Soon after this, he heard the welcome news that his regiment was ordered home immediately, evidently in consequence of the disturbances in the East. This caused Du Meresq great delight. His corps was, then, certain to be in it, and he would go into action with Lascelles and all his old friends, instead of exchanging into a strange regiment, as he had determined to do if his own were not for service.
With all this other thoughts were associated. Somehow he had never looked upon his rupture with Cecil Rolleston as final, having pretty well fathomed the motif of her renunciation of him, which he considered would bear explanation when occasion offered; but now, rather sadly reviewing the past, he said to himself that, after all, it was well for her they had not married.
I do not know that Cecil would have been of the same opinion. She had a brave spirit, that could bear up against known evils, but fretted and suffered in suspense. She was much altered since her illness. Once the most attentive and docile of daughters, she became irritable and uncertain in temper-difficile, as the French call it, or, according to a Scotch expression, “There was no doing with her” some days; and Mrs. Rolleston, unhappy about both Cecil and Bertie, looked upon her husband’s prejudice against the latter as the cause of all this unsatisfactory state of things.
As to Colonel Rolleston, he was in the condition of a man whose “foes are those of his own household.” No one appreciated more the “pillow of a woman’s mind”; but really now the pillow might have been stuffed with stones, so many corners and angularities had developed themselves in his feminalities.
The regiment had been ordered to Quebec almost immediately after Bluebell had gone to England; and, as Mrs. Rolleston there heard of Evelyn Leighton’s death, the fate of their protegee became naturally a subject of anxious speculation. Yet not a line had been received from her; and, after a time, the subject was avoided, for all felt that Bluebell had been ungrateful.
Then Mrs. Leighton wrote out the strange story of her elopement, and having since entered a family as governess in her maiden name. Mrs. Rolleston was painfully shocked; for, coupling it with the girl’s silence, she could not but imagine the worst, especially when, as they gazed at each other in mute dismay, she read in Cecil’s face a suspicion that Bertie had had some hand in her disappearance, he had not written either; but, unless he were in correspondence with Bluebell, could not have been aware that she was in England. Of course, therefore, it was only the wildest conjecture. Yet how could Cecil believe that a girl who had once cared for Bertie should so utterly have forgotten him as to sacrifice herself to any one else within a few weeks? But a letter from Du Meresq himself did much to banish these gathering doubts and suspicions. It appeared quite open and above-board, and was written to Mrs. Rolleston on the eve of embarking with his regiment for the Crimea. He mentioned one or two houses he had been staying in, related the successful visit to his aunt and wound up in a postcript with the words,—“Give my dearest love to Cecil, if she cares to have it.”