Fifty-Two Stories For Girls Part 28

An hour later his battered troops came up with the British forces. Three or four stragglers dropped into camp as the serjeant major was making his report.

"Ah!" said the colonel, expressively--"you got through?"

"Yes, sir, beastly hard work, too."

"Who brought you?"

"Lieutenant Weyburne, sir."

"I thought so. He's the kind of fellow for that sort of thing. Is he in?"

"He was shot, sir."

"Shot, poor boy. What will Alleson say?"

It was Wednesday morning, and the entire strength of the Depot had turned out on parade. The Colonel, tall and dignified in the faultless neatness of undress uniform, was standing in his characteristic att.i.tude, with his hands behind him and his head thrown slightly back.

His blue eyes looked out, grave and watchful, from under the peak of his fatigue cap, and the tense interlocking of his gloved fingers was the only sign of his mental unrest.

Yet the vision of Miles was before him--Miles bold, earnest, high-spirited, Miles in the full joy of life and strength, with the light of affection in his eyes; Miles again with his boyish face white and drawn and his active young form still in death.

He had loved the boy, his boy as he always called him, more even than he had realised, and life seemed very blank without the hope of seeing him again.

It was two days since his name had appeared in the lists of killed and wounded, and that afternoon the Colonel went down to see Marjorie, who had returned from Eastbourne a few days before. She looked unusually pale when she came into the room, and though she ran forward eagerly enough to greet him, her eyes were tearful and her lips quivering, as she put her hand into his.

"I thought of writing to you"--began the Colonel nervously, "but----"

"I'm glad you came," said Marjorie, "very glad. I shouldn't mind so much if we knew just how he died," she added sorrowfully.

"We know how he would face death, Marjorie!"

She put her arms on the table, and hid her face with a stifled sob.

"He was your boy, and you'll miss him so," she went on. "There's no one like him, no one half so dear or half so brave. If I were only a boy I might try to be like him and make you happy--but I can't, it's no use."

She was looking up at him with those dark eyes of hers, just as his boy had looked at him when he said good-bye three months ago, and he could not trust himself to speak.

"I suppose you get used to things," she said with a sigh.

The Colonel put his hand on her head. "Poor child," he said in a husky voice, "don't think about me."

"Miles loved you," she answered softly, going up close to him. "I'm his sister. Let me love you, too."

He drew her to him in a tender fatherly manner, that brought instant comfort to her aching, wilful little heart.

"Your father was my friend, Marjorie," he said,--"the staunchest friend man ever had. I have often wondered why we failed to understand each other."

"You don't like girls," said Marjorie, "that's why."

The Colonel smiled grimly.

"I didn't," he said. "Perhaps I have changed my mind."

Lord Roberts had entered Pretoria, and the Colonel sat in his quarters looking through the list of released prisoners. All at once he gave a start, glanced hastily around, and then looked back again. About half way down the list of officers, he read:

"Lieut. M. Weyburne (reported killed at Spion Kop)."

Miles was alive: there had been some mistake. The bugle sounded. It was a quarter past nine. He walked out on to the parade-ground with his usual firm step, smiling as he went. Miles was alive. He could have dashed down the barrack-square like a bugler-boy in the lightness of his heart.

People who met him that day hastened to congratulate him. He said very little, but looked years younger.

Three weeks later there came a letter from Miles, explaining how he had been left upon the ground for dead, and on coming to himself, had fallen unarmed into the hands of the Boers. He had never fully recovered from his wounds, and by the doctor's orders had been invalided home, so that his guardian might expect him about ten days after receiving his letter.

It was a happy home-coming. The Colonel went down to Southampton to meet him, and when he reached his aunt's house he found a letter from Marjorie awaiting him. "The Colonel's a dear," she wrote; "I understand now why you think such a lot of him."

Miles turned with a smile to his guardian.

"You and Marjorie are friends at last, Colonel," he said.

"Yes, my boy," he returned gravely; "we know each other better now."

'TWIXT LIFE AND DEATH.

_A MANX STORY._

BY CLUCAS JOUGHIN.

PART I.

Deborah s.h.i.+mmin was neither tall nor fair, and yet Nature had been kind to her in many ways. She had wonderful eyes--large, dark, and full of mute eloquence--and if her mouth was too large, her nose too irregular, and her cheeks too much tanned by rude health, and by exposure to the sun as the village gossips said, I, Henry Kinnish, poetic dreamer, and amateur sculptor, thought she had a symmetry of form and a grace of movement which wrought her whole being into harmony and made her a perfect example of beauty with a plain face; and every one knew that Andrew, the young village blacksmith and rural postman, loved her with all the might of his big, brawny soul.

These two ideas of Deborah's beauty and Andrew's love for her, were revealed to me one day when, with Deborah's master, his lumbering sons and comely daughters, and my chum Fred Harcourt, an artist from "across the water," we were cutting some early gra.s.s in May, just before the full bloom of the gorse had begun to fade from the hillsides and from the tops of the hedges where it had made borders of gold for the green of the fields all the spring.

A soft west wind, which blew in from the sea, made waves along the uncut gra.s.s to windward of the mowers, and played around the skirts of Deborah, making them flutter about her, while the exertion of the haymaking occasionally let loose her long, strong black hair.

But the face of Deborah was sad; for the village policeman had laid a charge against her before his chief to make her account for her possession of a large number of seagulls' eggs, to take which the law of the Island had made a punishable offence, by an act of Tynwald pa.s.sed to protect the sea fowl from extinction.

The eggs, all fresh, and newly taken from the nests, had been found on Deborah's dressing-table; but Deborah indignantly denied all knowledge of the means by which they had got there. There was a mystery about it to every one, for fresh clutches were seen there every morning, and the innocent Deborah made no attempt to conceal them. Where, then, could they come from but from some nests of the colony of seagulls which lived in the haughs that dropped down into the sea from Rhaby Hills? But no woman, young or old, could climb the craigs where the gulls had their nests. It was a feat of daring only performed by reckless boys and young men who were reared on the littoral, and who were strong and spirited craigsmen by inheritance and by familiarity with the dangerous sport of egg-collecting among the giddy heights of precipices on which, if they took but one false step, they might be hurled to certain destruction below.

When the mowers had made all but the last swath, and there were only a few more rucks of the early hay to be made in the field, Cubbin, the rural constable, came in from the highroad with Andrew, the smith. The hot and sweated mowers did not stop the swing of their scythes, but they talked loudly amongst themselves in imprecations against the new law which made it a criminal offence for a lad to take a few gull's eggs, which they, and their fathers before them, had gone sporting after in the good old times when men did what they thought right.

The bronzed face of Deborah s.h.i.+mmin paled, her lips set into a resolve of courage when she saw Andrew in the hands of the police; and I learnt for the first time that Andrew was looked upon as the robber and Deborah as the receiver of the stolen eggs. I saw more than this, I saw, by one look, that the heart of Deborah and the heart of the tall, lithe lad, who now stood before me, were as one heart in love and in determination to stand by each other in the coming trial.