see that she was
looking among the cavalry. Now, Pierrepoint was, he
knew, in the Lancers.
Had she an interest still, however vague, in that
3—2
38
JACK CHALONER.
roue ? It would almost seem so. Had she, in some
secret repository—in some most artfully contrived
drawer of her desk—notes, faded rosebuds, locks of
hair (he had some such things himself once), perhaps
a photo or two ?
How pleasant, after he and Lina were married, if
he should unexpectedly come upon such an infernal
posy ! Jealousy, he knew, was so absurd that few
sympathized with it, and many made merry over it.
Was it a secretly acquired knowledge of Pierre-
point's probable return to Brighton that prompted
Lina's unusual confidence towards himself; but it was
one which showed she had perfect confidence in his
love for herself.
And so, as jealousy 'doth make the food it feeds
on,' he began to remember having heard or read that
it is impossible for a man and a woman, who have
ever been more than mere friends to each other, to
meet without inspiring a mutual interest of some kind.
Viciously he twisted his dark moustache, as he
thought he might yet hear another man's name by
mere force of habit escape her lips as he kissed them
—another man's name murmured yearningly in her
dreams by night!
In all this he was horribly unjust to the tender, true
and loving Lina! ' But for the whole of the next day
a job's comforter.
39
lie remained away from Oakhurst Priory in a furious
pet, thus punishing himself.
The danger in which Constance Annerly lay; Lina's
great love for her; the silly dread of Pierrepoint's
return; the chances of the regiment going to the
other side of the world from Gibraltar, all filled him
with perplexity as the night of the next day wore on;
and to these worries was added another, by the
contents of a telegram which was put into his hand
by his servant just as he was about to retire to rest.
CHAPTER IV.
separated.
Lina had a vague, sad, and uncomfortable impression
on her mind that she had not seen the last of the
matter between her and Jack Chaloner, all the more
so as he did not come near Oakhurst Priory next day,
a most unprecedented thing on his part since their
formal engagement, and her spirit was piqued accord-
ingly ; and again and again she said to herself:
' It is quite too absurd !'
If it was his way to say gentle and soft things to all
women, how much more was he disposed to softness
and gentleness with her—such a girl as he thought
40
JACK CHA LONER.
he had never met before? And yet he had sorely
tempted and tested her temper, after the hunt.
Breakfast was just over in the pretty little morning-
room at Oakhurst Priory, and she and Amy, while
attired in the most becoming of soft morning wrappers,
frilled and trimmed with lace and ribbons, were still
idling over their letters and notes, when, to the sur-
prise of both, for the hour was early, Jack Chaloner
was announced.
4 Jack—Jack at breakfast time !' thought Lina, and
an expression of inquiry, blended with that of plea-
sure, overspread her soft, bright face, as he stooped
and kissed her.
'And me, too, Jack,' said Amy, proffering her rosy
lip. 'Now what is up, that you are here betimes ?'
' I have been telegraphed for, and find that I must
start for Gibraltar,' said he.
' Gibraltar!' exclaimed both girls, and Lina felt
that she grew pale as she spoke.
Jack Chaloner nodded. He had a curious kind of
satisfaction in having the power to pique her interest
in him, as a set-off against the unwelcome communi-
cation she had made.
These two loved each other very tenderly and very
truly; but on Jack's part, a kind of cloud seemed to
have come over them.
SEPARA TED.
4i
'What is the meaning of this?' asked Lina with
alarm in her face.
' I have to start to-night for Millwall Docks to take
the Marseilles steamer for Gibraltar,' said Chaloner,
'I have been telegraphed for. It seems that my
friend and old brother officer, Harry Stapleton, who
served with me so long in India, is dying, and wishes
to see me once again, so go I must, and I suppose
you can spare me ?'
' Oh, Jack !' said Lina upbraidingly.
' Poor Harry is down with something worse than
the Rock fever, I fear.'
'And you will be away—how long?' asked Lina.
interlacing her fingers on his arm.
' Three weeks certainly, at least.'
' And you were not here all yesterday!'
' I had much to engage me,' he replied, colouring.
' Three whole weeks ! Oh, Jack, how I shall miss
you !' exclaimed Lina; and Amy, conceiving that she
might be a little in the way, withdrew.
He gazed on her with much of the jealousy of
passionate love in his heart, yet he did not caress her
as he had been wont to do. He thought of those
other lips that had pressed hers before, and she felt
instinctively that there was a change in his eyes and
manner, and this seemed so utterly unreasonable to
42
jA CK CHALONER.
Lina, that pique mingled with her grief at the tempo-
rary separation, and her pride was roused.
' I hope you will miss me,' said he, ' and quite pine
for my return—pine till you are pale as a lily/
' Miss you!—of course I shall miss you !' exclaimed
the girl tearfully, and half reproachfully ; ' but don't
be absurd, Jack,' she added ; ' if I pine or grow pale
it will be with anxiety about Conny.'
She was looking at him earnestly and lovingly, and
unconsciously toying the while with her engagement
ring. Surely its presence, its existence, he thought,
would keep her mind true to him in absence ?
But some forty-eight hours before this no such
ideas or doubts would have occurred to him ; now he
was full of them.
Was she aware that her discarded lover was return-
ing home—home to Brighton, doubtless ? Why had
all these needless intimations been made to him, and
when just on the eve of his departure, too ? Until
the ill-omened day of the Hunt they had been so
one in heart and purpose, so happy together, he
and Lina.
Nothing had happened to sever that joy; but who
Could say what might happen now ?
Of course he never spoke of Captain Pierrepoint,
or Jocelyn Vane's lately made communication ; to
separated.
43
have done so would have been a' source of pain to
Lina and of humiliation to himself; but the exist-
ence of this bogie was uppermost in his thoughts all
the tjme and insensibly gave a tinge to his manner
during this their farewell interview; thus it was abso-
lutely a relief to him when Amy returned to say that
Conny wished to see him ere he departed.
He entered the room where, at that early hour,
Constance was still abed; and he thought that he
never saw her look more interesting or beautiful.
The pallor of her pure transparent skin was cer-
tainly deadly ; her dark eyes of violet grey seemed
black by contrast, but painfully hollow and full of
unnatural lustre now ; and strong, too, was the con-
trast between her complexion and the darkness of
her rich, soft hair—which overspread the laced pillow
in long, shining ripples—her long eyelashes, and
straight and well-defined eyebrows.
Careless of conventionality then, she permitted
more than usual of a snow-white neck and bosom to
be seen, and with a sad soft smile held forth a thin
transparent hand to Chaloner—a hand that had no
other ornament than her wedding ring.
'Kiss me, Jack,' said she; and stooping, he touched
her brow and lips lightly, but with great tender
ness.
44
JACK CHALONER.
* This is a sudden affair, your departure for Gibral-
tar,' said she after a little pause.
' Very—but I cannot refuse poor Stapleton ; we
were such chums, he and I.'
' Of course not; and you will be away '
' Three weeks, perhaps a month.'
'A month!' exclaimed Constance, with a low tone
of alarm—' a whole month! Oh, Jack,' she added,
drawing him close to her, with an arm round his
neck, ' I may not be here when you come back. I
had a strange dream of Annerley last night. He
seemed to be standing afar off, and beckoning me to
him, with such a sad sweet smile on his face ; and so,
Jack, as I may not be here when you come back, you
must repeat to me the promise you made when you
were betrothed to Lina, that you will love her all
your life, and be ever gentle and good to her.'
' Oh, Conny,' said he, surprised and startled by this
injunction or request at such a time, ' can you doubt
that I would ever cease to be otherwise V
' No ; but I should like the promise, Jack/
' You have it from my heart and soul, Conny. You
never mistrusted me before.'
' Nor do I now,' said Constance; but her thoughts
belied her words, as she remembered how Lina had
described his reception of the Pierrepoint episode;
Separated.
45
' but Lina is so loving and so gentle, and everyway
so dear to me, that I do not think I should rest in
my grave if you ever doubted, mistrusted, or re-
proached her.'
A faint blush, born perhaps of energy, overspread
the speaker's pale face as she said this; and then
Jack Chaloner knew what she referred to, but he said
nothing to indicate that he did so. He simply
pressed her hand caressingly, and said:
' Trust me, Conny—trust me.'
'When God takes me, Jack, I shall leave my two
orphan sisters in your care. Be kind to both—be
good to Lina! You saw her first but a few months
ago at the Pavilion Hall; and yet you can mould,
guide and sway her more than I can—I who slept in
the same cradle with her as an infant, and have been
with her ever since—except the short period of my
married life with—with Annerley.'
Her lips were quivering now, and her eyes welling
over with tears.
'Trust me, Conny—trust me,' he repeated, and
caressing her over again—for the last time, as it
proved — he retired considerably agitated in mind
and manner.
These injunctions and entreaties of Constance im-
pressed him most unpleasantly, coming as they did
46
JACK CHALONER.
after all that Lina and Vane had told him; and they
not unnaturally led him to think that there might be
much more to tell, and much more to dread !
Surely there must have been more in the Pierre-
point episode than he would ever know ! His man-
ner unconsciously became more constrained than ever
to Lina. She felt this keenly; but disdained to
notice it, as anger became mingled with her grief, and
she felt that this—the first separation since their en-
gagement—was fast becoming a painful and dis-
appointing one.
4 I will write to you the moment I reach Gibraltar,''
said he, 4 and I shall simply seem to live on your
answers, darling, till I return.'
4 I don't think I shall write at all—better not—what
have I to write about that will interest you—unless it
be the health of Conny—her want of health, rather ?'
4 Lina !—not write to me—why ?'
4 It is a whim,' said she, strangely piqued into
making matters worse; 4 better not, Jack; in our
present mood we might put unpleasant things on
paper—which is worse than saying them. Besides,
you will be so occupied with your friend—Stapleton.'
4 Before he joined us,' said Chaloner, twirling each
moustache in turn, 4 he was in another branch of the
service.'
SEPARA TED.
47
' Which ?'
'The Cavalry—a Lancer corps,' replied Jack calmly,
yet eyeing her closely, as he remembered the little
episode of the 'Army List,'
Lina started just a little, and changed colour.
In his spirit of suspicion he thought this could only
be caused by some secret interest jn Pierrepoint. It
was not so, however, and in thought he completely
wronged her, as she had spoken of Lancers to him ;
but it was the memory of all her unfortunate com-
munication that alone moved her, and her evident
emotion added to Jack's ire, and made him absolutely
stiff to the girl whom he longed to press to his heart,
and at whose feet he would have laid it.
And Lina, as we have said, feeling the constraint of
his manner, let her own pride and pique increase,
and even in that parting time she would not be
demonstrative.
Yet, if he had any doubt that she loved him with
all her soul, he should have seen, when he turned to
bid adieu to Amy, the warmth of tenderness that
spread over the soft face of Lina, and made her
beauty seem absolutely divine—the brightness
of eye over which her long lashes fell, and how
her sweet lips quivered as a painful sigh escaped
them.
48 JACK CHALONER.
Aware of his suspicions, she perforce acted a role
she did not feel; and thus they parted, without even
the promise to write—parted with a shadow between
them—a shadow that both deplored and secretly
repented ; yet neither would yield.
But he was gone now ; his last kiss seemed to linger
on her lips, and she felt that she would have given
half her life to feel his kiss there once—just once
again !
Days passed after this—days of terrible monotony
to Lina Capel. Jack was gone, and she knew now
why the hours of his temporary absences had been as
dead space—a worthless space—unless they brought
him back to her. She knew now to the full why his
approach, why the sound of his voice and the touch
of his hand, had always filled her with supreme joy
—the joy 'that a vivid imagination and a passionate
and poetic temperament confers.5
She would write him—she mtist write him! She
threw open her desk to do so; but paused in her
pique and pride—paused fatally.
She would wait till Jack wrote to her.
But if he did so, no letter ever reached her, and
slowly and wearily the days of agony went by, and to
add to Lina's mental anxiety, her sister Constance
seemed to be sinking hourly.
AMY CAPEL.
49
CHAPTER V.
AMY CAPEL.
MEANWHILE Jocelyn Vane did not seem to make
much progress in his love affairs with the coquettish
Amy, who played with his heart as a cat might with a
mouse that was in her power.
Amy was a girl, whose ripe and rosy lips ' seemed
made for saucy speech and sunny smilesa proud
girl too, who was fond of all men's admiration, and
vain of having among her adorers such a man as
Jocelyn Vane ; but it was difficult for her to say
whether she responded to his love or not, though
often taken to task by Constance and Lina on the
matter.
If she did so, she adopted a very strange kind of
treatment, as she coquetted openly with others under
his very eyes, ignored much of his tenderness at one
time, and openly laughed at it on other occasions,
while yet viewing him as her own peculiar property
after all, and she might keenly have resented his
attention to anyone else.
Perhaps she was only loth to surrender her liberty
just yet, and settle down among the unmarked and
unheeded mass of married people.
With that beauty, which is falsely called 'the gift
5°
JACK C HA LONER,
of the devil/ Amy Capel had much of that rare love-
liness which is. the gift of Nature.
' Such beauty as hers cannot be passionless, except
perhaps to me!' Jocelyn Vane often thought to
himself.
He had seen and duly traced in the daily prints the
departure of his friend's steamer from Millwall Docks
to Lisbon, and from thence to Gibraltar.
He knew that Jack had arrived at the Rock, and
reported that important circumstance to Lina ; but it
rather perplexed him to find the information received
almost with tears ; and that, as days went on, she
seemed in utter ignorance of Jack's movements and
intentions.
Almost daily he came to Oakhurst Priory, deter-
mined to bring matters to an issue with Amy; but,
with all his natural confidence, he found his heart
generally fail him, for if once he proposed formally
and she declined, he felt that he could go there no
more ; and so thenceforward life would be a hopeless
blank to him.
There was a pretty, mocking grace in all the girl
said. It seemed as if she never could be in earnest
about anything but her hair and her costumes ; so her
manner bewildered him sometimes, tantalized him
always, but never failed to fondly attract him.
AMY CAP EL.
5i
She would have resented alike being deemed either
a flirt or a coquette, and Lina often smiled when she
saw her before her glass, surveying with pleased gaze
her own beautiful resemblance.
' I am not a coquette,' she said more than once, when
thus employed ; and yet her secret heart told her that
she zvas so.
' What are you reading ?' asked Vane, one evening
when he called and found her so intent on a book that
she barely accorded him her hand. ' What interests
you so much that you care not for me ?' he added in
a low voice as he drew near her.
' Well, I am reading a novel.'
' A novel.'
'As you may see—one of Mudie's last, one that
contains as much love, murder and revenge, as you
will find in any penny daily ; but such is life,' she re-
plied laughing; and tossing the volume aside, she
added, ' now come and button this glove.'
She held out a snow white slender wrist, and he
gladly accepted the pleasant office of adjusting the six
buttons of the glove thereon.
'To judge by the daily papers, there is an awful
amount of mischief in the world !'
'Have you no brighter remark to make than that!'
exclaimed Amy; ' mischief, of course there is !'
4
52
JACK CHALONER.
4 I often wonder why did Eve listen to the serpent
in Eden.'
4 Because perhaps Adam was a dull fellow, not up to
the mark, and apt to entertain her with common-
places. What are you sighing about ? thanks—the
glove is buttoned,' she added, laughing.
They were quite alone, so, stooping his head near her
ear, he asked in a low and rather agitated voice:
4 With all your beauty why are you so cold ?'
< Cold—I ?'
4 Yes—to me.'
4 Perhaps you have yet to learn '
4 What love is, Amy ?—oh no ; you may read it in
my eyes, "whenever they turn to you.'
4 And how would you have me treat you ?' she
asked, her eyes sparkling with mingled mischief and
gratification under their long lashes.
4 Amy '
4 Come, you must not call me Amy. Dicky—
dearest Dicky !' she interrupted, starting up.
Dicky was a love-bird, all bright green and scarlet,
a gift of Vane's. She extracted it from the pretty gilt
cage in which he gave it to her. Then, while the bird
sat on the tiny white forefinger of her right hand, she
caressed it with her left, teaching him to extract a
little lump of sugar from between her pouting lips.
AMY CAP EL.
S3
How Jocelyn Vane envied the caress and the kiss !
Could his lips have been as near hers as the bird's
little bill! Amy knew precisely his thoughts, the effect
of the pose, and of the whole situation.
4 I see that the book you have flung aside tells us
that love is the great instrument of Nature/ said he
softly : 4 the band and cement of society, and that it
is such an affection as cannot be so properly said to be
in the soul as the soul to be in it ; in short, that it is a
man's whole being wrapped into one desire !'
4 And what does this most remarkable outburst
mean ?'
4 It describes the love I have for you, Amy.'
4 You should describe it for yourself; besides, again,
I say, you must not call me Amy—yet.'
4 Yet ?' his heart beating lightly.
4 How fluent we have become on the subject of
love !' she exclaimed, laughing excessively; and had
Vane been a closer observer, he would have detected
that this laughter was forced; but it perplexed him,and
he regarded her anxiously and with infinite tenderness.
4 Do be merciful with me, you darling wag,' said
he entreatingly ; 4 you knew well, Amy, how I love
you ! Think of
4 " Two souls with but a single thought—
Two hearts that beat as one I" '
4—2
54 JACK CHALONER.
' Oh, don't run out into poetry—I always laugh at
it so in the breach-of-promise cases !' said Amy ;
' but if you will quote Frederich Halm, give the whole
verse;' and then, while playing with the fan that
hung from her girdle, she sang, with great archness
and sweetness, eyeing him the while from under her
long lashes:—
' " Mein herz ich will dich fragen,
Was ist den liebe ? sag !
Twei seelen und em gedanke,
Twei herzen und ein schlag !"'
There was an indescribable witchery in the manner
of the girl as she sang, and Vane longed to take her in
his arms, and gather her close to his heart. Amy
laughed again, and then sighed.
Now Amy was very wary of when, how, and where
she sighed—chary of such signs ; but, on some occa-
sions, she could be moved in a manner no other could
excel or attempt; and just then it suited her to
appear to be moved by the sentiment of the German
song.
The truth was, she really loved Jocelyn Vane more
than she was inclined to admit, even to herself; and
she had begun to reflect, that if she wore him out and
lost his allegiance, more than her heart was involved
—ca thing far dearer to her,' says a cynical writer,
' and more precious to all women—her vanity.'
AMY CAP EL.
55
lie pressed her hand to his lips.
c You will give me an answer to-morrow?' said he,
hurriedly, as the sound of carriage wheels at the door
announced visitors.
' To-morrow ?'
' Yes, my love; say that you will.'
* Perhaps.'
' Here ?'
' No—no.'
' Where then ?' he entreated.
c Meet me on the Marine Parade, after luncheon.'
' Could you not find a more sequestered place than
that ? he asked, in a tone of disappointment.
' No—we can be lonely enough in a crowd.'
'Oh, Amy!' said he, almost upbraidingly, as he
took his departure, with mingled hope and doubt in
his heart.
' Who is it that says,' thought Amy, ' that " it is one
thing to like a man and flirt with him to the very
verge of love-making, and quite another to promise to
marry him ?" I am very bad to him—poor fellow,
and he loves me so !'
The morrow came; but there was no meeting
between the lovers.
Long before noon was passed, the shadow of Death
lay over Oakhurst Priory !
JACK CHALONER.
CHAPTER VI.
in the valley of the shadow.
Till the day of the hunt it seemed to Lina Capel
that the love of her and Jack Chaloner had been like
the lotus-steeped dream of a lovely summer night.
When would he come back to her?—Jack! In
heart and soul how she yearned for him, and repented
the mode of their parting.
On a sombre October evening she was playing
softly a low, sad air on the piano, and her dying
sister—poor Constance, who was confined to her bed
permanently now—listened with pleasure, as music
always strangely affected her, and now more than
ever, for as Jean Paul Richter has it, 'Music speaks
of things in our life we find not, and never shall find.'
Constance looked very placid and lovely in her
extreme feebleness, and at times strove to smile; but
her smiles had no beam or light in them.
It was the autumn of the year, and the autumn of
her heart and life, though young in years; and from
her couch she looked sadly out on the setting sun and
the falling leaves, and she thought of those solemn
passages in the Bible which tell of the time that is
coming when we also ' shall fade as a leaf, that the
wind has taken away, and all that thou hast, shall fall
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 57
down as the leaf falleth from the vineand at no
season are we so sensibly struck by such passages as
in autumn.
To Constance it seemed that the time of her de-
parture was near now; but, indeed, it was nearer
than she thought.
When these trees were putting forth their tender
green leaves in spring, she now felt that the place
which knew her then would know her no more, and
that Lina and Amy would be alone in the world.
Would Jack Chaloner remember his promise to
love and cherish the former ? It would be terrible to
doubt that now, to the poor dying creature, dying of
incurable sorrow.
Amy, who had been sitting near her bed and
watching her, now came hurriedly and with a pale
and agitated face to Lina's side.
' Oh, Lina,' she whispered, ' come—come—a terrible
change has come over poor Conny's features ! I am
so frightened—send for the .doctor at once.'
It was too late !
No human aid could avail Constance Annerley now.
The end had come suddenly, but she was perfectly
collected and calm. Her sisters knelt by the side of
her bed, and she held a hand of each.
' My dear Lina—my dear Amy,' she said feebly and
58
JACK CHALONER.
brokenly, ' you have been—very—good to me—and
always made me—happy. I have only one pain in
dying—dearest Lina—in leaving you and Amy—but
none to leave—a world where he is not.'
She referred to Annerley in his Afghan grave, and
these were nearly the last words she uttered.
In agony and dismay, by the dim rays of a night
lamp, they watched her breathing become more and
more difficult, as unconsciousness stole over her, and
about midnight she passed away, and then a horrible
stillness seemed to fall upon the pale watchers and in
the chamber of death.
Constance dead ! The sweet, the tender, the loving
and affectionate Constance ! It could not be, though
long expected ; it must be a dream—a painful dream
from which they would waken; and some time elapsed
before the dread reality forced itself upon the sisters.
The grief of Amy was noisy, passionate, and ex-
liausting ; but that of Lina, from the difference of her
temperament, was deep and voiceless.
How long, long seemed the hours of the terrible
night that had passed; how slowly the grey dawn of
the new day stole in on the sublime face of the dead
girl; how far, far off seemed yesterday !
Lina sat by the bedside like one turned into stone,
and it seemed to her, as if not hours, but days and
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 59
years must have passed, since she last heard the voice
of Constance, and since this great horror and woe
came to her heart.
Dead—Conny dead! It could not be ; it seemed
so dreadful to connect her—so young, so tender, so
beautiful, with death and decay!
There are, and have been, and will be, moments in
the lives of all of us, when mere seconds seem to be
drawn out to the length of years ; and hours—yea,
even minutes, lag like centuries.
As the dawn stole in, Lina gazed from the window,
and, to her bloodshot eyes, the landscape, though
familiar, seemed strangely altered, and so long as she
lived she never forgot her impression of it, on that
morning—the far extent of fields, the pollard willows,
the blue sky reflected in the pools ; the lazy cattle
knee-deep among the long grass; the shadow of a
church spire falling westward, till it mingled with the
flying shadows of a windmilL
She saw these things, but was not thinking of them ;
only of the darker shadow, the chill, the gloom that
had come between her and the world.
The first day of death stole on ; the sun was bright
in heaven; but the poignant grief and horror of the
past night remained unsoftened and unchanged in the
hearts of the sisters.
6o
JACK CHALONER.
Lina telegraphed to Gibraltar, urging Chaloner to
return to her at once, if possible.
But a reply came that he had gone to visit Staple-
ton at Malaga, and his address there was unknown ;
and then a new horror fell upon the over-sensitive and
agitated mind of Lina ; it was a prevision—a fore-
boding, that she would never see Jack again.
A few days more, and the funeral—each detail of
which was in itself a tragic horror—was over, and Lina
and Amy came back to their broken and desolate
home, where to them it seemed that the sun could
never shine again, and the stereotyped condolences of
friends fell without meaning on their ears.
Though Amy was with her, Lina felt alone—Amy
was so volatile, so childlike, with all her innate good-
ness of heart and purity of thought—that the* elder
sister found herself fearfully alone now that the
tender, true, and motherly Constance was gone—gone
from them for ever, in this world at least.
They could but hope that the reunion she longed
for had been achieved. She had but one comfort to
look forward to now—the return of Jack ; he had
been gone nearly a month now, and, in a few days at
latest, she must certainly see him now.
Oh, how foolish—she thought—how wicked was
their mode of parting!
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 61
But on the return of Jack, an event came to pass
that strongly added to the sorrow of the sisters for
the death of Constance—an event far beyond the con-
ception of all as being ever likely to happen—and
this sorrow only was, that this event occurred too
late.
CHAPTER VII.
doubts cruelly ended.
Chaloner had heard of the death of Constance the
moment he landed in England, and now, returning
with love, ardour, forgiveness, and great pity in his
heart, he quitted the railway station at Brighton, and
drove direct to Oakhurst Priory, where he had no
doubt the sisters must still be, and would perhaps
remain, until a sufficient time for mourning should
elapse, and he and Lina might make the necessary
arrangements for their marriage.
How strong a sense of the loss, and of the presence
of the dead Constance came upon him, with the
familiar features of her home, as he walked up the
avenue, on a bright clear November evening, and
anxious, perhaps unwisely, to give Lina a surprise,
resolved to enter the villa, not by the hall door, but
by the French window of the pretty drawing-room,
which opened down to a gravelled walk.
62
JACK C HA LONER.
( My darling was wise aforethought/ he murmured
fondly to himself. ' It were better not to write, after
the peculiarity of our parting : but what an age it
seems since we did part, and what a jealous fool I
was ! Home a few days sooner than I expected—
and dear Harry Stapleton didn't die after all! Dar-
ling Lina ! How glad she will be to see me, amid all
her great sorrow ; what a beast I was to leave her as
I did—so full of suspicion too !'
Jack had read in the military papers under the
head of the —th Lancers, that Captain Pierrepoint,
had left Ouettah, for Europe on twelve months' leave
of absence. Europe was a wide place, but Brighton
is in Europe; so Vane was right after all—he was
now home, or coming home.
As he had expected, the French window was open,
and he stepped softly into the room; but paused, as
he heard voices, sobs, and the sound of kisses, more
than once in the inner drawing-room, beyond a fes-
tooned silk curtain ; a strange irresolution seized him,
and he stood still.
He heard the voice of Lina; it seemed broken and
hysterical; and he could see the dark outline of her
figure, in the clear twilight, as she reclined her head
on the breast of a stranger, whose arms were caress-
ingly round her.
DOUBTS CRUELLY ENDED.
' Oh, why has all this come to pass too late—too
late !' he heard her say.
' Did you not see my return from Ouettah an-
nounced in the papers ?' asked the stranger in a piteous
tone.
' No—oh no.'
' Nor did you get my letter from Lahore ?'
'No.'
'Quettah!' muttered Jack Chaloner, with a curse
on his quivering lips. ' So I have only come in time
to see her meeting with Pierrepoint, after all!'
' Oh, Lina, dearest,' said the stranger, who was a
bronzed, tall, and soldier-like man, in the prime of life,
and very handsome too, 'never will you be able to
conceive the hopeless misery I endured, while shut up
in that Afghan fort, at once a prisoner and a slave, in
hourly suffering and hourly peril of my life, aware
that I was supposed to be dead, and might never more
be free, while all my thoughts and all my soul were
here with you all at Oakhurst Priory!'
Chaloner stood rooted to the spot for some
moments, and heard much more of this sort of thing,
while many sobbing caresses were exchanged. This
evening was fated to last long in his memory ; it was
to be the last of his love !
His heart almost ceased to beat; his lips became
64
JACK CHALONER.
white, as a deadly pallor overspread his face, and a
horror and rage stole over him, together with a strange
and terrible calmness. Then he shuddered as a man
might do if a sword blade was passed slowly through
his body.
He could see her in all her beauty, as he had seen
her last; but paler and careworn—yet that pallor
excited no pity in him now. Her lovely lips were
slightly parted, till that man's touched them; her eye-
lids were heavily weighted with a mist of unshed tears,
whilst she lay passive in his arms, looking upward in
his face, as one bewildered in a dream, and murmuring
his name together with that of her dead sister.
' At last—at last!' he heard Pierrepoint say fondly,
as he kissed her forehead, * after all, Lina, after all!'
Chaloner recalled his conversation with Jocelyn
Vane, and remembered how the latter had described
his rival as a fine handsome fellow, and very attractive,
but a little too gay, and that he was certainly coming
home to Brighton.
c Could you not have come sooner ?' he heard Lina
say, with a soupqon of Upbraiding in her voice.
4 It was impossible, darling. I left Quettah the
moment leave was given me, and took the train from
Lahore to Benares. 1 travelled night and day full of
love, anxiety, and impatience, and now '
DOUBTS CRUELLY ENDED. 65
Lina wreathed her arms round the speaker's neck
and kissed him, uttering terms of endearment, that,
like the action, divorced her and Chaloner for life.
He turned away, and fearful only of being seen,
quitted Oakhurst Priory, with the emotion of one
who was doing so for the last time.
' It has been said,' he thought, 'that when doubt
has come, faith and trust are dishonoured ; but I can
have no doubt now—none! God help me—oh, God,
help me—and I loved her so!'
He walked away staggering like a drunken man.
He thought of her rich brown hair, that seemed
shot with gold when the sunshine tipped it; he thought
of her deep eyes, with their white passionate lids and
long tremulous lashes ; of her lips so soft and proud ;
of all her pretty ways, and winning tricks of manner ;
of all he had loved and admired—all—all were for
another now; and he felt maddened by all his fancy
pictured and conjured up !
He remembered his farewell with Constance
Annerley ; her parting injunctions and his solemn
promises; but the episode he had witnessed was be-
yond his and her calculations, unless all women were
artful and false ; and it rendered all such promises
null and void.
The loveliness of her who was to have been his, or
66
JACK CHALONER.
who he thought had been so, was now embraced by
another, and the soft kisses he had so often gathered
from her lips he could never gather again, as they
were now given to a rival—to this fellow Pierrepoint
—her lover of the years that were past!
To him there was a world of bitterness in these
convictions.
' Her indifference to my letters, as to writing to me,
and hearing about my movements, is fully explained
now!' he muttered, mortification, rage, and grief
mingling in his heart; ' I have never really been much
to her; how little must I be now ! My God—why
did I meet, know, and learn to love her ? Living,
loving, and breathing, she is dead to me—dead as if
she lay, where Constance lies, in her grave. I would
rather have seen her there, in purity and truth, than
in that man's arms ; for in death I could have loved,
revered and prayed for her still; but now—now !'
He paused in his half-muttered speech with a sob
in his throat.
He gave one passionate and angry glance backward
to the woods that hid the villa, and turned away ; but
he could only think of all he had so suddenly lost—of
the lips that had trembled beneath his own ; but
should never do so again.
Ever recurring was the thought, that she who was to
DOUBTS CRUELLY ENDED.
67
have lain in his arms as his wife, was gone, as if dead;
and he had left her in those of another, her first love,
whom—in the old days of the pistol—he felt it in his
heart to have called to a terrible account, were it but
to be revenged on her!
While there is doubt there will always be hope, and
without the latter perhaps we should die ; but Jack
Chaloner could have no doubt now; thus terrible
indeed was the frame of his mind.
CHAPTER VIII.
A STRANGE REVELATION.
JACK wrote a bitter and upbraiding letter to Lina,
bidding her for ever farewell ; adding that he thanked
her for her candour and attempt to love himself, but,
that knowing what he knew now, he would leave her
to her old love again, and was going away, where—
would matter little to her, but that she never would
look upon his face again.
So resolute was he to break off with her, that lest
she might attempt to reply, explain or palliate, he
dispatched the letter without giving his address. It
was simply dated, and that was all.
Lina with pallid face and trembling hands read the
letter over twice, and then put it carefully past
S
68
JACK CHA LONER.
1 Is one so outrageously unreasonable, worth your
tears—worth even your consideration?' asked Amy,
who was watching her with commiseration and
anxiety.
' Poor Conny's advice to me was unwise. It roused
a secret fount of jealousy in his disposition, and
perhaps it is as well that we are parted,' said Lina
gently; ' I must learn to bear the cross that has come
to me.'
Meanwhile so great was the shock to Jack's system,
that he became seriously ill, and for days was incap-
able of quitting the hotel, or even his room.
As a further corroboration of the interview he had
witnessed, he saw the name of Captain Pierrepoint of
the —th Lancers, mentioned among the fashionable
arrivals at Brighton ; and he now concluded that the
captain was—what he, himself, had hitherto been—a
daily visitor at the Villa, whither an elderly maiden
aunt was coming, but had not yet come, to play the
part of propriety.-
And then, though he thought that all was over now
between himself and Lina Capel, he could not stifle
memory, or relinquish the art of self-torment.
To quit Brighton would be the first step in the right
direction.
All that had passed before this parting seemed dim
A STRANGE REVELATION.
69
to him now—even his former life ; all thought and re-
membrance of Lina were merged in that one fatal
evening when he had seen her last in the arms of a
man ! and that man, as he never doubted, the returned
Pierrepoint, and when he learned that he had been for-
saken and deceived by the girl whom he loved better
than his own soul!
She had wrecked his peace, and ' no woman ever
wrecks by halves,' it has been said.
' The regiment is under orders for the seat of the
Maori War, thank God !' exclaimed Jack ; ' there are
change of thought—change of scene, and of occupation
for me.'
He resigned his leave of absence, and began to
make his preparations for leaving England at an early
period—it could not be too early for him now!
Going to fight the savage Maories. Would she be
sorry for him? Would she regret the chances of
war—feel some compunction arising when she heard
of all he was about to face—the chances of suffering
and battle—if he found a grave in that distant
country, where he would forget all and be forgot ?
And as he thought of this, Jack, like many other folks,
felt a little pathetic at the thought of his own untimely
demise.
This was doubtful indeed in every particular; why
5—2
70
JACK CHA LONER.
should she care, absorbed as she was in this new
passion for her old love ?
Bah! women were all alike, and the author of
' Venice Preserved ' was right:
' What mighty ills have not been done by woman ?
Who was't betrayed the capitol ? a woman !
Who lost Mark Antony the world ? a woman !
Who was the cause of the long ten year war,
And laid old Troy in ashes ? woman 1
Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman !'
But this fiery peroration failed to ease Jack's mind;
and he began to think how unfortunate it was that he
left Brighton—that Harry Stapleton should fall ill
and require him at that particular juncture. However,
his next reflection was, if the absence and separation
of a month from him on one hand, with propinquity
and Pierrepoint on the other, caused such a perversion
of thought and rapid change in her affections, was he
not well rid of her ?
The change might have come after marriage, and
what then ?
So the land of the tattooed Maories be it! He
already saw himself, in bitterness of heart, sailing on
through hundreds of miles of sunlit or moonlight sea,
and striving to forget the woman who had beguiled
him by her beauty and befooled him in the end—
sailing on, while the waves careering past, murmured
A STRANGE REVELATION.
71
ever during the night, and the stars shining from afar
off, in the soft southern skies, looked down on the
world of waters.
Some eight days or so passed, and one evening he
sat in his room, overlooking the gay bustle of the
Marine Parade, endeavouring, amid the bitterness of
his heart, to draw solace from a cigar and a (night-
cap.'
As he sat there smoking quietly, to all appearance,
none could have imagined how black was the night
that had settled on his heart, the violence of the storm
that raged within it, and the curious mixture of envy
and scorn, with which he regarded the various flirta-
tions and tendernesses which were evidently in progress
among the promenaders below.
He had but one solace—the prospect of forgetful-
ness, in fierce and foreign service in a far and barbarous
land, for which he would take his departure in a very
short time now.
A hand was laid onvhis shoulder—the hand of one
of the men he loved best, if not the best—out of his
regiment, and who brought with him the welcome of
a friendship that was close as brotherhood—Jocelyn
Vane.
'Jocelyn !'
'Chaloner—Jack?'
72
JACK CHALONER.
The '.wo shook hands heartily; but the latter saw that
the countenance of the former looked grave and cloudy.
' I have not seen you since my return to Brighton,'
said Chaloner, pointing to a chair ; but without taking
it, Vane said,
' I have been in London for a fortnight, and only
came back yesterday, and just now have come from
Oakhurst Priory.'
Chaloner felt his face flush, and the flush grew
deeper, when Vane exclaimed :
'Why, Jack, what the devil has come to you ! Are
you mad ?'
' Not quite ; sadly wise, rather,' was the dogged
reply, amid a puff of smoke.
'Wise—is it possible—can it be possible, what I
have heard ?'
' Can't say for the life of me. But what have you
heard ?'
' That you have been in Brighton all these days, and
never gone near Lina.'
'Yes, and what then ? I went once too often.'
' You are aware of the death of Constance, I pre-
sume ?'
' Poor Constance, I am aware of that event/ replied
Chaloner, rather icily; ' and so there is one Capel less
in the world.'
A STRANGE REVELATION,
73
1 What has Lina done to you or left undone, that
you treat her in this barbarous and brutal fashion ?'
asked Vane, with more alarm than anger in his
manner.
'I do not understand you,' exclaimed Jack,
thoroughly roused now, and starting to his feet
' Do you mean to break her heart ?'
' Didn't know, upon my soul, that she had one to
break.'
Vane stared at his friend, alarm and astonishment
blending with absolute dismay in mind and eyes.
' Poor Lina—so good—so pure—so innocent.'
'Innocent! Come, I like that!' exclaimed Jack,
laughing, but his laugh was a rasping and bitter one.
'You have neglected her; put a dreadful affront
upon her when her heart is at its sorest, needing con-
solation most; and now that Pierrepoint is in Brighton,
he will be trying his chances again.'
'Exactly!' said Jack savagely. 'Listen, Jocelyn.
The moment I set foot on English soil I hastened
hither with all the ardour and pity that man could
feel in my heart—full of the most intense longing to
console Lina, if I could, for her terrible loss—my
heart was full of love and tenderness too. I hurried
on foot, in the dark, to Oakhurst Priory, and entering
by the French window of the drawing-room, saw her
74
JACK CHALONER.
sobbing in the arms of a fellow of unmistakable mili-
tary aspect, who had just come from India, and who
kissed her again and again—every kiss went like a hot
sword blade to my heart '
' Serve you right for stealing in that sensational
way into the house, by a window instead of the door.'
'This infernal fellow Pierrepoint '
' He was not Pierrepoint,' said Vane, actually laugh-
ing now, and heartily too.
'Who then was that interloper?' asked Jack,
fiercely.
f Annerley—Piercy Annerley—Lina's brother-in-
law, the husband of the dead Constance, who was not
killed in action as we supposed, but had been a pri-
soner among the Afghans, for three long, weary, and
terrible years. He achieved his escape at last, and
reaching Quettah, lost no time in returning home, only
to learn that he had come too late, and that Constance
—whose life, a knowledge of his existence might have
saved, or at least prolonged—was no more. Oh Jack,
Jack—what a jealous and uninquiring goose you have
been; and what a fatal mistake you have made.
Thank God, however, it is reparable. Poor Lina—
what do you not owe her ?'
'The devotion of a life!' murmured Jack, with
clasped hands; and sooth to say, he had almost
A STRANGE REVELATION.
75
dreaded that he was dreaming while Vane was speak-
ing, so sudden was the relief from the deadly strain
that had been on his mind for some days past. He
doubted his own hearing, and asked him to repeat
some parts of his explanation again and again, while
a tumult of joy filled his heart—joy mingled with
shame and compunction.
'You see, Jack,' said Vane, laughing again, 'that
"life is full of wilder mystery than any fiction fancies.'"
CHAPTER IX.
lina's two visitors.
' She will never forgive me, Vane !' exclaimed
Chaloner, for the twentieth time, sadly and remorse-
fully.
' Indeed, with all her gentleness, I think it very
doubtful whether she will,' replied Vane, after the
extraordinary explanation, which closes our last
chapter
All unconscious of the mischief the unexpected
visit to his own house had caused—temporarily, let
us hope—and in ignorance even of the existence of
Jack Chaloner, and that personage's relation with
Lina, Captain Annerley, after requesting the latter to
consider the Priory the home qf herself and her sister
76
JACK CHALONER.
as if Constance had still lived, had gone back to
London, crushed in heart and broken in spirit, to
arrange for once more going on active service as he
had now no tie that bound him to England.
Lina's gentle mind was very full of Annerley—the
terrible shock he had met with, after all his sufferings
and captivity, to hasten, full of sorrow, love, and joy,
to rejoin Constance, and find nothing of her left but
a new-made grave.
This natural sorrow for him drew her much from
the contemplation of her own in one sense, while
adding to the latter in another.
She thought of taking some action herself, in the
matter of Jack's cruel desertion, and of endeavouring
to discover his whereabouts and intentions; but anon
shrunk from doing so—a woman in some things is so
powerless; and then natural pride came to her rescue.
At least she would wait the return of his friend
Vane from London.
She was alone now, most fearfully alone. Her poor
heart seemed dead and benumbed with misery at the
unexplained affront put upon her. Her days were
passed in fasting, her nights in sleeplessness, or short
snatches of feverish and dreamy slumber; and when
awake her actions were all mechanical.
From a secret drawer of her desk she took out a
LIN AS TWO VISITORS.
77
bundle of Jack's notes and letters: all tender, loving,
and graceful, whether long or short—notes written
and conceived as only those who love tenderly can
—even when they have met and parted daily—indite
them ; and now floods of hot tears escaped her as she
perused them again and again, folded them reverently,
and once more laid them by, as she had not the heart to
destroy them yet.
There, too, was a bud from a bouquet—the first he
had given her—and a lock of his dark hair, already
looking faded and dry.
Oh, what did all this miserable mystery mean ?
The romance of her life was over now, she thought.
Why had so many weary hours passed, and yet her
lover had never come near her, in all her grief too ?
She was restless, unquiet, and anger began to blend
with her anxiety as day followed day. Her white
fingers wandered amid the few flowers of the garden,
and unconsciously she twitched their petals to pieces.
She wrote to his old hotel ; but as he had gone
to another, the letter was returned as he had left no
address.
Gone !—this was too much.
And he had seemed to love her so; his tender
caresses had all been hers; and the time had been all
but settled when she was to be his wife—and now!
78
JACK CHALONER.
Yet she never for a moment in her mind connected
his absence with the slightest suspicion of the actual
cause thereof. Such a dire complication and mistake
never occurred to her.
Reflection made her feel by anticipation all she
would have to bear and all she had lost, and she bent
her beautiful head on her hot and tremulous hands,
as if the waves of sorrow and of insupportable grief
were closing over it.
Dreamily she gazed on the objects around, often
noting, however, the most trivial; for ' in the ex-
tremity of wretchedness, the mind will play with
some trifle of which it has no consciousness.'
Times there were when she began to hate herself
for having loved him, and then loathed life for having
lost him. What error had been hers that any man
should dare to treat her thus ! Her life seemed a
great wreck—but many lives are so.
The noisy indignation of Amy at the conduct of
Chaloner only chafed Lina, and totally failed to
soothe her.
In her nervous state everything seemed to speak to
her of the absent one—the flowers in the garden, the
trees round the Priory ; the wind in the leaves seemed
to whisper his name. Would she never more look
upon the face that had grown into her heart—never
lina's two visitors.
79
hear the voice that was so welcome to her ear, never
again be eye to eye with him she loved so well ?
She remembered how, when the telegram came
from Gibraltar, she had a strange prevision—a fore-
boding, that she might never see Jack again; and now
that foreboding had been terribly fulfilled.
Some days after the reception of Chaloner's bitter
and most mysterious letter, Lina had- two visitors
whom she would rather not have seen, and the advent
of one filled her for a time with something akin to
dismay.
'Miss Arnaud' was announced—the last visitor in
the world whom Lina cared to see at this peculiar
juncture.
She came in with a kind of breeze about her, a
gushing young lady, who kissed Lina on both cheeks
with great effusiveness, though secretly her rival with
Jack. She was a tall and handsome girl, daughter of
a colonel on the staff—a genuine garrison belle, with
clear, dark grey eyes, a pure and brilliant complexion;
a nose slightly retrousse, a beautiful mouth, and
masses of bright chestnut hair. Her style was good,
though rather of the kind called ' dashing;' but she
was a girl who, as Jocelyn Vane said, 'would flirt
with the tongs or her grandfather if there was nothing
better in the way.'
86
JACK CHALONER.
She was so different in tone and mind from Lina
that the latter sighed wearily at the prospect of a pro-
longed visit from one who knew all the gossip of
Brighton.
' How lovely and calm the afternoon is!' she ex-
claimed.
'Too calm, I think,' responded Lina.
' How so ?'
' Such stillness always gives me a presentiment of
impending evil.'
' Ah—you are melancholy and impressionable ; but
you must not yield to such thoughts or fancies, dear. By
the way,' she added, with the brightest of her society
smiles, 'I saw Captain Chaloner on the pier, yesterday.'
' Indeed,' said Lina, glad that the light was behind,
so that her acute visitor could not see the change in
her colour, as every remark and thought connected
with Jack gave her, then, a cruel pang; 'how was he
looking—pale ?'
' Pale—oh dear no! not at all—and why should he
look pale ? But you, Lina, should know best. I
thought him looking remarkably well; and you have
seen him since, no doubt ?' continued her fair tor-
mentor, eyeing Lina with great sweetness and greater
watchfulness ; ' but under all the circumstances, what
a curious freak this is of his 1'
lina's two visitors.
Si
' What ?' asked Lina, in a breathless voice.
' Is it possible you do not know ?—resigning his
leave, as papa told me, last night.'
Lina remained silent—cut to the heart, as this she
knew to be significant of speedy departure from
England, and from her; so Fanny Arnaud spoke again.
f Where is Amy ?' she asked.
' Out riding.'
'Oh, with Mr. Vane, I suppose? He seems in-
tensely devoted to her.'
'Mr. Vane is in London—and Amy is hard to
please.'
'Now, dear, when is the double event coming off?'
asked Miss Arnaud, with her sweetest smile.
'There is no double event on the tapis j replied
Lina, with an asperity of tone unusual to her. 'You
talk as if Amy were engaged to Mr. Vane, which she
is not; and you forget our fresh sorrow, Miss Arnaud.'
' Pardon me, Lina dear. Papa has been gazetted
to full pay on the staff,' said Miss Arnaud, as she
drew near Lina's pretty little gipsy table, while
sipping a cup of five o'clock tea from a cup of costly
and fragile china; ' and as he is under orders for
foreign service, you may not see me for a long time/
' Foreign service—where ?'
' We are uncertain as yet/
82 JACK CHALONER.
Anywhere out of Brighton would be welcome to Una.
' But, of course, you must have heard all this before
from Captain Chaloner ?'
' When did the news come ?'
' A week ago.'
'A whole w^ek !' murmured Lina, scarcely knowing
what she said, but aware that her visitor's searching
eyes were upon her.
' Can it be possible that he has been in Brighton so
long without your meeting! Surely, dear, you are not
about to throw him over as you did— But, of course,
it, requires two for a quarrel as well as a flirtation/
' Who is talking of quarrelling or flirting ?' said
Lina, with growing irritation, while Fanny Arnaud sat
smilingly sipping her tea by applying the spoon to
the rosiest of lips ; ' what do you mean by all this ?'
'A whole week, dear—only think! Surely you
require sympathy; and it is good to unburden the
heart sometimes,'
' Why ?' asked Lina, scarcely knowing what to say,
in the intensity of her mortification.
'Lest it break,' said Fanny, with a sudden sigh.
' But not to strangers,'
' I hope you do not deem me one ?'
Lina made no response, so her tormentor spoke again.
' Decidedly there must be some mystery in the
UNA'S TWO VISITORS.
83
affair of Captain Chaloner being absent from you a
whole week, and when in Brighton too/
11 see no mystery in the matter,' said Lina, fairly
desperate ; ' and what of it if there be ?'
' This much, dear, that whenever there is a mystery
there is always something tfnpleasant, and a woman is
sure to be blamed.'
' Am I to infer from all this that you imagine I am
engaged to Captain Chaloner ?'
' Of course, darling—are you not ?'
' I am not,' replied Lina, with her heart full of
tears at the terrible denial, yet feeling now that by his
conduct Jack was lost to her for ever.
' But you were, though ?' persisted Fanny, full of
amazement now.
' Not at all—he was a friend of Piercy Annerley's,
and came here as such.'
' To see Constance ?'
'Yes,' replied Lina in a low voice, blushing painfully
at the deception she felt herself compelled to practise;
but what woman would admit to a thoughtless and
heartless girl like Fanny Arnaud—one who had been
long suspected of having a tendresse for Jack herself—
that she had been jilted—deserted !
' I am so glad to hear this, for your sake, dear, for I
think the wife for him would require to be an Amelia
6
84
JACK CHALONER.
like Fielding's,' said Fanny; 'an Amelia Sedley—a
meek, milk-and-water angel.'
' I do not know,' replied Lina, so coldly that Miss
Arnaud, having now learned more than she ever ex-
pected to know, arose to withdraw.
At that moment a servant brought in a card on a
salver.
' Captain Pierrepoint !' exclaimed Lina, with a spasm
of dismay in her heart as she read the superscription.
' Show him in,' she added aloud.
' I wonder where we shall all be this time next year ?'
said Fanny, laughing, as she rose from her seat.
Neither of the girls could have the slightest idea—
but that belongs to our story.
Again Fanny Arnaud kissed her effusively on both of
her cheeks, now cold and pale, and then withdrew,
with an expression on her smiling face that was in-
tensely knowing and provoking to Lina, who, starting
up, hurried into the inner drawing-room to gather
courage and arrange her hurrying thoughts.
CHAPTER X.
oliver pierrepoint.
The double drawing-room, with blue silk curtains
festooned in the arch between them, was so essentially
OLIVER PIERREPOINT. g5
English and suggestive of feminine presence that
Oliver Pierrepoint had seen nothing like them since last
he stood on British ground ; for although the English
lady in India strives hard to make her abode as much
as possible like home in the old country, bare floors,
cane chairs, punkahs and grass-tatties in the windows
make a woeful difference.
There were embroideries on frames, crewel-work
lying about, a drawing on an easel, books on art and
literature, a cage or two full of birds, and a cosy-look-
ingcat on the rich rug before the cheerful autumnal fire,
A white jewelled hand drew back the blue silk
curtain, and he was face to face with Lina Capel once
more—face to face, after the three years that perhaps
had seemed so long to him.
He had seen nothing like Lina since last he looked
upon her. Her eyes and hair alone would have made
her beautiful; and she had the same pure profile and
the same faultless figure of the past time when he
loved her.
He had a soft and sympathetic smile on his hand-
some face, which three years of the hot Indian sun had
bronzed and reddened.
Pierrepoint uttered some commonplace, took her
hand in his for a moment, and seated himself with the
air of an old friend ; but he was too well bred to
b—2
86
JACK CHALONER.
assume, even in the slightest degree, as yet, the old
role of love again.
' I heard of your bereavement—of poor Mrs.
Annerley's death,' said he, very sweetly in manner;
' and I presumed upon our—our former friendship to
intrude upon you, and offer to you and Amy—she
was quite a little girl when I saw her last—my most
earnest, if unavailing, condolences.'
' I thank you in her name and my own so much.
It was most sad indeed for poor Annerley, after all he
had suffered, to return here and find that he had lost
her for ever. She loved him so, that the false news of
his death actually broke her heart.'
' Short as the time has been of my absence,'said
Pierrepoint, ' I miss many a well-known face. As
years go on, friends fall away like leaves in autumn.
After being three years in India I seem quite a stranger
already at home. I travelled part of the way from
Quettah to Benares with Annerley—a remarkable
captivity and escape his have been.'
' A most fatal complication for our poor Conny.'
Lina's composure was perfect, yet her manner was
not, and could not be, that of a lady who sees a stranger
for the first time; for Oliver Pierrepoint was, indeed,
no stranger.
How snowy white, he thought, looked her slender
OLIVER PIERREPOINT.
8 7
throat and hands, in contrast with her black mourning
dress. She had a delicate ruche of white tulle round
the'former, and wore pretty cuffs with jet studs ; for,
even amid her sorrow for Constance and almost despair
at the inexplicable conduct of Jack Chaloner, she was
womanly enough to love pretty things and tidiness for
their own sake.
The conversation was somewhat desultory, and
broken by long and unpleasant pauses.
Pierrepoint had a sad reputation for fickleness and
volatility—the result, some said, of his broken affair
with Lina; and some were ill-natured enough to add,
that now he could not love even his wife—if he had
one—so long as the length of the honeymoon.
He was a courageous young fellow, who had won
more than one medal in the wars of India, but only
liked the service for the dash of it—his sole ambition
chiefly being to ride well, dance well, and dress well:
to flirt well too, and to make love, if she would let
him, to any pretty girl pour passer le temps ; but Lina
had undoubtedly proved his greatest and most lasting
attraction.
She felt a secret uneasiness in the unexpected pre-
sence of Pierrepoint; but not the fear—the real dismay
that would have been in her heart had the relations
between herself and Chaloner been quite unchanged.
88 JACK CHALONER.
Pierrepoint, with all his Lancer experiences and
natural insouciance, was a little confused at first: not
so Lina now, her mind was so full of her own sad
thoughts; but then, in most cases in life, women are
always more self-possessed than men.
'You have distinguished yourself greatly in India,
we have heard,' said she, after a pause.
' Well—so the despatches and newspaper people
were pleased to say. With my squadron, I covered
the retreat in that Afghan affair in which Annerley
was supposed to be killed, but was only taken prisoner.
A devil of a life he led after that in the hill-fort, at the
back of the Hindoo Koosh.'
' Poor dear Annerley !' exclaimed Lina.
' Come !' thought Pierrepoint, twirling his mous-
taches ; ' she has not lost interest in me after all, and
has been pretty cognizant of my movements.'
But it was not so ; she had only heard his name
mentioned incidentally, amid some military gossip at
Colonel Arnaud's dinner-table.
' I have heard of your engagement,' said he, after
another pause ; ' permit me to congratulate you upon
it as—as an old friend.'
'You have nothing on which to congratulate me,'
replied Lina, becoming very pale, and with difficulty
repressing her rising tears.
OLIVER PIERREPOINT.
89
' Indeed ! then I have been wrongly informed. I
heard that you were engaged to—to some fellow in the
Infantry. Is it not so?'
'No.'
She replied with the monosyllable emphatically; and
this was the second denial of her engagement within
half an hour, as she knew not now on what terms she
was with Jack Chaloner.
Pierrepoint was puzzled, but encouraged now to alter
a little of his tone and manner. He was handsome,
but artful, selfish, and somewhat cold-hearted as a
libertine, though warm enough in his passions.
If he chose to venture on love-making with an
unprotected girl like Lina Capel, he had the good
solid basis of his old admiration and her acceptance
to go upon. He knew not, however, that she had met
with a cruel disappointment; with recent cutting and
unmerited neglect; that she thought herself vulgarly
jilted, in fact; and that her sore heart might be caught,
ere long, on the rebound.
Luckily, Pierrepoint knew nothing of all this, when,
after a time, he ventured to refer to the past.
' There was a time when I thought my lot in life
was to have been cast with yours, Miss Capel,' said he,
with a tone of infinite tenderness that perhaps was
not all simulated, but the inspiration of the situation
9°
JACK CHALONER.
and the girl's great beauty-; 'and that time can never
be forgotten by me !'
' 'Tis better not to refer to it,' said Lina nervously, as
her white eyelids and long dark lashes drooped.
' I have seen much of the world and of stirring life
since those days—when we were parted.'
' The old time' was coming ' o'er him ' again, with
the sound of her voice and the sweetness of her sad
face ; but she m.ade no response.
' Lovers' vows are usually made to be broken,' said
he, with a little laugh.
' Not always.'
' Yet in some instances they are.'
' To which—to what do you refer ?' blundered Lina.
'Your own.'
' Why recur to that—to those days when you were
so fearfully dissipated and wild ? It is not generous of
you—Oliver.'
His name slipped from her lips unconsciously.
' How delicious to hear my name uttered by your
voice again !' he exclaimed.
But Lina blushed with annoyance now, for all this
seemed as treason on her part to her traitor, Jack !
'They were the means of parting us—Annerley and
'his wife,' said he, with a soupqon of bitterness in his
voice.
OLIVER PIERREPOINT. gi
' Constance is dead—do not upbraid her. They
parted us wisely, I hope,' said Lina, rising as a hint.
' It is possible that a woman may wreck a man's
life once—but the same woman cannot do it twice,'
said Pierrepoint, who looked all the while as if he had
rather thriven under the wreckage he hinted of.
'You were too wild a liver for a quiet girl like
me ; and I think, Captain Pierrepoint, we should avoid
this subject.'
' It is dangerous ground for me, at least,' said he,
assuming his hat ; ' I shall always respect and revere,
though I am not permitted to love you, Lina; and
now, good-bye.'
' Good-bye.' She presented one hand and laid the
other on the bell ; adding, ' Do you make any stay in
Brighton ?'
She had no sooner asked this question than she re-
pented of it, as showing some interest in his movements.
' No,' said he, with a brightening face. ' I go with
my yacht from St. Leonards to Cowes.'
Bowing, he withdrew. The reply relieved her from
any immediate apprehension, and she heard him ride
away; but she had not seen or heard the last of Jack
Chaloner's bete noir—Oliver Pierrepoint.
It was a singular circumstance, though poor Lina
knew it not, that the real Pierrepoint should have
92
JACK CHALONER.
called so soon after the first visit of Annerley, whom
Jack had mistaken for him ; and his unexpected ap-
pearance agitated her painfully the moment he was
gone, for then her spirit broke completely down.
More keenly than ever her mind reverted to the
blackness of Jack's unparalleled conduct. Once again
had she been distinctly informed by Fanny Arnaud of
his presence in Brighton, and her pain, bewilderment,
and distress began to increase, though she had no
desire now but to—forget him !
But ere that evening closed, Jocelyn Vane, who, on
his return from London, had heard of Jack's conduct
with utter amazement, went as a joyous herald of
peace to explain it all.
Lina heard that explanation with emotions difficult
to describe—that Jack had witnessed or overheard a
part of her meeting with the agitated and sorrowing
Annerley, and failing, in some extraordinary way, to
recognise him in the twilight, had mistaken him for
the returned Pierrepoint.
Amy, who saw only fun in everything, laughed
heartily now at the whole situation, and at the mistake
—a fatal one though it had so nearly been.
But Oliver Pierrepoint, we say, does not pass out of
our drama yet, nor had they seen the last of him.
MEETING BUT TO PART.
93
CHAPTER XI.
meeting but to part.
'And I have your forgiveness, my darling—oh, my
darling!' exclaimed the now repentant Jack.
' I don't think you deserve it,' replied Lina, smiling
through her tears.
' My own—my own ! how much I have made you
suffer, amid your great grief for Constance, too ! But
pardon me, Lina ; I must have been mad—I knew not
what I did.'
'Jack,' said she, very sweetly, as she nestled her
soft Greuze-like face in his neck, ' I would bear it all
again—at least, I think so—for the joy of this one
hour, and of knowing that you love me still.'
He remembered his farewell letter to her, and the
stern bitterness of its tenour filled him with shame and
compunction now; but he—nervously—did not refer
to it, and hoped she had consigned it to the flames.
Lina eventually had done so, lest she might have been
tempted to torment herself anew by the reperusal of it.
Eye spoke to eye, and heart to heart again, so there
was little need for words : and, for a time, the few they
said were passionate and low ; yet both had much to
tell of mental agony endured, and hoped-for joy to
come.
94
JACK CHALONER.
'The fault—the error—the cruelty have all beeil
mine/said Jack for the twentieth time. 'I cannot
ask you to forgive me, but forgive me you will, when I
tell you that the error was chiefly born of the com-
munications you made on that ill-omened day we rode
with the harriers, and your apparent, but simulated,
indifference about my letters from Gibraltar.'
Lina was silent, for the advent of Pierrepoint on
the preceding day filled her with vague terror.
' Passing fancies I have had, as I told you Lina,'
resumed Jack, ' but never did I know the meaning of
the word love until I looked into your eyes of tender
hazel, and a sweet sensation filled my heart it never
knew before.'
' My own dear Jack !'
Etccetera.
' I love you, Jack,' said Lina, after a pause, 'with
the love that comes only once in a lifetime—and mine
has been tested, purified, and perfected by much un-
merited sorrow. I thought you knew Annerley well,
when together up country in India?'
' I did, Lina.'
' And yet, on that evening, failed to recognise either
his voice or his figure ?'
' Three years have elapsed since we met in India,and
then I never saw him in mufti, but always in uniform.'
MEETING BUT TO PART.
95
' But his face—his voice !' persisted Lina.
' He was amply bearded then, and as for his voice
—I never thought of him at all ; we all supposed him
dead—and I thought, as Vane has told you, only of
—Pierrepoint.'
Lina winced at the name.
'There—there,' said she, ' let us say no more on a
mistake that might have proved very fatal for us both.'
To Lina's terror, Pierrepoint's card was in the silver
card-basket, where a servant had, as a matter of
course, placed it. Jack, intent only on her, never
thought of the basket or looked even towards it, and
the moment he was gone she hastened to destroy the
card.
It would have seemed quite a relic once.
'And oh, Jack,' she resumed in a very broken voice,
'in this burst of jealousy and mistrust you have
resigned your leave, and so brought about our utter
separation!'
' Do not say utter, Lina.'
' Well, what else is it ? Do you not repent your
precipitancy ?'
' In one sense I do, but in another sense it does not
matter much.'
' How, dearest ?'
' The regiment has got orders of readiness/
96
JACK CHALONER.
' For where ?'
' The seat of war—in New Zealand ; and I must
go with it.'
' Your own doing, Jack !' exclaimed Lina, choking
in tears.
'No, my darling; the onus lay upon me all the
same. No man of honour could indulge in leave under
these circumstances.'
' But the danger makes the undefined and protracted
term of our separation doubly bitter,' she sobbed.
' What would that separation have been to me had I
gone with the conviction that I had lost you for ever ?'
' And I, with the conviction that you had deserted
me!'
The snowy lids of Lina's eyes were inflamed by the
tears of her past anguish, and Jack was never tired of
kissing them and their long silky lashes to make all
the amends in his power, while Lina was thinking
from time to time, amid her present joy—
' Heavens ! had he come hither at this time yesterday
he would have found the real Pierrepoint with me!'
Her clear brown eyes were looking calmly and
fondly into his ; yet she felt an emotion of shame at
her reticence—at her duplicity, as she deemed it, on
the subject of that visit, and also of the denial of her
engagement to Fanny Arnaud; yet what right had
MEETING BUT TO PART.
97
that bold girl to come and question her on such a
subject ?
After the two terrible examples she had experienced
of Jack's ready jealousy—though it was a jealousy
born out of his great love for herself—she dared not
tell him (or Vane either, but only Amy) of Oliver
Pierrepoint's visit.
She forgot that the dangerous Fanny Arnaud had
seen him, and only hoped the event would never reach
his ears. Then she blessed her stars as she reinem-
bered that Fanny was leaving Brighton, and Pierre-
point, too ? as suddenly as he had come.
So hour succeeded hour, and Jack, gazing down
upon her clear and trustful eyes, wondered how he
could ever have doubted her love, even with all he
saw and overheard on that twilight evening ; and
more than all, how he could have left her—left her
coldly with rage and bitterness in his heart—yea,
almost with growing hatred, too !
How unnatural it all seemed now; and what a
wretch he thought himself.
The purest love is that which has been tested ; as
the purest gold is that which has been tried by fire.
Long lingered these two together, as if they would
make up for the miserable time they had mutually
lost; and in sorrowful anticipation of the great wrench
9§ JACK CHALONER.
that awaited them, when Jack would have, inexorably,
to join at Southampton the transport that was to take
on board the regiment, the famous old ' fighting Forty-
third,' at Gibraltar, a time but a few days distant now.
' Pierrepoint must not come here again,' said Amy
to Lina, after Jack had reluctantly left her.
' Of course—and he will not come.'
' How do you think so ?'
' Simply because I did not invite him.'
' But if Jack were to discover the fact of his visit,
there might be a storm again,' said Amy.
' I had no control over the matter,' replied. Lina,
with a sigh.
' Don't you think you had better tell him ?'
' No, Amy—oh no!'
'Why?'
'You know the mischief my first confidence made.'
So there, for the present, the matter ended.
' Has Vane come to the point with you yet ?' asked
Lina of Amy.
' No—not exactly,' replied the latter.
' Why—and what do you mean by not exactly ?'
' I won't let him, yet awhile. I always laugh it off
and evade it.'
' That is scarcely fair, Amy—he loves you evidently
so much.'
MEETING BUT TO PART.
99
'All is fair in love and war.'
'But you might do worse than accept him,' said
Lina, passing her white hand caressingly over the
shining hair of her younger sister.
'-Oh, time enough, Lina,5 laughed the wilful little
beauty.
Events were to tread on each other fast now.
Jack's resignation of his leave was accepted by the
Horse Guards almost by return of post, and he was
ordered by the Adjutant-General to embark on board
a transport, which was to sail in three days from
Southampton, to take the regiment on board at Gib-
raltar—tidings which sounded like a knell to Lina.
' A very few days more,' she sobbed, with her face
on Jack's breast, ' and you will be far away at sea—
going to that far-off land, where danger and death
lie ; and oh, Jack ! what may not happen, ere I can
join you there, or look upon your face again ? Oh, why
are we parted thus—why am I not with you always ?'
Swiftly flew the few remaining hours now.
All the weariness, the heart-sickness of separation,
and of waiting for the future, were realized now by
both. Their utterances were few and slow, and the
pure delight and joyful confidence of their mutual
love were swept away or well nigh crushed by it.
Lina gave Jack a ring, which he was 'never, never
7
ICO JACK CHALONER.
to take off his finger,' till they met again. It was a
massive, but plain gold gipsy ring, having a large
opal, and on the inside was engraved the legend
' Forget me not—Lina Capel.'
Her little white hand trembled as she slipped the
ring on Jack's finger; but little could either foresee the
part this trinket would yet play in the lives of both.
And now the time for parting came inexorably.
' You promise to think of me often—sometimes
every day at least ?' said Lina, as Jack strained her to
his breast.
' I shall think of you ever and always, darling!'
' How slowly—slowly, the time will pass with me !'
'But you will always love me, till we meet again ?'
£ We need not such entreaties, Jack—surely you and
I are far beyond mere promises now/ said Lina, making
a woeful effort to pick up a little courage; ' they are
only meant for those who cannot trust each other.'
' Oh, my God, if aught should come between us!'
was the sudden and foreboding exclamation of Jack as
he placed a hand on her head and gazed into her eyes.
' What can come between us !' said Lina.
' Some shadow on our affection.'
'The last—the only one—was cast by yourself,
J ack.'
'True, darling.'
MEETING BUT TO PART. 101
The tender little hands returned the pressure of his,
as lip met lip again and again, and the moments fled fast.
' Nothing on earth can make me less yours than I
am now,' murmured Lina; 'two months—though
long to me—will soon pass, &nd I shall be following
you on the sea ; by the time I reach you, the term of
mourning for my lost darling will be almost past,
especially in that strange land, Jack.'
' And you will be mine for ever, Lina!'
Impulsive Amy wept very much in sympathy
with this melancholy pair, and kissed Jack repeatedly
with much effusiveness, but she and Vane—as it was
his last evening with Lina—thought they had better
be left to themselves, and strolled away together to-
wards the Marine Parade.
Lina trembled so excessively, that Jack's heart
was wrung at the prospect of having to leave her.
All the courage with which she had striven to fortify
herself for a time of separation—though only for a
few months—gave way now, and she clung to him
passionately—so passionately—that he was tempted
at all risks to linger over the sensation of sad de-
light, and revel in the tenderness he had evoked, or
summoned up.
' Had poor Constance lived, you should have gone
with me as my wife, Lina,' said he.
7-2
102
JACK CHALONER.
' Oh, how far, far off our next meeting seems !'
At last they were compelled to part, and, as they
did so, strangely enough, there was—unuttered, yet
in the hearts of both—the dread of some deadly blight
—some coming evil that menaced them dimly and
darkly in the future.
******
During the sixty miles' journey from Brighton to
Southampton, Jack was in a kind of maze. The train
swept on by Shoreham with its shingly beach; by the
village of Havant, by Bishopstoke, near the fortifica-
tions of Gosport, each a stage further away from
Lina ; but what were they all to the distance that
ere long would be ?—and in due time, the engine went
clanking into the Southampton station, about mid-
night, for he had remained at Oakhurst Priory till the
last moment that could be spared.
A cab conveyed him to the vast and splendid docks,
and in the tidal one, he repaired at once on board
the Unicorn steam transport, of 2,800 tons, which was
to put to sea about daybreak.
What other officers or passengers were on board
he cared not to inquire. He knew that there were
detachments for the 57th and 68th going out; but he be-
took himself at once to his cabin, to be in solitude and
once again rehearse the tendernessof the parting scene.
MEETING BUT TO PART.
103
When he came on deck next morning, the trans-
port had steamed down Southampton water; Spit-
head was abeam, but the high cliffs of the Isle of
Wight and the opposite coast of Hampshire were
shrouded in sunny haze.
The soldiers of the military watch on deck had
already donned their coarse canvas frocks for the
voyage ; they had already been divided into messes
by their officers; a sentry in his greatcoat was at
the break of the poop, another forward at the caboose,
to prevent any accident by fire; the bedding was
being all brought on deck and placed in the side
nettings according to regulation, and everything
seemed in order for the long journey, as the great
transport, with her canvas set, steamed out into the
Channel.
Could it be that it was only last night he had been
with Lina! How changed were all his circumstances
and surroundings now! Already he was beginning
to con mentally over all the tender things he would
indite to her in his first letter from Gibraltar ; but now
three or four ladies came on deck—a little gloved
hand was put in his, and his eyes met the laughing
ones of Fanny Arnaud.
' You here, Captain Chaloner !' she exclaimed.
* And you ?' he asked inquiringly.
104
JACK CHALONER.
' Papa is going out on the staff.'
' To Gibraltar T
' No.'
' Where then ?'
'To New Zealand—great fun, is it not ?' she added,
with a burst of silvery laughter, in which, however,
Jack did not join.
For many reasons he would rather that this young
lady had not been on board H.M.S. Unicorn.
CHAPTER XII.
1 the girl he left behind him.'
Ere poor Lina received Jack's first loving letter from
Gibraltar she was fated to endure—apart from her
sorrow at their separation—all the bitterness of death,
as when she closed the eyes of her sister Constance,
and hung over her in her coffin.
On the evening Jack left her, he was barely gone,
ere she bitterly regretted that she had not accompanied
him to the station to see him off—to see the last of
him; but Jack, she knew, had a genuine English
horror of 'scenes,' and 'seeing people off,'as it is
called, is too often one of these.
Since she had known him, since he had called to
inquire for her, after the ball at the Pavilion, and their
{ THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND HIM .' I0$
acquaintance ripened fast until it became an engage-
ment, every action and thought of her life had some
reference to Jack Chaloner, his going and his coming,
their mutual participation in thought, idea, and every-
thing; but now that he was gone, her ' occupation '
had gone too. Life seemed to collapse, and all action
would be useless till they could meet again.
From time to time she looked at her watch, and a
railway time-table alternately, to calculate the place
at which her lover would be, while the evening in
silence deepened around her, and she heard only the
beating of her own heart.
Great to her was now the horror of the misty
November leaf-strewn lanes and the dismal dusk that
fell so swiftly with leaves and dew on poor Conny's
grave. The beautiful tendrils and trailers of the
Virginia creeper were scarlet and russet now on the
porch and verandas of the Priory.
The November sky was leaden-coloured ; the sun
had gone down in gloom beyond Selsea Bill, and to
Lina's eye an unusually disheartening shadow seemed
falling over everything. Recent rains had beaten the
dead flowers into the earth, for November, the grim
Pioneer of Winter, was marching steadily on.
Ere the autumnal flowers were again in bloom she
would be once.more with Jack—Jack, whose voice
was still lingering in her ear.
JACK CHALONER.
But how long it seemed until then—oh, how long !
So full were her thoughts of Chaloner that it was
not until the servants had brought lights and the clock
struck, that she became aware of the lateness of the
hour.
Nervously she looked at her watch.
' Ten o'clock—can it be ?—and Amy not returned !
Where can she and Vane be at this time of night ?'
she exclaimed to herself.
Such an event had never occurred before, and soon
intense alarm was added to her utter perplexity.
Nothing short of an accident or some most untoward
event could have detained them abroad together so
long and So late, and her mind immediately began to
revolve every conceivable peril.
There was a concert at the Aquarium, but Amy
would not go there without a proper chaperon; per-
haps she had found one. The theatre was not to be
thought of. Perhaps she was at some friend's house,
but then to be abroad, alone with Jocelyn Vane, at
that hour, was all so unlike even Amy's heedless
volatility, that the perplexed and anxious Lina knew
not what to think.
They had simply gone forth for a promenade on
the Marine Parade, to leave her and Jack together, as
it was their last interview. Could an accident have
' THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND HIM.' 107
befallen them there ? Had a runaway horse injured
one or both ? If so, why was no message sent home ?
Had they fallen over the cliffs ?
Lina's conjectures were endless ; her heart beat
fast, and after midnight struck on all the clocks, her
soul became filled with c that nameless terror of the
unknown evil, which is harder to bear, than even the
certain and clearly seen calamity.'
She sent the wondering servants forth in every
direction, but in vain ; they could hear of no accident
that had happened anywhere in or about Brighton;
but people fell over the cliffs, and the Sea Wall some-
times, all unseen, and their bodies were found when
the tide ebbed, if found at all.
Cloaked and veiled, her eyes half blinded by tears
and her heart torn with terror and anguish, Lina set
forth herself in vain search. The streets were empty,
the pathways silent and deserted, and the guardians
of the night, whom she questioned with tremulous
accents, assured her that no accident ' had been re-
ported as yet.'
She gave her address to an inspector, and hastened
home in the desperate hope that some tidings might
have come—perhaps the lost pair themselves—in her
absence—a hope that was unfulfilled.
At times she rested her weary head on the cushions
JACK CHALONER,
of the sofa; then she would start up and pace impa-
tiently to and fro. How slow seemed the motions of
the clock-hands as she waited and waited. Then
how swift time seemed to fly—every moment laden
with fate, to her and the absent ones.
Morning drew on ; the light of the table lamps grew
pale, and when they were extinguished came the
painful conviction to the sleepless watcher that night
had inexorably departed ; that inexorably another
day was being added to ' the days that are no more
and the absent were still unaccounted for.
Could they have eloped ? That idea was too ridicu-
lous for Lina to entertain for a moment; though the
servants were not without some such thoughts on the
subject. £ Miss Amy and Mr. Vane were so uncom-
monly fond of each other.'
Lina thought of telegraphing to Jack; but duty
would have precluded his attention to her summons,
even if he had received it; and at the time the idea
occurred to her, in her anguish and desperation, the
Unicorn transport was steadily steaming down South-
ampton Water.
In the awful and utter loneliness of her soul, and her
apprehension of certain danger and sorrow, life seemed
to die within her, and she flung herself, without un-
dressing, on her bed, while the startled servants
' THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND HIM.' 109
gathered in a hushed but sympathizing group around
her.
Oh that Jack was there to assist and console her !—
Jack more than ever now.
And so three days passed away, and three terrible
nights, and no tidings of the lost pair came to Oak-
hurst Priory.
^ i-c >]■.
In four days H.M.S. Unicorn was at Gibraltar.
She encountered much rough weather before she
sighted the Pillars of Hercules ; and as there existed
considerable sickness in the ladies' cabin, Jack saw
little or nothing of the fair Fanny, though he saw a
good deal of the young lady's papa, the Colonel, a
fine hale and hearty old officer, who was very effusive
to Jack, and knowing that the pecuniary prospects
of the latter were undeniably good, shook his hand
every morning with all the warmth of a—perhaps—
prospective father-in-law.
Jack recalled now, with no small degree of sorrow
and compunction, that when last he had looked upon
the beetling cliffs of Old Gib, his heart had been
teeming with much of pique at Lina, and even doubt
of her—doubt and pique which reached a painful
culmination after he witnessed the interview between
her and Annerley in the starlight.
no
Jack chaloneH,
As the Unicorn, hugging the Spanish coast, steamed
into the Straits, all the ladies came on the poop,
and Fanny Arnaud, with much of her bright colour
gone, but attired in a most becoming toilet, got up
expressly to attract, crept to the side of Jack, and
began questioning him about the place, and as he
knew it well, he completely ignored her most effective
ceilladcs, and very quietly ' talked Guide Book,' telling
her that Colonel James had described it as a fortress
so strong that no power on earth can take it from us,
' unless a plague, pestilence, famine, or the want of
ordnance, musketry and ammunition, or some unfore-
seen stroke of Providence, should happen.'
And certainly the bright coquettish eyes of the
listener had never seen anything more striking than
that vast rock, upheaved from the boiling sea, one
peak crested by the signal staff, and the other by the
Tower of O'Hara, rent by a thunder-bolt. There,
wheeling in mid-air, the hawks mingle their screams
with the murmur of the breakers far down below,
the varied sounds in the city, and the occasional roll
of a drum echoing among the rock-hewn galleries of
the mighty fortress.
It was early morning when the steam-transport was
swayed to her anchor off the Mole. Jack did not go
ashore, as he knew that ere evening his regiment
' THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND HIM.' hi
would be on board ; and anon, with kindling of the
eye and heart, he saw it, the Fighting Forty-third, of
gallant memory (for it is the Forty-third no more,
alas !), its white colours laden and heavy with twelve
of the greatest glories of the Peninsular War, descend-
ing to the place of embarkation, led by Lieutenant-
Colonel Booth, a gallant officer, who was fated to find
a bloody grave in the land they were going to.
Marching like a long glittering and vibrating snake
of steel and scarlet, the colours flying gallantly in the
wind, the flashing bayonets glittering in the sun—then
sinking towards the sea and reddening in warm light
the tower-crested headland of Cabrita Point—the regi-
ment wound upon its way, every moment the music
of the band becoming louder, as it wakened the
echoes of rock and battery, casemate and casern,
playing 'Good-bye, sweetheart, good-bye,' a farewell
to the sunny-eyed girls and pretty Jewesses of the
Alamada; and as Jack looked and listened, the grand
old esprit-de-corps and of the fighting devil that lurks
in every Briton's heart blazed up within him, and we
believe that, for a moment, he almost forgot Lina, the
poor girl who was plunged in a sorrow of which he
had no conception, and who was eating out her heart
in utter woe at that identical time.
Jack was conscious of Fanny Arnaud prattling to
113 JACK CHA LONER.
him ; but he was too full of ' the regiment' to attend
to her just then, in that supreme time of 'the pomp
and circumstance' Othello tells us of.
The regiment defiled down and out of the subter-
ranean path, and under the old Moorish tower—a
remnant perhaps of Tarik-Ben-Zaide, and which it is
said seems to stand as a war-worn sentinel over the
dark and fearful passages which stretch through the
bosom of the mountain beyond.
The battalion formed close column of subdivisions,
and the mounted officers quitted their saddles ; great
gangways were run out, and the task of embarking
the men, their baggage and stores at once began, for
matters were pressing in far New Zealand, and there
was no time to be lost, and the reiterated cheers of
the attendant crowd, among whom were mingling
English sailors, Highland soldiers, Spaniards, Portu-
guese, and Italians, Andalusians in the costume of the
age of Cervantes, Moors, Arabs, and Jews, and all
that make up the Babel of Gibraltar, proved very
inspiring.
' How many faces that we shall never see again
are smiling a farewell to us, Captain Chaloner !' said
Fanny, as she looked from the poop along the crowded
Mole.
' Some of them are so deuced ugly and dirty that I
' THE GIRl HE LEFT BEHIND HIM113
don't think there is much to regret,' said Jack, laugh-
ing, as he knew that the fair Arnaud could act senti-
ment very prettily when occasion offered.
' And how many a voice that is cheering now, may
be hushed in the land we are going to/ she added.
'All the fortune of war, my dear—all the fortune
of war,' said her father, the Colonel, regarding her
fondly and admiringly ; but now Chaloner received a
slap on the back.
'Hallo Jack, old man, how goes it ?' exclaimed the
cheery voice of Harry Stapleton, grasping his hand.
'At the same old game, Jack ?' he added, with a furtive
glance towards Fanny; and now members of the mess
crowded round Jack on the poop, as he was one of the
most popular men in the Monmouthshire Light In-
fantry, and much banter and jollity began to pervade
the group, with the odour of cigars, as the officers
ascended in succession, while the men went pouring
by sections down into the womb of the transport.
And much banter—some of it more rough than
witty—was in progress.
'Jones, my hearty, going at last to polish off these
Maori fellows.'
1 Perhaps to get polished off.'
' Keep up your pecker—have a cigar ?'
' Going back to Chatham, eh, Melville ?'
ii4
JACK CHALONER.
' Can I do anything for you among the girls there ?'
'No, thanks.'
' Good-bye, Willoughby, old fellow ; can I give your
love to the little Jewess in the Alamada ?'
' Certainly not to be given by you, at all events,
you inconceivable rip.'
And so on, on all sides.
Harry Stapleton, looking pale from his recent ill-
ness, had a clearly cut face, with more determination
and power in it than beauty. He was a senior
lieutenant, about thirty years of age, tall and well
built, with a heavy moustache, and with a squareness
of carriage and bearing suggestive of a drilled man.
Fanny Arnaud took in all his ' points' at a glance,
and her mind became instantly divided between him
and 'handsome Jack;' but indeed, so many fine-
looking young fellows, all of good style, too, came
crowding upon the poop in undress uniform, the old
blue surtout, with gold shoulder scales, that Fanny
thought with good reason her outward-bound chances
were far superior to any she ever had at Brighton.
Annerley joined the Unicorn at Gibraltar. He was
going out, pale in face, and saddened at heart, to join
the Fifty-seventh, 'the Old Diehards,' in the MaoriWar,
and he proved a pleasant companion for Jack, as they
had so much interest in common at Oakhurst Priory.
' THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND HIM' u5
Thither Jack despatched a letter for Lina, in ex-
pression all that might be expected ; but he omitted,
or forgot, to mention the fact of Fanny Arnaud's
presence in the ship ; and then, reporting himself to
the Adjutant and Colonel, he at once took command
of his company, and went below to see the berths
apportioned, the arms and accoutrements deposited
in the racks, and the knapsacks hung on the cleats,
the messes formed ; and every eye kindled as Jack
went cheerily ordering and bustling about, for the
men of his company simply adored him—and no
weakly half-grown short service men were they—but
seasoned soldiers, who had been broiled at Bangalore,
and tanned anew by the sun at the Cape of Good
Hope—trained men of the good old fighting school,
' who could go anywhere and do anything.'
By the time this was all over, and innumerable
' Returns' on foolscap paper had been signed and
countersigned, the steam was up, the screw revolving,
and with some of her head sails set, the Unicorn was
leaving the battery and lighthouse on steep Europa
Point astern,and heading towards the darkeningocean.
When Jack re-entered the principal cabin, he found
Fanny Arnaud amid a group of ladies, and the centre
of another group of admiring subalterns; but her eyes
immediately seemed to brighten, and her smile to
8
JACK CHALONER.
sweeten at the approach of Jack, and she indicated a
place for him, by her side, on the sofa, or cushioned
locker which ran round the cabin.
She was a beautiful, but wayward, vain and un-
scrupulous girl; she saw all the advantages the pre-
sent situation gave her, and she meant to utilize them.
'He is neither a Joseph nor a St. Anthony,' she
thought; ' the latter was tempted in a wilderness of
wood; why should not I tempt J ack on the wilderness
of water ?'
Now, 'the fair Arnaud/ as the mess of the Forty-
third called her, was girlish in manner without being
at all girlish in heart; and her clear, bright eyes
looked upon life with a steady gaze, devoid of all
romance and glamour.
She thought of marriage and meant it; and to
achieve that end would take any girl's fiance from
her without the smallest scruple, if she could. She
knew she was handsome—her own glass and a hundred
men had told her so. She was on board ship, for a
long voyage, with Jack Chaloner, who, she had reason
to believe, had not been without a little weakness for
herself before that Pavilion ball came to pass.
Full of her plans and thoughts, she was so silent
that Jack said, after a pause: 'You seem unusually
abstracted—for you, at least, Miss Arnaud ?'
i THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND HIM." 117
' Do I—indeed !'
4 Yes—and I think I can guess your thoughts.'
' Well ?'
'That you will find the monotony of living in a
ship unbearable, I suppose.'
' You are not a diviner of my thoughts,' said she,
with a genuine smile to find him so wide of the
reality. ' I was only wondering how I have the
chance of being in this particular ship at all, and—
and with you.'
The glance and half-repressed sigh that accom-
panied the reply were more than Jack wanted, and-—
as he afterwards told Stapleton—' bothered him a bit.'
' By the way,' said she suddenly, ' why do you wear
that opal ring ?'
4 Because it is a gift.'
' Whoever gave it to you Was not Very wise/
'Why?'
'Because the opal is always said to bring evil to the
wearer.'
But Jack oftly laughed softly as he thought of ' the
girl he had left behind hW
ITS
JACK CHALONER.
CHAPTER XIII.
loved at last.
' Cannot you say yes ?' asked Jocelyn Vane tenderly
and imploringly, on the evening of Jack Chaloner's
departure, as he and Amy strolled slowly in the fitful
sunshine of the November evening along the Marine
Parade. ' Cannot you say yes, Amy, now ?' he repeated.
4 No—not yet, at least.'
' Oh, why so ?'
fTo say yes, compromises one so much.'
He sighed impatiently, while the girl regarded him
coquettishly with half-closed eyes, and laughed with
her sweet little silvery laugh.
' You will marry me in the end,' said Jocelyn.
' No, I won't,' she replied, while giving him a dainty
blow with her parasol, and then putting it up as the
sun shone in her eyes, and she wished perhaps to con-
ceal the pleasure that sparkled in them through the
black lace veil that was tied under her velvet hat,
which was encircled by a single black ostrich feather,
for she was a girl, young, naturally gay, and beautiful,
whose deep and impassioned eyes were wonderful for
their ever-varying expression of vehement and fitful
emotion.
' Poor Conny!' she said suddenly, as if to change
LOVED AT LAST.
119
the subject; 'with her death, our dancing days—or
nights rather—seem over.'
' But only for a time.'
' Fortunately, as dancing is such a passion with me,
and bad style though I know it to be, I have danced
most balls out. However, some one must be last.'
'We did not come out to talk of dancing,' said
Vane, endeavouring to lead her back to the former
subject; 'I have something nearer my '
' Suppose we take a boat and have a pull ?' said she,
interrupting him.
' Very well,' replied Vane, with a sigh, and a pretty
and suitable boat, all shining with brown varnish,
gilded rowlocks, scarlet cushions, scarlet yoke-lines
and white oars, was speedily selected. He handed
her on board, seated her in the stern, placed the
yoke-lines in her gloved little hands, assumed the
sculls and shoved off.
' Don't go far, sir,' cried the boatman, as he did so.
' Why ?'
' Looks uncommon black to seaward, sir.'
' Thanks—all right'
The boatman had proposed to accompany them;
but Vane, who wished to be alone with Amy, declined
alike his presence and his services.
Jocelyn was not like the typical ' 'Arry,' or fresfu
120
JACK CHALONER,
water sailor who had no idea of waves or wind, of tides
or weather ; he had been stroke-oar of the University,
and knew much of yachting at Cowes and elsewhere.
There was a little less swell than usual on for the sea
at Brighton, and Amy, childishly delighted with the
sensation of going ' up, up, up, and down, down, down,'
as she phrased it, was speedily in high spirits, while
Jocelyn pulled sturdily to seaward, and headed east-
ward, round the end of the towering and stately pier,
which was covered as usual by promenaders, listening
to the music of the band.
'Now, Amy* said he, 'no one can interrupt us
here '
' For that very reason I won't be called Amy.'
' Dearest Amy,' said Jocelyn, again, and pausing for
a moment with the dripping sculls resting on his knees,
while he gazed on her tenderly ; ' you always try to
turn it away '
' It—what ?'
' You know what I mean ; but I have made up my
mind to have an answer from you this evening, pro or
con, before I turn the boat's head shoreward.'
' If you pull seaward till you extract a promise
from me we may reach the coast of France, perhaps,'
said Amy, laughing ; 'Jocelyn, I wish you would not
worry me so,'
LOVED AT LAST.
121
His name on her lips made his heart leap!
' Oh, Amy, will you never be serious ?' urged Vane,
as he resumed his pulling, and was so intent on her
that he never looked either leeward nor astern ; ' you
know that I love you so much, yet you make a jest
of all I say, and already people are beginning to talk
about us.'
' Then we must keep apart for the future,' said she,
with coquettish, wilful mischief smiling on her rose-
leaf-tinted face.
'You know too well how impossible that would be
for me; that I cannot live without you.'
' And you want to marry me, I suppose, and—all
that sort of thing ?'
' Of course, dearest—dearest Amy.'
' There—there—that will do—don't lay in the sculls,
and take care you don't lose them. We should be in
a fine plight if you did !'
Jocelyn had manifested a sudden desire to seat him-
self beside her in the stern sheets, but this she would
not permit.
' What do people want to get married for at all ?'
said she, with a coy laugh ; ' besides, I don't want to
leave dear, lonely Lina.'
' Lina will soon be leaving you,' retorted Vane.
* Oh no; besides,' added the girl, in her irrepressible
122
JACK CHA LONER.
desire to tease her lover, ' I should like so much to see
something of the world ; thus, when Una goes out to
be married to J ack, I shall go with her, of course, and
we shall always be with the Forty-third, don't you
see; so I shall always have lots of fellows about me,
and any amount of fun and attention.'
Jocelyn resumed his pulling, but eyed her angrily,
sorrowfully, and reproachfully, yet her soft mignonne
face was rippling over with brightness and laughter.
' You seem to have the world of Brighton already to
wait on you and for you/ said he.
'Yes, Brighton, and Hove, and the Steyne, too !'
replied Amy, for as Constance became a tender
memory, and as grief for her dead sister became
lessened or softened, the old coquetry of her nature
returned to her, and she alternately fanned and played
with the love of Jocelyn Vane till he was well-nigh
exasperated with—but never weary of—her.
They were rather too far from the land now, and the
sea was becoming too rough to be pleasant, and Amy
desired him to pull in shore ; but he recalled what he
had said, and implored her to give him a favourable
answer ere he did so.
'Another time, Jocelyn—I won't be threatened in
this fashion. Ah !' she added, with a little cry, as the
snowy spoondrift of a larger billow than usual swept
LOVED AT LAST.
123
in a glittering shower over the boat, and quite alarmed
her, ' what if we should be drowned Y she exclaimed,
with something between a gasp and a laugh.
' Believe me, Amy, if I am not to be loved by you,
I would rejoice in sharing your fate !'
' Would you really ? Now don't be absurd,' said she
petulantly ; ' that sort of thing went out with stately
men and stately women—patches,hair-powder, courtesy
and gallantry—except in novels.'
Honest Jocelyn Vane was this wilful little beauty's
devoted slave. Lina often said to Jack that had
Vane been, or affected to be, somewhat indifferent on
the subject, he might not have found her so hard
to win.
The sun was nearly set—a November sun ; Amy
began to feel chilly, and anxious to return; but
luckily she had a rich sealskin over her crape-trimmed
costume.
Genuine concern began to cloud Jocelyn's handsome
face now; they were rather too far from the land,
and so full had he been of Amy that he had not been
aware that the ebb-tide had been helping to bear him
seaward at the rate of nearly three miles an hour.
All objects in Brighton had diminished very much ;
the Grand Parade seemed level with the water ; the
great pier and the palatial masses of the vast hotels
124
JACK CHALONER.
had dwindled to specks ; the last rays of the sun had
faded away from the houses on the summit of the
Steyne ; the white cliffs there were growing green and
then dark, while other objects seemed to be fast chang-
ing alike their colours, shapes, and places.
By pulling with one oar, aided a little by Amy's
hand on the starboard yoke line, Vane got the boat's
head easily round shoreward, and then their real
troubles began.
He had thought that half-an-hour's steady rowing
would enable him to be within the pier-head at least;
there the distant lights shone now, and the lamps of
the Marine Parade seemed like a long garland of sparks
above the level of the sea ; but ere long a spasm of
alarm struck the heart of Vane, when, casting a glance
ahead, the waves seemed to be rising so high between
them and the shore, that the lines of street lamps were
at times hidden for a moment in certain places.
In fact, in spite of all his exertions, the shore was
receding from them, and night was coming down upon
the sea.
They would scarcely be home in time for dinner
even; at that season the ' sober sun' sets at half-past
four p.m. Vane threw off his coat, rolled up his shirt-
sleeves, set his teeth, and pulled away with all his
strength and the sternest energy, more than ever he
LOVED AT LAST.
125
had exerted in the most keenly-contested University
boat race, and made the snow-foam fly from his little
sculls, that bent in the rowlocks like willow wands, at
times half lifting the boat out of the blackening water,
and ere long he was all but perspiring at every pore
with action and anxiety.
Pausing a moment, he looked at his watch and at
the shore. The latter seemed further off than ever;
and Amy was becoming silent and pale.
The revolving light on Beachy Head was twinkling
clearly out now.
' I wish I had more powerful oars,' said he, scarcely
knowing what to say, as he resumed his rowing; * yet
my strokes seem steady enough.'
'We shall be awfully late, Jocelyn—how scared
Lina will be, and Jack must be gone by this time.
What will she think of us ? Poor Jocelyn—how hard
you toil!' said Amy.
' And without avail, I fear,' he replied, as the large
drops started to his brow.
' It seems like witchcraft—the harder you row, we
make less progress,' said Amy, with growing alarm.
' My God !' he exclaimed, ' if it should be so !'
' What ?' she asked, with blanched lips.
' That we are falling away from the land.'
Vane took in his oars and stood up in the boat, and
126
JACK CHALO NEK.
looked around him. Three miles distant was a
schooner, close-hauled, running in for the land upon
a wind ; he shouted again and again ; but he might
as well have done so to the fast-darkening waves. The
distance was too great for him to be heard^ or for the
boat to be seen at that hour of the evening, and Amy
began to interlace her slender fingers and look the
very picture of dismay.
'We shall perish, Jocelyn—will some who may
have seen us leave the pier not think of us ?*
' A slender chance indeed, Amy.'
Again he shipped the sculls and took to rowing,
but mechanically and hopelessly; the boat was
too evidently being carried seaward by some sudden
current running past Beachy Head. Every moment
the land seemed to sink lower, the lights upon it to
lessen and fade out.
Few vessels, as a general rule, are ever seen off
Brighton, and they had no prospect but death by ex-
posure and starvation, or by a rising sea that would
swamp or capsize the boat. And what a miserable
speck it seemed upon the now dark waste of waters,
for the darkness came at last with a gathering gloom
that seemed to swallow up everything.
The wind was off the land, and carried the boat with
it. Vane, utterly weary now, had laid in his sculls in
LOVED AT LAST.
127
despair and took his seat by the side of Amy, putting
an arm round her for shelter and protection, and she
did not reprove him for doing so now.
Overhead the stars were coming out, but the sky
was moonless, and the sea was black as ink. A red
streak westward lingered yet, to show where the sun
had set, and the waves could be seen rising and falling
in dark and opaque outline against it, ere it faded out;
and the wind and the sea rising together tossed and
slopped the boat about like a cork ; thus its head and
stern were sometimes to the land and sometimes to
the sea.
'What can we—what shall we do, Jocelyn?' said
Amy imploringly, in a voice full of tears.
' What can we do but trust to Providence ?' said he,
kissing her now cold cheek.
With all her coquetry, flirting—and at times little
fantipole manner—no man (save Jack Chaloner) had
kissed her before, and this little event—a great one in
one sense—startled her, and with it came a new and
subtle knowledge of love.
Her heart quivered, sweetness and joy seemed to
mingle with the terror of their situation. She felt her
cheek burn in the cool sea breeze, and her eyes sank
shyly under the ardent gaze of his as he drew her to
his breast—at last!
128
JACK C HAL ONER.
' Oh, Jocelyn, how hard it is to die now that I love
you !' she said, in tremulous voice; ' but I loved you
always, though I would never acknowledge it. I have
treated you very badly, my poor Jocelyn, but—but
you will forgive me now ?'
His only reply was to kiss her—to press his lips to
hers again and again.
Poor little Amy, after all her coquetry, scarcely
knew what had happened, or what had been said, or
how it had all come about. She was at once happy
and rather scared. She thought now that she knew
what real love meant, and that she must never flirt—
never coquette any more, but be true and steadfast
to Jocelyn Vane—and Jocelyn only ; and that no man
but he should ever, ever kiss even her hand again—if
they did not perish ; and she murmured again and
again, with her little face nestling in his neck, ' It
seems so hard to die now !'
With all its stars, the sky overhead seemed very
dark ; the sea below was darker still, and every twink-
ling spark that once indicated the lights on shore
faded out completely now, and that on Beachy Head
was certainly sinking fast.
In its passage downwards a shooting-star shot swiftly
through the clouds and vanished into space—a swift
memento, or suggestion, of a world blotted out.
LOVED AT LAST.
129
The disappearance of the shore lights, and even of
the shore itself, amid the gloom, left their eyes nothing
to rest upon but each other's face, and the boat seemed
to be tossed about upon mid-ocean now.
'Even if we escape and live, Jocelyn,'said Amy,
with a sudden sob,' think of what people may say of
my impropriety.'
' Let them say what they choose, my darling. It is
only the improper who speak of propriety,' said he,
impetuously, though he felt that being absent for a
night, even under the circumstances, was decidedly
awkward. ' You are with your affianced, Amy, that is
all,' he added, and folded her tenderly to his heart.
' This dreadful boating was my suggestion !'
'To avoid giving me on shore the joy you have
given me on the water!'
'My suggestion, Jocelyn ; not yours ; and whatever
may be our fate, you, dearest, are in no way to blame.
But I know what people will say.'
'When day breaks the current may change.
Beachy Head can't be out of sight, and I shall regain
the shore for you, or die in attempting it!'
' If not ?' she asked with quivering lips.
' I can then but—but die with you !'
' I would call this melodramatic, but—but '
' For what, Amy ?'
JACK CHALONER.
' The real—the awful peril we are in.'
'We are in peril, Amy, my darling—my own at
last; but to lose you—to lose you now—oh no !—
God will help us—God will help for your sinless
sake!' he said in a broken voice, and, reclined in each
other's arms, they committed the sequel to fate.
'If Catholic fancies are true,' said Amy, after a
long pause,' there are six of us in this boat.'
' Six ?' repeated Vane, fearing that terror had af-
fected her mind ; ' Oh, Amy, what a strange idea !'
'Yes—ourselves, and our two guardian and our two
evil angels.'
' Then I think the latter are having it all their own
way as yet,' said he.
' Poor Lina—poor Lina, darling; she has so much
to bear just now—Conny's death and Jack's de-
parture,' said Amy, after another long pause, ' that if
she loses me '
Then her soft voice broke and she wept alike at the
thought of her sister's sorrow and her own untimely
demise*
' Amy, sweet one, do not speak thus—do not think
of it,' was all Jocelyn could urge.
Fortunately there was little or no dew yet to in-
crease their cold and misery.
The girl's mind was a chaos, a painful maze.
LOVED AT LAST.
Would she never again see Lina, the sweet-voiced,
soft-eyed Lina—never Jack, whom she loved so?
Were the days all gone for ever of her past life—the
long morning rides on the green breezy downs, the
scampers with the harriers by Crowlink Cliff and
Friston Mill; the jolly luncheons at Coversides, among
the long green fern ; the games at lawn-tennis; the
five o'clock kettledrums; the Marine Promenade and
the Pavilion; balls—all that make up the sum of a
young girl's life in such a place as ' Piccadilly-super-
Mare?'
Too surely now it seemed to be so!
Dread was the silence of the sky overhead; dread
the silence of the watery waste around them—silence
broken only by the incessant wash, wash, washing of
the waves against the sides of the boat, until the very
monotony and iteration of it lulled both into a species
of dull stupor or torpor—not sleep, for the sense of
immediate and future peril never lulled for a moment
as they reclined in each other's arms—but from this
they were suddenly roused, and a cry of terror
escaped Amy.
Two rays of red light, a little way apart, suddenly
shot along the tumbling waste of water; they seemed
to come from two enormous or monstrous eyes; some-
thing black and towering seemed suddenly borne
9
JACK CHALONER.
between the boat and the sky ; then high aloft, amid
a long black smoky-like cloud, flashed out a pure
white light—a third one ; a rumbling, clanking sound,
with a violent agitation of the water, lashing it into
white foam, followed, as a great steamer swept past
the lost ones, about thirty yards off, nearly swamping
the boat as she tore on her ocean way, by the violent
commotion she made among the waves.
Jocelyn shouted frantically, but in vain. Worn
with anxiety and exhaustion, his weak voice was swept
away by the wind.
The boat was unseen by anyone on deck; his voice
was unheard, and the steamer was soon blended with
the surrounding gloom. Her top and side lights lin-
gered for a time to the eye, and in time faded out too.
They had lost a chance of rescue; but they had also
escaped a narrow chance of death, as she might have
run them down ; but the advent of passing a steamer
so large made Jocelyn aware of a fact that he did not
communicate to Amy ; that they must be further from
Brighton—further off the land than they were the
least aware of.
He looked at his watch; the time was midnight
now, and they had been nearly nine hours on the
Water.
When there was such a close prospect of their
LOVED AT LAST.
*33
perishing together, Amy knew now how much she
loved him, and all her heart went out to Jocelyn Vane
—went out, when perhaps it was too late, and with the
terror of death before him, he felt the joy of being
loved by her at last /
Her pride, her petulance, and all her playful wilful-
ness and coquetry were gone now ; and with her face
reclined 011 Jocelyn's breast, and his arms around her,
they floated away they knew not whither—or only
knew that it was amid the chill and darkness of the
midnight sea.
Suddenly the feeble and distant light on Beachy
Head disappeared, and as it may be seen at the dis-
tance of twenty-eight miles from the shore in clear
weather, a pang like that of death entered the heart
of Jocelyn Vane.
CHAPTER XIV.
ON BOARD H.M.S. 'UNICORN.1
So the great transport, with its human freight, was
fairly at sea now, and the next land she would sight
must be the tall and isolated peaks of lovely Madeira.
A few days sufficed to make all the cabin passengers
pretty familiar with each other, and not a few—espe-
eially young ladies, including Miss Arnaud—betook
9—2
134
JACK CHALONEk.
them to keeping 4 diaries'—for, as Lord Bacon says,
'it is a strange thing that in sea-voyages, where there
is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should
make diaries; but in land-travel, wherein so much is
to be observed, for the most part they omit it, as if
chance were fitter to be registered than observation/
In these our days of steam, incidents and meetings
at sea are of more frequent occurrence than they were
in the days of Lord Bacon, and apart from these the
military duties of the transport as laid down by Her
Majesty's regulations caused daily some stir and
movement—drum-beat or bugle sounded for every
man as if in barracks; the guards and watches were
mustered and detailed, and in fine weather, the former
were exercised with their arms, and even recruits were
drilled occasionally. Every morning the bedding was
placed in the nettings, and remained there till sunset
sounded, or the weather roughened. There was a
weekly inspection in marching order, when squads
of twenty files went round the decks at the ' double '
for exercise, while flirtation without end reigned on
the poop, over which an awning was rigged when
tropical latitudes were reached.
The first instalment of discomfort was a tough gale
of wind within a few leagues of the little isle of Porto
Santo, an appendage of Madeira, when the canvas was
ON BOARD H.M.S. JUNICORN.'
135
reduced to a double reefed mizen-topsail, fore and main
lower topsails, foresail and jib, and tremendous seas
swept over the Unicorn, inundating the 'tween-decks,
causing terrible consternation among the lady passen-
gers, and some bad language among the male, flooding
all the lee berths, putting out the galley fires, knock-
ing out two of the lee ports, and requiring every exer-
tion of the watch—Jack had the military one on this
occasion—to bale out the water, and get matters
straightened when the gale abated.
Two days after was so calm that hundreds of the
beautiful pink nautilus or, 4 Portuguese men-of-war,'
sailed past on the green translucent sea, making
another item for Fanny Arnaud's diary. The Unicorn
was nearly becalmed, when the cry of 'A ship
on the weather-bow!' caused a general rush on deck,
and Fanny claimed Jack's arm to assist and steady
her ; but a long time elapsed ere the ship passed
slowly to windward of the transport, rising and sink-
ing gracefully on the long, glassy rollers, with all her
snow-white canvas shining in the sun.
She proved to be homeward bound for London, and
a bag of letters, prepared days before, was sent on
board of her, after which the head sails were filled, the
ensigns dipped a farewell, three cheers were exchanged,
and each ship ploughed onward on its watery way.
136
JACK CHALONER.
Jack sent a loving letter to Lina, but did not mention
the fact of Miss Arnaud being on board the Unicorn—
Some strange emotion seemed to fetter his hand.
As Madeira and the Canaries were left behind, and
the transport steamed towards the tropic of Cancer,
the evenings were pleasant; the regimental band was
turned up ; the ladies frequently had a quadrille—even
a round dance, if the ship was on a wind, and there
was much promenading, flirtation, fun and tittle-tattle.
But one day there occurred an accident which cast
a gloom over the ship.
When she had Cape Bojador on her port quarter,
about twenty miles distant, the wind blew half a gale
ahead, and the officer of the watch ordered much of
the canvas to be stowed or reefed, till the wind sud-
denly abated and became favourable, when in hot
haste the hands were ordered to make sail again upon
the ship, and the yards were squared.
' Set the mizen, fore and main-upper-topsails and
jib!' was now the order; but when hauling up the
fore-topsail yard a catastrophe took place.
Four seamen aloft, having untied the reef-points,
were engaged in clearing the gear, while those on deck
hauled up the topsail-yard.
' Now then, look out,' shouted the officer of the
watch \ ' hoist away and masthead the yard!'
ON BOARD ff.M.S. ' UNICORN?
He had scarcely spoken, when the halliards parted,
and at the moment when an unfortunate seaman was
attending to the gear on the lower topsail-yard, down
came the spar with a crash and dreadful noise, crush-
ing and fearfully mangling the poor seaman between
the yards and killing him instantly, and there swung
the dead body high aloft in upper air,
A cry of dismay went through the ship, and with it
mingled the shrill shriek of a woman ; this was given
by Fanny Arnaud, who, in real horror, as we must
suppose, fairly flung herself into the arms of Jack
Chaloner, and clung to him hysterically, beseeching
him to take her below, as she dared not open her eyes
again on deck till all traces of the tragic event were
removed. Indeed, there was a general exodus of all
the ladies from the poop to their cabins, while the
ship's surgeon went aloft to examine the dead man,
whose body was lowered on deck. A few minutes after
fresh halliards were rove, and the upper yard hoisted.
At noon on the following day the funeral took
place; the troops were paraded, and all hands piped
at seven bells {i.e., Iialf-past eleven) to bury the dead
man, whose body was brought from the fore-hospital
stitched up in a hammock, with a couple of forty-eight
pound shot at the feet to sink it.
It was reverently laid upon a grating at the gang-
JACK CHALONER.
way, and covered by a Union Jack. Another floated
half-hoisted at the gaff-peak. On the poop was
gathered a great group, and nearly all the ladies had
assumed such dark or black dresses as they had at
hand.
The crew and officers were formed up near the
captain, bare-headed, and he read the service in a
distinct voice, while the ship's bell tolled a death knell,
adding much to the solemnity of that most solemn of
all scenes.
At a word of command, the grating was sloped ; then
it was partly put through a-port, the lid of which had
been unshipped by the master carpenter, and there
was a slack rope on either side to allow the whole to
slip nearly to the water's edge.
The Union Jack had now been withdrawn, and the
canvas clad body bore a ghastly resemblance to a great
swollen corpse, which—amid a silence the most pro-
found—five seamen at the word of command launched
into the sea ; where it vanished with a dull heavy
plunge, the sound of which haunted long those who
heard it for the first time.
So ended the last act of this tragedy, during which
Jack Chaloner had been perfectly aware that Fanny
Arnaud had taken his arm and cluug thereto. In
some respects she was irrepressible.
ON BOARD H.M.S. ' UNICORN
Even at that time, amid all the striking details of a
scene the most solemn in the world—a funeral at sea
a body about to be committed to the mysterious depths
of the vast and eternal ocean—she could not help
utilizing the occasion, or resist a little flirtation, by
offering to share with Jack her tiny prayer-book,
which she held in one of the whitest and slimmest of
ungloved hands, opening it and nestling beside him.
' Why,' said Jack, 'you have opened it at the wrong
place—this.is the marriage service.'
' Dear me—so it is—but I am so confused—so
frightened !' she faltered out with the most charming
air of confusion.
Next, as he wrote such a fine, bold, manly hand 'as
a souvenir of himself and of the voyage ' she employed
him to engross in her ' diary ' the advent of a shark,
which after long dallying with a bait, was towed
triumphantly on board, amid the exultant cheers of
the sailors ; but the watery savage lashed its tail with
such fury that all had to give him a wide berth (as a
blow of it would smash a man's leg), till the carpen-
ter's axe made a close acquaintance with its spine.
Then followed the adventure of a waterspout, which
was bearing rapidly down towards the ship. It was
perhaps two hundred feet in height, and seemed to
join a column of vapour that descended from the clouds;
140
JACK CHALONER.
it was luminous, phosphorescent and fawn coloured,
presenting a curious and terrible appearance against
the darkening evening sky. There was also in the air
the strange sound as of a mighty cascade falling into
a deep valley.
' Reef topsails!' was the first order of the officer of
the watch, save whom all were ordered below;' Ready
a gun in the starboard bow !' was the next command,
and it was rapidly shotted and pointed towards the
advancing column of water, which was barely a
quarter of a mile distant, and sinking, melted away
into the sea, just as the order to ' fire' was about to be
issued, and sail was shortened; it was then observed
that the water was resplendent with a species of light,
and that the blades of the propelling screw left behind
them a long track or wake resembling fire.
It was often the roll of the ship, no doubt; but
somehow, when Jack's hand caught Fanny's soft little
one, at any time—once under the table-cloth—and
she held on to it, what could he do but hold on too ?
A secret understanding was being established by
her between them, and though no word of tenderness
had ever escaped Jack, the situation was perilous, and
now a flirtation with such an irrepressible young lady,
even pour passer le temps, was treason to Lina Capel.
But unscared by the presence of the latter's brother-
ON BOARD H.M.S. * UNICORN141
in-law, the grave and saddened Piercy Annerly, she
strove to lure Jack into an affaire with her.
Besides, she remembered that Lina had denied the
existence of an engagement between herself and Jack,
so deemed the latter fair game ; but she never spoke
to him of the Capels, though she thought much and
suspected more.
The Unicorn, in addition to her captain and five
lieutenants, had nine other officers; so with these and
the young fellows on board of the forty-third, fifty-
seventh, and sixty-eighth, Fanny Arnaud had admirers
enough to pick and choose from. The captain, it was
true, was a married man ; but he was wont to say that
' a wife at Sheerness to a husband in the tropics was
about as good as no wife at all.'
With all his social qualities, Jack Chaloner was fond
occasionally of solitude, so difficult to be got in a
crowded transport; fond of stealing to a quiet quarter
of the poop where he could enjoy a 'quiet weed,'
think over his next letter to Lina, recall the past—
the past with her ; tender conversations, and pleasant
scenes, now, far, far away ; but the inevitable Fanny,
with her ever smiling eyes, often contrived to steal
after him ; ' the air was so stifling in the cabins,' she
would urge piteously. ' The moonlight on deck was
so lovely—she doted on moonlight on the water;
142
JACK CHALONER.
and they had so many thoughts and sympathies in
common, she had discovered now.'
Times there were, when to avoid her he thought of
getting into the mizen top. He was certairj she could
never surmount the futtock shrouds.
On finding that when she approached, Jack was
about to relinquish his cigar, she prayed him not to
do so, but requested him to make her up a tiny
cigarette, which she lit at his cigar and put from time
to time to her pretty lips, but making terrible grimaces
while doing so.
'Won't you try my briar-root ?' asked Jack saucily.
She found the cigarette inconceivably nasty. ' Oh !
for what reason do men smoke/ she thought, as she
prettily continued her awkward imitation of Jack's
mode of using the cigarette in his well-moustached lip,
till, at last, she was compelled to drop it in the sea.
Jack was disposed to adopt to her that tone and
bearing which, for the life of him, he could not help
adopting to all women, but her own manner, brought
upon her, at times, much that resembled what is com-
monly known as ' chaff,' yet every gleam of her eyes,
every turn of her handsome head, every trick of her
little white hands, and every tone of her sweet and
skilfully modulated voice, impressed upon him that
Fanny Arnaud was an accomplished flirt, who had
ON BOARD ti.M.S. ' UNICORN.'
practised them all upon a hundred men, horse, foot
and artillery.
'Why so silent?' asked Jack, as she seemed very
quiet, while gazing at the bright waves rolling past in
the tropical moonlight. ' Has the cigarette disagreed
with you ? A penny for your thoughts.'
' A penny only ! I would not tell some of them to
you for all the money in the Bank of England.'
' Am I, then, so unworthy of confidence ? Why
not to me in particular?'
' To any one, then. How beautiful the sea looks to-
night, and yet there is something always terrible in it.'
' Terrible ?'
'Yes, when one thinks, as a poem has it, how
In ocean's wide domains,
Half-buried in the sands,
Lie skeletons in chains,
With shackled feet and hands.
Beyond the fall of dews,
Deeper than plummet lies,
Float ships with all their crews,
No more to sink or rise.
There the black slave-ship swims,
Freighted with human forms,
Whose fleshless, fettered limbs
Are now the sport of storms."
1I love the sea,' she added,' especially as we look upon
it to-night. I may change in many things, but never
in my love of Nature P
144 JACK CHALONER.
'It is always the privilege of beauty, a love of
change,' said Jack (a privilege he would not have
granted to Lina), as he looked down into the bright
roguish eyes that were upturned to his.
' I have no claim to that, Captain Chaloner,' she
replied demurely and effectively, dropping her lashes
for a moment.
'No claim 1'
' My nose is a decided snub.'
' It is a divine retrousse /' said Jack gallantly.
' But saucy.'
' Piquante, say ; but no claim to beauty—come!'
' Except in my hair, which at night comes tumbling
down to my knees.'
'And every ripple of it tinged with gold; how T
should like to see it then !'
' Have you never read that a single thread of
a woman's hair may prove to a man stronger
than a chain cable?' she asked, laughing. 'You
know, Captain Chaloner, that my face is my for^
tune!'
'And a very magnificent fortune it is,' replied Jack
—adding,' Permit me,' as he proceeded to manipulate
another cigar.
' But long of being realized ; why, I am an awful—
a too awful age to be a spinster!'
ON BOARD N.M.S. 4 UNICORN.''
145
'"May I inquire?' asked Jack insinuatingly.
'Yes—four-and-twenty, and my aunts (who, by the
way, have never been married) say I must soon be-
come a district visitor, a sister of mercy, or some such
thing,' she added, with pretty mock seriousness. ' Yet
I can remember a time when I was very romantic,
and had thoughts of marrying for love, and all that sort
of thing. I was a school-girl then, Captain Chaloner.
Ah, it is a fine thing to have day-dreams !'
' How you talk ! Dare you say that you are past
the time of a young girl's day-dreams ?' exclaimed
Jack, amused by her prattle, and patting her hand, that
rested on the taffrail. ' What about first love, now ?'
' Much has been said about that, but it seems to
me,' replied the pretty casuist, bending her most telling
glance upon him, and then dropping her eyelids,' that
we may love one with only one part of our nature
until we meet another, who compels us to love them
with the whole of it by awaking anew our dormant
sympathies, instincts and faculties—another who seems
to have been made by Heaven for ourself only.'
' A strange theory,' said Jack, applying it to him*
self and Lina Capel.
' But not unnatural,' added Fanny, applying it men-
tally to herself and Jack, who now thought,' To how
many fellows has she said all this, I wonder ?'
146
JACK CHALONER.
But it was dangerous work to talk much on such a
subject while looking into such eyes as those of Fanny
Arnaud, especially if she clung to his arm, or it went
protectingly round when the ship lurched or rolled.
' How I wish this voyage was over !' said she, after a
pause, with a mock sigh of weariness.
' Why ? You have nothing to complain of,' said
Jack, who took in the young lady's 'length and
breadth' precisely, yet could not help being flattered
by her open preference of himself, for Jack Chaloner
was only a man after all.
* Complain—in what way ?' she queried.
' You have surely love affairs enough on your hands
just now to preclude ennui V
' Oh, how can you say so ?' she asked, in a pleading
and reproachful voice, but Jack ignored the deduction,
and replied :
' All the fellows in the ship are ever round you like
—like '
' What ?'
f Well—like flies round a honeypot/ said Jack, at a
loss for a simile ; and now the supper-bell ended a con-
versation that was only one of many, which Faniiy,
somehow, had a singular knack of bringing about; and
as Jack felt the firm clasp of her soft hand, when he
assisted her down the poop-ladder to the cabin, he felt
ON BOARD H.M.S. ' UNICORN*
147
his heart rising up in rebellion against the subtle in-
fluence this girl (whom he would not have married 'for
worlds') was beginning to acquire over him.
Knowing nothing of the temporary hitch or lovers'
quarrel, somehow, instinctively, she did not—on reflec-
tion—believe Lina's denial of her engagement; yet the
denial had been made, and Fanny Arnaud felt bound
to believe her if she chose, and was, she conceived, at
perfect liberty to play her cards as she chose and could
for the best.
' When once a fish takes bait,' she thought, ' and is
satisfied with the flavour, it forthwith—if managed in
a proper manner—proceeds to devour it. I am the
bait and Jack Chaloner is the fish.'
'By Jove!'said poor Harry Stapleton, who was a
devoted admirer of Fanny's, ' I suppose it is all
settled between these two. I don't wish to be Jack's
rival, and it is no use entering stakes with him ; for he
has always the devil's own luck with the girls; and
this one seems rather an adept in the gentle art known
as flirtation.'
In fact, beyond all the ladies on board, and there
were several, whenever she went on the poop or main-
deck, in the saloon or cabin, a crowd of young fellows
were always about her, ready with chairs, shawls for
her shoulders, and hassocks for her feet, etc., or whether
10
148
JACK CHA LONER.
she sang at the piano, or danced (for dances were fre-
quent) to the music of the forty-third band, she heard
the voices of admiration and flattery; yet she seemed
to have eyes only for the apparently impenetrable
Jack Chaloner.
CHAPTER XV.
christmas under the tropic of capricorn.
St. Helena, around the rocky shore of which the
surf, at the season referred to, is always most tre-
mendous, had vanished astern when the dawn of
Christmas Day saw the transport under the Tropic of
Capricorn ; and how unlike that festival at home, with
its frosts and snows, greener mistletoe, red holly
berries, and hilarity, it seemed ; for the temperature
was mild, the south-east trade-wind blew a steady
breeze, and the canopy of clouds afforded sufficient
shelter from the vertical sun-rays, to allow all exercise
with impunity, even during the heat of noon.
Divine service was performed on deck by the cap-
tain in honour of the day, the Union Jack floating
out from the gaff, though no other eye on the ocean
saw it but the eye of God; after which all preparations
were made among the crew and troops for their Christ-
CHRISTMAS UNDER CAPRICORN. 149
mas festival, as the day is a feast wherever they go,
held sacred * as if it were their perennial birthday.'
On board all her Majesty's ships, a regular banquet,
with vast ribs of beef and piles of plum-pudding, or
'duff,' as Jack calls it, with beer and wine, often pro-
vided by the officers, while grog and cans of flip go
round to the health of' all absent friends.' In the
same way, their officers saw that the soldiers were
equally cared for, and the heart of poor ' Tommy
Atkins ' was made glad.
In the evening, games, fiddling and dancing jigs and
reels went on joyously forward, while in the cabins
aft, music, singing, and story-telling were the order of
the night.
Many stories and yarns were told, but the most stir-
ring was a Christmas reminiscence of Piercy Annerley,
in which Jack Chaloner figured.
A grave and sad-eyed man now, though in the prime
of life, Annerley's hair was already becoming streaked
with silver, from all he had suffered in the East, and
lately lost in his native land, and when playfully asked
by Fanny Arnaud to give some account of his captivity
among the Afghans—
'I would rather not,' said he; 'it was a term of
horror to me, which I have no desire to recall, and
most melancholy has been the sequel to it,' he added,
10—2
JACK CHALONER.
referring to the death of Constance. ' But if you care
to hear it, I shall tell you of an adventure I had among
savages in the Andaman Isles, and how I spent my
Christmas feast exactly eight years ago.
f I was stationed with a strong detachment of my
regiment, to which Jack Chaloner then belonged, at
Rangoon, which, you all no doubt know, is the chief
port in the province of Pegu, on the Rangoon, or
eastern branch of the river Irawaddi.
'Our lives were dull, tiresome, and monotonous.
Without society, we had not even the chances afforded
to the European civilians, of interest in trade to amuse
us, so we passed the time in smoking, studying the
" Army List" and the thermometer amid the steamy
atmosphere of a district where swampy rice flats extend
on every hand, intersected here and there by a dense
jungle, which surrounds the great Dagon Pagoda, or
temple, that was stormed by our troops in the Burmese
War in 1822.
' I was very sick of Rangoon, its Burmeans, Peguers,
and Portuguese, its miasma and mosquitoes, and long-
ing to go home where—well, a darling bride awaited
me, who was then a girl at school, and who is now—
alas !—in her grave !
' Thus I was not sorry when Jack Chaloner, our ad-
jutant, came to my bungalow one afternoon, and said :
CHRISTMAS UNDER CAPRICORN. 151
*" I have just got your name from the chief to put in
orders."
'"For what ?"
•" As first officer for duty. You are to leave this
lively hole on particular service. To do so will not
break your heart, I suppose ?"
' "I should think not, old fellow; but service where ?"
•" In the Andaman Isles," replied Jack, with a laugh.
• " The Andaman Isles ?" I repeated, with a laugh
also, but an incredulous one. " This is a joke, of course.
Could you not invent a place more unpleasant ?"
•" You will find it no joke," continued Jack gravely,
" and the duty is an important one for an officer so
young as you, barely five-and-twenty."
'Jack, be it remembered, was considerably my junior
in years.
I thought this place, Rangoon, about as bad as any
could be," said I, giving my moustache an angry twirl;
" but, man alive, Jack, this is out of the frying-pan into
the fire!"
'" Quite, by Jove!"
•" But what the deuce am I to do when there ?"
•" Give me a brandy and soda and I'll tell you all
about it," said he, as he flung himself, panting with
heat, into a long cane Chinese arm-chair, and pro-
Ceeded leisurely to light a Chinsurah cheroot. " You
152
JACK CHALONER.
see, about two months ago the captain and six
men of a Scotch ship, named the Duke of Rothesay,
landed, in mere curiosity, from their boat on one of
this cluster of solitary and savage isles in the Bay of
Bengal, the Isle of Arcondam; but they never came
back again, and are supposed to have been destroyed
by the aborigines, who are the most utterly heathen in
all the isles of India; so the ship, after hanging off
and on shore for a week, sailed under the command of
Andrew Barton, her chief mate. A gun-boat, the
Lord Clyde, was despatched to make inquiries, and
found the place described by Barton as being that
where his captain and shipmates landed ; but so furious
was the surf that to get on shore was impossible ; so,
after dodging about for some days, she too steamed
away without effecting anything."
' "Now, in the name of wonder," I exclaimed, " what
has this legend of the vasty deep to do with me, Jack ?"
' " Only this much, that as Government has deter-
mined to make an effort to learn the fate of these
seven unfortunate Scotchmen, they have applied to
the officer in command here for soldiers to go in the
gunboat, under the orders of a smart and intelligent
subaltern officer for that purpose."
1 "And the chief does me the honour of selecting me /"
'" Precisely so, and with one sergeant, one corporal,
CHRISTMAS UNDER CAPRICORN.
ten privates of ours, and ten native sappers, you will
have to start on this most troublesome duty to-morrow
—a duty in which much peril may be run, much suffer-
ing undergone, and little or no honour gained."
' " No V.C., at all events."
'"You are a thorough brick!" said he, meaning
thereby to be complimentary; " and I know that you
will do this duty with credit to yourself and to the
regiment."
*" I'll do my best, Jack," said I hopefully.
'" A man can do no more."
' Next day, with my detachment on board, the little
gunboat steamed down the Irawaddi, and soon the
great gilded mass of the bell-shaped Dagon Pagoda,
three hundred feet in height, wherein the White
Elephant is worshipped, began to sink amid the dense
green leafy jungle ; and then the jungle itself seemed
to melt into the crimson evening sea, as we stood away
into the north channel of the Gulf of Martaban.
' The second day—Christmas day—we had passed
the Northern and then the Middle Andaman in succes-
sionon the port side, and in the afternoon the steam was
blown off, the gunboat lay to, and a boat was ordered
to be lowered to take me off to the Isle of Arcondam,
with eight naval brigade men, my few soldiers and
sappers.
154
JACK CHALONER.
' I carefully examined the arms and ammunition of the
whole ; and carefully was the boat prepared to receive
us, for, as usual, there was a heavy surf on.
'" Stand by the fall-tackles !" cried the boatswain :
" out with the davits—away with her—handsomely
now, and lower away."
' With a splash the boat descended into the water,
and while two seamen, who were at the stem and
stern, held on like grim death to the main chains with
boat hooks, we dropped down into her.
'" Shove off!" was the order; " out oars—give way,
my lads, with a will."
' I was armed with a rifle as well as a revolver, and
while we toiled and were tossed amid the white boiling
surf, I regarded the isle with more than common in-
terest as we approached it.
' Like all the rest of the cluster, it is buried in
densest jungle to the water-edges; pestilential man-
grove swamps fringe every creek, and foliage ever
green, with a wealth of creepers and climbing plants,
interwoven until they become a veritable thatch, ex-
elude all fresh air from the forest stems, and allow
the malaria to gather in its deadliest strength below.
' A species of small boar, a rat with spiny hair, a wild
cat, and the fruit-eating bat, alone thrive in such dis-
tricts.
CHRISTMAS UNDER CAPRICORN.
155
' Soon we were close in shore, where the surf seemed
less heavy.
4" Buckle your revolvers and ammunition about your
necks, hold your rifles well up, for the water is four
feet and a half—and now jump out, lads !" I ordered.
'In this fashion we struggled ashore. We had already
been soaked again and again by the surf; and more
than once when a wave rolled over my shoulders, I
was nearly swept away; and I have often, since then,
thought that men landing under such circumstances
should do it in line, and grasping each other's hands in
the old Scottish fashion, to stem the force of the water.
'We got ashore at length, safely, with our ammunition
dry, and sought the spot where Andrew Barton said
his shipmates must have perished ; and after crossing
a belt of white sand we found a dense and sombre
jungle before us.
' "Keep a bright look-out, men," cried I; " we know
not who may lurk in these bushes and shower poisoned
arrows on us with perfect impunity."
' Bates, my sergeant, now uttered an exclamation.
' " What is up ?" said I.
' " Here are a couple of human skulls', half sunk in
the sand, sir!" replied the non-commissioned officer.
' " European skulls, too," said I, as he turned them
out with his sword-bayonet.
yACK CHALONER.
' Among the jungle we found some fragments of a
ship's boat, and after this, no doubt remained in our
minds that the men of the Scottish ship must have
perished miserably at the hands of the islanders,
and to punish the latter was our next and earnest
thought.
' Whizz came an arrow out of the bush, from what
precise point I knew not, but it passed perilously close
to my left ear. Then came another and another, till
they thickened to volleys and showers, whistling
through the air, or striking into the sand to quiver at
our feet.
'Some of my men were wounded, none killed as yet j
but those who were hit had the horror of poisoned
arrows before them, and became desperate. We
struggled forward, and passed a hollow wherein lay—
an awful spectacle—the half buried, and apparently
half devoured, remains of four or five Europeans,
doubtless of those we sought; but of our assailants we
could only get partial glimpses now and then, as they
lay in small pits, showing only their black heads and
bare shoulders, and, uttering neither sound nor cry,
shot at us in silence with all the skill they could com-
mand.
' These people are a degenerate race of negroes, fierce,
cunning, and vindictive in nature, and simply horrible
CHRISTMAS UNDER CAPRICORN.
in aspect. They are active as baboons, perfectly black,
and, though barely averaging five feet in height, have
prodigious muscular strength, and large heads out of
all proportion to the size of their bodies (like the
gnomes of a Christmas pantomime), which have no
other covering than greasy mud, with which they
smear themselves as a protection from the stings of
the noxious insects with which these isles are infested.
' Their bows are five feet long; their arrows are of
reed pointed with fish-bone; their lances are of iron-
wood, and they carry shields made of layers of bark.
Rats, lizards, and snakes are their chief food, and they
worship several monstrous genii—among others a
Demon of the Storms.
' Such were the pleasant people among whom Fate
sent me to fight without a hope of the coveted V.C.
' A hoarse cry and then a gasp of agony startled me,
as poor Sergeant Bates—pierced through and through
by an arrow—fell at my feet; then a sapper, after
running forward a few yards with another in his breast,
fell on his face, and there both lay, the marks for
scores of arrows, under which their sufferings were
soon ended.
41 shot the fellow whose arrow killed Bates. He was
lurking in one of the holes, from which I saw him rise
with bow bent and an arrow drawn to its head, and
I5s
JACK CHALONER.
pointed at myself; but my rifle bullet anticipated the
missile—it crushed through his woolly head, which
sank into the hole to rise no more.
4 It was an exciting Christmas Day !
' Matters were gettingdes;"crate now, for the savages
increased in such numbers that our first thought was
a retreat to the gun-boat. We fired briskly on every
side, and floored, I think, about fifty—my men averred
nearly double that number, for we fired on them at less
than thirty yards sometimes.
'But to reckon their number correctly was impossible,
as they never uttered a cry or sound when hit, and
the jungle was too thick for us to see who were
wounded and who lay dead.
'" Keep up your fire steadily, men," cried I; " but
fall back towards the boat."
' Another and another of my men fell now, one im=
paled, and another 'spritsail yarded,' as the sailors
call it, by an arrow through his jaws; but as we were
close to the beach now, I called to the officer com-
manding the boat to pull closer in shore and take us off.
' Vain was the summons! In attempting to act up
to it, the boat was capsized in the snow-white surf,
which was now boiling twelve feet high, and the officer
was drowned—at least, I never saw him again; and
all along the shore for miles and miles the surf was
CHRISTMAS UNDER CAPRICORN 159
fearful, washing to and fro and up and down the
mangrove trees that drooped in it.
'"We are in a precious fix, Mr. Annerley," said
Corporal Dean, with a rather blank expression of fear.
' A " fix" indeed it was! Our ammunition was run-
ning short; the silent but desperate savages were
crowding after us in exultant hordes, thirsting for our
blood, and the surf was so wild that no boat could
reach us, while the officer commanding the Lord Clyde
was afraid to use either shells or rockets, lest he might
slay friends as well as foes.
' Firing one furious but searching volley, we drove
our assailants a little way inland, and finding a strip
of low beach, we proceeded along it at a run, seeking
for a place where a boat might reach us; but there
was high hissing surf—surf everywhere !
' The officer of the gunboat threw overboard a raft
with strong lines attached to it, and the current
carried it fast in-shore, two boats' crews keeping the
ends of the lines in their hands.
' Through the surf we all made a rush at this con-
trivance, but only two other men and I reached it;
the rest were all either drowned or swept back among
the interwoven mangroves, where they were slain by
the savages—slain helplessly, and incapable of
resistance.
i6o
JACK CHALONER.
'The boats headed against the surf, amid the fierce
hissing of which we heard their cre\ys cheering lustily
that we might keep up our hearts, though so high rose
the salt spray that they were unable to make out how
many or how few were on the raft, which they strove
to tow out to the gunboat, and every moment I
thought the lines would snap, so terrible was the
strain upon them.
' Every second the waves poured over us—we could
scarcely breathe; at length one, with enormous weight
and force, burst upon the raft in all its strength and
fury, and tore me off, washing me some twenty or
thirty yards towards the fatal shore.
' When I rose like a cork on its summit, I saw, for
a moment, the gunboat, and the now bare raft in the
twilight, for the time was evening now, and with
despair in my heart I felt that I could never reach it,
but I could not consent to quietly drowning without
a struggle, and hoping that I might be unseen by the
islesmen, I turned, swimming towards the beach under
emotions which I leave you to imagine, but cannot
describe, for if seen by our pursuers, a cruel and pro-
tracted death was all I could look for.
' To die as a soldier may, face to face with an enemy,
was a very different fate from this, and then flashed
upon me all the high aspirations of my young heart—
CHRISTMAS UNDER CAPRICORN. 161
my ardour for the service, my love of the regiment, my
parents, my home amid the pleasant Sussex Downs,
and more—ah, more than all, the love of the girl I left
behind me, while the cruel foaming waves overtook
me ever and anon to sink me beneath their surface.
'At last I grasped the pendant branches of the
mangroves, and swung myself upward and ashore,
high, if not dry, with the last desperate effort of
departing strength, and became utterly insensible.
'When consciousness returned, the isle, with all its
jungle and mangroves, was sunk in the darkness of night.
On one side of me all was blackness and obscurity—
the dense intertwisted foliage of the trees; on the other
was the whiteness of the ever-boiling surf, the sound
of which was so hateful to my ears. The bright stars
shone clearly out, but there was no moon.
' Anxiously I looked seaward for a light that might
indicate the whereabouts of the gunboat, but looked
in vain, and terror suggested the not unnatural idea
that her commander, supposing I must have perished
with the rest, had steamed away for Rangoon, and
left me to perish of starvation.
' The odious fruit-eating bats flitted about me, and
very frequently a weird and prolonged howl broke the
awful stillness of the place. The howl had a kind of
triumph in its notes, suggesting that the islanders
JACK CHALONER.
were torturing some of my unfortunate comrades to
death, or were exulting over a studiously horrible
mutilation of their poor remains.
' So this awful Christmas night wore on.
' I lay still, scarcely daring to respire, and must have
become again insensible, for when I remember looking
about me again day had broken, and I heard some
sounds, and, as I fancied, voices near me.
"'The savages !" was my first thought as a prayer
rose to my lips, and then a cry of joy escaped me !
' There—close by me, and creeping near in shore—
was a whaleboat belonging to our vessel, steered by her
commander in person, and manned by four sailors. A
place had been discovered at daybreak, where the surf
was less furious in its nature, and they had dashed
through in search of any who might survive.
' I plunged into the water; a few strokes brought
me close to the boat—hands grasped me—I was
dragged on board—the sole survivor of that ill-fated
expedition ; and as we pulled through the gap in the
surf towards the Lord Clyde, she began to open on
the island with shell and rockets, pitching them,—with
what effect we never knew—wherever by the aid of
glasses a savage could be seen.
Two days after, we came to anchor in the Irawaddi
river, and I hailed with a joy which I never thought
CHRISTMAS UNDER CAPRICORN.
to feel the jungles of Rangoon, and the bell-shaped
outline of the great gilded Dagon Pagoda, shining in
the blaze of the setting sun,'
After this Christmas evening in the saloon-cabin, it
was proposed by Jack, seconded by Stapleton, and
was carried nem. con., that when the Unicorn came to
anchor in Table Bay, to have a ball on board, after
the letters by the swift mail steamer had been
received; and of that ball, or rather, of all that
happened about the time thereof, Jack Chaloner was
fated to have a long and bitter remembrance.
CHAPTER XVI.
the castaways.
Though clasped close to the heart of Jocelyn Vane,
and with his arms around her, Amy felt as if frozen
(and might have perished, but for her ample sealskin
dolman) before the sombre light of a November
morning began to steal across the sea, a little after
seven, and steady lines of rippling radiance spread
further and further along the horizon of the dark grey
water.
Masses of cloud floated overhead; sea birds skimmed
past; the boat, the cushions and all their clothing
ll
JACK CHA LONER.
were damp and wet; a mist rested on a part of the
sea; it might hide the land or a passing ship, but
none was in sight, and despair and dismay settled
deeper in the hearts of the two castaways.
They could only seek each other's haggard eyes,
for words they had none.
The once bright Greuze-like face of Amy seemed to
be grey in tint, and to have aged, so pinched had it
become, and the heart of Vane was weary with agony
as he looked upon her and marvelled how long she
could endure more of this exposure and misery, and
when, or how, the end would come.
Ah ! there was no laughter in poor Amy now; and
in past times Jocelyn had often thought that Amy's
laughter at himself might have a good deal to answer
for.
However, matters might have been worse. The
night had been calm, and the morning was calm too ;
had the wind and the sea risen the boat might have
been capsized, or they might have perished of cold
and wet.
No vestige of land, not even the lowest or faintest
streak, met their eyes at the far horizon, while in a
ruddier splendour than he seems to possess ashore, the
dim November sun came up from the sea, and shed a
long line of brilliant light across the rippling waves.
THE CASTAWAYS.
Anon, his heat, slight though it was then, exhaled
the bank of mist upward from the bosom of the water,
and a cry escaped Jocelyn—a cry of profound and
awful thankfulness, while Amy clung closer to him,
and sobbing, hid her face in his breast, for they saw,
about a mile or so distant, a schooner going slowly
through the water under a great spread of canvass,
for the breeze was very light.
Not another sail was in sight, and if she passed
them unnoticed, Jocelyn felt their fate was sealed !
By her build she was evidently on the approved
model of an English yacht. Her fore and mainmast
raked roguishly aft, and carried the small sails of a
topsail schooner, while her mainmast carried a vast
fore and aft mainsail, with a kind of jigger-sail and
gaff topsail, which tended to render the long low hull,
that seemed to crouch upon the water like a black
hound, more weatherly, and enabled her to sail almost
in the wind's eye when close hauled.
A white paint stroke relieved the blackness of the
hull, and she was going through the water in the
grandest style, cleaving it with a cut as clean as a
knife, her bright copper flashing in the uprising sun,
and dropping her beautiful bows upon the face of the
rollers as if they had been the breast of a seabird.
'We are unseen!' said Jocelyn in a voice like a
II— 2
JACK CHALONER,
groan; then he stood up in the boat, and taking off
his coat, waved it repeatedly over his head, shouting
the while with all the power he had left.
His enfeebled voice never reached the schooner,
though sound goes a long way over water; but his
signals were evidently seen, as a commotion ensued
among the watch on deck.
The square sails aloft on the mainmast were thrown
in the wind ; the fore and aft mainsail was hauled up,
and all the snow-white canvas shivered in the breeze,
as the beautiful schooner lay to, and preparations were
in progress for lowering a boat.
'We are saved, my darling—oh, my darling, I
thank God, for your sake !' exclaimed Jocelyn, with
something like a sob in his throat, and he looked
with love and sorrowful pity on the once bright Amy,
and saw how the horrors of the past night had
affected her. She seemed ten years older, her face
was lined, her dress all limp, like her hair, with the
dew; but he was, as she afterwards told him, was
equally impressed by the change these few terrible
hours had temporarily effected in his appearance.
' Boat ahoy—where do you come from ?—keep up
your pecker—all will right in a minute!' cried a voice
cheerily over the brightening water, as the schooner's
boat, pulled by four vigorous oarsmen, came towards
THE CASTAWAYS.
16 7
them with long steady strokes, the dripping oar-blades
flashing in the sun.
' My eyes, if there ain't a poor girl—a young lady,
by Jove, in the boat!' said the fifth seaman, who was
steering, as she came sheering alongside, and the oars
were laid in. ' How in the name of wonder do you
two come to be here, sir ?' he asked Jocelyn.
' We are carried away to sea,' replied the latter.
'And in this boat we have been all night—all
night,' sobbed Amy, who was weak as a child now
from the very revulsion of feeling.
' Carried away—where from ?' said the steersman, as
he hitched a rope through a ring bolt in the bow of the
pleasure boat, and made it fast to the stern of his own.
' Brighton.'
' Brighton—my eye !'
' And where are we now ?'
' Nearly thirty miles off Worthing,' replied the
coxswain. The oars were again shipped, and Jocelyn's
boat was towed alongside the schooner, at the side of
which appeared many faces all expressive of interest
and wonder.
' Rig the side ladder,' cried the voice of one in
authority. 'By jingo, there is a lady in the boat!'
Jocelyn put one arm round Amy, and assisted her
feeblq and tremulous steps up the ladder to the gang-
i68
JACK CHALONER.
way, when a gentleman in correct yachting costume,
a smart, handsome and well-moustached fellow of five-
and-twenty years, or more perhaps, presented his
hand, and drew hers through hist arm, to lead her aft.
'Good Heavens—Amy!' he suddenly exclaimed,
' Amy Capel—you, adrift and in that boat—here !'
' Pierrepoint!' said she faintly.
' Oliver Pierrepoint!' added Jocelyn, for Pierrepoint,
Jack's bete noir, it was, whose yacht, the Pride of Cowes,
had so opportunely picked them up.
They descended into the pretty cabin, which was
like a lady's boudoir, with its lace hangings, pictures,
and pannelling all painted over with roses and flying
Cupids, its softly-cushioned lockers, and general air of
luxury, where the steward was already laying an
elegant equipage for breakfast, and rigging an appara-
tus round to prevent the dishes ' fetching way' and
going to leeward, as the master of the yacht had pre-
dieted squalls within an hour—so the castaway boat
(which was now hoisted in and made fast on deck) had
just been overhauled and its occupants rescued in
time.
Some hot tea for Amy, and brandy and seltzer for
Jocelyn,revived them a little,and their narration began;
and though there was not much to tell, they had under-
gone so much in their mutual terror and anxiety, that
THE CASTAWAYS.
169
there was much description, repetition, and circumlo-
cution, so that it took a long time to tell, while
Pierrepoint and two or three friends, all in yachting
costume, with Oxford-blue jackets studded with gilt
anchor buttons, tarpaulin hats with blue ribbons,
glazed boots, and wonderful neckties, listened and
looked appreciatively and approvingly on the fair and
rare beauty of Amy, who, in the cabin appropriated to
ladies (who might be on board) ere long proceeded to
renew her toilet, brush the spray out of her soft hair,
and efface the traces of tears.
She knew she was perfectly safe now—that she and
Jocelyn, after all they had undergone, were restored to
each other, as if from the jaws of the grave ; yet when
she spoke there came ever and anon one of those convul-
sive sighs that so often succeed a fit of heavy weeping.
N'ow she had but one thought—Lina! Oh, what
must the mental anguish of that affectionate sister be?
' Have a weed before breakfast, Vane ?' said Pierre-
point, proffering his silver cigar-case to Jocelyn ; 'and
you left Brighton last evening, you say ?'
' Yes.'
' And have drifted thirty miles since then—it seems
incredible.'
' I know not how far we have drifted—it seems far
enough, to judge by the agony of soul we underwent,
but the coxswain of the boat said thirty.'
ijo JACK CHALONER.
' I am aware that Beachy Head light was not visible
from the deck when day came in this morning,' said
Pierrepoint. ' Well—it is quite an adventure, this,
but no time must be lost in putting you ashore and
communicating with Lina—Miss Capel, I mean/ he
added, colouring slightly. ' You know the Capels and
I are old friends ?'
Vane nodded his head ; he knew well that they were
old friends, and as he thought of his friend Jack
Chaloner, who at that precise moment was being
steamed out of Southampton, he devoutly hoped that
no future complications might arise out of this 'roman-
tic adventure,' as the Lancer was pleased to term it
Amy did not appear at breakfast; remembering
now much that had passed between herself and
Jocelyn in the boat—the wild iterated and reiterated
passionate endearments, while they thought death
menaced them—she cared not just then to face Pierre-
point's gentlemen friends, with their tender attentions
and scrutinizing eyes—all gay, thoughtless men of the
world; for her little heart just then was full of tender,
holy and thankful thoughts—thankfulness to God that
she and Jocelyn were spared to each other, and that
both were spared to Lina—loving, sisterly, and affec-
tionate Lina.
So Amy remained secluded in a pretty cabin apart
THE CASTAWAYS.
as yet. For she was no longer—at least, not just then
—the Amy she usually was, with her wild speeches,
her waggery, and her pretty imperious ways.
For some time the yacht was continuing the same
course she had been running when the boat was
picked up, westward by south, for Cowes ; thus she
had run nearly twenty miles further before the ex-
planations were made, and was fully fifty miles from
Brighton—indeed, the cliffs of the Isle of Wight
were clearly seen ahead before orders were given to
put her about; by this time it was blowing a half gale,
and the wind,being from the east, was dead against her ;
but Pierrepoint had great faith in the powers of his
yacht, and made light of that circumstance.
Not so his skipper, who deemed it necessary to make
long tacks after Selsea Bill was on the beam ; and as
the gale increased to a series of fierce squalls, in which
some of the top hamper was carried away, about the
time that the schooner was expected to be off Brighton,
or certainly St. Leonards—where, notwithstanding the
state of the sea, they hoped to land Amy—she was
beating about some fifty miles below the Straits of
Dover in a somewhat crippled condition, and the
evening of the third day was drawing on ere she came
to anchor off Newhaven.
Amy, overcome by "sickness and all she had under-
172
JACK CHALONER.
gone, was conveyed to an hotel, while Vane and Pierre-
point took the first train for Brighton, and lost not a
moment in reaching Oakhurst Priory.
CHAPTER XVII.
events progress rapidly.
The desolation of death seemed to have settled again
over pretty Oakhurst Priory. Ere this Lina had heard
that a lady and gentleman answering to the description
of Amy and Jocelyn Vane had left the pier in a boat
on that fatal evening, and had not been heard of since.
She could not doubt that this luckless pair was them !
If, as we know it is, that in quiet lives simple events
become great occurrences, what an appalling effect had
the episode of Amy and Vane on the life of Lina
Capel! The maiden aunt had not yet come, so Lina
was alone—alone in the second of her sorrows. Oh !
when would she ever see Jack, she thought; lay her
head on his heart, and pour out all her griefs to his
affectionate ear ?
Oliver Pierrepoint was not sorry to have established
a fair and solid claim to her gratitude, and this was his
first thought when he and Vane stood together in the
drawing-room at Oakhurst. The latter thought how
EVENTS PROGRESS RAPIDLY. 173
strangely silent and desolate the once pretty room
looked. The piano was closed, the music all huddled
away in a corner, the draperies hung' anyhow,' and all
the flower vases were empty.
Lina came slowly forward ; on seeing Jocelyn,a cry
of joy, ending in one of pain, escaped her.
He came alone. Where, then, was her bright little
Amy ? Her dry lips refused utterance, her eyes alone
spoke, and Vane, taking both her hands in his, drew
her towards him.
' She is safe—safe and well!' said he joyously.
Lina bowed her face on his shoulder. Sore with
much weeping, her beautiful brown eyes were open,
but told of that blindness to external objects where all
thought is, as it were, turned inward.
' We bring you good news, Miss Capel,' said Pierre-
point, now coming forward—' good news.'
'Of Amy ?'
' Yes—of Amy.'
' Oh, blessed be God for that 1'
' She is safe-—'
' But where ?'
' At St. Leonard's, where she was taken from my
yacht.'
She kissed his hand, and her tears fell on it. Pierre-
point was moved by the tender humility of the action.
m
JACK CHA LONER.
' Don't,' said he, in a rather troubled voice—' don't.'
Vane explained all in a few words, lifting from
Lina's heart the awful load that oppressed it; but
now Captain Oliver Pierrepoint, of H.M. —th Lancers,
who was seldom afflicted either with bashfulness or
awkwardness, felt himself somewhat put out by Lina's
manner. It evinced intense gratitude and thankful-
ness, but nothing more; for the untowardness of the
new situation soon began to force itself upon her, and
the sense of this increased, when for a few days subse-
quent to Amy's restoration, Pierrepoint continued to
make himself—in common with Vane—of great use
in many ways, and Lina's sincere gratitude to him
became mingled with a fear of Jack Chaloner.
It seemed as if Lina would never weary of caress-
ing her sister.
' God only knows what I suffered during those
awful three days and nights, and the supreme thank-
fulness with which I behold you again,' she exclaimed.
' Oh, Amy! this was worse to endure than seeing
Constance dead ; for then I knew the worst, and that
she, dear soul, was at rest.'
Pierrepoint's visits of inquiry, and so forth, involved,
poor Lina knew, a terrible awkwardness, and she
deemed them very bad taste, in time. She became
reserved, almost silent; and sometimes our Lancer,
EVENTS PROGRESS RAPIDLY.
175
who would talk on everything or anything, whether
he understood it or not, found himself reduced to can-
vass that never-failing resource the weather, and they
would of course agree that it was ' cold for the month
but seasonable,' and silence would ensue.
Then Lina began to see that, gratitude apart, she
must ere long be ' not at home/
She knew from past experience the risk of mention-
ing Pierrepoint's name to Jack, especially when now
the latter was so far away ; so, when writing of Amy's
danger and escape, in her timidity, she did not say
who had saved her; and trusting that the part Pierre-
point had borne in the episode might never be known
by him, till her own lips told him, was silent on the
subject.
But poor Lina reckoned without her host.
Lina repented now most bitterly her double denial
of her engagement to Fanny Arnaud and to Pierre*
point.
Here was the latter visiting her frequently, believing
her to be—rumours to the contrary apart—free ;
there were Fanny and Jack in the same ship, as the
newspapers had informed her, and she believing that
he was free.
What terrible complications might not arise again!
Lina felt no particular jealousy of Fanny, who was
176
JACK CHALONER.
not Jack's style, and she never for a moment doubted
Jack himself; but he had never alluded to Fanny as
being a fellow passenger. Why was this ? Perhaps
he cared too little on the subject.
4 And so, Captain Pierrepoint, you have been fight-
ing in India,' said Amy, on one occasion ; ' I was
quite a little girl when you went away.'
4 Fighting! I should think so ; had it galore, as the
Irish say; and learning Hindostanee, how to eat hot
curries, make my own ice, and—and '
' How to fall in love ?' added Amy, a little of her
old self returning now.
4 No, Miss Amy—not to fall in love.'
4 Why ?'
41 have not done since——'
' Since when T asked Amy.
Pierrepoint glanced furtively at Lina (who felt
herself grow pale), and said nothing more.
'And you are not married ?' queried the incorrigible
Amy, who for a moment forgot what he referred to, if
indeed she ever knew all the details precisely.
'No.'
4 Why ?'
'It is something too awful to think about?' said
Pierrepoint, twitching his moustache and laughing,
but only from his white teeth outwards.
EVENTS PROGRESS RAPIDLY. 177
This was one of the awkwardnesses that Lina felt
she must put an end to.
In spite of himself and his vcturien ways, the memo-
ries of three years ago came rather tenderly over him,
when he loved, or thought, in his own fashion, that he
loved Lina; but he half smiled over these memories
now, they seemed so dim and distant.
' Perhaps in that past time, as a mere girl, she only
fancied she loved me/ he would think : * any way, no
one has been really in love with me since, nor I with
any one; we have both shammed alike, to pass the
time up country, and in that fashion I have made love
to a good many in my time. She is not engaged, as
she told me. I had no right to hint about it, of
course; yet the fact remains. She is devilish hand-
some—money, too! Why shouldn't I enter stakes
again ?'
This was the off-hand way in which Oliver Pierre-
point began to view the situation.
No secret was made now of the engagement of
Vane and Amy Capel.
' Oh, yes, we are to be married, Captain Pierrepoint!'
said that volatile young lady, who had now recovered
her general flow of spirits and raillery. '" Take
down the bill," as Sam Weller says, " I'm let to a
single gentleman, and the terms is agreed upon."'
i78
JACK CHALONEK
But it seems terrible not to have one flirtation
more before losing one's liberty for life 1'
* Amy!' exclaimed Lina reprovingly, while the eyes
of the visitor regarded her admiringly ; but she had
begun to see that it was Pierrepoint's pride, and not
his heart, that was affected by her bearing, so she
thought by some hint to make him aware of how she
stood.
' I am going abroad, Captain Pierrepoint,' said she,
' a long way from England ; and then, like you, I
shall learn to feel what it is to be so far from home.
I suppose you often thought of all your friends, when
you were in India ?'
'I do not know that I did so of all; however, I
must admit that I often thought of—you.'
Lina felt that she had brought this upon herself,
and made a great mistake.
'I often thought of things you did and said. I
remember one little speech about women—that meji
never cared for those who wore their hearts upon
their sleeves.'
'It is a common aphorism, Captain Pierre-
point; and you remember this trifling remark of
mine?'
' No words of yours were ever so to me,' said he,
with lowered voice and tenderness of tone.
EVENTS PROGRESS RAPIDLY. 179
References to the past proved perilous work, and
Lina shrank from it nervously ; but now he came
suddenly to her side, and looking down into her eyes,
with a tenderness that, for the time, was certainly not
simulated, he said :
' Oh, Lina, to love you, and to lose you!'
' Well ?' said she, with tremulous lips.
' Those who love you, as you deserved to be loved,
will never love another, though they may fancy
they do.'
' Captain Pierrepoint '—she paused—for she was
trembling now ; and added, ' this must end !'
' Lina—let me call you so, once again—even if it be
for the last time 1'
' Well.'
' Did you mean what you said just now ?—that our
—our friendship must end—that we must see less of
each other ?'
' I mean that—that we must not see each other at
all,' said she in desperation.
' I—I scarcely comprehend you.'
' Yet I spoke plainly enough !' she exclaimed, with
her eyes full of tears.
' Too plainly to be kind, perhaps—we were wrenched
asunder, Lina, and I have suffered much !'
She knew pretty well that much of this was mere
12
JACK CHALONER.
talk, and considering her love for and engagement to
J ack, most dangerous talk to listen to.
The abrupt entrance of Jocelyn Vane put an end to
these speeches, which were proving very painful for
Lina ; so, by her instructions, the next time the luckless
Lancer came, she was * not at home,' and this having
occurred two or three times, he came near Oakhurst
Priory no more.
But a fear came over Lina that she had begun the
system—too late!
Time wore on quickly now.
Lina got Jack's letter by the homeward bound ship ;
another from Ascension, and a third from the Cape,
with a postscript added in Table Bay, just as the mail-
bag was going ashore. All were loving and tender—
all that she could wish; but there was never the
slightest reference to the presence on board of the
dangerous Fanny Arnaud.
A fourth letter reached her—one prepared before
hand—put on board a homeward bound vessel, in mid-
ocean, longitude 6o° East, and latitude 40° South. It
was very brief, and something in the construction of
it struck a chill to her heart.
' There is a change in the tone and tenor of this
letter—why so ?' she thought. ' Oh ! God forbid that
he should have began to love me less \ but there is a
EVENTS PROGRESS RAPIDLY,. 181
change somewhere. Can she be at the bottom of it—
that girl Fanny Arnaud ?'
But no letter came to her from New Zealand, where
she knew, ere long, from the public prints, that the
regiment (the ' Fighting Forty-third') had landed,
and gone with other troops ' to the front,' into the
immediate seat of war.
Why was this ? she asked of herself daily, while
writing to him lovingly by every mail. Did his letters
miscarry—was he too ill to write, or did the girl
Arnaud fetter his hand and heart ? Oh no—no—she
could not think that, and yet—what was she to think ?
Meanwhile she was busy enough at home. Under
all the circumstances of Conny's recent death, and her
own approaching departure, it was arranged that
the marriage of Amy and Jocelyn Vane should be a
very quietly conducted affair ; and Lina prayerfully
thanked Heaven when it was over, Amy left with a
protector, and herself free to act.
She was going out to be married. Auckland was a
poor little place, where she supposed nothing suitable
for a bride of position could be got. How many things
she required—how much she would have to take with
her !—of Course, a perfect trousseau.
Its selection and arrangement occupied her and her
12—2
1^2 *JACK CHALONE&.
aunt hourly, after Amy's quiet marriage, and amid all
the principal doubts that beset her, she thought how
delightful it would be to show all her new dresses to
Jack—and dear, dear Jack's tastes, or supposed tastes,
were carefully considered and studied in reference to
every costume, colour and ribbon. And now the time
of departure was drawing nigh; so Lina wrote Jack
lovingly and trustfully of it—that she was to take the
steamer Oroutes for New Zealand—that she was
coming to him at last—at last!
Times there were when she paused—and her heart
stood still at the now vague prospect before her—
vagne, by the cessation of letters and absence of infon-
mation ; but it was too late to pause now.
' Oh, Lina, Lina!' cried Amy, clasping her sister
again and again to her heart; * it is bitter—it is terri-
ble to think, that when there are only two of us left in
the world, we must part!'
' -For a time, pet—only a time.'
' Gannot you wait till this tiresome Jack comes
home ?'
' No—he cannot come home for years now.'
' His letters have been few and far between—and his
last one was—pardon me,darling—so very brief and cold.'
' All the more reason I should go now and—and,'
she added with quivering lips, ' learn the worst.'
EVENTS PROGRESS RAPIDLY. i83
'The worst—oh, Lina! and you will go ?'
' Yes, even if I know beforehand that—that—
' What ?'
'The ship I am to sail in would sink on her way out.'
This was Lina's mood of mind now—not a pleasant
one in which to begin a long, long journey by sea.
' Jack can't come to me,' she said sweetly and softly ;
' so I must keep my promise and go to Jack ; and then,
Amy—the^ after a time—a shorter time perhaps than
we think—we shall come home together, to join you in
Oakhurst Priory.'
' My own pet sister, it seems awful for you to go
that distance alone—all by yourself!'
'I shall not be alone, Amy; I have introductions to
the captain, in whose special care I shall be, and to
married ladies who are also going out, and we shall be
quite a little community on the sea.'
But little Amy wept heavily, and the affection be-
tween the sisters appeared to acquire new strength as
the time for separation drew near.
( How much you will have seen of a distant world,
and how much you will have undergone, Lina, before
I feel your dear soft arms round me again !'
Poor Amy could little foresee all that the departing
Lina was to undergo ere her life in the land she was
going to was over!
184
JACK CHALONER.
CHAPTER XVIII.
playing with edged tools.
And now we must retrograde a little in our story
from the point we left off at—Oakhurst Priory.
It was-fortunate that neither Jack Chaloner nor
Lina Capel was just then furnished with a magic
mirror that depicted the doings of the loved and
absent, as Jack might have seen his bete noir, the real
Oliver Pierrepoint, hanging over Lina's chair as he
did on the occasion of his last visit; and she would
have discovered him in—perhaps enforced—attend-
ance on Fanny Arnaud, as the transport sped to-
wards the Southern Seas.
It has been written that ' in every woman's breast
is born the desire to captivate. It depends on her
own character whether or not this may develop into
vanity. But in its early stage, when she is yet totally
unacquainted with her own powers, she views her
charms with hopes and fears, and her great desire is
that she may please.'
In too many instances, since mere girlhood, had
Fanny Arnaud proved the power of her attractions ;
while to play at love-making had been one of her
earliest and most sedulously cultivated accomplish-
ments; and so now there were likely to be many
PLAYING WITH EDGED TOOLS. l8s
passages and episodes which she would not—like most
folks who keep such records—put down in her' Diary.'
She also knew well that if propinquity is Love's
opportunity, opportunity is often the devil's game,
and she was fond of indulging in rantipole speeches
that always made Jack laugh, while her beauty com-
pelled all to pardon them.
' I was papa's ugly duckling, you know, Captain
Chaloner,' said she one evening, as she promenaded
the deck, leaning on Jack's arm.
' I can easily believe it.'
The bright face clouded resentfully and doubtfully
for a moment, till he added :
* You know what a lovely bird the ugly duckling
became.'
' Beauty is useless, and I shall never be married,
because I am poor,' said she, resorting to one of her
wild speeches.
'Don't be absurd in your deductions,' said Jack,
rather puzzled what to say ; ' and poverty is no crime.'
' It is very disagreeable, with its petty make-shifts,
for all that.'
' If you adopt this strain, Miss Arnaud,' said Jack,
' you will shock some of our regimental matrons.'
' What is the use of trying to be good—to act pro-
priety !' said the girl petulantly, as she fanned herself.
JACK CHALONER.
'What do you mean?' queried Jack, laughing; 'this
is one of your wild speeches, of course.'
' People only misunderstand you if you attempt
either,' continued Fanny, pursuing some thought of
her own; ' and it must be a terrible thing to marry
without love !'
'True,' said Jack, looking more tenderly into her
laughing eyes than he had any business to do ; ' and
who is it that says :
'" Life without love's a load, and Time stands still;
What we refuse to him to Death we give,
And then—then only, when we love we live !" '
Jack was an apt hand at quotations of this kind.
After a voyage of six thousand five hundred miles
from Southampton, the transport cast anchor in Table
Bay, which is always frequented by ships from Sep-
tember to May (in preference to False Bay), while the
south east winds prevail.
The weather was fine and serene, for it was now the
Cape summer, which lasts from December to February.
The Unicorn was to remain there for several days,
and the view from the deck—the Table Mountain, its
flat summit, four thousand feet above the sea, veiled
in mist, and presenting on one side a tremendous
precipice of solid rock, Cape Town in a valley at the
base, with its white-walled houses^ the pentagonal
PLAYING WITH EDGED TOOLS. 1S7
fortress, close to the water's edge, pretty villas studd-
ing all slopes—formed a constant source of interest
from the deck of the ship, around which ever and
anon the great albatrosses were floating.
There letters brought in by the swift mail steamer
awaited all the cabin passengers at last. There was
one to Jack Chaloner from Lina, so loving and so
tender that his heart was stirred within him as he read
it. She detailed all she had endured during the boat-
ing episode of Amy and Jocelyn Vane, adding that it
had ended in their formal engagement; that a ma-
ternal aunt had come to share their home at Oakhurst
Priory; 4 and after Amy is married,' she continued, 4 I
shall be packing up about the time you read this and
coming after you. Oh, Jack, my darling, think of that!'
Jack did think of it, and kissed and re-read the
letter again and again in the solitude of his cabin.
He then sent to the mail-bag, which was going on
shore, a long and pre-prepared letter, full of love and
longing, adding thereto—as others did to theirs—a
final little postscript, dated from Table Bay ; and then
gave all his attention to the coming festivities, as he
was president of the ball committee—and certainly
the entertainment to be given by the gallant Forty-
third excited much interest among the 4 upper ten ' of
Cape Town?
JACK CHALONER.
After the reception and despatch of his letters, Jack
did not see much of the impulsive Fanny till the night
of the ball, as both were so often on shore; but that
night speedily came.
General invitations had been sent to the Governor
and his staff, the garrison, heads of departments, and
so forth, and boat-load after boat-load of guests came
off to the ship, where a guard of honour, under
Stapleton, drawn up at the gangway, saluted all high
officials according to their rank, while a drummer
beat the ' point of war,' on its flank.
Dressed to perfection, and armed on all points for
conquest, the fair Fanny looked radiant, her soft face
flushed and brightened by her anticipations of a joy-
ous night; but our story has less to do with the ball
itself than with what transpired casually there.
The deck was covered by a vast awning, under
which a profusion of lanterns, lights and drapery,
chiefly brightly coloured bunting, red and white calico,
made a gay scene; stars of bayonets glittered every-
where, nor were the trophied colours of the old Forty-
third, with all their Pensinular glories, wanting, as a
culminating ornament, at the break of the poop.
Under this canopy were groups of men in brilliant
uniforms, resplendent with gold lace, medals and
decorations ; and ladies, many of them rarely beauti-
PLAYING WITH EDGED TOOLS. 189
ful, in airy costumes, and fanning themselves, though
the month was January, and casting languid eyes on
the moon-lighted water, or the lamps of the distant
town, while the great ship swayed at her moorings
with a scarcely perceptible motion.
When the band struck up and the dancing began,
it was difficult to think that this brilliant scene was
being enacted on the deck of the same ship which for
weeks past had been ploughing through the sea, the
boiling foam sweeping under her counter to mingle
with that made by her vast propelling screw, while
topmast and topgallant studding sails had been rigged
aloft to catch every breath of the favourable breeze.
So many and so shifting were the colours that the
maindeck looked like a huge kaleidoscope, as the
dancers whirled in the waltz, while high aloft, if viewed
from the poop, the masts, the spars and rigging, all
tipped with silver by a glorious moonlight, stood out
sharply and clearly defined against the pale blue sky ;
while the music of the band, the voices and laughter,
floated afar over the rippling water.
' Our dance again, I think,' said Jack, as his arm
encircled the very willing waist of Fanny Arnaud, and
they swept off together in a round dance for the third
time, feeling all the delight and intoxication conse-
quent to the occasion and the novelty of the scene ;
igo
JACK CHALONER.
and after a time he led his partner, flushed, palpitating
and well-nigh breathless—to judge from the way she
clung to his arm—into the cuddy, or poop cabin,
which had been set apart for refreshments, and through
the open ports of which the soft sea breeze and the
moonlight stole together.
' How well your step suits mine!' exclaimed the girl.
1 And yours mine,' replied Jack.
It was the tvois temp waltz in those days, when the
couples whirled like lightning, as if bitten by the
tarantula.
' Oh, how I do love the music and the rtioonlight on
the water!' exclaimed Fanny, as she vigorously
used her feather fan.
'You seem in a mood for loving everything,' said
Jack laughingly.
'Yes—iced champagne cup—round dancing—and
—and '
' Flirtation, of course ?'
' I must admit that I do—Oh, Jack !—Captain Chal-
coner—I mean, I always say what I think, and never
was a correct young lady to talk " prunes and prisms."'
'Jack !' thought Chalconer, at this abrupt adoption
of his Christian name; ' come—this is rather going
the pace!'
Yet it did not displease him—quite the reverse,
playing With edged tools. 191
for it was a lovely lip—red as a carnation—that
uttered it.
'Your next dance is with Stapleton, I think/ said
he ; ' Harry has dismissed his guard, as all the " big
wigs " are on board, and he will be coming in search
of you/
'I would rather stay where I am—oh, what a worry!'
'What is it ?' asked Jack.
' Only this refractory glove/
Aware that a white and slim hand was one of her
chief beauties, she had drawn off a glove while toying
with some grapes.
' Permit me—how many buttons are there ?'
' Only four ; don't you wish there were a dozen V
' With a wrist so slender, an arm so lovely, of course
I do!' replied Jack, making exactly the speech she
wanted.
' They seem more than enough, at the rate you
button them/
' How impatient you are!'
' No, not with you, whose least touch has in it
something of a caress,' said she, with one of her most
effective ceillcides from under her half-veiled eyes.
Jack knew that to flirt with Fanny Arnaud was like
playing with edged tools, apt to become perilous, so
to change the conversation he said :
192
JACK CHALONER.
'What a miraculous escape little Amy Vane had in
that boating affair!'
' Miraculous indeed !'
' Poor little Amy! But for that yacht- *
' And how strange it should be his yacht!'
' His—whose ?'
' Captain Pierrepoint's.'
Jack flushed scarlet through the bronze hue of his
skin, and then grew pale.
' Pierrepoint's!' said he.
'Is it possible you didn't know?' asked Fanny
sweetly, and with the prettiest air of surprise.
CHAPTER XIX.'
liking, not loving.
' Women may forget their love and change it,' says
a writer; ' but there are few forget the desire of
exciting jealousy.' For the truth of this axiom we
do not vouch; but Fanny Arnaud had heard too much
of Lina Capel not to be rather jealous of her.
Prior to the former's sudden communication, Jack
had been remarking admiringly the exquisite toilette
of the girl, achieved in a cramped and confined
cabin; the tasteful arrangement of her beautiful wavy
brown hair; the air and style of elegance that per-
LIKING, NOT LOVING.
193
vaded her ; but now he saw none of these details, and
the outline of her face and figure seemed to become
blurred and indistinct.
4 And your informant in this matter ?' began Jack.
' Is a friend in Brighton, whose letter came by the
last mail.'
' One of those people who will never let others
alone,' said Jack, almost savagely ; 'who are always
suggesting, and looking after their neighbours' morals,
while, perhaps, forgetful enough about their own.'
' Captain Chaloner, you are quite excited!' said
Fanny, her bright eyes sparkling with mischief. ' My
aunt—it is her letter—details all about the rescue of
Amy and Mr. Vane—and of Miss Capel's gratitude to
Captain Pierrepoint, who is a frequent visitor at the
Priory. How odd it is that Lina should say nothing
of all this to such an intimate friend as you,' continued
Fanny, stooping to sip her champagne cup, while
Jack's tightly fitting regimentals seemed to grow
tighter still, especially about the neck. ' You know
Pierrepoint's way,' she resumed, following up her sue-
cess, ' is to pay attention to any girl who happens to
be near him, and gratitude on her part—you under-
stand ;' and so she paused, leaving all the rest to be
inferred; ' I have heard it said, however, that there is
trouble to all women who hear his name.'
194
JACK CHA LONER.
SKe was thinking that to receive the visits of the
man Lina had thrown over, in the absence of the man
she was believed to have accepted, and to keep such
visits secret, was—to say the least of it—a very re-
markable proceeding, and we cannot doubt that Jack
thought so too ; for a silence fell upon him.
He took the girl's fan from her hand, and she
reclined gracefully back on the sofa that ran round
the cabin, behind the then draperied rudder-case ; he
began to fan her with a slow and regular motion,
which she found very pleasant. It ruffled her hair,
and made her long, dark eyelashes quiver; yet he did
so mechanically, apparently with no thought of what
he was doing ; though, of course, she did not think so.
'You must have done this very often to do it so.
nicely,' said she, with a meaning smile.
' Perhaps—but never to a fairer face.'
jack had such speeches by rote, enough and to spare,
and he spoke softly and insinuatingly, too, by force of
habit. With Fanny it was generally broad and open
flirtation, ' half chaff;' how unlike his intercourse with
Lina, when ' talking that sweet nonsense so delightful
to lovers, but so unintelligible to everyone else !'
Jack's heart was full of doubt and anger then, and
yet he was smiling on the girl beside him, and they
conversed in low tones, for the cabin was filling with
wearied dancers now.
LIKING, NOT LOVING.
41 do think you are fond of me !' said Fanny, taking
the initiative, while giving Jack a very telling glance
under her half-closed eyelids.
'Fond of you—oh, Miss Arnaud ! Of course I am
—very!'
' I could wish the past away.'
' The past ?'
'And be—what is impossible—the first you were
ever fond of.'
Jack winced a little at the strange turn the conver-
sation was taking; but Fanny was fearless in her
speeches. .
' But who ever marries their first love, except in a
three volume novel ?'
' Surely you don't love me ?' said Jack, thinking
that matters were just going a little too far.
'You have left nothing undone to make me do so,'
was the half-reproachful reply.
'I am so sorry to hear this, Miss Arnaud—I had no
idea—it is deuced awkward, you know !'
'Why?'
' I am an engaged man,' said Jack, taking a' header '
to end the affair.
'To whom, Captain Chaloner ?' she asked, with eyes
wide open.
' To Lina Capel/
13
196
JACK CHA LONER.
' Lina Capel!' she repeated, taking her fan from his
hand and holding it open between her face and his ;
' but she denied to me that you were engaged to her,
or she to you.'
' You must have asked her, then ?'
' Yes.'
' When was this ?'
' Long before this boat accident, of course—the first
day Captain Pierrepoint called.'
' Pierrepoint again !' said Jack, becoming somewhat
bewildered as he remembered the visit of Annerley;
' there was a mistake once—my own ; may there not
be some unlucky mistake again, Miss Arnaud ?'
'Oh, no mistake at all, Captain Chaloner,' said she
petulantly, while fanning herself rapidly.
'You met Pierrepoint, then ?'
' And left him there; it was a visit of condolence
apparently.'
' Why did Lina say nothing to me of this visit ?'
said Chaloner, almost to himself.
' She knows best; people don't like to trot out old
lovers before new ones, I suppose.'
' And she denied her engagement to me ?'
' Flatly—Pierrepoint was on the tapis again,' con*
tinued Fanny, spitefully now.
' What if all this should be false ?' Jack was
LIKING, NOT LOVING.
197
thinking, till he was roused again by Fanny saying,
almost angrily :
'Why don't you answer? I have spoken to you thrice.'
' Pardon me ; but—but can it be that Lina makes a
mockery of me ?'
' No woman who is worthy of her sex will mock the
love of any man who offers it to her in honesty and
sincerity/ said Fanny, who felt much provoked by
what the conversation had elicited—Jack's vital interest
in Lina Capel. ' But I will show you aunt's letter, if
you like, with a description of the yacht affair, and an
addition that " the old affair " with Pierrepoint is on
again/
' Thanks,' said Jack coldly ; ' but I have no wish to
see it—and I am keeping you from the dancers.'
'I don't think Lina Capel is a girl to love twice,'
continued Fanny, resolved to follow up her advantage.
' You think so ?' said Jack, with a strange smile.
' I do—and a girl who falls a captive to Oliver
Pierrepoint is not likely to escape his toils for ever.'
By exciting his jealousy, she hoped ere long to lure
him into a confession of love that he had no right to
ask for, nor she to give.
' You know, Captain Chaloner,' she resumed, in her
most sweetly modulated tone,' that there is always
supposed to be a wonderful charm and freshness about
13—2
JACK CHALONER.
a young girl's early love—a bud that can have no
after bloom.'
'You are a young girl,' said Jack, marvelling on
whom her ' bloom' had been bestowed.
' Scarcely—I am five-and-twenty—well ?'
' Have you never been in love—now that we are on
the subject ?'
She made no reply by her lips, but if ever eyes
spoke, her upward glance said :
'Not till I met you!
' And what is the charm of this young girlish love ?'
' I don't know—rather, I can't explain.'
' But I think it may often be very foolish, very
unwise, and very unpleasant,' said Chaloner, gnawing
his moustache as he thought about Lina and Pierre-
point, Hounslow Barracks, and the boarding-school;
' but from the emotions of my own heart, I can tell
you '
What Jack was about to tell he never told, for at
that moment Harry Stapleton came effusively forward,
exclaiming:
' At last I have found you, Miss Arnaud—I have
been searching for you all over the ship ; but who
would expect to find you half hidden behind the
rudder-case ? Our dance is nearly over.'
And, as he led her away, her backward glance at
LIKING, NOT LOVING.
199
Jack spoke volumes of worry and annoyance. She
felt that she had injured the prospects of her rival,
but was doubtful how far she had improved her own.
One moment Chaloner thought he would plunge into
a mad flirtation, and, if possible, dance out the whole
programme with her; the next, he resolved to dance
no more that night, and betook him to a very stiff"
brandy and soda in the cuddy.
'Fanny,' he muttered; 'no—no — by Jove! how
many fellows between Bombay and Lahore have
danced with her, flattered her, flirted with her, toyed
with her hands and hair—kissed her too, perhaps !'
'You've been going the pace with that Arnaud girl,
Jack,' said Calvcjrley, of the Forty-third, laughingly ;
'hope you won't go to the front driving in double
harness.'
'It is just the way these fellows speak of her—
perhaps that prevents one getting up an affair with
her; but why shouldn't I, if there is any truth in this
Pierrepoint story?' thought Jack revengefully ; 1 pour
passer le temps, during the voyage, at least; neither of
us would be a hair the worse for it. But poor Stapleton
is bitten in that quarter, and I shouldn't like to cross
Harry. And what a handsome girl she is!' thought
Jack, as he had another brandy and soda; 'how
delicate is the outline of her profile, though her nose
200
JACK CHALONER.
is a trifle retronsste, or saucy ; how perfect is the loveli-
ness of her complexion, and soft her satin-like hair P
Her father, the staff-colonel, poor old man, who al-
ways made himself most pleasant to Jack, was greatly
delighted with the apparent progress of affairs between
that officer (whose circumstances he knew to be unex-
ceptionable) and his handsome but penniless daughter.
Mistakes and misconceptions there had been in more
than one garrison town and cantonment; but now he
hoped that she was in a fair way to secure her golden
fish ; but with Jack it was only liking, not loving.
Next day Jack thought deeply over all Miss Arnaud's
communications, and remembering the mistake and
mistrust of which he had been guilty before with his
ears and eyes, he resolved to be wary now; but he
knew not what to think, or think eventually; and mean-
time his heart was wrung and tortured by doubts.
Should he take Annerley, as a mutual friend and her
brother-in-law, into his confidence, or leave the affair
to develop itself ? He chose the latter plan.
He became very moody after the transport steamed
out of Table Bay, and hauled up for her eastern course.
'What the deuce has come to Jack?' said Staple-
ton, Calverley, and others; 'he is always spooning
about with that girl ; but certainly he seems to have
lost much of his old espritl
LIKING, NOT LOVING.
201
We have said that Lina got a letter sent on board
a homeward-bound vessel, in latitude 40° south and
longitude 6o° east, after the Cape ball.
Lina had pressed that letter to her lips again and
again, and with eyes that were moist strove twice to
read, after, with tremulous hands, she cut the envelope
carefully open.
It was a letter that caused her to throw herself upon
her bed in a kind of paroxysm of despair, and lie there
dry-eyed and tearless, while a strange, new, and unde-
fined terror and pain took possession of her heart.
' Think of me kindly, if you think at all,' said this
letter, every line of which was as a stab, so cold and
peculiar was the tenour of it; ' but Heaven bless you
now and always.'
And so it ended, without a word of joy at the hope of
seeing her; or of gratitude to her for going so far
after him, as she had promised to do, to the very
Antipodes !
CHAPTER XX.
the isle of st. paul.
' Patience—patience/ thought Jack ; ' let me await
the end—the bitter end : perhaps I have listened too
much and too readily to that girl, and all may yet
202
JACK CHALONER.
be explained. Heaven, if it should be so, and I have
written a letter again—so cold, so cruel!'
All the reflections and workings of Jack Chaloner's
mind at this time it would be utterly impossible to
describe ; but his doubts and resolutions made him
pretty nearly proof to the fair Fanny's fascinations
for the remainder of the voyage, though both were
very nearly involved in what might have proved a
very serious complication, if not catastrophe.
On a still and lovely day, the transport was be-
calmed in the 37th degree of southern latitude and
the 77th of eastern longitude, near two small isles,
mere specks in the waste of waters, in the Indian
Ocean, but which are known to mariners as St. Paul's
and Amsterdam, midway between the Cape of Good
Hope and the coast of New Holland.
In clear weather they are visible for thirty miles,
their lofty rocky outlines varying from three hundred
to seven hundred feet in height, rising from the turbu-
lent waves around them.
The January day was clear, bright and sunny, and
St. Paul, the northern isle of the two, was distant
from the Unicorn about three miles. The sea was
like glass, and the great transport lay like a log upon
it, as a gang were shifting her screw. The sails hung
idle on the yards, with the reef-points pattering on
THE ISLE OF ST. PAUL.
203
them, as she lurched and rolled on the long oily-like
swell, through which showers of flying-fish came at
times ; and the eyes of all on deck were turned to
the twin isles, objects of intense interest after a
voyage so long.
'Let us go on shore, Captain,' said Fanny to the
commander of the transport, with one of her brightest
smiles.
' I have not the slightest objection,' said he, for he
was a goodnatured fellow, and could refuse anyone—
Fanny, least of all—nothing. ' Mr. ,' he added,
to the lieutenant of the watch, ' lower a couple of
boats, and let the crews be piped away.'
So a party of ladies and officers speedily got ready
to go on shore, the latter taking with them guns, as
they promised themselves some sport with the seals,
fowls and wild hogs, with which the two islands are
said to abound.
Jack Chaloner, Stapleton, and Fanny Arnaud were
in the first boat that was shoved off for the shore.
'There is papa, dear old thing, waving his hand-
kerchief to us from the poop,' said Fanny, as she
nestled close by Jack's side in the stern sheets.
Jack waved his cap in reply to the Colonel's
signalling.
Matter - of - fact though he seems, would you
204
JACK CHALONER.
believe that there was a romance in the pater's early
life ?' said Fanny.
' Indeed!'
' Oh yes, quite.'
' What was it ?' asked Stapleton.
4 Only this,' said Fanny, her eyes wandering oftener
to Jack than to him,' he was a disappointed man.'
' In what way ?'
4 He broke an engagement with a young lady
because he discovered that she had been betrothed
to some one else, and never told him about it.'
' And she ?' asked Jack.
' Well, she married her first love, and was happy
ever after, as the story-books say; and papa married
poor mamma, and there was an end of it.'
Jack knew precisely how this parable was to be
applied, but Lina had told him all about Oliver Pierre-
point, and was not likely to marry that personage, as
she was coming out to join himself.
They were nearing the shore fast, and its rocky
cliffs looked steep and high.
'Van Vlaming,a Dutch navigator, visited these isles
in the year 1697,' said Stapleton,' and gave them their
names.'
' There is a strange novelty—oh, quite a charm in
looking on and treading a new and almost untrodden
THE ISLE OF ST. PAUL.
shore !' exclaimed Fanny, as their boat, the leading
one, went sheering, as the feathered oar-blades flashed
in the sunshine, into a large circular basin, or creek,
through which the tide ebbs and flows—a basin that is
supposed to be the crater of an extinct volcano, so pro-
digious is its depth, and across which there is a bar of
pebbles, whereon several seals were basking.
In this basin the water is always so hot that smoke
or steam rises from it, and the hand cannot be dipped
in it ; indeed, Vlaming records that a fish fastened on
the hook may be taken out of the cold water and here
dipped into the hot to boil.
On landing, the visitors spread in parties of two or
three over the isle of St. Paul, which is about ten
miles in length, by five in breadth, enclosed by steep
and rocky cliffs several hundred feet in height, and
covered with a stunted vegetation of scrub, coarse
grass, and ferns. Some of the ladies betook them to
collecting specimens of the latter, and to sketching,
while the gentlemen went in search of game with their
guns, and the reports of rifle-shots were speedily heard
on every hand, sending the scared sea-birds in vast
flights from their eyries; and after Jack had knocked
over a wild hog or two, he gave his gun to Stapleton,
who was a keen sportsman, and felt himself impelled
—by force of habit, perhaps—to become the escort of
206
JACK CHALONER.
Miss Arnaud, whom the novelty of the situation had
put in the highest spirits, with a great desire to wander
inland and see all that was to be seen; so she scrambled
about among the rocks, availing herself of his arm or
his hand—which she preferred—as occasion offered or
required.
His confidences with her did not end on the night
of the ball, hence, when she said :
'This is the 16th of the month—you must help me
to write all about this island in my diary,' he said:
' The 16th—by this time Lina Capel will have sailed
from Southampton. I told you she was coming out.'
' Where to ?'
' New Zealand.'
' New Zealand ! For what purpose ?' asked Fanny,
with a decided curl of her lip.
'To be married to me—I told you that we are en-
gaged,' said Jack grimly.
Fanny laughed softly, and said,
' So Lina is coming out! It just requires Oliver
Pierrepoint to get on the staff, or something of that
kind, and come out in the same ship, to complete the
game of complications and cross-purposes.'
f More unlikely things have happened,' replied Jack
savagely, for we must admit that though by the com-
munications of Fanny his affection for Lina had been
THE ISLE OF ST. PAUL.
207
wounded at first, his pride was roused latterly, and his
jealousy fired anew. ' Happen what may/ he added,
' I know what my duty to Lina is.'
' The path of duty is often a hard one—the path of
love—never,' said Fanny, who was always equal to the
occasion ; ' but you love her very much, of course !'
'Yes,' said Jack, tugging at his moustache; 'and
absence, you know, makes the heart grow fonder.'
'Yes, but too often fonder of some one else—there
is the rub.'
' Life is too short for all this sort of thing,' thought
Jack, 'and the result of these " complications," as she
calls them, are about as troublesome to calculate as
the windage of a cannon shot!'
He had a delicate and nervous dislike of hearing
Lina's name on Fanny Arnaud's lip, but, somehow, she
often brought it up ; then, as he was leading her over
some broken rocks by the hand, he suddenly with-
drew it, on her playfully attempting to draw off his
opal ring.
' Please don't,' said he; ' that ring never leaves my
finger.'
' You have a superstition about it ?'
'Yes.'
' A superstition of the heart V
'Yes.'
20§
Jack chaloner.
' It was a most unlucky gift for her to bestow on you
—an opal.'
' Her—who ?'
' Lina—it was Lina Capel's gift, I suppose ?'
'It was—it was her farewell gift,' said Jack curtly ;
' and now let us recur to it no more.'
After this they rambled on in silence, and after a
time lost sight of all their party, as they passed through
a narrow gorge, on each side of which basaltic rocks
were piled in inextricable confusion, forming a species
of tunnel, beyond which lay a wilderness of shattered
cliffs, the wreck apparently of a mountain, that by
some convulsion of nature had been rent to fragments,
and scattered over a grassy plain.
Here Fanny seated herself, and proceeded to make a
sketch, to which Jack gave a touch from time to time ;
and they—while idling and loitering there—little
thought of all that menaced them, and that they ran
a risk of being horribly compromised for the term of
their natural lives, if indeed, their lives were not lost!
As the sketch proceeded, they were neither of them
aware that the sun was going down and the wind rising,
till the distant boom of a cannon made both start, and
seek each other's eyes inquiringly.
' By Jove—a signal from the ship!' exclaimed Jack ;
' what the deuce is up now ?'
THE ISLE OF ST. PAUL. 2o9
He ran to the summit of a rock, and an exclamation
of dismay escaped him. He saw that the two boats
had left the island and were now close to the trans-
port, which was getting up her steam, and had her
mainyard thrown in the wind, which was beginning to
blow stiffly : and it was but too evident that the watch
were only waiting to get the boats hoisted in to get
the vessel under weigh.
' My God !' exclaimed Jack ; ' we are left behind.'
4 How, have they not missed us ?' said Fanny, grow-
ing pale with consternation.
' The party in each boat must have supposed us to be
with the other.'
They knew not how close was the risk they ran of
not being missed till after darkness fell; for it was
precisely as Jack surmised.
The parties in both boats got on board, and the boats
were quickly hoisted in, and the order went to the
engine-room to get up the steam, as a half gale was
expected from the aspect of the clouds, and an offing
must be made at once.
'Trim the sail, the watch,' cried the lieutenant on
duty* walking to the break of the poop ; ' lay aft some
hands and man the starboard braces* Wheel—how
is her head ?'
' East by south, sir/
210
JACK CHALONER.
' Haul taut to windward—belay now—slacked to
leeward,' and so forth the orders went, and the trans-
port was actually under weigh, when the voice of
Colonel Arnaud was heard to exclaim :
' Where is my daughter ? she has not come off to
the ship!'
' And where is Captain Chaloner V said Stapleton
excitedly.
' By Heavens, they are left ashore!' exclaimed
several voices.
The steam was let off—the mainyard again thrown
in the wind—and a boat went off for the absent ones,
who were not a moment too soon on board, as a stiff
breeze sprang up just as the sun set.
' Had you and Miss Arnaud been left behind by a
gale—perhaps a tempest coming on,' said Annerley,
gravely and reprehensively, to Jack, of whose late
bearing he did not approve ; ' had the Unicorn been
blown to sea before we could have succoured you, the
girl would have been seriously compromised. No one
would have given you or her the benefit of any doubts.
You must have married her, by Jove ! and then how
would you have stood with poor Lina when she joined
you in the colony we are bound for ?'
' I have had a devil of an escape!' was Jack's un-
complimentary response.
And so, while Lina Capel, in accordance with their
THE ISLE OF ST. PAUL.
211
own mutual and tender arrangements, was coming out
after him, Jack Chaloner remained a prey to doubt
and dread, that none but herself could allay or ex-
plain, if explanation were possible.
Ere she could reach him, or even know the remote
land he was in, she knew that the Forty-third must
have been engaged, not once, but many times; that
Jack might be wounded, mutilated—even dead ; but
better dead than false to her, since she had proved so
tender and true to him.
If false to her in that distant land, what had she
then to look forward to ? Could she return ? never,
never ! And these terrible thoughts pervaded the mind
of the agitated girl, while the great steamship in
which she was a passenger ploughed the seas from
Southampton to Aspinwall, on the South American
coast, where she crossed the Isthmus of Panama, by
which route she was told she would save two hundred
miles of travel—not much on a route so long and
weary ; and from there the magnificent railroad con-
veyed her in two hours to the Pacific, by a route that
of old took twenty-four, by the goat-track that was
nearly impassable during the rainy season, or the
greater part of the year, and so intersected by frowning
precipices, deep ravines and swollen torrents as to be
a terrible journey indeed.
*4
212
JACK CHALONER.
On the western side of the isthmus they reached
the steamer Lesbia, and gladly saw the great American
Cordillera sink in the horizon as she ploughed the
waters of the Southern Pacific.
But as the distance between her and Jack lessened,
she began hopefully to build those castles in the air,
where they were to dwell in happiness and joy till
death parted them.
CHAPTER XXI.
' land ho !'
Hitherto we have treated, or been compelled to
treat, chiefly of love-making, real and sham— of
jealousies and flirtations; but now we are approach-
ing the scene of more exciting events—the arena of
' grim-visaged war' itself.
' If this wind holds good, with it and the steam
we shall see the land soon after sunrise to-morrow,'
was the welcome intimation made suddenly by
the lieutenant of the watch to a group of ladies on
the poop one evening; and accordingly, next morn-
ing betimes, the cry of' Land ho!' came from the
lookout at the mast-head, and, after a time the loom
of it was visible from the deck, but to experienced
eyes only, and it was seen bearing from the ship north
£LAND HO/
213
east by east, and cheerily the watch began to get the
'ground tackle' ready, by rousing the vast chain
cables out of the tier, as that place in the hold, or
between-decks, where they are stowed, is named.
The land rose quickly from the sea, for the screw
transport was now before the wind, with a great spread
of canvas set, and every yard squared.
It was the North Cape of New Zealand, and she had
to run along a hundred and sixty miles of extremely
indented and varied coast before she entered the gulf
of Hauraki, to reach her final destination. It is a re-
mote, and was then a small and barbarous, settlement;
but every eye was turned yearningly to its shore, after
the long and monotonous voyage from Southampton.
Headlands in succession were quickly passed, but
the wind varied greatly, and it was not until the fol-
lowing mid-day that the Unicorn, after making Point
Rodney, steering for the island of Tiri Matangi, and
keeping between a magnetic islet and the mainland,
sighted the bluff North Head of the Waitemata river,
on the southern shore of which the little town of Auck-
land, the seat of the Government, is situated.
The wind was fair when the North Head, two hun-
dred and eighty feet high, was rounded at half a
cable's length, and a mid-channel course led to the
anchorage in front of the town. On the high headland
14—2
2 74
JACK CHALONER.
is a signal station to communicate to Auckland the
arrival of ships in the offing.
The little capital is situated in a valley opening
from a bay; the fort and barracks are on a promon-
tory, perpendicular towards the sea on two sides east-
ward of these were the Government buildings ; on high
ground was the Government House, and rising streets
of brick and wooden houses, while immediately in the
background of all, green Mount Eden rises to the
height of five hundred feet, covered with the ruins of
native fortifications and of large pahs or villages.
While the signal flags were yet fluttering on the
North Head, the Unicorn swung at her moorings, and
the canvas was being furled, a boat shot off from the
shore, with a staff officer, to communicate with Colonels
Arnaud and Booth to make the necessary arrange-
ments for disembarking 'on the morrow, and all the
soldiers were as ' busy as bees,' packing their knap-
sacks and getting their arms from the racks and
cleats, while the staff were equally busy in preparing
their ' disembarkation returns,' in accordance with
the War-Office forms.
Long after the last of the ladies had retired for the
night did Chaloner, Stapleton, Annerley and others
linger on the poop, smoking, and speculating on the
chances of' hard knocks ' among the Maoris.
' LAND HO /
21$
The weather was glorious ; the tender light of a
newly risen moon gave far-off glimpses of the winding
Waitemata river, and fell softly and mysteriously upon
vast groves of strange trees and the dim lamps that
twinkled in the little town; shedding tremulous lines
of radii across the anchorage ; but the wondrous light
of the tropical moon was above all—' a pensive light,
by which,' as some one has written, ' fhen not alto-
gether given up to the world are apt to ponder on the
deeper enigmas of this life, and to look backward,
heaven knows with what keen regret, to youth that
has vanished and friends that are dead.5
We are doubtful if our friends of the ' Fighting
Forty-third' were quite so sentimental, Annerley
excepted. Many were speculating on what sort of
game abounded in the woods ; whether scratch races
and garrison theatricals could be organized—Fanny
Arnaud would be ' killing' in the burlesque of
' Hercules and Omphale then, cricket matches and
pic-nics could be got up, of course, and Jack Chaloner
was voted the prime fellow for improvising everything.
Dull though the place might be, they would be sure
to make their own fun out of it, ' once those devilish
Maori fellows were knocked into a cocked hat.'
'You are very silent, Annerley,' said Jack ; 'what
are you thinking about ?'
2l6
JACK CHALONER.
' Dear old England, and wondering whether I shall
find a grave here in some reedy swamp or wilderness.'
' There will neither be glory nor gain won here, any
way,' said Stapleton.
' Glory, perhaps—gain certainly not,' added Jack
Chaloner;' we have come all these thousands of miles
over the sea to fight a parcel of miserable savages,
and for the life of me I don't know what about. They
are not foemen worthy of our steel, so Scott would say.'
' Is it possible you do not know the outs and ins of
this Maori quarrel?' asked Annerley.
4 Never gave it a thought,' said Jack, lighting a fresh
cigar, while Annerley explained to him and others,
who now understood for the first time that the soil of
New Zealand belonged to certain native tribes, all
having an inborn and' hereditary right therein, as in
the case of our Highland clans, before the Scottish
kings created feudal baronies north of the Grampians.
In the year before our story opens, an attempt had
been mad§;>to purchase land for settlers, without
obtaining the consent of all the tribes who claimed it,
which provoked the natives of Taranaki (or New
Plymouth) to rise in arms to defend their hereditary
rights, and this soon led to a formidable insurrection,
and stormy debates in the Colonial General Assembly.
Our forces then were very slender, and it was sup-
4 LAND HOf
217
posed by those insular folks, who judge of all the
world by the standards of Regent Street and the Old
Bailey, that the mere landing of 200 red coats on the
beach at Taranaki would terrify the chief of the
Waitara and his people from resisting the robbing
them of their land; and it soon became evident that
all the troops we could collect would have enough to
do to defend themselves. * Englishmen,' says Swainson,
' find it difficult to believe that any coloured race can
stand before them in the field; and until they have
met the Maoris on their own ground, our officers in-
variably underrate their military prowess; but, in
the attack on Puketekaure, both officers and men,
who had just landed in the colony, found that they
had to deal with no despicable antagonists. Armed
with rifle and bayonet, and supported by artillery, our
troops were driven from the field, to the astonishment
of the insurgents themselves, by a Maori force not
more than double the number of our own troops, and
armed only with common muskets, fowling-pieces,
and double-barrelled guns.'
During this flight our troops were so hard pressed
by the assailants that our dead, and, what proved
worse, our wounded, were left to their fate—in many
instances an awful one, so many of the victors were—
as many of the New Zealanders still are—cannibals!
218
JACK CHALONER.
From that day forward all who were engaged
learned that, both in point of leadership, as well as
energy and courage, the Maoris, even in the open,
were formidable foes, and this prestige they carried
with them during the whole of the perilous cam-
paign.
The head of one officer who fell into their hands at
an early period—the brave but unfortunate Captain
Lloyd—was cut off, and sent round to all the other
tribes as a signal to rise against us, and as an
assurance of victory.
So, with the baffled assault of Puketekaure fresh in
their minds, the Forty-third, among whom were officers
and men who had served in the Kaffir and Burmese
wars, and whose ranks yet teemed with the traditionary
glories of the Peninsula, were full of ardour and
anxiety to grapple with the enemy in this already-
forgotten strife.
The hour of disembarkation came, and the troops,
with all their arms and accoutrements, and in heavy
marching order, could be seen by the crowds upon
the heights descending the ship's side.
Then boat-load after boat-load of them went off to
the shore, the men sitting closely packed, knapsack ad-
joining knapsack, their muskets between their knees,
the farewell cheers of the crew of the Unicom ming-
' Land ho /
ling with those by which they greeted the Auck-
landers.
Jack Chaloner landed with the first boat, and he
was fast getting his men into their ranks, when a
shout of alarm, mingled with some laughter, burst
from the attendant crowd.
Among the latter who watched the disembarkation
of the troops, no individual appeared to do so with
more interest—and perhaps he had good reason for
doing so—than an old native, clad in a surtout, hat
and striped trousers. His features were perfectly
aquiline, even delicately moulded ; jasper beads hung
from his ears, and his face—of a pure brown colour—
was elaborately tattooed in spiral lines, one within the
other, all with perfect uniformity, from the mouth and
eyes, on each side, round to the ears. As he was
without shirt or neck-cloth, the tattooing was also
visible on his throat and bare chest. He either fell,
by chance, or, by some evil disposed persons among
the crowd, was thrust off the high jetty into the water,
where he was in evident risk of drowning, as no one
seemed to have the least intention of assisting him.
' Let the old devil drown !' cried one.
4 A New Zealander more or less in the world won't
matter much V cried another, while the man rose and
sunk again.
220
jfACK CHA LONER.
' Shame on you all,' exclaimed Jack Chaloner,' will
you stand idly by and see the poor creature perish!'
In a moment he had off his shako, belt, sash, and
full uniform, and taking a header into the water,
brought the half-drowned creature to the surface, and
got him up the gangway, and safely ashore. For this
he was applauded by his men, and by a few of the
crowd ; but the majority seemed to think his humanity
labour lost, for their minds were full of animosity at
the time against all natives, and the name of Paora—
who had commanded them in our defeat at Pukete-
kaure, who cut off the head of Captain Lloyd, and
even now was constructing an enormous pah at
Tauranga—was in all men's mouths.
With a polite dignity of manner, the rescued man
thanked Jack, half-breathless as they both were, in a
language unintelligible to the latter, and then in broken
English. Being evidently a 'gentleman of the old
school' — a school that exists everywhere, in his
gratitude he evinced a disposition to rub his nose
against Jack's—the ancient mode of salutation, but
perceiving that the Briton shrunk with very unmis-
takable dismay from this custom, he resorted to a
shake of the hand (which is fast superseding it), and,
mingling with the crowd, disappeared. But Jack
Chaloner had not seen the last of his tattooed friend.
1LAND HO /
221
He shook himself, like a Newfoundland dog, and
resumed his regimentals and place at the head of his
company, in such haste that a minute elapsed before
he became aware that a pair of bright eyes were bent
on his, an oily tongue was sweetly complimenting, and
a pretty hand invited his farewell clasp.
'Good-bye, Captain Chaloner—good-bye, Jack,'in a
lower voice, added Fanny Arnaud.
' Good-bye.'
' Or is it only an revoir ? I suppose we shall think
of the voyage very often.'
' I cannot doubt it; believe me, I shall think very
often of you,' replied Jack gallantly.
' Oh, Jack ! I do believe you are sorry to leave me
at last!'
' I do like you very much,' said he, not knowing
what was coming next,' but—but—as for '
' There ! good-bye—papa is beckoning,' interrupted
Fanny sharply ; and biting her scarlet lips with anger
to find that she had been taking the initiative, and
done so in vain, she swept away, still thinking that,
but for the image of Lina Capel, they might have
parted on different terms.
Well, thought Jack, if she had permitted herself to
be too much impressed by him—which he did not
believe—that was her look-out; his conscience was
222
JACK CHALONER.
easy on the subject. He didn't mean anything—never
did.
Fanny was to accompany her father to his quarters
in Government House; Jack's duty lay at the barracks,
so for days she knew they should see nothing of each
other ; and before they met again events had made
considerable progress with reference to them and their
surroundings.
Soon after this the regiment marched into the
humble barrack within the earthen fort, drums beat-
ing, bayonets fixed, and colours flying, the transport
dipping her ensign there as the last section vanished
between the palisaded gates.
So the long voyage had ended, and Fanny's chances
seemed all to have come to nothing. Jack had not
thrown Lina over and proposed, and neither had Harry
Stapleton, who had begun to view his friend as a
species of dog-in-the-manger.
4 She is a deuced fine girl, Harry,' said Jack, over a
stiff glass of brandy and water in the mess-room ; 4 and
though I am rather fond of her, I should never think of
falling in love with her, so don't dread a rival in me, old
fellow.'
DOUBT AND GRIEF,
223
CHAPTER XXII.
doubt and grief.
During one of the days that followed their landing in
the North Island, Jack's feelings received a fillip, or
shock, when he perceived Annerley, who was smoking
in his quarters with him, suddenly grow pale, and,
letting fall a newspaper—the Auckland Gazette—he
was perusing, pick it up, and turn to a paragraph
therein.
4 My God ! if it should be so !' exclaimed Annerley,
4 If what should be ?'
4 Lina, poor girl V
4 What do you mean ?' asked Jack, starting up.
4 A ship which came in last night reports having
picked up a boat with44 Steamship Lcsbia " painted on
its stern, floating among a quantity of wreckage, near
south latitude 40°. The Lesbia was the name of Lina's
steamer.'
Jack grew deadly pale, and, with some sudden emo-
tions of compunction and alarm, read in hot haste the
paragraph thrice.
4 Don't think of it for a moment, Annerley,' said he ;
4 there must be many vessels named the Lesbia
" 4 But this boat has belonged to a steamer ; it was
picked up among wreckage, and in the direct route a
224
JACK CHALONER.
vessel takes from Panama to this dreary part of the
world.'
There might have been no wreck in the matter; the
boat might have belonged to some other Lesbia> or,
even if to Lina's vessel, might have got adrift, or been
carried away at sea ; but the two friends found ample
food for reflection, commiseration, and much conver-
sation, in thinking over all the pros and cons of a pro-
bable catastrophe, till the approaching hour of strife
compelled them to give some of their thoughts else-
where.
The news of our disaster at the hands of Paora
caused the people at home to blame, most unjustly,
Sir Duncan Cameron, the General commanding, a dis-
tinguished officer who had served in the Eastern cam-
paign, and commanded the Black Watch at the battle
of the Alma, the Highland Brigade at the battle of
Balaclava, at Kertch and Sebastopol, where he com-
manded in the outworks ; yet it is undeniable that no
attempt was made by the authorities, civil or military,
to prevent the native insurgents from erecting a pah
at Tauranga, where for weeks the work went on with-
out interruption.
It was of great strength, and constructed on a
narrow slip of land which connects the peninsula of Te
Papa with the coast; hence, as this isthmus became,
DOUBT AND GRIEF.
225
as it were, the avenue to the whole district, it was
named the Gate Pah. It was stronglygarrisoned by the
men of Paora, and others, and on a morning in the
middle of April, the ' Fighting Forty-third ' and other
troops were ordered to take the field against it.
Day had not yet dawned, and no morning bugle had
blown as yet, and Jack Chaloner—though all had sat
late at the mess having a ' farewell drink'—was up
betimes, dressed, accoutred, and inditing letters to
Lina and a friend or two at home by candle-light in
his somewhat dingy quarters, as it was impossible to
foresee what might happen now, or with how little of
life and much of death a day might be fraught, when
the usually calm and placid Piercy Annerley burst
upon him with his face expressive of the utmost ex-
citement, arresting him in the act of just taking a cup
of hot coffee, which his soldier-servant, buckled up in
heavy marching order, had dashed with a soupqon of
brandy.
' Lina Capel's ship !' exclaimed Annerley.
' What of it ?' asked Jack, changing colour, as he re-
membered the paragraph about the drifting boat and
the wreckage.
£ She is coming round the North Head and standing
in for the anchorage ; the watch on deck have fired a
gun and burned a blue light. Now, look alive, Jack,
226
JACK CHALONER.
we'll get a boat and go off to her. The regiment does
not fall in for two hours yet.'
' Come along, then !'
The morning was yet dark when they quitted the
barracks and fort, but the faint light of the coming day
threw forward in dark outline the isle of Rangetoto, a
mass of volcanic scoriae, that rises to the altitude of a
thousand feet eastward of the bay, and is interspersed
with thick, low woods.
A blue light just dying out amid the gloom indicated
the exact locality of the Lesbia, and then, as their boat
shot off from the shore, Jack could see the outline of
the great ship, gliding quietly and mysteriously, as it
were, to her anchorage, and as he looked at her swing-
ing round at her moorings, it seemed strange to think
that Lina was there—so near him, and alone—perhaps
the only woman he ever truly loved, and for whom he
would have spilled his blood as freely as water—once;
would he do so now, after all Fanny's innuendoes ?
Jack felt he had a terrible part to act. One moment
he longed to clasp Lina to his heart, and the next he
almost wished her at home again in England ; yet, to
do him justice, we must admit that an iota of love for
Fanny Arnaud had no place in his heart.
' I wish the Lesbia had come sooner,' said Annerley;
' the bugle will sound in two hours.'
DOUBT AND GRIEF.
227
4 In two hours—thank God !' muttered Jack, under
his moustache.
'You say this, with Lina almost within arm's
length of you ?' exclaimed Annerley, angrily and re-
proachfully.
' What more can I say—to fight those Maori fellows
is the best work for me now. I have lived my life,
you see,' said Jack bitterly.
' Lived your life ? I don't know what the devil has
come to you, Jack Chaloner,' said Annerley, who had
disapproved of much that he had seen, and more that
he suspected, during the voyage.
The boat was soon pulled alongside, and the cry of
' What ship is that ?' was promptly responded to by
the name ' LesbiaJ Jack looked up, and by the quickly
dawning morning light saw several male and female
figures on the poop, and his heart quickened with
growing agitation,, He heard the order given to
' cast them a painter,' as the boat was bumped against
the ship's side, amid a good deal of shouting, jabbering
and confusion, for there were mulattos and lascars
among the crew of the Pacific steamer. His shako
was nearly knocked off by the rope that was flung
overboard, and he himself was nearly tossed into the
water ; but anon a voice cried, ' Hand the man-ropes,'
and in a minute more he was pulling himself, with
15
228
JACK CUA LONER.
considerable muscular exertion, up the side-ladder of
the Lesbia, followed by Annerley, whom he would,
rather, at that particular juncture, have been without.
At the cabin door, or break of the poop, stood a
young lady in deep mourning, her pale face looking
paler in the early light. .
' Lina !' cried Annerley, and in a moment she was
in the arms of Jack, who kissed her twice tenderly
enough, and then resigned her to her brother-in-law,
but retaining her hand, nevertheless^ while the group
close by and overhead prevented—to Jack's infinite
relief — more of a scene, and the cabin, to which
they withdrew,was very quiet just then, as the coloured
stewards only were busy at the tables and side lockers
arranging tea-cups and so forth for breakfast.
' This is Doctor Chancel, the Vicar of Auckland/
said Lina nervously, introducing a tall burly man,
clerical in costume and aspect, 'and Mrs. Chancel.
They have been like father and mother to me on the
way out, Jack/
Chaloner, with more politeness than warmth,
thanked them for their care of her, while the Vicar and
his wife eyed Jack approvingly; but Annerley
thought his manner strange, and poor Lina evidently
felt that it was so.
' And Amy—dear little Amy ?' said he,
doubt and grief.
229
* Is well, and so happy !'
'And Jocelyn Vane ?'
'Well and happy too—jolly as ever.'
' An awful risk they ran in that boating business—
providential escape they had 1'
' Providential, indeed !'
' A yacht picked them up.'
' Yes,' replied Lina, and there was something of
suppressed agony in her voice, as she dared utter no
more than that monosyllable. She appeared quite
composed,but her heart was beating wildly with appre-
hension, while Jack's face was inscrutable. It seemed
as if he and she were treading' upon the verge of some
conversational abyss—some dangerous chasm, into
whose depths they might at any moment descend with
a sudden plunge,' and this was the meeting to which
both had looked forward !
' How did you stand the voyage ?' asked Jack, after
a pause.
' Very well, Jack, but counting every hour of it, and
every mile too,' and as she spoke the true-hearted,
loving, and unselfish Lina looked up at him timidly
and yearningly.
'You have come at a most unfortunate time—
darling,' said Jack, and the term of endearment seemed
somehow to escape his lips with a jerk.
15—2
230
JACK CHALO NEK
' Unfortunate—how ?'
' In two hours—less now—the regiment goes to the
front.'
' To the front ?' repeated Lina, failing to understand
him.
'Well, to attack the Maoris at Tauranga.'
' Oh, Jack! oh, Jack !' she exclaimed, with anguish
in her voice and face,' and—and—when you return ?'
' We shall see each other, of course, again/ said he,
making such an effort to appear calm that his
manner seemed quite stolid, and her heart seemed to
die within her, and she regarded him questioningly and
anxiously, while a haggard expression stole over her
poor little face.
In fact, pain, mentally, had become habitual to her
for some time past, and this was now the fore-
shadowing, the prophetic agony, of some dire event
about to happen.
To be more alone, they went on deck together, but
neither could speak of what was nearest their hearts ;
a curtain seemed to have fallen between them. Their
conversation was disjointed, and there ensued awkward
silences, and each glanced furtively at the other ; and
this was the hour to which both had whilom looked
forward so lovingly and so passionately.
The sun was now up in his glory, bathing each pro-
DOUBT AND GRIEF.
231
montory with gold, and tinting with fire the waves that
rolled around them ; but Lina, as she looked about
her, became horribly depressed ; even the joy and
hope—for there was still much of hope in her heart—of
being with Jack never to part from him again, could
not rouse her drooping spirits.
To look upon the ' rising town' of Auckland as it
was then, was something very different from the
Brighton she had left ; and the colony of which it was
the capital was, in her mind, only associated with
the butchery of Captain Cook, and with tattooed
cannibals.
Jack's manner, or want of it, crushed her. She was
all unaware that he knew aught of Pierrepoint's visits
and so forth, and simply connected it with some
change in himself.
Fanny Arnaud—of whom he never spoke, and to
whose existence he never referred, in itself a suspicious
circumstance—had been for months in the same ship
with him; this fact, and the whole involvements at
Brighton, looked so like fatality to poor Lina, that even
while standing there by Jack's side, she felt inclined
to bow her beautiful head to fate, and let the black
waves of sorrow flow over it.
She heard Jack speaking from time to time, but
scarcely knew what he was saying.
232
JACK CHALONER.
' Is each of us for life—I certainly for one,' she
thought,' to carry the burden of a life-long regret—the
regret of having loved each other unwisely ?'
Though she could little know it, the same identical
reflection was occurring to the mind of Jack Chaloner.
All the fears, suspicions, and anticipations of evil
that had daily and nightly tortured her heart, during
the long, long journey by sea, after the reception of
Jack's last letter, seemed to be terribly realized now;
her senses seemed on the point of forsaking her as
a conviction, which she cared not to put in words,
like a great surge of sorrow seemed to pass through
her tender heart.
With Jack—with him at last—and this was the only
result! how long had her glad thought been that when
he was with her, and she with him, nothing could harm
her ; and now, oh, Heaven ! his love was lost to her,
and he was on the eve of going to battle with another's
image in his heart!
Amid the bustle that prevailed around them, of so
many persons preparing to go ashore, the forlorn ex-
pression of her sweet pale face suddenly struck Jack,
and he took both her hands caressingly in his, and
thus it was that, with a quivering lip, and a voice full
of tears, she said :
' I feaiHt is pity, not love, you give me, Jack.'
Doubt and grief.
233
' Lina!' he exclaimed, in a tone of expostulation ;
but, at that moment, the notes of the distant bugles
sounding the ' assembly' came floating over the water
from the fort; and Annerley came hurriedly up to say
they ' had not a moment to lose, and must go ashore
at once.'
So Jack was compelled to resign her to the care of
Mrs. Chancel, drop into his boat and shove off for the
shore; but he expected to see her again, as all the
passengers—or the most of them—were about to land
and witness the departure of the Forty-third, and
Annerley's detachment of the Fifty-seventh, or ' Old
Diehards.'
CHAPTER XXIII.
GOING TO THE FRONT.
All the population of Auckland, and the garrison
thereof turned out to witness the departure of the
troops; and among the spectators of course came
Fanny Arnaud, on horseback, and she made quite a
feature amid the Governor's staff; and—thanks to
her—it spread like wildfire, even then, that the beauti-
ful, pale, and distinguished-looking girl who had come
out in charge of the Vicar and Mrs. Chancel was the
fiancee of the handsome Jack Chaloner : and poor Lina,
who clung to Dr. Chancel's arm amid the crowd, found
234
JACK CHALONER.
herself in that trying hour the observed of many an
eye while the regiment was falling in, so small and
petty was the Auckland of that time.
The brilliant spectacle of the parading troops
seemed to her eyes like an unreal phantasmagoria of
some fatal kind in which Jack and his life were mys-
teriously involved ; but she had not a tear now, for
the fountain of tears seemed dry.
How many months of long, long separate days,
every hour of which had seemed to strengthen her
love for Jack, had passed ! January, February, March,
and April! Oh, how long the time had seemed since
she left Brighton, looked last on pleasant Oakwood
Priory and Amy's tear-stained face!—how many weeks
and days had dragged on ; how long and weary they
had seemed !—and now she would rather go through
them all again with hope than meet a reality like this.
But was it not better to know the bitter worst at
once—that nothing more could be known—and now,
was she to go home again, or die here ?
Better die if she could.
And, meanwhile, what were Jack's thoughts ?
Better to be fighting the Maoris — better anything
than to be idle, and thinking the same galling thoughts
over and over again with maddening repetition. To
be the pis alter for Pierrepoint, indeed !
GOING TO THE FRONT.
Anger mingled with his regret, but as yet Lina felt
the latter only.
' Oh heaven !' she wailed in her heart ; 1 after com-
ing here on the strength of, and a belief in, his promises
—after compromising myself with my friends and
society—after coming out here, over half the world,
am I to find him changed, false—or the victim of
another gust of jealousy ?' she mentally added, as
she thought of Oliver Pierrepoint. 'No father—no
mother—no guide or friend, save poor Annerley,
and a day may deprive me of him, and him of
life!'
' Lina, dear, welcome to Auckland ; how well you
look after your voyage,' exclaimed Fanny, approach-
ing as if she had just then seen her for the first time,
and stooping from her saddle, she suddenly presented
her hand to the pale girl, whom she was rather pleased
to see looking so 2'//, and whom she at once over-
whelmed with questions about Brighton, and with
chit-chat concerning all whom they mutually knew
there ; and Lina replied mechanically, with a sicken-
ing and recoiling heart, to this coquette so bright
looking, so beautiful and so gay ; and, certes, there
was no love lost between them.
And now a flush of feminine anger filled her heart,
though her cheek grew pale at the thought of all she
JACK CHALONER.
too probably owed to Fanny, while a sickening sense,
of wrong and disappointment blended with it.
What coil had this artful girl cast around Jack ?
In what fashion had she utilized her time during their
mutual voyage, and the opportunities that voyage
afforded ? So genuine indignation mingled with Lina's
grief, especially when she saw Fanny was so bright, so
animated and, in triumph apparently, looking her best.
When the inspection commenced, and the staff rode
along the line of the regiment, she rode with it,
and stooping from her horse, checked its bridle for a
moment, and talked to J ack, laughingly and lightly
too, though he was going to face certain peril; while
poor Lina stood among the crowd of pedestrians,
clinging to the Vicar's arm, and feeling that—worn
with the effects of her recent voyage and her many
anxieties—she must be the picture of misery in mind
and body.
With Lina, love was not a violent passion, but a
sweet and profound affection. She had—till his fatal
ocean letter came, after passing the Cape—looked
joyfully forward to her re-union with Jack and the
time of their marriage. Alas! the latter seemed now
a remote contingency indeed.
Meanwhile, the battalion was wheeled back into
open column; Colonel Booth shook hands with the
GOING TO THE ERONT.
Governor and some other officers, the band struck up,
and by sections from the right of companies the
regiment began its departure amid the cheers of the
throng, followed by Annerley's detachment of the
Fifty-seventh.
The first crash of the brass drums made Lina's over-
charged heart rebound ; still more did Jack Chaloner's
long and earnest backward glance, and the farewell
wave of his sword to her, make it leap, for Jack was
marching on with a firm step and upright bearing,
though his honest and tender heart was as heavy as
lead.
The adieu was to her and not to Fanny ; she was
sure of that, but it seemed certain that they had met
but to part again, and on worse terms than before;
and she recalled the aphorism that—
" They live too long, who happiness outlive."
Her heart beat responsive to the tap of the drums, and
when their sound died away fn the distance the light
of heaven seemed to pass away from her, for her
whole soul went with Jack and the regiment.
She watched the latter so long as a vestige of it was
in sight, nor was it till the last sound of the drums
had passed completely away, and the last bayonets
flashed their farewell gleam in the sunshine, that she
turned sadly aside to her temporary home at the vicar-
23B
'JACK CHA LONER.
age, feeling her grief enhanced by the bitter knowledge
that Fanny Arnaud, being mounted, had accompanied
the Forty-third some miles on its way, and conse-
quently would see the last of Jack-—Jack, who had
not even promised to write to her.
A prey to intense mortification, with a sense of un-
merited humiliation, Lina remained at the vicarage,
and was beginning to con over her plans for a return
to England, when hope came again to her heart in a
hastily-written letter to her from Jack—a letter written
during a halt on the march, in the valley of the Waipa
river—and in which there was a little of his old
tenderness expressed; so Lina wept as she kissed it
and read it again and again.
As yet they had seen nothing of the enemy, he
mentioned ; but the regiment had not yet crossed the
borders of Taranaki, where the mass of the insurgent
Maories were in arms under the terrible Paora ; but
a great force of all arms was now ' going to the front,'
and a short and sharp reckoning would soon be made
with them.
On re-reading the letter, however, it became pain-
fully apparent to Lina that a tone more of pity than
of love pervaded it, and that it did not contain one
word expressive of hope or joy for their future; it
seemed to speak of a dull blankness of existence—an
emptiness, or hopelessness, very strange for Jack.
l/na's tormentor.
239
CHAPTER XXIV.
lina's tormentor.
The worthy Vicar and Mrs. Chancel, both easy-going
and very unromantic personages, knew not what to
think of Lina Capel's gloomy spirit now ; it was more
depressed than it had been even during the voyage
out; but both began to attribute it, not unnaturally,
to Captain Chaloner's departure to the immediate
scene of strife with a barbarous enemy.
Mrs. Chancel thought she would enlist Lina in the
interests of her Dorcas work, and the well-meaning
Vicar strove to do so, by drawing her attention to the
new features of the strange land she had come to, and
was never tired of expatiating on the strong evidences
that existed of a vast native population having once
existed in the New Zealand Isles.
As a proof of this, he referred to the sacred burial
mounds, the evidence of great battles and warlike
feuds, evincing ' that in all countries, whether of classic
renown, or of the untutored savage, human passions
are the same, and that time deals equally with all.
Here, in this far distant and comparatively unknown
region, has existed for ages the same thirst for glory,
the same attempts for aggrandisement of territories,
the same defences and stratagems of war, the same
240
JACK CHALONER.
respect and honour due to the tombs of the brave, as
in the most polished and civilized nations ; and the
traveller, while he feels surprise, cannot but also be
impressed by corresponding emotions as when visiting
similar spots found in the annals of more enlightened
kingdoms.'
ButLina,who viewed the land to which she had come
as simply a land of cannibalism, listened to the Vicar's
quotations and platitudes wearily and in silence.
When Jack was gone from her again, after having
seen him for two hours—two hours only! existence
seemed a greater blank than it had been during that
long voyage, which was now a thing of the past; and
amid that blank stood darkly and grimly out the perils
he was to encounter.
How long would the storming of the pah take—and
what was a pah ? Would the war end with that, or
be a protracted affair ? All people there were inclined
to take the latter view.
Would he be back on Thursday, Friday, or Satur-
day ? How many day®, hours and minutes were to
elapse again ere she should hear his voice, and learn
for good or evil what he meant, and whether he loved
her or not ?
Times th£re were when a strange feeling came over
her, that she could not explain even to herself, but it
lina's tormentor.
241
was a kind of foreboding that she might see Jack no
more; and at these times to think of him seemed like
thinking of the dead.
Ere Lina heard of Jack again, a little light—some
of it a false one—was to be thrown on his apparently
inexplicable conduct.
Two or three days after his regiment marched from
Auckland, Fanny Arnaud, on the plea of being c an
old friend of Miss Capel's,' rode over to the vicarage
with pretended kindness of manner, though secretly
she felt only annoyance, jealousy, and spite at the
arrival of Lina in that part of the world.
Throwing up the veil of her riding-hat, she kissed
her very effusively, as usual, on both cheeks, and it
was impossible to deny that Fanny, in her well-fitting
dark green habit and yellow gauntlets, looked very
bright, handsome, and dashing,' with her gathered
skirt in one hand and her jewelled switch in the
other.
' I thought you would like to see me, dear/ said she,
'as I rode with the 43rd as far as the head ofManukao
Harbour.'
' How far is that ?'
' About ten miles from Auckland ; and then I bade
good-bye to Jack—to Captain Chaloner,' she added,
with the faintest approach to a blush. ' He seemed
242
JACK CHALONER.
rather sad to see the last of me—as an old friend, of
course.'
'You rode ten miles without an escort ?' said Lina
coldly.
'Ohno—I had papa's aide-de-camp,young Cheveley,
of the 68th Light Infantry.'
' Miss Arnaud '
' My name is Fanny ; I am an old friend surely, so
don't Miss Arnaud me. I have vanity enough to
think my name a pretty one;' and the speaker laughed
merrily, but not innocently. c Fanny sounds more
natural, more familiar and affectionate. Well, what
were you going to say ?'
' I have forgotten,' replied Lina, wearily and absently.
' I don't dislike being called Fanny even by gentle-
men.'
' Indeed ! I should cut dead any man who dared
to call me Lina.'
' There are some exceptions, surely ?'
' Very few,' replied Lina, colouring as she thought of
Chaloner, Vane and Annerley.
'Jack Chaloner soon learned to call me Fanny on
the voyage out; but people are thrown so much
together on board of ship—quite like one family, you
know. Don't you think Harry Stapleton, of the 43 rd,
a fine-looking fellow ?'
ltna's tormentor.
h3
' I scarcely remarked him; he is, I know, a very
good fellow, and a great friend of Captain Chaloner.'
' I know that he is in love with me,' was the confi-
dent assertion of Fanny.
4 Indeed ; but has he said so ?'
' Oh no ; but I have read it in his eyes and manner.
I have looked for a declaration daily, before he was
compelled to go to the front; and I believe he would
have made it long before this but for—but for '
' But for what ?' asked Lina stiffly.
'Dread of Jack Chaloner.'
' Dread of Captain Chaloner—why ?'
' He was so—so attentive to me on the way out.'
Lina had but one thought at this reply. ' How dare
this bold girl say such things to me /'
' Has Captain Chaloner made you a proposal, Miss
Arnaud ?' she asked categorically.
' No—not yet.'
' Not yet!'
' And if he does, what then ? He is a free man, as
you yourself told me.'
' When ?'
' The day that Pierrepoint called on you.'
Lina had not forgotten her denial to Fanny Arnaud;
but she bit her nether Hp and played nervously with
her fan.
16
244
JACK CHALONER.
' Oh no, he has not proposed,' continued the visitor
laughingly ; ' but I am sure he likes me a little—oh,
far more than a little, the dear fellow !'
Stung by the girl's confident manner, arid oppressed
by the keen sense of a terrible change in Jack's manner
to herself, the gentle Lina could with difficulty restrain
her tears, as she said in an uncertain voice:
' If I denied my engagement to you, it was because
you had no right to ask about it; and so far from
being a friend of either of us, Miss Arnaud, I shrewdly
suspect you have made some mischief between us.'
• If mischief has been made, I had no hand in the
matter,' said Fanny, looking down, and flicking a spot
from her skirt with her riding switch.
'Who then?'
.'Yourself.'
' I ?' exclaimed Lina incredulously.
'Yes, you, Lina. You now lead me to infer that
you are engaged to Captain Chaloner, though you
denied it to me, as he knows, on the day that Captain
Pierrepoint called, a visit of so-called condolence which
he knows too, and of others that have followed it, after
the affair of the yacht.'
As this cruel girl spoke, Lina felt a spasm of pain
in her heart; yet she asked steadily,
' And who was his informant of all this ?'
lina's tormentor.
245
' I was,' replied Fanny, her dark-blue eyes sparkling
with pitiless triumph.
' May God forgive you—I never shall! All his
coldness to me is accounted for now !' she added in a
low voice, as if to herself.
' He has been cold ?' said Fanny, attempting to take
the crushed girl's hand, but the latter snatched it away.
' Cruelly so,' replied Lina, becoming careless of what
she admitted, so extreme was her sense of misery at
mistakes which seemed unexplainable.
'Why not take the initiative and give Captain
Chaloner his congt, ?'
' To suit your further plans, Miss Arnaud ? No—
the wrong, if wrong is to be done, may come from him.'
'As you please/ said Fanny, adjusting her tight
yellow gauntlets ; 'to me all this jealousy seems stagey,
like a bit of a play or romance.'
' There is more romance in real life, Miss Arnaud,
than girls such as you wot of.'
'Oh yes—Jack, like Captain Pierrepoint—'began
Fanny spitefully, as she rose to go.
' What do you know of Captain Pierrepoint ?' asked
Lina, interrupting her haughtily.
' Much, by reputation.'
' Well, and he, like Captain Chaloner ?'
' Can say sweet things without meaning them, flatter
16—2
246
JACK CHALONER.
a girl by pretty caressing ways and speeches, and
laugh at her simplicity for believing them—and now,
good-bye, dear/ she added, as Lina rang the bell
and gave her hand slightly to her tormentor, who
made no attempt to salute her white cheek now; and,
as Fanny swept away, there was an expression, half
scornful, half triumphant, on her full and finely-
moulded lips.
Lina gave orders that when this visitor called in
future she 'was not at home,' and then sat long im-
mersed in new and terrible thoughts after Fanny's de-
parture. She saw it all now—all that it was hopeless
and even degrading to explain to Jack Chaloner.
Pierrepoint now had been the means with which the
artful girl had played her trump card with Jack; and
it was impossible now to know how much or how little
had been said, or what had been said at all.
The deduction to be drawn was, that under these
influences, if he had not learned to forget her, he had
soon transferred his love to another—and that other
was Fanny Arnaud ! Tear followed tear now, till they
became a shower. Alas ! Lina and grief had long
been intimate friends !—yea, ever since the death of
Constance ; and now she envied the latter, lying in
her quiet grave at home in dear old England—in that
sweet old Sussex churchyard so far, far away !
lina's tormentor.
247
Jack was gone from her again, witli his heart full of
bitterness against her, after that most transient meet-
ing, and no more letters came to her, and darker
seemed to settle the gloom around her.
She wrote Amy a carefully-worded letter to prepare
her and Vane for the change she began to find neces-
sary in her own plans ; and to the end that her affec-
tionate little sister and Vane might not be surprised if
she joined them at Oakhurst Priory or somewhere else
in the course of a few months—a letter which occa-
sioned infinite astonishment, consternation, and dis-
tress, when it arrived at its destination.
Jack's last letter apart—a letter written on the line
of march, she had no doubt, in a mere spirit of pity
for her; and the effect of Fanny's communications were
such that very soon she made up her mind to go home.
But, on reflection, she resolved to avoid Brighton,
lest the gossiping world there, knowing that she
had gone to the Antipodes to fulfil a matrimonial en-
gagement, should stigmatize her as 'returned goods.'
She came fully to the conclusion of conferring with
Mrs. Chancel and the Vicar on the subject, and then
leaving them, with Jack, for ever—and leaving the
field open to Fanny Arnaud or anyone else; and she
pictured to herself what he might think or feel when
he returned to Auckland and found her gone I
248
JACK CHALONER.
But soon after this there came flying rumours to the
little capital of the colony that the Gate Pah had been
invested and attacked, with what result none knew,
but that our losses in officers and men were more than
usually severe, indeed.
'Oh, if Jack should fall in this miserable contest—
die believing that I have been false to him, and all by
the machinations of that heartless girl!' thought Lina.
CHAPTER XXV,
the gate pah of tauranga.
Under Paora and other chiefs the New Zealanders
were in great force at the pah of Tauranga, which
was unusually strong in construction, being formed
of palisades and earthworks. 'These pahs in the
open country,' reported the Colonel of our Engineers
to Sir Duncan Cameron, ' will invariably be left on
the approach of a hostile force. Capture of the pah,'
he added,' may be calculated upon confidently with
little loss ; but capture of the defenders, with the ex-
perience already gained, will, never be effected.'
The Gate Pah, as it was called, was built, as we have
stated, on the narrow isthmus that connects the penin-
sula of Te Papa with the mainland. On both its
flanks were swamps extending to the water, so that it
was impossible for the troops to attempt to turn thQ
THE GATE PAH OF TAURANGA. 249
position or by any way to get into the interior except
by storming the whole place.
On the 27th of April, the troops under Sir Duncan
Cameron, consisting of the 43rd and 68th Light In-
fantry (the latter originally, in 1758, the 2nd Battalion
of the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers), with a flying
column made up of detachments from the 14th, 65th,
and 70th Regiments, and a Naval Brigade of two
hundred seamen, under Captains Hay and Hamilton,
R.N., from the war ships off the coast, made prepara-
tions to attack the insurgents in the Gate Pah.
The General and his staff had been in front of the
place for some days before, reconnoitring and observ-
ing the ground whereon to plant his artillery, which
consisted of eleven Armstrong guns, six mortars, and
two howitzers, while the only weapons possessed by
the enemy were their muskets and tomahawks ; and
through his field-glass Jack Chaloner could see them
swarming and gesticulating wildly, in brown hordes,
tattooed, on the ramparts of the pah, naked, or clad
only in their native dress, which is made of the flax
so plentifully produced in the country, and which is
not woven, but knotted in a peculiar manner. This
garment, five feet in length and four feet in breadth, is
fastened round the shoulders by the two corners, and
round the middle by a girdle.
250
JACK CHALONER.
Ready for conflict, many of them had dispensed
with even this scanty covering, and with their tattooed
visages, shining teeth and eyes, their scrubby heads
of hair, and wild antics, they seemed to European eyes
like troops of infernal fiends, as the sun went down
into the sea.
The night was dark and lowering, and while the
68th Light Infantry and a detachment of seamen, by
order of Sir Duncan Cameron, stole softly, silently,
and in spectral fashion through one of the swamps,
and, unknown to the insurgents, obtained a position
in rear of the pah, to cut off all retreat, the rest of the
troops remained with arms piled, and out of range of
musketry.
Jack Chaloner, Stapleton, Annerley, and another
officer, named Blake, a little way apart from their
men, were seated at a place where the water-melons
grew wild amid the grass, under the shadows of the
banana and mango trees, having a little improvised
supper—a farewell feast it might prove to some of
them—but soldiers never think of such things; and
after their first day's march the tinned ham, tongue
and chicken, with plenty of brandy and water, proved
very acceptable.
' We have polished off one bottle of cognac,' said
Blake of the 43rd, who had served in all the battles of
THE GATE PAH OF TAURANGA. 25r
the Crimea; 'pass the screw, Jack, I must uncork
another—thanks.'
' Eat, drink and be merry, lads,' said Chaloner,
' enjoy all you can in the present, without asking for
or expecting anything in the future.'
'What would the chaplain say to this doctrine, Jack?'
asked Annerley ; ' I, for one, always make the best of
the present, and hope a great deal in the future.'
'Why so cynical, Jack?' exclaimed Stapleton.
' What the deuce has come to you of late ?'
But though his thoughts were all of Lina, he could
give no utterance to them there.
' I hope la belle Arnaud, that most facile and fasci-
nating of young ladies, is not at the bottom of your
troubles,' said Blake, as he applied himself to the
brandy-pawnee.
Jack laughed grimly ; but the fair Fanny had more
to do with them than he then knew. The expression
of his face, however, as seen by a stable lantern, that
cast a kind of glowworm radiance over the viands
that were spread upon the grass, attracted the atten-
tion of Blake, who said laughingly :
'Jack, old man, what the deuce is, and has been,
the matter with you for some time past ?'
' Matter—what do you mean ?' asked Chaloner,
with annoyance in his tone,
2S2 jack chaloner.
* You are not looking well—have you been ill ?'
' 111—never was better in my life !' said Jack testily.
' But that I know my man, and knew him in India,
I would say that Jack Chaloner, was scared by these
yelling devils of Maories. There is something wrong,
Jack.'
' There is, Blake—but something that neither sym-
pathy nor friendship can cure.'
4 Don't say that,' said Annerley, with some severity
of tone, as he resented the turn his affairs with Lin a
had taken.
' I would wager a pot of money it is all about a
girl,' persisted Blake.
' Whatever it is about,' said Chaloner, ' you may be
assured of this—that I feel strong as if made of iron,
and as reckless of events to come as if I had lost my
last penny on the St. Leger!'
' There go the guns into position,' said Blake ; and
the clatter of the wheels, rammers, sponges, and
buckets was heard, as they were turned with their
mufczles to the pah, unlimbered, the horses untraced,
and taken to the rear.
With all his vaunted recklessness about the future,
.Jack was anxious to take Annerley into his con-
fidence. It was unlikely that both might be killed,
and if he fell, he should like him to be aware of his
THE GATE PAH OF TAURANGA.
e
253
real or imaginary cause of complaint against Lina
Capel; but just as he had made up his mind about
this, the General sent his aide-de-camp for Annerley,
concerning some special duty, and the chance was
missed ; so, muffled in a great coat, with his sword-
hilt and revolver under his head for a pillow, Jack
strove to get a nap ere the serious work of the
morrow began.
At half-past seven on the morning of the 28th, the
whole force got under arms, and at that time the
guns opened on the pah, and with terrible precision
continued to pour shot and shell into it, without a
moment's intermission, until four o'clock in the after-
noon ; and during that process a number of Maories,
who had been outside the fortress, were seen to creep
into it by a hole like a common drain, on all fours,
dragging their muskets after them.
The booming of the artillery woke the echoes of
the mountains, and the groves of the giant kauri
trees (that grow sometimes to the height of one
hundred feet before the branches spread forth), scaring
the wild hogs and goats, and silencing the melody of
the beautiful birds that abound in all the woods of
New Zealand, and which Pollock declares to be
superior to all the 4 wild melody' he ever heard.
By four o'clock, when the guns were well-nigh red-
254 JACK CHALONER.
hot, and the firing ceased, it was supposed that very
few Maories could be left alive, so seldom had they
fired a shot during the bitter cannonade ; and it was
expected that an attack would be made at once upon
all who had survived.
' Gentlemen, uncase the colours; officers command-
ing companies, inspect your ammunition!' were the
orders of Colonel Booth, after he had formed 'the
43rd in quarter-distance column, and sent his horse to
the rear that he might join in the assault on foot.
' After this awful pounding, there can be none left
to kill or capture,' said Blake, who had the leading
company; 'but I suppose the blue-jackets will have
the post of honour.'
Blake was one of the handsomest young fellows in
the corps. With features very regular and very
pleasing, he had closely shorn dark hair, an almost
olive complexion, and a heavy moustache, which he
was always twirling at its waxed ends. His dress
was always perfect, his gloves—as Fanny Arnaud
used to declare—were perfection; but all were more
suited to the latitude of Pall Mall than that of the
Gate Pah of Tauranga.
The troops were impatient to advance ; but Sir
Duncan Cameron delayed the assault until a practic-
able breach—or gap large enough to admit a storm-
THE GATE PAH OF TAURANGA. 255
ing party—had been effected in the palisades and
earthworks of the pah—a breach which the natives
had not the skill to repair.
The Naval Brigade, with the 43rd Light Infantry,
were to form the stormers, and a loud cheer rose from
the ranks of the latter, as with a diminished front
they'began to advance, opening fire upon the pah as
they did so.
Commander Hay, of H.M.S. Harrier, led on the
stormers, sword in hand, and with ringing cheers they
rushed towards the breach, with an impetuosity that
seemed irresistible. In a few seconds they had
plunged into the ditch, swarmed up the embankment,
and poured like a living tide through the rugged gap
into the heart of the place.
' Well done, well done, hurrah !' cried the General
and staff, who sat in their saddles, field-glasses in
hand ; ' the day is ours!'
But it was not so !
Suddenly volley after volley of musketry rang like
rolling thunder within the pah, and clouds of pale blue
smoke were seen to curl upward from it, while the
cheers of our men were drowned by savage shrieks of
rage and triumph.
* As if all the fiends from heaven that fell
Had pealed the banner-cry of hell.'
256
JACK CHALONER.
And then were seen the stormers—soldiers and sailors
—mingled pell mell, rushing in headlong flight, to the
utter bewilderment of all who looked on, from the
breach, throwing themselves helplessly into the ditch,
and flying from the pah in disorder unparalleled.
' Forward the supports,' cried General Cameron, and
then a more unaccountable scene took place.
Captain Hamilton of H.M.S. Esk, twenty-one guns,
an officer remarkable for bravery, led them on.
' Follow me, men — follow me !' he exclaimed,
brandishing his sword, and forward the seamen rushed,
with cutlasses fixed on their short Enfields ; but alas !
they came too late.
A ball struck Hamilton in the forehead, killing him
on the spot. As he fell, the panic was communicated
to the supports, who became mixed up with—or swept
away by—the fugitives. Vain were the remonstrances
of the pfflcers, and profiting by this disorder, the
brown-skinned savages swarmed to the summits of
the pah, rending heaven with their yells, and pouring
a terrible fire upon our troops, who seemed to have
but one idea—escape !
1 The day was lost,' wrote one who fought there.
' The instrument had broken in the hands of him who
knew how to use it so skilfully. It was too much for
even the strongest nature to bear with equanimity;
THE GATE PAH OF TAURANGA.
the General dashed his field-glass on the ground,
turned his back upon the fugitives, and retired to his
tent to conceal his emotion.'
For this bitter humiliation the soldiers blamed the
sailors, and it may easily be supposed that the latter
were not slow in furiously retaliating ; and now, in
another chapter, we shall relate how this catastrophe
came to pass.
CHAPTER XXVI.
HOW THE REPULSE OCCURRED.
ACCORDING to Jack Chaloner's account in a letter to
a friend, and of other officers, as given after the affair
was over, it would seem to have come about thus :—
After Hay's stormers entered the pah, to their as-
tonishment, no trace of the Maories was to be seen,
save a few who had been torn to pieces by exploded
shells, and believing that the great work was evacuated,
they threw aside their arms and betook them to
pillaging ; but, in a moment after, the wild and reso-
lute Maories, flushed with their recent victory at
Puketekaure, and their later cruelty in beheading
Captain Lloyd, sprung from holes and hiding-places
constructed in the earthworks of the pah, or skilfully
covered over with branches and turf, wherein they
JACK CHA LONER.
had lurked safely during the eight hours' cannonade,
and rising like a volcano, as it were, from under the
very feet of the stormers, poured upon them volley
after volley, firing into their very teeth, and inspiring
a panic that proved incurable.
For a moment there was a struggle, as the seamen
recoiled on the leading companies of the 43rd, headed
by Blake and Jack Chaloner. The former emptied
his revolver and cut down more than one Maori with
his sword. He was a careless, good-natured, and fine
fellow, who during one season in London had dis-
tinguished himself in several flirtations and two
decided intrigues with professional beauties, yet kept
heart whole ; he had played high, did all sorts of
things, and would have fought duels, no doubt, but
now a bullet from the rusty gun of a wretched Maori
stretched him among a pile of dead and dying to rise
no more, and by the contents of another barrel the
same savage killed young Calverley of the 43rd.
- With his glittering tomahawk he next rushed to en-
counter Jack, but paused with it uplifted. He was an
elderly Maori—a chief apparently.
He had a head-dress composed of a great comb,
feathers and pearl shells, with strings of beads round
his neck and hanging from his ears ; over his bare
breast were pasted rows of postage stamps as orna-
HO IV THE REPULSE OCCURRED. 259
ments, and in his tattooed visage Jack recognised the
Maori whom he had saved from drowning on the day
the regiment disembarked.
The savage drew back, in gratitude, perhaps, and
others poured between them, and Chaloner was com-
pelled to retire, as the stormers fairly fled from the
pah in the manner we have described, and the whole
affair was over in ten minutes.
Darkness fell soon after this unfortunate affair, the
worst feature in which was, that, owing to the con-
fusion, the density of the smoke that settled down
within the pah, and the obscurity, a number of wounded
men and officers were abandoned to the savage victors ;
but there was one grand exception in the case of
Samuel Mitchell, captain of the foretop of H.M. ship
Harrier, who showed his shipmates what the first duty
of a British sailor was in the hour of peril.
When his leader, Commander Hay, fell mortally
wounded, Sam refused to quit the dying officer, and
raising him in his arms, by the exertion of vast mus-
cular strength bore him out of the pah, miraculously
escaping a shower of bullets, and thus saved his dead
body from expected desecration under the knives of
the enemy.
Terrible were the sensations of our troops as the
night—one of intense gloom and darkness—settled
17
25 o
JACK CHALONER.
down on the fatal pah, with all its dying and dead, its
bordering swamps and dense groves of wood.
They were ignorant of all that was being enacted
there, and in the darkness no measures could be taken
for a fresh attack. Gleams of red light flared up at
times, and each time they did so, shrill and apparently
agonizing yells rang out upon the night air.
The troops knew that many wounded and dying
men had been left there; they knew all that the
cannibals were capable of; they remembered how it
was said they had half roasted and half eaten an
officer of the 96th Regiment, and fears of all the
torture they might be enduring, simply maddened
them, and they longed and prayed for the dawn of
day, as they leaned on their muskets and looked
grimly at the great black mass of the pah.
There was left the Colonel of the 43 rd—an officer
whom the regiment loved well—Henry Parkyn Booth,
a tall and extremely handsome man, who had served
with distinction in the Kaffir War. One bullet had
pierced his spine, another had shattered one arm.
Mortal though his wounds, they did not produce im-
mediate death, and all night he reclined against the wall
of the fort, enduring agonies from pain and thirst, with
a group of bleeding comrades round him. Near him
lay Captain Hamilton of the 43rd, who had marched
HOW THE REPULSE OCCURRED. 361
with Havelock to Lucknow—one of a long and gallant
race of Scottish soldiers—also mortally wounded.
Among these were two other officers of the 43rd,
the sons of an English clergyman, both subalterns,
Robert and Fred Glover, the former of whom had
served in the Burmese War, at the capture of Rangoon,
and elsewhere. He was the first who fell in that fatal
pah; ' and the younger, who,' says an eye-witness in
his narrative, ' loved him with more than a brotherly
love, rushed forward with a loud and bitter cry. It
was in vain that he raised him in his arms and strove
to bear him from the field—a hostile bullet brought
both the brothers to the ground, and left them side by
side with the tide of life ebbing fast away. If there
is a mother in some distant English home, weeping
like Rachel for her children because they are not, or
a father lamenting their loss because they are not, let
us comfort them with the assurance that in life and
death they were all that the fondest parent could wish.'
The whole result of this affair filled our troops with
exasperation.
The days of recent and universal military muddle
had not then come to pass; and, indeed, such astound-
ing follies as we have seen of late perpetrated under
the name of' organization '—follies that would have
broken the hearts of the true soldiers of the good old
17-2
2(32
JACK CHALONER.
school—were undreamt of and unconceived; and now,
amid the gloom that deepened on the land and sea,
the men of'the Fighting Forty-Third' spoke with
indignant pride of the Peninsula glories that loaded
their white silk colours; and they thought of their
grand inheritance of military history since Brigadier
Fowke (ancestor of the baronets of Lowesby, in
Leicestershire) raised the corps in 1741. Five years
after saw their colours flying in Minorca, and in many
a battle of the American War, and then in the Peninsula.
At Vimiera they reddened their bayonets in the
blood of Kellerman's Grenadiers, through whom they
poured in a solid mass with ringing cheers and the loss
of a hundred and twenty men ; the plains of Corunna,
the hills of Busaco,the ramparts of Ciudad Rodrigoand
Badajoz, have heard the victorious shouts of the 43rd.
Their dead lay thick at Salamanca, and amid the
ruins of the French army on the vast plain of Vittoria ;
on the banks of the Nive and the Nivelle, and in the
closing battle of that great war where Toulouse looks
down on the Garonne. Nor was that high discipline
ever wanting which the 43rd so grandly displayed in
their wondrous march of four hundred miles in the
depth of winter during the rebellion of Canada, when
the thermometer was below zero, and only one man
was left behind.
HOW THE REPULSE OCCURRED. 263
So, in the darkness of the night beside the pah, the
soldiers spoke of these things, and again and again
longed for dawn, when the pah would be taken if the
last of the ' Fighting Forty-Third ' fell in its capture ;
for the blunders, fiascos, and successive defeats in Zulu-
land, the Transvaal, and elsewhere, had not accustomed
our men to think first of retreat—our true old soldiers,
who never knew what it was to be beaten or when
they were beaten ; but when daylight began to tip with
golden sheen the summit of the mountain and the top-
most leaves of the stupendous kauri trees, and the
troops got under arms again for the attack, the pah
was found to be abandoned in earnest.
When Major Greaves, of the 70th (or Surrey) Regi-
ment,bravely advanced alone to reconnoitre the breach,
he found the great earthen work silent, and empty of
all save our dead and dying ; and among the latter was
poor Colonel Booth, of the 43rd, who was at once
visited by the General, Sir Duncan Cameron, as the
despatches tell.
' I endeavoured to carry out your orders, General,'
said he faintly; * I tried, at least, to do my duty, and
—and am sorry I failed.'
' You have done it nobly, Booth !' exclaimed the
Highlander, as he pressed the hand of the dying
Colonel, who died next day,
264
JACK CHALONER.
Battered caps, torn belts, broken cutlasses and
swords, twisted bayonets, and great clots of blood
lying everywhere, attested the fury of the struggle.
Two Victoria crosses were won here—one by Sam
Mitchell, the foretop man, and the other by Dr.
Manly, of the Royal Artillery, of whom it was re-
ported that4 he ministered to the wants of the wounded
and dying amid the bullets of the enemy with as much
sangfroid as if he had been performing an operation
in St. George's Hospital.'
Hamilton, of the 43rd, breathed only once after his
body was brought forth. A ball had passed through
his head. 4 Poor Hamilton !' wrote a brother officer;
4 we think of him still, as he sat at the mess-table,
expatiating on the capture of Lucknow, or some cog-
nate subject, to a group of admiring ensigns, who loved
him for the dangers he had passed.'
At Te Runga, a few weeks after these events, the
43rd Light Infantry, led by Booth's successor, had an
ample opportunity, in a terrible encounter with the
Maories, of avenging the fall of their Colonel and so
many brave comrades in the assault of the pah of
Tauranga—and it was an opportunity of which they
were not slow in availing themselves; and Jack
Chaloner, when leading his company, had his cap
pierced by one bullet, while another carried away his
HOW THE REPULSE OCCURRED. 255
sword-knot; and there Harry Stapleton fell into the
hands of the enemy, but soon after effected his escape.
'Jack, who do you think the swell with the postage-
stamps on his manly bosom proves to be ?' he asked
laughingly of Chaloner, when he joined the latter in
his tent.
' Some savage of distinction, who, no doubt, would
enjoy a devilled chop cut from either of us.'
' Paora himself!'
' The old fellow I fished out of the water ?'
' The same—he is the insurgent leader, Paora.'
'Wonders will never cease,'said Jack, with some-
thing like a laugh and a sigh mingled, as he lighted
his cherished briar-root, and pushed his pouch of
honeydew to Stapleton, with a box of vestas.
CHAPTER XXVII.
tiie redoubt on the waitara.
The war with the Maories—a war chiefly of a skirmish-
ing and desultory nature, as there could be no pitched
battle in the open field with such peculiar adversaries
—a war also of which amazingly little is known in
Great Britain, which was waged chiefly in the province
of Auckland, and at Taranaki, ' the garden of New
Zealand,' a district a hundred miles in length by from
266
JACK CHALONEK
forty to sixty in breadth, and which is intersected by
mountain ranges, some of which have an altitude of
nine thousand feet — was conducted with varying
success, till the troops under Major-General Pratt, C.B.,
a veteran officer, who had served in Holland in 1814
as a volunteer with our ' Pompadours,' who was at the
bombardment at Antwerp, and served long afterwards
in the China War, formed lines of redoubts for the
purpose of keeping our tawny-skinned foes in check,
and protecting New Plymouth, as we now call Tara-
naki, on the west coast of New Zealand.
These redoubts were garrisoned by detachments
from various regiments, and from these detachments
skirmishing parties were sent almost daily into ' the
bush,' where the enemy were generally lurking, and
by those occupying a redoubt on the river Waitara
some very brilliant, if desultory, deeds were done.
This river lies twenty miles north of Mount Egmont.
In the redoubt was Jack Chaloner's company, with
Stapleton, and Annerley also, who was attached to it,
with a company of the 40th (01* 2nd Somerset) Regi-
ment, under Captain Thomas Bailey Richards, of that
corps, who commanded the whole.
Skirmishing went on daily, and daily more men
were borne in, killed or wounded. Some of the former
who fell in the bush were never seen again, and may
be lying there unburied still.
THE REDOUBT ON THE WAITARA. 267
One night, after a particularly sharp encounter, in
which much loss was suffered, Jack and Annerley, in
the former's tent in rear of the redoubt, were enjoying
their grog together with a ' quiet weed,' and to him it
seemed that on this occasion Piercy Annerley, who
was a man with a dark and, now, thoughtful cast of
face, strongly-marked eyebrows, and deep-set grey
eyes—a stamp of intellectual power on his brow, but
with a great expression of kindness over all—'Was
more than usually moody and silent,
Jack asked him the reason.
' Only this, Jack—I have been thinking a good deal
of late.'
' About what ?'
* We shall perhaps be under fire again to-morrow.'
'We are under fire every day in this infernal place,
for the matter of that,' said Jack. ' Well ?'
' I have something on my mind that I must say to
you. We may not both live to leave this redoubt—
every day sees some fresh graves dug by that Waitara
river; and as I have a strange foreboding about myself,
I wish you to make me a promise, Jack, in case you
get safe back to Auckland.'
' With all my heart, old fellow,'replied Jack, emitting
a mighty volume of smoke through his moustache.
' What is it about ?'
208
JACK CHALONER.
' If you are spared to rejoin Lina Capel—be kind
to her, Jack—kind for poor Conny's sake—she loved
you well,' said Annerley, in a shaky voice. ' She is
friendless here, where she came to cast her lot with
you, and she is a girl of priceless worth.'
Jack remembered Constance Annerley's farewell
words—her dying request; he felt greatly impressed,
and knit his brows behind the smoke in which he
hid his. features. Finding that he remained silent,
Annerley spoke again.
£ I know you could not marry her off-hand, when
we were all but on the line of march, the day the
Lesbia came in ; but something seems to have come
between you; what it is, I know not ; yet I pray
God I may prove a peacemaker, were it only for the
sake of my poor dead Constance. But if—as I
suspect—it is Miss Arnaud ! '
'Annerley,' exclaimed Jack, ' as I may have Heaven
to answer before this time to-morrow night, it is not
—not at least as you may fancy.'
' What is it, then ?'
'She has seen—well—that fellow Fierrepoint—
secretly.'
' Secretly ?'
' Well—at least she has never once hinted of his
visits to me.'
THE REDOUBT ON THE WAITARA. 269
'She owed him gratitude for saving the lives of
Amy and Jocelyn Vane.'
' In one sense—yes.'
' In any sense; but pray who was your informant
of all this ?'
' Fanny Arnaud, after she got her Brighton letters
at Cape Town.'
' I thought so—and she thought to make capital
out of the affair!'
' It has often been urged,' said Jack doggedly, ' that
the most bitter part of the lesson of love—is—is
' Out with it—what ?'
'That it knows not how much to ask or expect,
and fears when it ought to hope—hopes when it ought
to fear.'
' I am long since past all this casuistry, if I ever in-
dulged in it at all, Jack.'
' I had my dream,' said the latter, replenishing his
glass, and placing the bottle, a black one, before his
guest; ' it looks as if it would be a bad finale, and I
don't like being hood-winked—fooled.'
'A'dream—a finale and a fooling!' exclaimed
Annerley, with irritation of manner; ' why the deuce
do you use these phrases in conjunction with the
idea of Lina Capel ?'
' Sorrowingly I do, and have had much to ponder
over,'
270
JACK CHALONER.
4 Much, of what ?'
' Instinctive doubts'
' Instinctive fiddlesticks ! doubts to which this girl,
old Arnaud's daughter, gave a tangible form. I have
not a doubt that, knowing your rather jealous nature,
poor Lina shrank from all reference to the name of
Pierrepoint. If her girlish fancy for him had remained,
would she have come all these thousands of miles
here after you V
'Well—I should think of course not,' replied Jack,
his heart relenting fast.
' And if he visited her, as a friend, condoling with
her on the death of her eldest sister, in the first in-
stance, and with reference to Amy in the second, he
would mean nothing more. He dared not have re-
curred to the old story again, or make the least
advances to Lina.'
4 Dared not—why ?'
4 The man is married.'
4 Whew ! married—to whom ?'
' A Eurasian girl in Calcutta; consequently he
could have no intentions save those of friendship.'
Annerley spoke in the honesty of his heart, which
gave Pierrepoint credit for better impulses than that
enterprising person possessed.
4 You know this, Annerley V
THE REDOUBT ON THE WAITARA. 271
4 Certainly,—I was present at the marriage. Is it
possible you didn't know ?'
4 How should I know ?'
4 Well, he is married hard and fast; he got tabooed
about it—was put in Coventry, in fact, and so he left
the Lancers.'
After a pause, during which hope dawned brightly
in Jack's heart, and a load seemed to be passing from
it, as he was compelled to admit some things he had
not thought of before, Annerley spoke again as he
grasped his hand :
4 Believe all I have advanced as to Lina's motives
and silence. Perhaps—nay, I doubt not, she meant to
tell you all verbally in time, but could little dream
that distorted and exaggerated details would be given
by a rival. Let me be the peacemaker. She has
neither father nor brother in the world ; she has no
one to love, to protect, or advise her in this strange
land but you, if I fall,' he added, with deep emotion
in his voice and eye.
4 It shall all be as you say — as you wish,' said
Chaloner, as he pressed his friend's hand. ' I can't
quit this blessed redoubt—but if a letter can reach
her—poor Lina !'
4 God bless you, Jack ! I shall buckle on my sword
to-morrow with a lighter heart than I have done for
many a day.'
272
JACK CHALONER.
Jack Chaloner remembered his parting with Linaat
Oakhurst Priory, and how he had drained to the last
drop, as it were, the sorrowful luxury of that farewell
—so sad and so sweet; and how his last memory of
old England was her soft, afflicted face.
How different from his second farewell of her, but a
little time back, when, had he been less afraid of fate,
less the fool of Fanny and his own suspicions, more
confident in her and in himself, he would have taken
her in his arms and assured her of his love with all the
passion that was trembling on his lips—the passion
that he would now endeavour to pourtray on paper.
To this delightful task he betook himself at once in
the morning. In this letter he rehearsed all that
passed between himself and Annerley ; he craved her
pardon for his own blind folly a second time; called
himself some very hard names ; assured her of his
unaltered and unalterable love, with much more to
the same sort of purpose, including various ' cart-loads
of kisses and, after pressing to his lips the opal ring
she had given to him, he finally closed the missive,
for transmission to Auckland by the first armed party
passing northward to that town, But
' Great events were on the gale,'
and terrible things were to happen ere Jack's letter
left the redoubt by the Waitara river.
SKIRMISH IN THE RUSH. 273
The next day passed over quietly ; but when even-
ing was closing, and the sun was going down beyond
the distant cone of Mount Egmont (that towered up
in the distance like the Peak of Teneriffe), leaving a
long line of crimson in the west, throwing forward the
groves of dark trees in black outline against the flaming
light, the sound of rifle-shots in front brought all the
little garrison in the redoubt under arms in hot haste.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
SKIRMISH IN THE BUSH.
So accustomed were the troops in the redoubt to this
sort of thing, that they turned out quite merrily ' to
have a little shooting at the Maories,' as they styled a
matter that always involved wounds, and death to some.
' Fall in, the men of the Somersetshire !' cried Cap-
tain Richards, who was deemed one of the ' most
purpose-like' officers in his corps.
' Fall in, 43rd Light Infantry !' exclaimed Jack, and
the two companies speedily got into their ranks, and
after being ' proved,' proceeded to load.
' Natuarilists affirm that the New Zealanders are the
most interesting branch of the great Polynesian family,
whatever the devil that may be,' said Stapleton, as he
carefully loaded his six-shooter and drew his swofd ;
JACK CHALONER.
' but I wish those learned fellows had to face them
here in the bush ; their interest in them would then, I
fear, be rather fleeting, especially in this place, where
daily and nightly we are treated to " alarums and ex-
cursions," as the old dramatists have it.'
Great masses of them have now been converted to
Christianity of some kind, but the more degraded are
often suspected and accused of secret cannibalism, or
were so during the war we refer to ; and this added
much to the horror and dread our soldiers had of
falling into their hands alive.
The company of the 40th moved off to the front,
while Jack Chaloner's men remained as supports for
a time.
' I am so happy, so content, that you have written to
poor Lina,' said Annerley, as Jack was watching
Richards' advance; ' there is a depth of feeling in
that girl's heart, Jack, that lies hidden as in a well—
the feeling of a pure and truthful soul; I have known
and loved her since her childhood.'
' And I love her too, Annerley—oh, my God, how
do I love her!'
' She deserves it, Jack.'
' And you actually thought that Fanny Arnaud in-
fluenced me ?'
* By her tongue she certainly did so. I knew not
SKIRMISH IN THE BUSH,
275
what to think ; but as for Miss Arnaud, you don't
know her as I do. She "makes up" like a girl of
eighteen, but she is thirty if she is a day, with the ex-
perience of twice that age ; and there is not a fellow
in the Staff Corps, or any other corps, to whom she
has not sung:
' They don't propose—they won't propose,
For fear, perhaps, I'd not say "yes/'
Just let them try—for Heaven knows why,
I'm tired of single blessedness !'
Jack laughed at this, as he had more than once
heard her sing, with great empressement, the song re-
ferred to, and he was glad to find that the usually grave
Annerley seemed in high spirits, and to have quite
forgotten the solemn forebodings of yesterday.
Suddenly the sound of scattered musketry was heard
in front, and several red flashes came swiftly out amid
the dim light of the evening.
Between the redoubt and the dense wild bush there
spread an open space of more than a thousand yards
in width ; and it was over this that the reconnoitring
detachment of the 40th, under Captain Thomas Bailey
Richards, advanced, for a time without molestation;
but the moment his men entered a narrow gorge,
bordered by dense bush, gigantic ferns, some of which
were arborescent and nearly forty feet in height, with
cabbage palms and kauri trees, then a heavy fire was
18
276
JACK CHALONER.
opened on both flanks by foes that were completely
invisible.
Flash, flash, flash, come out redly and in quick
succession from amid the utter gloom of that vast
and antediluvian species of jungle. The white smoke
was seen to curl up from the trees against the starry sky,
but no other trace was visible of those in ambush.
' Three paces from the centre—extend !' was now
the order of Bailey Richards, for there was seldom a
movement by half-companies at that time, and his
men continued to advance slowly by successive files,
firing almost at random, while the concealed Maories,
with their old rifle-muskets and double-barrelled
fowling pieces, took quietly sure and deliberate aim
at our men, numbers of whom fell fast, killed or
wounded; and such was the nature of the ground, and
the density of the darkening bush, that much dis-
order and confusion ensued, as the extended files
failed naturally to see each other, or the point to
advance upon.
Here it was that Lieutenant Rees, of the 40th, taking
the rifle and pouch of a dead soldier, proceeded to
handle it himself, and "by voice and example, as
second in command, encouraged his men to keep up
a steady fire, while at the same time he ordered
Colour-Sergeant Lucas to carry to the rear the more
SKIRMISH IN THE RUSH.
2 77
severely wounded, lest they should fall into the hands
of the energy.
Ere this could be. done, a sudden gleam of light
flashed amid the gloom, as a fresh volley came crash-
ing from the leafy screen, and more of the 40th fell,
among them the gallant Rees, whom a ball pierced in
the groin. He fell into the arms of Lucas, who had
him sent to the redoubt, in care of a soldier.
The detachment of the 40th was now falling back,
while Jack Chaloner was advancing with his company
in support, but fearing as yet to fire lest he might hit
friends as well as foes.
Meanwhile, so heavy had been the Maori fusillade
that three wounded men, with four muskets, were all
that remained with Sergeant Lucas.
Yet this gallant fellow resolved to fight the enemy
till succour came.
Taking post behind the huge trunk of a kauri, tree,
he and his three men kept up such a fire in succes-
sion as completely to hold the savages at bay for more
than ten minutes. Perfectly isolated for a time, so
long as these brave men, all old and trained soldiers,
kept in rear of the tree, they were safe, but the
moment they left its shelter to take aim, they drew on
them the concentrated fire of the enemy at a distance
of thirty yards,
18—2
JACK CHALUiXER.
Very badly must the special antagonists of Ser-
geant Lucas have fired, though the hard stem of the
tree was studded with their bullets; but a great
number of Maories fell under the rifles of himself
and his three comrades.
Eventually they must have perished, and perhaps
amid terrible tortures, at the hands of the infuriated
Maories, had not Lieutenants William Gibson and I.
J. Whelan, of the 40th, re-formed and collected a few
skirmishers, and brought off Lucas and his men just
as their ammunition was becoming expended, and they
retired through the extended files of Chaloner's com-
pany—a slender one now—which advanced into the
bush, firing steadily from the left knee whenever a
red flash came to direct an aim.
Her Majesty bestowed the Victoria Cross upon Ser-
geant Lucas for his bravery, and next year he was de-
servedly made sergeant-major of his regiment.
It is recorded that' only one of the three wounded
men recovered, and Lieutenant Rees, in consequence
of the severity of his wounds, had to return to Britain.
It would be difficult to overestimate the importance
of Sergeant Lucas's gallant conduct on this occasion.
He prevented the bodies of his wounded comrades
from falling into the hands of the savage enemy, and
saved four stand of arms.'
SKIRMISH IN THE BUSH.
279
With fierce, angry, and bitter recollections of the
Gate Pah of Tauranga, the men of the 43rd went on.
The last red flesh of the set sun seemed to linger on their
faces as they advanced steadily into the gloomy jungle.
One might detect a gleam in their eyes as, with knitted
brows and set teeth, after a hearty hurrah, they went
on, stumbling at times over dead and dying men of the
Somersetshire.
They were only three paces apart, as eight would
have been too great an extension on such ground ;
and Jack contrived that their fire, even in the dark,
should be a pretty searching one; but so dense became
the bush, that often the men found a difficulty in
loading when advancing. They were thus compelled
to halt and do so, and then double or scramble up to
their file leaders.
Jack Chaloner, who now began to find that from the
nature of the ground and the position held by an un-
seen foe, it might be as well to fall back, ordered his
bugler to sound the retire ; and such was the effect of
discipline and the traditions of the barrack square,
that, with perfect order, at the last sound of the bugle,
the men rose, faced to the right-about, and stepped
off, as well as they could, in quick time, rear rank in
front, and doing their best to preserve their, distance
from the centre, yet facing round at regular intervals
28o
JACK CHALONER.
to fire, but at random, as it unfortunately proved, in
the direction of the enemy.
In the rear and centre of the company was Jack
Chaloner, at some little distance, and they were just
about to emerge from amid the giant ferns into the
open that lay before the redoubt, then, as we have
said, about a thousand yards off, when Jack—who
had undergone more than one severe fall, by the trailers
twisting round his ankles, when looking after his men
—suddenly heard the voice of Annerley utter an ex-
clamation of agony; a ball had pierced him somewhere,
and he fell heavily forward, with three half-naked
savages close by him.
Jack's revolver was empty ; he hurled it at the head
of one, and—remembering with the speed of thought
poor Annerley's forebodings of yesterday—was rush-
ing sword in hand upon the other two, when he was
struck on the back part of the head, either by a
clubbed musket, or one of those war clubs which the
natives carve so elaborately.
He fell, half senseless and wholly speechless, beside
his friend, and, unseen and unknown by the men of his
company, who would have sacrificed for him ' the last
of their blood and their breath,' was dragged away a
prisoner by the Maories.
He was missed when too late, and Stapleton brought
SKIRMISH IN THE BVSH
281
the company into the redoubt, where every man of the
43rd looked darkly, inquiringly, and sorrowfully in his
comrade's face.
All compared notes on the circumstance, and did so
in vain.
Henry Stapleton assumed the command, and with
the first blink of dawn went forth in person with a
party in extended order 4 to feel the ground,' and
search for the killed and wounded. While on that
duty many dreadful sights they saw, and in one place
a great shock awaited the kind-hearted friend of Jack
Chaloner.
CHAPTER XXIX.
amy's letter.
And now for one brief glance homeward, at a happy
little household in England far away, before we re-
sume our story in the land of death and disaster—
for disasters we had, especially at Puketekaure and
Tauranga, though we did make'peace with honour'
in the end.
The sun shone brightly into the dainty little break-
fast-room at Oakhurst Priory ; the perfume of violets
and the song of the blackcap, the earliest of the spring
birds, and whose voice is only equalled by that of the
282
JACK CHALONER.
nightingale, stole in together through a partially
opened window.
Breakfast was over, and Jocelyn was opening the
despatch-box containing the morning letters, while
Amy, with her small hands crossed above her head,
and her slender slippered feet crossed just outside the
lace frilling of her morning robe, watched him leisurely
and lovingly, while singing the song she had not sung
for many a day :
'Twei seelen und ein gedanke,
T wei herzen und ein schlag.'
But the girl sang dreamily, and anyone who had
observed her might have wondered what she was think-
ing about, if the heedless Amy ever thought at all.
Not yet dressed for the day, her hair, like thick
golden fleece—her hair, which Jocelyn was wont to
call ' the most rebellious hair in the world,' for if sub-
jected to ribbon or braid, it always made its escape—
was now floating over her shoulders, while a chance
sunbeam made an aureole of it round her bright little
face; and Jocelyn, who whilom had regarded it oc-
casionally over his coffee and morning paper, thought
his girl-wife looked a veritable English Hebe ; and in
the mornings, generally the first sound he heard was
her song mingling with that of the lark or the black-
bird.
amy's letter.
283
' A letter for you, little one—from Lina, too!' said
he, presenting her with a missive, which Amy cut open.
'Dear Lina, what may her news be since Jack's
regiment took the field?' she exclaimed, as she ran
her eyes rapidly over the letter, which was a brief,
and to her, apparently, rather incoherent one.
' She is coming home/ said Amy, in a startled voice.
' She writes of the calmness born of despair—of the
necessity of seeking out a new life—that she loves
Jack dearly, yet prays upon her knees for strength to
cast out his image from her heart! That her heart is
broken ! That she longs to die as the only hope left
to her, and much more to the same purpose. Oh,
Jocelyn, what can be the meaning of all that?'
' Coming home!' ejaculated Jocelyn, looking up
with surprise from a pile of letters he was rapidly
opening ; ' broken hearts, and all that sort of thing ?'
'Yes; she has quarrelled with Jack, or Jack has
quarrelled with her;—I can't make it out at all.'
' And they are not married V
' No. Oh, the tiresome couple !'
'She is at Auckland ?'
' Yes.'
' And where is Jack ?'
' Campaigning in some place called Taranaki. This
quarrelling seems so silly!'
284
JACK CHALOMER.
' They should get adrift in a boat, and make it up
again/
'Oh, Jocelyn, don't talk of that !'
' It can't be about Pierrepoint again.'
' I would write and tell her all about his funny little
Eurasian wife turning up at Brighton.'
' Better not write about Pierrepoint at all,' said
Vane,' if we are to judge by Jack Chaloner's.general
frame of mind.'
' An Othello, poor Conny used to call him.'
' Besides, by the date of Lina's letter, and fehe terms
of it, she maybe home here before yours could reach her.'
' True—but. oh, it is astounding that she should be
coming home again as Lina Capel, and leaving Jack
out there /'
CHAPTER XXX.
the opal ring.
Lina had answered Jack's first letter, which she had
believed to be merely dedicated by pity for her, but
her missive never reached him ; the carrier of the
mail bag for the troops had been shot on the way
and robbed of everything.
Daily she looked for another letter from him, but in
vain. The Vicar explained to her that in the disturbed
THE OPAL PING.
285
state of the country it was vain to think of regular
correspondence being maintained with the Queen s
troops, so she betook her to studying the shipping
advertisements, and, with an aching heart and sorely
mortified spirit, thought only of—home !
News came, meanwhile, of another conflict near one
of the chain of redoubts on the banks of the Waitara
river, but vaguely and uncertainly.
The Vicar, a kindly and fatherly old man, at times
a little pompous, regarded with tender pity her small,
pale face, so worn and wasted, and the dark shadows
under her pure hazel eyes, all the result of heavy secret
thoughts.
Yet, though so sad now, Lina had naturally in her
much of that buoyancy and genuine sunshine of the
heart that comes from Heaven only.
One day the Vicar came to her with an expression
of such intense and genuine concern in his face that
she felt her heart leap in her breast.
' My dear child,' said he, putting a hand kindly
upon her head,' prepare yourself, if you can, for dread-
ful news, a most calamitous story. Captain Chaloner
has fallen into the hands of those horrible Maories.'
' Alive—or dead ?' she contrived to articulate, with
quivering and suddenly parched lips.
s We may not know which now '
286 JACK CHALONER.
' You—you have a letter in—in your hand!' gasped
Lina, her face now white as snow.
' A most woeful one.'
1 From whom ?'
'Mr. Stapleton, of the 43rd.'
'Jack's friend !'
' We are told,' said the Vicar slowly and senten-
tiously,' that it is not in nature to meet evil tidings or
the arrows of misfortune unhurt; but, dearest Miss
Capel '
'Your letter, or I shall die!1 wailed Lina in a voice
all unlike her own.
She took it from his hand, and read :—
' Rev. and Dear Sir,
' Prepare Miss Capel for the dreadful intelli-
gence that our poor friends, Chaloner and Annerley,
fell into the enemy's hands last night. The body of
the former has just been brought in, mutilated and
headless, like that of Captain Lloyd, lately. Of the
body of Annerley we can find no trace. I send here-
with by the bearer, a, sergeant of ours, a ring which
was found on poor Jack's left hand, and the enclosed
letter for Miss Capel, which was found in his tent.
' H. Stapleton,
' Lieut. 43 rd L.I.*
THE OPAL RING.
287
* P.S.—The savages had been endeavouring t6 tear
off the ring, when fortunately they were scared by our
scouting parties.'
The ring which the Vicar placed in Lina's passive
hand was the massive but plain gipsy ring, with the
large opal—the stone of evil import, as Fanny Arnaud
had said—given to him before he left her at Brighton,
with the legend:
' Forget-me-not—Lin a Capel.'
Lina's head fell back upon the arm of the sofa on
which she was seated, and her eyes were closed. The
Vicar started forward, and took her hand in his. It
was cold as the hand of death, and lay passive in his
clasp. After a time she revived a little, and looking
shudderingly round her, said :
* Oh, why is God so cruel—so cruel to me ?'
' He will pardon the blasphemy that agony has
wrung from your tortured heart, my poor child,' said
the Vicar kindly, as he put one arm round her, and
Mrs. Chancel, whose tears were flowing silently, pressed
her to her breast.
Then some shuddering sobs escaped Lina.
* It is well,' said the old lady in a low voice to her
husband ; 4 this will relieve her, poor darling.'
4 Such tears are gracious rain,' said the Vicar, 4 and
will bring clear skies after them.'
288
JACK CHALONER.
But it was long before Lina could realize the magni-
tude of her loss—a double one, for Annerley she
regarded as a brother and protector—or the whole
horror of the calamity that had befallen her, and in
that strange and, to her, horrible country.
Jack's letter, the letter he had written at Piercy
Annerley's request, and left in his tent when, for the
last time, as it proved, he went to the front, explained
all, and by the tenderness in which it was conceived,
so wrung her tortured heart that every pulsation be-
came a positive pang.
How keenly she repented now her anger and
mortification at Jack, and her entire misconception of
him, though it had been mutual.
4 Thank Heaven, he was undeceived in me before he
perished !' she murmured to herself again and again.
4 He has been torn from me for ever ! Oh, how blank
this world will seem without Jack, and what an old,
old woman I begin to feel already !'
4 My love,' said Mrs. Chancel, 4 this grief will pass
away, and other hopes will rise, for Time assuages
everything/
But to Lina it seemed then that her grief could
never be assuaged, and no other hopes could ever rise.
The words of Stapleton's brief note to the Vicar
seemed as if burned into her brain, so crushing were
THE OPAL RING.
289
they in their tenour; and she now recalled the gloomy
forebodings of evil and sorrow that possessed her
when Jack marched, and she began, in spite of herself,
to feel that thinking of him seemed, strangely to her,
like thinking of the dead !
Love may be given, but cannot always be taken
away; and all the love of her heart was given now
more than ever to him who was gone. Poor Lina re-
proached herself most bitterly now for ever having
doubted Jack's affection; so sorrow and love, tender-
ness and despair, and a great horror of his ending,
were mingled in her heart, while she allowed Mrs.
Chancel to undress and place her in bed, passive in
her motherly hands as a child, and in her own saintly,
gentle way.
When Mrs. Chancel drew down the blinds and
darkened the room, Lina turned her face to the wall,
as if by doing so to forget the world and all that
was therein; but ever and anon, when the old lady
stole on tiptoe to the room door, she could hear her
low, suppressed sobbing, and was not sorry that relief
of this kind came to her.
The platitudes of the Vicar, his professional though
well-meant condolences, only worried her ; all human
pity seemed so utterly unavailing.
' My dear Lina/ said he,' death is the test of our
290 JACK CHALONER.
lives, and the standard of all our actions; and to avoid
it is a weakness, as we know not what it is.'
' I am not avoiding it,' said Lina, 4 as I wish it
would come to me.'
' In that wish you err. If, in the day of despair,
the Shunammite could say, "It shall be well," can
you have less faith in the Divine promise of happi-
ness ?'
' I shall never know happiness again in this world !'
exclaimed Lina, with a fresh burst of weeping.
'It is not of this world I spoke/ said the Vicar,
stroking his white beard. ' Death comes to us all,
once, at least, in life, Lina.'
' Death has come to me four times now,' said Lina,
misunderstanding his meaning. ' My parents, my
sister, and my promised husband—where are they all ?'
' Not lost, not lost; but only gone before/
But this style of consolation was as nothing to
Lina. How vividly Jack's form, figure, voice, and all
his presence rose before her, as she last saw him, when
he gave that farewell backward glance and waved his
sword as an adieu, and her heart gave such a bound
as it had never given before.
Jack dead!—dead like Conny, was the ever-reiterated
thought. Oh! now, indeed, she had done with this
world and all its interests, instincts, and affections.
THE OPAL RING.
291
In Jack she had nothing to forgive now. Death does
so heal, salve over, and obliterate all mistakes and
errors,
CHAPTER XXXI.
the muffled drum.
In due time it was announced to Lina that Harry
Stapleton, who had come from the front with a convoy
of wounded men, had brought with him the remains
of Jack Chaloner, and that they had been conveyed to
his old quarters at the fort, prior to interment.
As the Maories are excessively fond of procuring
European habiliments of any kind, the body had been
found stripped, and denuded of everything save the
opal ring.
There was peace with them now, for very soon after
the last skirmish, in which these calamities occurred,
they had hoisted the white flag, and it proved to be
the last engagement in the Taranaki War.
A dull and blank despair took possession of Lina,
and she felt the vanity of attempting to struggle
against her great grief, or of listening with patience
to the .little bits of Scripture that the worthy Vicar,
and more especially his wife, Mrs. Chancel, repeated to
her ; yet, to the latter, it seemed as if their afflicted
l9
292
JACK CHALONER.
visitor was slowly fading out of life, or as if it was
slowly fading out of her.
' Oh, if I could only kiss him in his coffin !' thought
Lina, and then a shudder passed over her tender form
as she thought of that headless body !
And she longed yearningly and pityingly to dress
Jack's remains for the grave, as she had done those of
her sister Conny, whom she would permit no strange
or hireling hands to touch ; but the last offices for Jack
would be cared for, she knew, by brave comrades
who loved and revered him.
Again and again she remembered the words of
Flora Maclvor at Carlisle with regard to the decapi-
tated remains of her brother :—' But they will not all
rest together—no, his head !—I shall not have the last
miserable consolation of kissing the cold lips of my
dear Fergus!'
If she looked from the Vicarage towards the fort
and barracks, she saw the flag flying half-mast high,
a token of respect to the dead who lay there.
'Things all come right in time, my dear. Time
takes the edge off everything, even the keenest sorrow.
It is a mighty and a sure consoler,' said Dr. Chancel;
but Lina had ever before her the vision of a face she
would never see again upon earth.
At last the funeral day, the closing act of this, to
THE MUFFLED DRUM.
293
Lina, most terrible tragedy, came. To her over-
charged heart, it seemed that a species of relief might
come when all was over, and poor Jack was laid in his
narrow tomb, in that land so far away from his home ;
yet every day had seemed to carry the pale mourner
further and further away from earth and all the things
thereof.
Like all who have suffered mentally before a great
crisis, Lina slept soundly on the preceding night, but
awoke suddenly with a sense of great chilliness.
The bell of St. Paul at Auckland was already tolling,
and brought terribly home to her heart that it was
the day of Jack Chaloner's funeral. How hateful was
the sound—would the bell never leave off tolling those
sepulchral strokes, which announced that with early
morning the procession was already forming ?
This day proved a terrible one to Lina Capel, and
great was the strain upon her already overstrung
nerves ; but great was the effort she resolved to put
upon herself in sharing the place of chief mourner
with Harry Stapleton. It was all the more severe
that she knew all men's eyes would be upon her;
and when the time came she read genuine sympathy
in most of them, and more than all in the bronzed faces
of Jack's company of the ' Fighting 43rd/ for his men
loved 'Jolly Jack ' dearly, and revered his memory,
19—3
294
JACK CHALONEK.
She felt as in a dream when that company came
forth in funeral order, marching slowly to the wailing
' Dead March/ their arms reversed, the muffled drums
covered with crape, rolling out the time marked by the
deep boom of the bass drum.
Leaning on Stapleton's arm, and closely veiled, she
moved like an automaton behind the light gun-car-
riage; and never would Lina forget, while life lasted,
the peculiar clank of the wheels, and the aspect of
that coffin-head visible from under the Union Jack that
formed its pall, and the dreadful knowledge that the
head of her lover was not there.
Slowly on each side stepped the pall-bearers, all
captains of the 43rd, crape on their arms and sword
hilts.
The music ceased; then the voice of the Vicar, as
he led the way to the grave, saying,' I am the resur-
rection and the life/ etc., announced that they were in
the burying-ground. The firing party, facing inwards,
on arms reversed, the yawning grave, the words ' dust
to dust, ashes to ashes,' the damp soil amid which
the smoke seemed to settle down when the three
farewell volleys rang upon the still and startled air,
the drums beating the ' point of war,' between each,
the voice and face of the Vicar, in his surplice and
square-topped Oxford cap, seemed to Lina all part of a
THE MUFFLED DRUM.
295
terrible yet unreal phantasmagoria, in which she was
called upon to act a part; but amid it all she had one
prevailing thought, that a time would come when—as
Dr. Chancel phrased it—she could look forward ' to
the hand-clasping on the golden shores of Eternity.'
At last all was over, and she turned feebly, slowly
away, still leaning on Stapleton's arm—kindly Harry,
who pressed her little hand ever and anon to his side
as if to reassure her.
The rifles were shouldered now, and the drums, un-
muffled and uncraped, were beating merrily—unnatur-
ally, it seemed to Lina—as the troops wheeled off to
barracks, and Jack was left alone in his grave.
As the cortege issued out into the street, the eyes of
Lina caught those of Fanny Arnaud, who had come
thither on horseback, and, though dressed in sombre
hues in honour of the occasion, she could not refrain
from flirting ' at the rate of forty miles an hour,' as an
officer remarked, with the aide-de-camp, Cheveley, of
the 68th Light Infantry.
' I believe that girl came into the world flirting,'
thought Stapleton resentfully; ' it seems a second
nature with her.'
The girl's manner and aspect, her perfect physical
health, her undeniable beauty, and gaiety of conversa-
tion, made men follow her, and it was always her way,
296
"JACK CHALONER.
under any circumstances, to appropriate some young
man, and so the aide-de-camp came to her hand just
then ; but on this awful occasion, to be smiling and
coquetting almost by the verge of Jack Chaloner's
grave showed precisely what she was, as Harry Staple-
ton said, 'in heart, or rather heartlessness.'
She bent her bright eyes, scrutinizingly and without
a vestige of pity, but perhaps wonderingly, on Lina.
Anon there stole something of triumph—malignant
triumph—in her handsome eyes. Lina Capel could
not get Jack Chaloner now.
But Lina felt that she was then doing a last duty to
the dead, and was utterly indifferent as to how Miss
Arnaud looked or what she thought; yet she gave way
terribly when all was over and she found herself in the
solitude of her own room at the Vicarage.
Evening was drawing on ; the shadows were falling
far westward, and, seated at his desk, Mr. Chancel was
already composing an epitaph for the white marble
cross that Lina meant to place above the grave. He
had got as far as—
I.H.S.
Joannes Chaloner, Centurione,
and was sorely puzzling himself whether he should de-
nominate H.M.'s 43rd Foot as Velites, as the Light
Infantry in the Punic War were styled by Livy, or
Ascensi, as the same species of force were called by
THE MUFFLED DRUM.
297
Terentius Varro, when a shriek of a very appalling
kind ran through the house, proceeding from the room
of Lina, and made the old man's heart stand still as,
with trembling steps, he proceeded thither, and found
her in a dead swoon, as he thought.
It would seem that when Lina had for the first time
been—at her special request—left alone and to her
own reflections, she remained sunk amid them,uncon-
scious of time and of the evening deepening round her.
After the exciting bustle and display of the burial-
day—for both were there amid all its solemnity—an
awful quiet seemed around her.
The wind sighed softly through the trees of the
garden without; it rustled the leaves of the trees as it
passed ; but she heard it not—though other sound
there was none.
She was remembering now—as Fanny Arnaud had
done elsewhere—that in all matters connected with
love, betrothal and marriage, the opal was deemed of
old, and was now, a stone of ill omen ; yet, from time
to time, she took up the ring that had been found on
the hand of the dead, and kissed it tenderly.
Dear to her though the spot of earth was that held
those cold remains, she could not too soon leave it
behind her. Home—home—was her course now—
home to Amy ; not even the most evil-minded would
293
JACK CHA LONER.
mock at the non-fulfilment of her hapless engage-
ment now.
With her own hands—working as Flora Maclvof
worked the shroud of Fergus ere he died—she made a
floral wreath of white flowers, which she meant to lay
on Jack's grave, and then go near it—to indulge in
the luxury of woe—no more.
After all—all that had come and gone, this was the
end; and, but for Annerley, he might have died be*
lieving that she was false to, or indifferent to him,
through the cunning of that cruel girl.
The twilight was deepening rapidly, as the sun had
now set, and the floral wreath was nearly complete,
when some impulse, born of what she knew not, made
her look through the window into the darkening
garden without.
Then every pulse in her body stood still, while a
thrill of unnatural horror ran through her heart.
There—there she saw, for a moment or two, the form
of Jack, his dark eyes as though regarding her with a
loving, but piercing and melancholy expression !
Of what his dress or costume was, she could make
out nothing—she saw the face, and the face only.
Then the sound of the muffled drum seemed like
ghost-music to come to her ears again, and, uttering
the shriek referred to, she fell on the floor on her face,
THE MUFFLED DRUM. 299
with her hands outspread upon the cold damp flowers
of the floral cross.
The Vicar raised her in his arms, and found her
almost as cold as marble.
' Help—help!' cried the poor man, in great dismay;
' Miss Capel is dead !'
CHAPTER XXXII.
the pah of paora.
Not to keep the reader needlessly in suspense, we may
as well admit at once that it was not Jack Chaloner's
body which was found decapitated by the scouting
party of the 43rd, which was so wept over by Lina,
and so solemnly buried by the garrison of Auckland.
Such fellows as Jack are often hard to kill ; it was
' a close shave' with him, as he afterwards said,
' Lombard Street to a China orange,' that he was not,
in reality,' shortened by a head.'
The Maories had hewn off that of poor Annerley in
token of triumph ; and Jack, as he lay half stunned on
the ground by a blow from a knob-keerie, war-club, or
some such implement, felt the collar of his tunic torn
roughly open by tawny hands, and knew that his head
was about to be slashed off, when a native—a chief
apparently, by his stature and authority—interposed
JACK CHALO NEK,
with a loud voice, flung the assailants aside, and drew
up Jack, who found himself face to face with the man
he had dragged out of Auckland Harbour, the com-
mander of the pah at Tauranga, Paora, the wearer of
the postage-stamps!
The latter, in broken English—for he had been a
trader in some fashion with our people—and in his
native language, which is radically the same as the
Tahitian—rich, sonorous, and abounding in meta-
physical distinctions—made Jack understand that he
would be retained as a prisoner, and protected, if he
made no attempt to escape.
He was deprived of his sword, sash, belt, and re-
volver, and was dragged away by one party of Maories,
while another was busy in stripping to the skin the
dead body of Piercy Annerley, whose head they
carried off with them.
Jack's blood was at fever heat, but to resist in the
least would only be to anticipate a terrible doom;
besides, he felt faint, weak, and giddy—the result of
the knock on the head.
He now discovered that he had lost his ring—Lina's
gift—it was no longer on his finger; it must have
dropped from his hand in some scuffle, or one of the
falls that occurred to him in the bush ; it was gone,
anyway, an omen of evil apparently, all the more so
THE PAH OF PA OX A.
301
that he had parted with the donor in doubt, coldness
—almost anger—and might never see her again !
All day his captors continued to travel, taking him,
so far as he could judge, some twenty miles or so
inland, and eastward from the Waitara river ; but as
to whether they meant to keep him as a hostage or
slave he could not divine.
His eyes had not yet got accustomed to the natives,
who seemed to him absolutely savages, barbaric and
rather demoniac, in their brown nudity, painted with
red ochre mixed with oil, their large gleaming eyes,
thick lips, coarse hair, tied in a bunch on the top of
the head, with a tuft of feathets therein, their huge
irregular teeth, their great ears garnished with strings
of beads, and a fiendish-like expression—an odious
grotesquerie was imparted to their faces by tattooing.
All wore middle-cloths of flax, and were arrayed
with muskets, ammunition-pouches, and ugly-looking
knives.
Paora supplied Jack with some of the hastily-pre-
pared food he carried in a species of wallet for his
own consumption—maize, peas, and barley moistened
in water—and conversed with him from time to time.
' I hate the Pakehas' {i.e., English), Jack understood
him to say; 1 they come here, where they are not
wanted, and make us sign papers, by which we are-r-
JACK CHALONER.
we know not why—deprived of our lands, and their
Queen would make slaves of our chiefs, as the husbands
of white women.'
This was the very language used by the Zemindars
of Oude before the Indian mutiny.
' She only wishes peace,' Jack ventured to urge.
' Peace !' said Paora scornfully, ' then why does
she send guns and gunpowder among us, and bands,
like that to which you belong, all armed, if she is so
fond of peace ?'
So Jack betook him to his mess of barley and
maize,thinking the while 'what a devil of a tiffin it was,'
and deemed it unwise to pursue the subject further.
About nightfall his captors reached a pah of great
size on the slope of a hill, which closed one side of it.
Within this was a number of houses, quite a native
village, the nearly nude inhabitants of which came
noisily forth to welcome Paora and stare at his captive,
at whom some made grimaces, but many more
threatening gestures, expressions of anger and hate ;
and he was not sorry when Paora conveyed him to
his own house, and then he threw himself on one of
the usual native beds—a bundle of straw in a corner,
to which Paora added, as a covering, a large native
mantle, formed of knotted flax, a garment which
extends from the shoulders to the heels.
THE PAH OF PAORA.
303
It was not odorous of Araby or Ind, but Jack was
past being particular now, and gave himself up to
thinking of what was to be done next, and how he
could levant from his present friends—a desire rather
sharpened by the yells of the Maories in other parts of
the pah.
The house of Paora, like most of the others, was
about twenty-four feet long and eight in height; the
walls and roof were dry grass firmly compacted, lined
with bark of trees, and the ridge of the edifice was
formed by a single pole that ran from end to end.
The entrance was only high enough to admit a person
crawling* on hands and knees, and near it was a square
hole that did duty for both window and chimney, as
what passed for a fire-place adjoined it, enclosed with
stone.
The side walls and roof projected three feet beyond
the former, at each end forming a sort of portico,
where benches were placed to sit upon, and as the
natives are wont to squat upon their hams, their limbs
often lack that proportion which is necessary to true
symmetry.
Paora's wife, whose body was decorated with black
stains, called amoco, whose lips were dyed sable with
it, and who now wore Jack's patent lever watch as a
pendant to her necklet of glass beads, brought him
304
JACK CHALONER.
some fern-root, which they use as bread in some
places, and the flesh of some bird, roasted or baked,
as they had no vessels wherein to boil anything ; and
as he took this supper among the straw in a corner,
he could only mutter to himself:
' Here's a coil!—how the devil to get out of this
place ?'
A couple of days passed, and Jack found himself
closely watched, though not always, by Paora, who
had herds of cattle and a corn-mill to superintend ;
he found, moreover, that he was an object of no
small interest to the entire female population of the
pah—ladies who differed in no way apparently from
the gentlemen—save that they were less in stature
and had softer voices. Some of them had no objection
to f rub noses' with him ; but, ere long, great was his
consternation when he understood they wished to tat-
too him, and turn him from a Pakehas into a Maori!
He felt that his whole protection rested in the hands
of Paora, and great was his anxiety when that personage
was absent.
Many of the Maorieshave become Wesleyan Chris-
tians; but Paora and his people stuck to their old
faith: he believed in the existence of a soul and its
immortality, and like the rest of his race, had curious
traditions concerning the Creation, and a deluge in
THE PAH OF PAORA.
which one family escaped in a big canoe, after which
New Zealand rose from the sea, through the agency
of a spirit; he believed in a devil called Wiro, and in
Time and Eternity too ; but he made Jack Chaloner
understand that he believed the former too 'short to
reward his own valour and virtues, and the latter not
long enough for the punishment of all his enemies—
the accursed Pakehas !
By no ingenuity could he extract from Paora what
he meant to do with himself.
If he was returned among the killed in the late
affair, near the Redoubt, as poor Annerley had been
in Afghanistan, what must Lina suffer, and be suffer-
ing now / And if long retained a prisoner by Paora,
she might return to England before he ever saw
Auckland again ! The mystery of his fate might
even prove her death, and he might only return to
find her grave, as Annerley found that of Constance,
on his return home.
Paora had lost several of his postage stamps
during the last struggle in the bush—only a few re-
mained on his breast; but Jack promised to give him
whole sheets of them if he got safely back to Auck-
land, and the savage only grinned, as he knew all
that implied. He was a sharp-looking man, with
piercing black eyes that seemed to possess a faculty
306
JACK CHALONER,
for taking in everything that was within range of
them, and had shining teeth, that, to Jack, seemed
unpleasantly suggestive of tearing the flesh from a
well-devilled thigh bone.
Paora might be killed in some skirmish ; Jack
would then be left without a protector, and he
shuddered at the thought of what his fate might be;
he knew chiefly about the New Zealanders through
the voyages of Captain Cook (rather antiquated
accounts now), and feared he might be killed right
off and eaten without ' the honour ' of being tattooed.
Anything was better than the hourly horror and
anxiety he endured, and he resolved to attempt an
escape, come what might of it.
He knew that, like the Pah of Tauranga, the one
in which he was a prisoner had but one entrance—a
mere hole like a drain, and, were he once through
that, and out in the open, he would take his chance
of whatever might follow.
On the third night after his capture, he thought the
time had come to make the attempt. Paora and
most of the male occupants of the pah were ayaw
looking after sohie strange cattle that had broken
into their Indian corn plantation, and Jack having
secured and concealed among the straw that formed
his litter a musket, with caps and a pouch of am-
THE PAH OF PA OR A.
munition, when all was still within the pah, and all
there, he hoped, were asleep, he quietly and softly
dropped a cartridge into the barrel, and placed a cap
on the nipple. He then muffled himself in the wide
flax mantle to conceal his face and the rags of his
uniform, and noiselessly crept out of the hole that
formed the doorway of the house.
The night was moonless, and the little square of
huts within the great palisades, and within the em-
bankment of the pah, was sunk in obscurity. Jack
knew the quarter in which the avenue of exit lay,
and went quickly towards it. Just as he stooped
down with a wildly beating heart, and, trailing the
musket after him, was about to enter it, a Maori, who
had been scouting probably, passed in on his hands
and knees, and on seeing Jack uttered an exclama-
tion, the latter knew not what. He only knew, or
supposed, that, thanks to Paora's flaxen mantle, he
was taken for a native, and crept at once through the
hole or gully, which was about ten feet long, and a deep
respiration, like a sigh of gratitude and joy, escaped
him when, drawing himself up to his full height, he
threw aside his disguise, grasped his musket, and
without the delay of a moment hastened, almost
heedless of what direction he went, to put as great a
distance as possible between himself and the pah,
20
JACK CHALONEll
Amazed at the facility with which his escape had
been effected from the thraldom of enemies so terrible
and repellant, he now took heart anew, and his natural
spirit rose. He knew neither the distance nor the
direction he had to pursue to reach Auckland, but he
possessed confidence from the mere fact that he had the
means of defending himself, of avenging his own death
if he fell, and of selling his life most dearly if overtaken.
After proceeding some miles over rough, unculti-
vated, and waste land, he reached a pine-wood, and
sought concealment there till the coming dawn might
direct him. Dense indeed was the gloom around
him, for the pines of that land—of different descrip-
tions, and utterly unknown to Europeans—soar to
a height which leaves no similarity between them
and the tallest that ever grew by the deep blue fiords
of Norway.
Itwas nowlongpast midnight, and Jack thought,with
something between a laugh and a sigh, of how he had
heard Harry Stapleton, quoting some one, say:—'How
crooked are the paths of life—at two in the morning.'
Will he survive toil and peril, and reach Auckland,
where Lina h^s laid a farewell chaplet on his sup-
posed grave, and has perhaps gone homeward over the
wide ocean, a widow in heart7
We shall see.
ESCAPE AND FLIGHT.
3c9
CHAPTER XXXIII.
escape and flight.
Even, had the sky been cloudless, the strange con-
stellations there could not serve Jack as guides by
which to steer his way; but after hour succeeding
hour wearily amid the gloom, as he dozed against
the stem of a tree, a redness in the sky attracted his
attention.
It was the first crimson light of dawn stealing down
the giant peak of Mount Egmont, which seemed about
ten miles distant, and, strangely shaped and conical in
outline, it seemed like a blood-red spike, high in air,
against the deep blue of the quickly brightening sky.
The sun came quickly up, the landscape teemed
with golden light, and from the skirt of the pine-wood
he saw everywhere a fine rich verdure spreading round
him.
If he was ten miles from Mount Egmont, twenty
lay between him and the redoubts by the Waitara
river, and he was a hundred and twenty distant from
Auckland. -Without money, a guide, or food, how
was he to travel all that distance on foot, especially
as all towns and posts were chiefly on the coast ?
However, the attempt was to be made. He ex-
20—-2
JACK CHALONER.
amined his ammunition and musket. Singular to say,
it proved to be one that must have belonged to his
own company of the 43d, as he knew by thejiumber,
letter, and regimental mark on the butt-plate, and was
of the pattern approved of at Hythe in the preceding
year, which,with the bayonet fixed, weighed iolb. 3|oz.,
and remained in use till the breechloaders were adopted.
All around the country seemed desolate and silent,
though Jack could hear the melodious voice of the
poe as he tightened the pouch-belt round his waist,
and he left the pine-wood—a beautiful bird, with curi-
ously pendent tufts of white feathers ; and there were
also the whistle and chatter of the brilliant paroquets ;
but as he shouldered his rifle and strode on in a north-
westerly direction, it seemed that he was traversing one
of those grassy plains which, far away from the small
block of cultivated land in Taranaki, stretch inland to
an extent as yet unknown.
All day he trod on, his food being only an occa-
sional bunch of tama, or prune-damson, of which the
natives eat great quantities, the luscious maiberry, and
other wild fruits which came in his way, as he began
to reach some low hills with rounded summits, and
anon the elevation rose, till he found himself wearily
traversing the base of a mountain, the sides of which
were covered by giant ferns and porcupine grass.
ESCAPE AND FLIGHT.
The lack of proper food for days past, together with
the anxiety and mortification he had undergone in
finding himself the prisoner of these miserable savages,
were all telling upon Jack now, and as the afternoon
drew on it seemed to him as-if he had lost control of
his own actions ; he found himself stumbling mechani-
cally onward, among innumerable rocks and swamps,
travelling first one way and then another to escape
them, till he felt half dead with fatigue.
In the pocket of his tunic he found a lost and for-
gotten cigar, and in his case two solitary vestas. A
sort of instinct made him search, as he knew not that
he had them, and a little exclamation of joy escaped
him as he lit the cigar and sat down on the hill-side,
with his back against a rock, and began to smoke,
with his eyes fixed dreamily on the undulating and
hilly ground that intervened between him and the
great extent of grassy plain he had traversed, and
which stretched away to the horizon, bathed in the
warm light of the setting sun.
Soothed by the tobacco, Jack must have dropped
asleep, for he dreamed that he was pursued, and that
a party of Maoris were coming swiftly after him at a
run, their hard-soled bare feet enabling them to tra-
verse rocks and thorny thickets with the agility of
baboons; and he could see their dusky forms leaping
313 JACK CHALONER.
from bank to bush, and from rivulet to rock, as they
came on.
Then a puff of smoke spurted out, a shot rang in
his ears, startling the majestic solitude of the desert,
and a bullet flattened out like a silver star on a rock
beside him.
He started up—was it a dream or a reality ? About
seven hundred yards distant were seven armed Maoris
coming on at a run, and from the rifle of one had
evidently come the shot he had so narrowly escaped.
This assured him that it was no hunting-party, but a
pursuit of himself—that they had followed his foot-
prints, his trail, from the pah, with the unerring in-
stinct of savages; and how many more might be coming
on, or have already encircled the hill to cut him off, it
was impossible to determine.
One was fast outstripping the rest. Jack dropped
on his right knee, planted his left elbow firmly on
the left knee, took a steady aim, and down went, the
Maori with his heels in the air and a ball through his
head.
Jack Chaloner instantly reloaded, carefully adjusted
the sight, and picked off another, just as the whole six
fired at once ; but as they evidently fired with Go-
vernment rifles, furnished with sliding sights, of which
they knew not the use, their bullets went Jack knew
not where, but he began to breathe more freely now.
ESCAPE AND FLIGHT.
313
Another and another he shot down, at two hundred
and fifty and two hundred yards respectively, which
so cooled the ardour of the remaining three, that they
—after uttering shrill yells of rage—went plunging
down into a deep hollow and disappeared.
Chaloner feared that he had not entirely got rid of
them, but feeling, with something of fierce exultation,
that he had in small manner avenged the death of
Annerley and others, and that there were four Maoris
less in Her Majesty's colony, turned away towards the
setting sun, and, refreshed by his sleep and his smoke,
continued his sorrowful and doubtful journey, thinking
that certainly his present adventures "were rather out
of the course of things in this usually humdrum and
jog-trot world.
The sun soon sank, and night again came on, and
after hours of toil in a direction which he could but
hope was the right one, through unenclosed tracts of
ground, all but impenetrable, and gigantic ferns and
shrubs, swamps and marshes, dense with rushes and
flax, where all was silent and profound solitude, save
when a few wild goats were scared by his approach—
he reached a forest of kauri-trees, the straight stems
of which make such excellent spars for shipping, and
some of which are of amazing height and circum-
ference, so much so, that an aged one on the shore of
314
JACK CHALONER.
Mercury Bay, called the King of the Kauris, is no less
than twenty-five feet in diameter, and its height has
never been ascertained.
Chaloner crept in among the underwood that
encircled the colossal stem of a tree, and, feeling both
light-headed and faint now, and careless alike of wild
hogs or the stings of centipedes and sandflies, fell into
a profound sleep.
When he awoke, sunrise was gilding the leafy
summits of the gigantic kauri trees, and his eyes
beheld with joy that the stems of some had been
stripped of their bark, which must have been done by
a human hand, armed with a sharp steel axe, to judge
by the freshness of the cutting.
A great many were all marked thus in succession,
as a guide apparently, and following these to a certain
point, an exclamation of joy escaped Chaloner, as he
came upon a most decided cart-track that led west-
ward—a track that improved and became a species of
road as he pursued it, and found that he must have
travelled much farther and faster than he had the
least idea of, as a man—a European—whom he came
upon, driving a herd of cattle, informed him that he
was northward of the redoubts on the Waitara river,
and close to the shore near the mouth of the Mokau
river, where one of Her Majesty's gunboats was at
anchor about a mile off shore,
ESCAPE AND FLIGHT.
315
The squatter provided Chaloner with food, and
guided him through a district covered with ferns, over
a series of -undulations, that ended at the elevated
cliffs which overhung the almost desolate shore of
the bright blue bay, and there—most welcome sight-—
was the tiny gunboat, with her ensign floating astern,
and almost dipping in the water.
The squatter, whom Jack Chaloner had, as yet, no
means of rewarding, procured a punt that lay moored
in a creek, and put him on board the Lass 0' Gowrie
gunboat, on the deck of which he felt himself at home
and safe as if in Trafalgar Square.
He had not come on board a bit too soon, as the
steam was just being got up for Auckland, so he was
told by her commander over some wine in the cabin.
From him he also learned that peace had been made
with the Maoris. Thus Paora might, perhaps, even-
tually have released him, and permitted him to travel
to head-quarters, but had perhaps resented his escape
from the pah and pursued him. Perhaps those who
attacked him by the mountain-side were ignorant of
the fact that the white flag had been hoisted by the
Waitara river. It seemed strange, however, that
Paora should pursue him with armed men after
sparing his life in gratitude — savage though Paora
was—3s the lion spared Androcles, the kindly wopd-
316
JACK CHALONER,
cutter, in the arena. However it was, Jack would
never know, or carevto know, now that he was safe
and at liberty.
On being landed at Auckland in the evening,
before reporting himself at head-quarters, his first
thought was of Lina, and to relieve her mind of the
grief he knew she must be enduring.
' For what is the flag flying half-mast high on the
fort ?' he asked a soldier of the 57th, whom he met.
£ In consequence of the funeral to-day, sir,' replied
the soldier, eyeing Jack's tattered uniform and general
aspect with some surprise.
' Whose funeral ?' asked the latter with some
anxiety.
' Captain Chaloner's.'
'What Captain Chaloner ?'
' Of the 43rd, sir.'
' Eli—what—how ?'
' His body was brought in from the front, sir.'
' By whom ?'
' Lieutenant Stapleton.'
' Stapleton of the 43rd ?'
' Yes, sir.'
' How was it known ?'
' I cannot say, sir.'
Jack Chaloner was stupefied, and began to doubt
his own identity, as he hurried off to the Vicarage.
ESCAPE AND FLIGHT.
317
Passing hastily through the garden, he had seen
Lina, and been seen by her, as we have related. Pie
rushed to her apartment, and took her from the arms
of the astonished and greatly terrified Vicar, to whom
all necessary explanations were made in time.
For some hours after this, Lina, whose nervous
system was terribly shaken, was almost delirious, ere
she calmed down and realized the astounding fact
that Jack Chaloner was alive, hale and hearty, and
the body, so solemnly interred as his, was that of
poor Annerley, whose head was sent in to Auckland
by Paora, on payment of a bribe.
The melancholy expression which she thought she
had read in Jack's eyes on the evening she deemed
him a spirit was simply the result of her own over-
strained fancy.
' But by what miracle came your ring on Annerley's
finger ?' she asked.
' That, is more than I can tell—it must have been
found by him, after I had lost it,' said Jack, as he put
his arm round the slender figure in its dark dress—
the mourning worn for him—and drew to his heart
the only love of his life.
* How good Heaven has been to us, darling,' said
he ; 'we shall never part now, till death comes in
reality.'
318
JACK CHA LONER.
'Oh, Jack, don't talk of death; let us live and die
together!'
He kissed her tenderly, and then it seemed as if
' their hearts leaped to their lips.'
To Lina, wondrous was the story of Jack's escape
and arrival. How happy was the subsequent day,
when she quite realized it all, and saw him surrounded
by his rejoicing comrades ! How sweet was the sleep
that came to her wasted form and wearied heart;
how joyous after it the awakening to another day, to
be spent with Jack as of old, after all they had both
undergone, when now all evil was over, and all happi-
ness was coming!
CHAPTER XXXIV.
conclusion.
I do not think that we have much more to relate,
unless it be for the benefit of the ladies, who would
not willingly forego the description of a bride's
dress, the rice, satin slippers, and so forth, especially
as the 'hero and heroine,' to use the old novelists'
phrase, are rarely followed into their wedded life.
'Oh, Jack!' said Lina, on the day before their
marriage, 'dearly as I love you, I knew not how
much 1 really did so until I thought I had lost you
for ever, and that we should never—never meet again !*
CONCLUSION.
Only once was Oliver Pierrepoint referred to, and
never again.
' Why did you not tell me about Pierrepoint and
his visits ?'
'To tell you the truth, Jack, I was afraid,' said
Lina, smiling up fondly in his face; ' but why did
you never mention Fanny Arnaud ?'
' I thought her not of sufficient consequence at first;
and, by Jove, after a time I was afraid to write of
her, too. But, Lina, when I heard of Pierrepoint, I
knew not that he had a wife already, and I could but
judge of him as I did of myself.'
' Pearest Jack, and how was that ?'
4 That it was impossible for any man who had ever
loved you to cease doing so.'
' He loved me, Jack, or perhaps thought he loved
me, in my girlish days; more hearts than his have
been offered to me since then; but I looked for one
to whose love my own heart could respond, and I
never found that, Jack, till I met you. You believe
me, darling, don't you ?'
Could Jack Chaloner doubt her ?
When the marriage morning came, St. Paul's, the
metropolitan church at Auckland, a fine edifice built
of bricks in the old English style, though its founda-
tion stone was only laid in 1841, was crowded, as
32° JACK CHALONER.
Stapleton, the groomsman, irreverently said, ' with
fair women and brave men to see Jack Chaloner
turned off,' and Jack seemed rather to enjoy the
concourse.
As Lina was led into the church by the Governor,
who was to give her away, she could not—even amid
the present happiness—repress a shudder at the
thought of her last appearance there—the awful
funeral day !
Fair as a lily and lovely as only a lovely girl can
look on her marriage day, when all girls look their
best, Lina Capel's beauty was something wonderful,
and her rich brown hair caught every, gleam of light,
and seemed to retain it amid the glossy coils.
' The beauty of the bride is enough to make every-
one long to be in love,' said Cheveley, of the 68th.
' Man alive, the 43rd are never out of it,' replied
Stapleton.
Among the mere spectators was Fanny Arnaud,
whom even her quondam admirer, Stapleton, avoided
now.
'I have found her out, Jack,'said he; ' she looks
very well to the eye, but there is nothing in her—you
know an empty barrel looks quite as well as a full
one, but is less satisfactory. Even Cheveley has.
thrown her over, so she'll take more than ever to
tight-lacing and French novels/
CONCLUSION.
32i
Lina's eyes—eyes into which Fanny averred she
dropped belladonna to make them appear larger than
they were by nature—met those of her rival for
an instant, but she drooped her long lashes ; the
diamond necklace sparkled as it rose and fell upon
her soft bosom, but there was neither triumph nor
animosity swelling under it then.
Fanny had been anxious to be one of the brides-
maids, who were eight girls, the elite of Auckland, as
to be a bridesmaid is next best to figuring as an
actual bride, but Lina declined all her advances on
the subject.
According to the local prints, 'the bride wore a
dress of white brocaded satin, trimmed with lace
thickly embroidered in pearls, and a bouquet of
orange-blossoms on the left shoulder, and over a
wreath of the same a tulle veil fastened by diamond
stars, her only other jewels being diamond earrings,
and a necklace, the gift of the bridegroom.'
A great number of men of the 43rd were pre-
sent, and lined the pathway to the church door in
two ranks facing inwards*
The ceremony was performed by the Vicar, who
said to Mrs. Chancel, after it was all over :
' It will be strange, indeed; if these two ate not
happy in the future, after all they have gone through
322 jack chaloner.
in the past, and surely the blessing of love will follow
them,' he added, waxing poetical; ' he with talent,
bravery, and high moral worth ; she, dear girl, with a
pure, affectionate, and religious heart ; and that they
may be blessed above the common lot of humanity is
my most earnest prayer.'
' And mine, Vicar,' added the old lady, her eyes
moist with tears.
When the time for departure came, the carriage
containing the happy pair was only driven a few
yards, when (amid the crash of the regimental Ijand)
it was unhorsed by the non-commissioned officers
and soldiers of Jack's company, who, with ringing
cheers, drew it to the harbour, where 'Captain and
Mrs. Chaloner' were fo take the steamer for the gay
little town of Nelson, where the honeymoon was to be
spent, and where the former had to be spa'red for
a time by the ' Fighting Forty-Third.'
THE END.
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8. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. With 40 Illustrations.
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6
Dr. ROOKE'S
OHIENTAL PILLS & SOUR ELIXIR.
TASSE WELL-KNOWN FAMILY MEDICINES have had a continually
increasing' sale throughout the United Kingdom arid the British Colonies since
their introduction in 183G, and are especially noted for their STRENGTHENING
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RELIEF and CURE of
INDIGESTION, j PULMONARY CONSUMPTION,
LIVER COMPLAINTS, RHEUM A "! dl.
ASTHMA, LOUT, SC ICI'VLA.
BRONCHITIS, f GENERA! G l, r IfY,
and &ri Diseases of th; r RRYOUS SYC ; M,
Whether arising from a sedentary mode . life, unh v.r occupation, in-
salubrious climate, ox* any other cause.
The ORIENTAL FILLS are sola in Boxes at Is. VV. vm, in. dd. each.
Th- SOLAR ELLalR in Bottles at is. id. and lis, each.
Both o bs (bxtained of a!! Chemists and Patent Medicine Vendors.
DR. ROOKE'S ANTI-LANCET.
Alt who>wish to preserve health and thus prolong ibe, should read Dr. R< oke's "ANTI-
LANCET," or "HANDY GUIDE TO DOMESTIC "MEDICINE," which contains 5.72 pages,
and is replete with anecdotes, sketches, biographical matter, portraits of eminent men, Ac.
It may be obtained GRATIS of any Chemist, or POST FREE from Da. Rookx, Scarborough,
England.
i 'eiicerning this book, the late eminent author, Sheridan Knowles, observed:—"It will bt
an incalculable boon to *very pet so: who can read and think."
CROSBY'S
BALSAMC
COUGH ELIXIR
Is specially recommended hy several eminent Physicians, and by DR. ROQKR,
j Scarborough, Author of the " Anti-Lancet."
It has been need with the most signal success for Asthma. Bronchitis, Con-
sumption, Coughs, Influenza, Consumptive Night-Sweats, Spitting of Biood,
ihortness of Breath, and all Affections of the Throat and Chest.
St.Tdin Bottle^ at 1 9d., 4s. fid., and lis. each, by all respectable Chemists,
and wholesale by JAMES M. CROSBY, Chemist, Scarborough.
Invalids should read Crosby's Prize Treatise on " Diseases or the Lungs
and Air Vessels," a copy of which can be had Gratis of all Chemists.