CHAPTER LVI.
SCUTARI.
Alas! poor Charles. While they were all dividing the spoil at home,thinking him dead, where was he?
At Scutari. What happened to him before he got there, no one knows orever will know. He does not remember, and there is no one else to tell.He was passed from hand to hand and put on board ship. Here fever setin, and he passed from a state of stupid agony into a state of delirium.He may have lain on the pier in the pouring rain, moistening his parchedlips in the chilling shower; he may have been jolted from hospital tohospital, and laid in draughty passages, till a bed was found for him;as others were. But he happily knew nothing of it. Things were so badwith him now that it did not much matter how he was treated. Read LordSidney Osborne's "Scutari and its Hospitals," and see how he _might_have been, and probably was. It is no part of our duty to dig up andexhibit all that miserable mismanagement. I think we have learnt ourlesson. I think I will go bail it don't happen again. Before Charlesknew where he was, there was a great change for the better. The hospitalnurses arrived early in November.
He thinks that there were faint gleams of consciousness in his delirium.In the first, he says he was lying on his back, and above him were themasts and spars of a ship, and a sailor-boy was sitting out on a yardin the clear blue, mending a rope or doing something. It may have been adream or not. Afterwards there were periods, distinctly remembered, whenhe seemed conscious--conscious of pain and space, and time--to a certainextent. At these times he began to understand, in a way, that he wasdead, and in hell. The delirium was better than this at ordinary times,in spite of its headlong incongruities. It was not so unbearable, saveat times, when there came the feeling, too horrible for human brain tobear, of being millions and millions of miles, or of centuries, away,with no road back; at such times there was nothing to be done but toleap out of bed, and cry aloud for help in God's name.
Then there came a time when he began, at intervals, to see a greatvaulted arch overhead, and to wonder whether or no it was the roof ofthe pit. He began, after studying the matter many times, to find thatpain had ceased, and that the great vaulted arch was real. And he heardlow voices once at this time--blessed voices of his fellow-men. He wascontent to wait.
At last, his soul and consciousness seemed to return to him in a strangeway. He seemed to pass out of some abnormal state into a natural one.For he became aware that he was alive; nay, more, that he was asleep,and dreaming a silly, pleasant dream, and that he could wake himself atany time. He awoke, expecting to awake in his old room at Ravenshoe. Buthe was not there, and looked round him in wonder.
The arch he remembered was overhead. That was real enough. Three peoplewere round his bed--a doctor in undress, a grey-haired gentleman whopeered into his face, and a lady.
"God bless me!" said the doctor. "We have fetched him through. Look athis eyes, just look at his eyes. As sane an eye as yours or mine, andthe pulse as round as a button."
"Do you know us, my man?" said the gentleman.
It was possible enough that he did not, for he had never set eyes on himbefore. The gentleman meant only, "Are you sane enough to know yourfellow-creatures when you see one?" Charles thought he must be some onehe had met in society in old times and ought to recognise. He framed apolite reply, to the effect that he hoped he had been well since he methim last, and that, if he found himself in the west, he would not passRavenshoe without coming to see him.
The doctor laughed. "A little abroad, still, I daresay; I have pulledyou through. You have had a narrow escape."
Charles was recovered enough to take his hand and thank him fervently,and whispered, "Would you tell me one thing, sir? How did Lady Hainaultcome here?"
"Lady Hainault, my man?"
"Yes; she was standing at the foot of the bed."
"That is no Lady Hainault, my man; that is Miss Nightingale. Do you eversay your prayers?"
"No."
"Say them to-night before you go to sleep, and remember her name inthem. Possibly they may get to heaven the quicker for it. Good-night."
Prayers forgotten, eh! How much of all this misery lay in that, Iwonder? How much of this dull, stupid, careless despair--earth ahopeless, sunless wilderness, and heaven not thought of? Read on.
But, while you read, remember that poor Charles had had no domesticreligious education whatever. The vicar had taught him his catechism and"his prayers." After that, Shrewsbury and Oxford. Read on, but don'tcondemn; at least not yet.
That he thanked God with all the earnestness of his warm heart thatnight, and remembered that name the doctor told him, you may be sure.But, when the prayer was finished, he began to think whether or no itwas sincere, whether it would not be better that he should die, and thatit should be all over and done. His creed was, that, if he died in thefaith of Christ, bearing no ill will to any one, having repented of hissins, it would not go ill with him. Would it not be better to die nowthat he could fulfil those conditions, and not tempt the horrible blackfuture? Certainly.
In time he left watching the great arch overhead, and the creepingshadows, and the patch of light on the wall, which shaped itself into afaint rhomboid at noon, and crept on till it defined itself into aperfect square at sundown, and then grew golden and died out. He beganto notice other things. But till the last there was one effect of lightand shadow which he always lay awake to see--a faint flickering on thewalls and roof, which came slowly nearer, till a light was in his eyes.We all know what that was. It has been described twenty times. I canbelieve that story of the dying man kissing the shadow on the wall. WhenMiss Nightingale and her lamp are forgotten, it will be time to considerwhether one would prefer to turn Turk or Mormon.
He began to take notice that there were men in the beds beside him. One,as we know, had been carried out dead; but there was another in hisplace now. And one day there was a great event; when Charles woke, bothof them were up, sitting at the side of their beds, ghastly shadows, andtalking across him.
The maddest musician never listened to the "vox humana" stop at Haarlem,with such delight as Charles did to these two voices. He lay for a timehearing them make acquaintance, and then he tried to sit up and join. Hewas on his left side, and tried to rise. His left arm would not supporthim, and he fell back, but they crept to him and set him up, and sat onhis bed.
"Right again, eh, comrade?" said one. "I thought you was gone, my lad.But I heard the doctor say you'd get through. You look bravely. Time waswhen you used to jump out of bed, and cry on God A'mighty. Many a timeI've strove to help ye. The man in _his_ bed died while you was likethat: a Fusilier Guards man. What regiment?"
"I am of the 140th," said Charles. "We had a bit of a brush with theenemy on the twenty-fifth. I was wounded there. It was a pretty littlerattle, I think, for a time, but not of very much importance, I fancy."
The man who had first spoken laughed; the other man, a lad who had around face once, perhaps, but which now was a pale death's head, withtwo great staring eyes, speaking with a voice which Charles knew at onceto be a gentleman's, said, "Don't you know then that that charge ofyours is the talk of Europe? That charge will never be forgotten whilethe world is round. Six hundred men against ten battalions. Good God!And you might have died there, and not known it."
"Ah, is it so?" said Charles. "If some could only know it!"
"That is the worst of it," said the young man. "I have enlisted under afalse name, and will never go home any more. Never more. And she willnever know that I did my duty."
And after a time he got strong again in a way. A bullet, it appears, hadstruck the bone of his arm, and driven the splinters into the flesh.Fever had come on, and his splendid constitution, as yet untried, saveby severe training, had pulled him through. But his left arm wasuseless. The doctor looked at it again and again, and shook his head.
The two men who were in the beds on each side of him were moved beforehim. They were only there a fortnight after his coming to himself. Theoldest of the two went first, and two or three days after
the younger.
The three made all sorts of plans for meeting in England. Alas, whatchance is there for three soldiers to meet again, unless by accident?At home it would have taken three years to have made these three mensuch hearty friends as they had become in a fortnight. Friendships aremade in the camp, in the bush, or on board ship, at a wonderful rate.And, moreover, they last for an indefinite time. For ever, I fancy: forthese reasons. Time does not destroy friendship. Time has nothingwhatever to do with it. I have heard an old man of seventy-eight talkingof a man he had not seen for twelve years, and before that fortwenty-five, as if they were young men together. Craving for hiscompany, as if once more they were together on the deck of thewhite-sailed yacht, flying before the easterly wind between Hurstcastleand Sconce Point. Mere continual familiarity, again, does not hurtfriendship, unless interests clash. Diversity of interests is thedeath-blow of friendship. One great sacrifice may be made--two, or eventhree; but after the first, two men are not to one another as they werebefore. Where men are thrown intimately together for a short time, andpart have only seen the best side of one another, or where men see oneanother frequently, and have not very many causes of difference,friendship will flourish for ever. In the case of love it is verydifferent, and for this obvious reason, which I will explain in a fewpages if----
I entered into my own recognisances, in an early chapter of this story,not to preach. I fear they are escheated after this short essay onfriendship, coming, as it does, exactly in the wrong place. I must onlythrow myself on the court, and purge myself of my contempt by promisingamendment.
Poor Charles after a time was sent home to Fort Pitt. But that mightyleft arm, which had done such noble work when it belonged to No. 3 inthe Oxford University eight, was useless, and Charles Simpson, trooperin the 140th, was discharged from the army, and found himself onChristmas Eve in the street in front of the Waterloo Station, witheighteen shillings and ninepence in his pocket, wondering blindly whatthe end of it all would be, but no more dreaming of begging from thosewho had known him formerly than of leaping off Waterloo Bridge. Perhapsnot half so much.