I dozed at last; but my slumber was haunted by dreams and nightmares,
like those of a fevered patient. I saw Louisa Loftus, with her pale and
lovely features distorted by fear, her black hair floating all
dishevelled about her white shoulders. She was clinging to the verge of
a lofty rock, towards which an angry tide was advancing, while I,
chained, withheld by some mysterious power, was unable to succour or to
save her. My voice was gone, and my agonies were unbelieved, as she
only beheld them with proud smiles of scorn and derision.
The scene changed. Now she had married, or was about to marry the
Marquis of Slubber, believing me dead—that I had perished in the East.
I heard her say so, distinctly and tearlessly, with a calm sympathetic
smile, which my Lady Chillingham, with an impatient motion of her fan
rebuked. Still I was deprived of all power of volition, and a spell tied
up my utterance, till Berkeley—I saw him to the life, in his lancer
uniform, hovering about her, to the evident annoyance of the senile
marquis—told her, in his drawling lisp, that he had seen me killed, and
she quite believed him. Then a painful cry escaped me, and I awoke. I
had other dreams, and these were, perhaps, the worst of all. I was
free! I had exposed and punished Berkeley. I was again among my
friends; handsome Beverley, Travers, bluff Jack Studhome, Fred Wilford,
and the others were around me. The lancers were on parade, I heard the
neighing of the chargers; and saw the long line of glittering lances,
the plumes and banperoles waving in the sunshine; I heard the music of
our band; we were laughing, talking, smoking; we were in the mess or
billiard-room, and I could hear the bells of Canterbury ringing in the
cathedral towers.
At other times I was in Calderwood Glen, under the old, old trees that
had echoed to the hunting-horn of many a kingly Stuart; or I was on the
heather muirs, gun in hand, with old Sir Nigel, knocking over the
whirring partridges and the golden pheasants, the plash of the mountain
burn and the hum of the mountain bee coming together on the balmy
breeze, as I trod the green Lomond side, and saw the grassy glens of
Fife, the blue Forth, and many a village spire among the woodlands far
away.
Then to waken and find myself chained to the Cossack corporal, in that
loathly Russian den, in the wilds of Crim Tartary, was a disappointment
cruel and bitter!
The rising sun saw us once more on the road; but for what place I was
still ignorant. Before we started Corporal Pugacheff released my hand,
but pointed significantly to his pistols.
On this day, as we proceeded eastward, there rose in the distance on our
right the mountain of the Tents, the highest in the Crimea (the Tchatir
Dagh, a mass of red marble), so named from its resemblance to the
dwellings of the Nogai Tartars. Five thousand feet it towered above the
Euxine, with its summit crimsoned in the morning sun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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