I should think it must have been the devil tempting Lieutenant Leigh, or he would never have done as he did; for, as he looked at Miss Ross, the change that came over him was quite startling. He could read all that was passing in her heart; there was no need for her to lay her hand upon his arm, and point with the other out of the window, as in a voice that I didn’t know for hers she said, —

“Will you leave those two brave men there to die, Lieutenant Leigh?”

He didn’t answer for a moment, but seemed to be straggling with himself; then, speaking as huskily as she did, he said, —

“Send away that girl!” And before I could go to her – for I should have done it then, I know – and whisper a few words of hope, poor Lizzy went out, mourning for Harry Lant, wringing her hands; and I stood at my post, a sentry by my commander’s orders, so that it was no spying on my part if I heard what followed.

I believe Lieutenant Leigh fancied he was speaking in an undertone when he led Miss Ross away to a corner and spoke to her; but this was perhaps the most exciting moment in his life, and his voice rose in spite of himself, so that I heard all; while she, poor thing, I believe, forgot all about my presence; and, as a sentry – a machine almost – placed there, what right had I to speak?

“Will you leave him?” said Miss Ross again. “Will you not try to save him?”

Lieutenant Leigh did not answer for a bit; for he was making his plans; and I felt quite staggered as I saw through them.

“You see how he is placed. What can I do?” said Lieutenant Leigh. “If I go, it is the signal for firing. You see the gunners waiting. And why should I risk the lives of my men, and my own, to save him? He is a soldier, and it is the fortune of war; he must die.”

“Are you a man, or a cur?” said Miss Ross then, angrily.

“No coward,” he said fiercely; “but a poor slighted man, whom you have wronged, jilted, and ill-used; and now you come to me to save your lover’s life – to give mine for it. You have robbed me of all that is pleasant between you; and now you ask more. Is it just?”

“Lieutenant Leigh, you are speaking madly. How can you be so unjust?” she cried, holding tightly by his arm; for he was turning away; while I felt mad with him for torturing the poor girl, when it was decided that the attempt was to be made.

“I am not unjust,” he said. “The hazard is too great. And what should I gain if I succeeded? Pshaw! Why, if he were saved, it would be at the expense of my own life.”

“I would die to save him!” she said hoarsely.

“I know it, Elsie; but you would not give a loving word to save me. You would send me out to my death without compunction – without a care; and yet you know how I have loved you.”

“You – you loved me, and yet stand and see my heart torn – see me suffer like, this!” cried Miss Ross, and there was something half wild in her looks as she spoke.

“Love you!” he cried; “yes, you know how I have loved you.”

His voice sank here; but he was talking in her ear excitedly, saying words that made her shrink from him up to the wall, and look at him as if he were some object of the greatest disgust.

“You can choose,” he said bitterly, as he saw her action; and he turned away from her.

The next moment she was on her knees before him, holding up her hands as if in prayer.

“Promise me,” he said, “and I will do it.”

“O, some other way – some other way!” she cried piteously, her face all drawn the while.

“As you will,” he said coldly.

“But think – O, think! You cannot expect it of me. Have mercy! O, what am I saying?”

“Saying!” he cried, catching her hands in his, and speaking excitedly and fast; “saying things that are sending him to his death. What do I offer you? Love, devotion, all that man can give. He would, if asked now, give up all for his life; and yet you, who profess to love him so dearly, refuse to make that sacrifice for his sake! You cannot love him. If he could hear now, he would implore you to do it. Think. I risk all; most likely my life will be given for his; perhaps we shall both fall. But you refuse. Enough; I must go; I cannot stay. There are many lives here under my charge; they must not be neglected for the sake of one. As I said before, it is the fortune of war; and, poor fellow, he has but a quarter of an hour or so to live, unless help comes.”

“Unless help comes!” groaned Miss Ross frantically, when, as Lieutenant Leigh reached the door, watching me over his shoulder the while, Miss Ross went down on her knees, stretched out her hands towards where Captain Dyer was bound to the gun, and then she rose, cold and hard and stern, and turned to Lieutenant Leigh, holding out her hand. “I promise,” she said hoarsely.

“On your oath, before God?” he exclaimed joyfully, as he caught her in his arms.

“As God is my judge,” she faltered with her eyes upturned; and then, as he held her to his breast, kissing her passionately, she shivered and shuddered, and, as he released her, sank in a heap on the floor.

“Smith,” cried Lieutenant Leigh, “right face – forward!” And as I passed Miss Ross, I heard her sob, in a tone I shall never forget, “O, Lawrence, Lawrence!” and then a groan tore from her breast, and I heard no more.

Story 1-Chapter XV

“This is contrary to rule. As commandant, I ought to stay in the fort; but I’ve no one to give the leadership to; so I take it myself,” said Lieutenant Leigh. “And now, my lads, make ready – present! That’s well. Are all ready? At the word ‘Fire!’ privates Bigley and Smith fire at the two gunners. If they miss, I cry fire again, and privates Bantem and Grainger try their skill; then, at the double, down on the guns. Smith and I spike them, while Bantem and Grainger cut the cords. Mind this: those guns must be spiked, and those two prisoners brought in; and if the sortie is well managed, it is easy; for they will be taken by surprise. Hush! Confound it, men, no cheering!”

He only spoke in time; for in the excitement the men were about to hurray.

“Now, then, is that gate unbarred?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is the covering-party ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

My hand trembled as he spoke; but the next instant it was of a piece with my gunstock. There was the hot square, with the sun shining on the two guns that must have been hot behind the poor prisoners; there, too, stood the two gunners in white, with their smoking linstocks, leaning against the wheels; for discipline was slack; and there, thirty or forty yards behind, were the mutineers, lounging about, and smoking many of them. For all firing had ceased; and judging that we should not risk having the prisoners blown away from the guns, the mutineers came boldly up within range, as if defying us; and it was pretty safe practice at some of them now.

I saw all this at a glance, and while it seemed as if the order would never come; but come it did at last.

“Fire!”

Bang! the two rifles going off like one; and the gunner behind Captain Dyer leaped into the air; while the one I aimed at seemed to sink down suddenly beside the wheel he had leaned upon. Then the gate flew open, and with a rush and a cheer we, ten of us, raced down for the guns.

Double-quick time? I tell you it was a hard race; and being without my gun now – only my bayonet stuck in my trousers waistband – I was there first, and had driven my spike into the touch-hole before Lieutenant Leigh reached his; but the next moment his was done, the cords were cut, and the prisoners loose from the guns. But now we had to get back.

The first inkling I had of the difficulty of this was seeing Captain Dyer and Harry Lant stagger and fall forward; but they were saved by the men, and we saw directly that they must be carried.

No sooner thought of than done.

“Hoist Harry on my back,” says Grainger; and he took him like a sack; Bantem acting the same part by Captain Dyer; and those two ran off, while we tried to cover them.

For don’t you imagine that the mutineers were idle all this while; not a bit of it. They were completely taken by surprise, though, at first, and gave us time nearly to get to the guns before they could understand what we meant; but the next moment some shouted and ran at us, and some began firing; while by the time the prisoners were cast loose, they were down upon us in a hand-to-hand fight.

You see in those fierce struggles there is such excitement, that, for my part, I’ve but a very misty recollection of what took place; but I do recollect seeing the prisoners well on the way back, hearing a cheer from our men, and then, hammer in one hand, bayonet in the other, fighting my way backward along with my comrades. Then all at once a glittering flash came in the air, and I felt a dull cut on the face, followed directly after by another strange numbing blow, which made me drop my bayonet, as my arm fell uselessly to my side; and then with a lurch and a stagger I fell, and was trampled upon twice, when, as I rallied once, a black savage-looking sepoy raised his clubbed musket to knock out my brains; but a voice I well knew cried, “Not this time, my fine fellow. That’s number three, that is, and well home;” and I saw Measles drive his bayonet with a crash through the fellow’s breast-bone, so that he fell across my legs.

“Now, old chap, come along,” he shouts, and an arm was passed under me.

“Run, Measles, run!” I said as well as I could. “It’s all over with me.”

“No, ’taint,” he said; “and don’t be a fool. Let me do as I like, for once in a way.”

I don’t know how he did it, nor how, feeling sick and faint as I did, I managed to get on my legs; but old Measles stuck to me like a true comrade, and brought me in. For one moment I was struggling to my feet; and the next, after what seemed a deal of firing going over my head, I was inside the breastwork, listening to our men cheering and firing away, as the mutineers came howling and raging up almost to the very gates.

“All in?” I heard Lieutenant Leigh ask.

“To a man, sir,” says some one; “but private Bantem is hurt.”

“Hold your tongue, will you!” says Joe Bantem. “I ain’t killed, nor yet half. How would you like your wife frightened if you had one?”

“How’s private Lant?”

“Cut to pieces, sir,” says some one softly.

“I’m thankful that you are not wounded, Captain, Dyer,” then says Lieutenant Leigh.

“God bless you, Leigh!” says the captain faintly. “It was a brave act. I’ve only a scratch or two when I can get over the numbness of my limbs.”

I heard all this in a dim sort of fashion, just as if it was a dream in the early morning; for I was leaning up against the wall, with my face laid open and bleeding, and my left arm smashed by a bullet; and nobody just then took any notice of me, because they were carrying in Captain Dyer and Harry Lant; while the next minute the fire was going on hard and fast; for the mutineers were furious; and I suppose they danced round the guns in a way that showed how mad they were about the spiking.

As for me, I did not seem to be in a great deal of pain; but I got turning over in my mind how well we had done it that morning; and I felt proud of it all, and glad that Captain Dyer and Harry Lant were brought in; but all the same, what I had heard lay like a load upon me; and knowing, as I did, that poor Miss Ross had, as it were, sold herself to save the captain’s life, and that she had, in a way of speaking, been cheated into doing so, I felt that, when the opportunity came, I must tell the captain all I knew. When I had got so far as that with my thoughts, the dull numbness began to leave me, and everything else was driven out of my mind by the thought of my wound; and I got asking myself whether it was going to be very bad; for I fancied it was; so getting up a little, I began to crawl along in the shade towards the ruined south end of the palace, nobody seeming to notice me.

Story 1-Chapter XVI

I dare say you who read this don’t know what the sensation is of having one arm-bone shivered, and the dead limb swinging helplessly about in your sleeve, whilst a great miserable sensation comes over you that you are of no more use – that you are only a broken pitcher, fit to hold water no more, but only to be smashed up to mend the road with. There were all those women and children wanting my help, and the help of hundreds more such as me; and instead of being of use, I knew that I must be a miserable burden to everybody, and only in the way.

Now, whether man – as some of the great philosophers say – did gradually get developed from the beast of the field, I’m not going to pretend to know; but what I do know is this – that leave him in his natural state, and when he, for some reason or an other, forgets all that has been taught him, he seems very much like an animal, and acts as such.

It was something after this fashion with me then: for feeling like a poor brute out of a herd that has been shot by the hunters, I did just the same as it would – crawled away to find a place where I might hide myself, and lie down and die.

You’ll laugh, I daresay, when I tell you my sensations just then; and I’m ready to laugh at them now myself; for, in the midst of my pain and suffering, it came to me that I felt precisely as I did when I was a young shaver of ten years old. One Sunday afternoon, when everybody but mother and me had gone to church, and she had fallen asleep, I got father’s big clay-pipe, rammed it full of tobacco out of his great lead box, and then took it into the back kitchen, feeling as grand as a churchwarden, and set to and smoked it till I turned giddy and faint, and the place seemed swimming about me.

Now, that was just how I felt when I crawled about in that place, trying not to meet anybody, lest the women should see me all covered with blood; and at last I got, as I thought, into a room where I should be all alone.

I say I crawled; and that’s what I did do, on one hand and my knees, the fingers of my broken arm trailing over the white marble floor, with each finger making a horrible red mark, when all at once I stopped, drew myself up stiffly, and leaned trembling and dizzy against the wall, trying hard not to faint; for I found that I wasn’t alone, and that in place of getting away – crawling into some hole to lie down and die, I was that low-spirited and weak – I had come to a place where one of the women was, for there, upon her knees, was Lizzy Green, sobbing and crying, and tossing her hands about in the agony of her poor heart.

I was misty and faint and confused, you know; but perhaps it was something like instinct made me crawl to Lizzie’s favourite place; for it was not intended. She did not see me, for her back was my way; and I did not mean her to know I was there; for in spite of my giddiness, I seemed to feel that she had learned all the news about our attempt, and that she was crying about poor Harry Lant.

“And he deserves to be cried for, poor chap,” I said to myself, for I forgot all about my own pains then; but all the same something very dark and bitter came over me, as I wished that she had been crying instead for poor me.

“But then he was always so bright, and merry, and clever,” I thought, “and just the man who would make his way with a woman; while I – Please God, let me die now!” I whispered very softly directly after, “for I’m only a poor, broken, helpless object, in everybody’s way!”

It seemed just then as if the hot weak tears that came running out of my eyes made me clearer, and better able to hear all that the sobbing girl said, as I leaned closer and closer to the wall; while, as to the sharp pain every word she said gave me, the doll dead aching of my broken arm was nothing.

“Why – why did they let him go?” the poor girl sobbed; “as if there were not enough to be killed without him; and him so brave, and stout, and handsome, and true. My poor heart’s broken! What shall I do?”

Then she sobbed again; and I remember thinking that unless some help came, if poor Harry Lant died of his wounds, she would soon go to join him in that land where there is to be no more suffering and pain.

Then I listened, for she was speaking again.

“If I could only have died for him, or been with, or – O, what have I done, that I should be made to suffer so?”

I remember wondering whether she was suffering more then than I was; for, in spite of my jealous despairing feeling, there was something of sorrow mixed up with it for her.

For she had always seemed to like poor Harry’s merry ways, when I never could get a smile from her; and she’d go and sit with Mrs Bantem for long enough when Harry was there, while if by chance I went, it seemed like the signal for her to get up, and say her young lady wanted her, when most likely Harry would walk back with her; and I went and told it all to my pipe.

“If he’d only known how I’d loved him,” she sobbed again, “he’d have said one kind word to me before he went, have kissed me, perhaps, once; but no, not a look nor a sign! Oh! Isaac, Isaac! I shall never see you more!”

What – what? What was it choking me? What was it that sent what blood I had left gushing up in a dizzy cloud over my eyes, so that I could only gasp out once the one word “Lizzy!” as I started to my feet, and stood staring at her in a helpless, half-blind fashion; for it seemed as though I had been mistaken, and that it was possible after all that she had been crying for me, believing me to be dead; but the next moment I was shrinking away from her, hiding my wounded face with my hand for fear she should see it, for leaping up, hot and flush-cheeked, and with those eyes of hers flashing at me, she was at my side with a bound.

“You cowardly, cruel, bad fellow!” she half-shrieked; “how dare you stand in that mean deceitful way, listening to my words? O, that I should be such a weak fool, with a stupid, blabbing, chattering tongue, to keep on kneeling and crying there, telling lies, every one of them, and – Get away with you!”

I think it was a smile that was on my face then, as she gave me a fierce thrust on the wounded arm, when I staggered towards her. I know the pain was as if a red-hot hand had grasped me; but I smiled all the same, and then, as I fell, I heard her cry out two words, in a wild agonised way, that went right to my heart, making it leap before all was blank; for I knew that those words meant that, in spite of all my doubts, I was loved.

“O Isaac!” she cried, in a wild frightened way, and then, as I said, all was blank and dark for I don’t know how long; but I seemed to wake up to what was to me then like heaven, for my head was resting on Lizzy’s breast, and, half mad with fear and grief, she was kissing my pale face again and again.

“Try – try to forgive me for being so cruel, so unfeeling,” she sobbed; and then for a moment, as she saw me smile, she was about to fly out again, fierce-like, at having betrayed herself, and let me know how she loved me. Even in those few minutes I could read it all: how her passionate little heart was fighting against discipline, and how angry she was with herself; but I saw it all pass away directly, as she looked down at my bleeding face, and eagerly asked me if I was very much hurt.

I tried to answer, but I could not; for the same deathly feeling of sickness came on again, and I saw nothing.

I suppose, though, it only lasted a few minutes, for I woke like again to hear a panting hard breathing, as of some one using great exertion, and then I felt that I was being moved; but, for the life of me, for a few moments I could not make it out, till I heard the faint buzz of voices, when I found that Lizzy, the little fierce girl, who seemed to be as nothing beside me, was actually, in her excitement, carrying me to where she could get help, struggling along, panting, a few feet at a time, beneath my weight, and me too helpless and weak to say a word.

“Good heavens! look!” I heard some one say the next moment, and I think it was Miss Ross; but it was some hours before I came to myself again enough to find that I was lying with a rolled-up cloak under my head, and Lizzy bathing my lips from time to time, with what I afterwards learned was her share of the water.

But what struck me most now was the way in which she was altered; her sharp, angry way was gone, and she seemed to be changed into a soft gentle woman, without a single flirty way or thought, but always ready to flinch and shrink away until she saw how it troubled me, when she’d creep back to kneel down by my side, and put her little hand in mine; when, to make the same comparison again that I made before, I tell you that there, in that besieged and ruined place, half starred, choked with thirst, and surrounded by a set of demons thirsting for our blood – I tell you that it seemed to me like being in heaven.