Blue Lights: Hot Work in the Soudan

“Eh! no—yes—yes.”

“Where to, ma’am?” asked the sympathetic porter, after the lady was seated in the cab.

“Where to?” echoed Mrs Milton, (for it was she), in great distress. “Oh! where—where shall I drive to?”

“Really, ma’am, I couldn’t say,” answered the porter, with a modest look.

“I’ve—I—my son! My dear boy! Where shall I go to inquire? Oh! what shall I do?”

These would have been perplexing utterances even to an unsympathetic man.

Turning away from the window, and looking up at the driver, the porter said solemnly—

“To the best ’otel you know of, cabby, that’s not too dear. An’ if you’ve bin gifted with compassion, cabby, don’t overcharge your fare.”

Accepting the direction, and exercising his discretion as well as his compassion, that intelligent cabby drove, strange to say, straight to an hotel styled the “Officers’ House,” which is an offshoot of Miss Robinson’s Institute, and stands close beside it!

“A hofficer’s lady,” said the inventive cabby to the boy who opened the door. “Wants to putt up in this ’ere ’ouse.”

When poor Mrs Milton had calmed her feelings sufficiently to admit of her talking with some degree of coherence, she rang the bell and sent for the landlord.

Mr Tufnell, who was landlord of the Officers’ House, as well as manager of the Institute, soon presented himself, and to him the poor lady confided her sorrows.

“You see, landlord,” she said, whimpering, “I don’t know a soul in Portsmouth; and—and—in fact I don’t even know how I came to your hotel, for I never heard of it before; but I think I must have been sent here, for I see from your looks that you will help me.”

“You may depend on my helping you to the best of my power, madam. May I ask what you would have me do?”

With much earnestness, and not a few tears, poor Mrs Milton related as much of her son’s story as she thought necessary.

“Well, you could not have come to a better place,” said Tufnell, “for Miss Robinson and all her helpers sympathise deeply with soldiers. If any one can find out about your son, they can. How were you led to suspect that he had come to Portsmouth?”

“A friend suggested that he might possibly have done so. Indeed, it seems natural, considering my dear boy’s desire to enter the army, and the number of soldiers, who are always passing through this town.”

“Well, I will go at once and make inquiry. The name Milton is not familiar to me, but so many come and go that we sometimes forget names.”

When poor Mrs Milton was afterwards introduced to Miss Robinson, she found her both sympathetic and anxious to do her utmost to gain information about her missing son, but the mother’s graphic descriptions of him did not avail much. The fact that he was young, tall, handsome, curly-haired, etcetera, applied to so many of the defenders of the country as to be scarcely distinctive enough; but when she spoke of “My dear Miles,” a new light was thrown on the matter. She was told that a young soldier answering to the description of her son had been there recently, but that his surname—not his Christian name—was Miles. Would she recognise his handwriting?

“Recognise it?” exclaimed Mrs Milton, in a blaze of sudden hope. “Ay, that I would; didn’t I teach him every letter myself? Didn’t he insist on making his down-strokes crooked? and wasn’t my heart almost broken over his square O’s?”

While the poor mother was speaking, the unfinished letter was laid before her, and the handwriting at once recognised.

“That’s his! Bless him! And he’s sorry. Didn’t I say he would be sorry? Didn’t I tell his father so? Darling Miles, I—”

Here the poor creature broke down, and wept at the thought of her repentant son. It was well, perhaps, that the blow was thus softened, for she almost fell on the floor when her new friend told her, in the gentlest possible manner, that Miles had that very day set sail for Egypt.

They kept her at the Institute that night, however, and consoled her much, as well as aroused her gratitude, by telling of the good men who formed part of her son’s regiment; and of the books and kind words that had been bestowed on him at parting; and by making the most they could of the good hope that the fighting in Egypt would soon be over, and that her son would ere long return to her, God willing, sound and well.

Chapter Seven.

Miles begins to discover himself—Has a few Rough Experiences—And falls into Pea-Soup, Salt-Water, and Love

While his mother was hunting for him in Portsmouth, Miles Milton was cleaving his way through the watery highway of the world, at the rate of fifteen knots.

He was at the time in that lowest condition of misery, mental and physical, which is not unfrequently the result of “a chopping sea in the Channel.” It seemed to him, just then, an unbelievable mystery how he could, at any time, have experienced pleasure at the contemplation of food! The heaving of the great white ship was nothing to the heaving—well, it may perhaps be wiser to refrain from particulars; but he felt that the beating of the two thousand horse-power engines—more or less—was child’s-play to the throbbing of his brain!

“And this,” he thought, in the bitterness of his soul, “this is what I have sacrificed home, friends, position, prospects in life for! This is—soldiering!”

The merest shadow of the power to reason—if such a shadow had been left—might have convinced him that that was not soldiering; that, as far as it went, it was not even sailoring!

“You’re very bad, I fear,” remarked a gentle voice at the side of his hammock.

Miles looked round. It was good-natured, lanky, cadaverous Moses Pyne.

“Who told you I was bad?” asked Miles savagely, putting a wrong—but too true—interpretation on the word.

“The colour of your cheeks tells me, poor fellow!”

“Bah!” exclaimed Miles. He was too sick to say more. He might have said less with advantage.

“Shall I fetch you some soup?” asked Moses, in the kindness of his heart. Moses, you see, was one of those lucky individuals who are born with an incapacity to be sick at sea, and was utterly ignorant of the cruelty he perpetrated. “Or some lobscouse?” he added.

“Go away!” gasped Miles.

“A basin of—”

Miles exploded, literally as well as metaphorically, and Moses retired.

“Strange,” thought that healthy soldier, as he stalked away on further errands of mercy, stooping as he went to avoid beams—“strange that Miles is so changeable in character. I had come to think him a steady, reliable sort of chap.”

Puzzling over this difficulty, he advanced to the side of another hammock, from which heavy groans were issuing.

“Are you very bad, corporal?” he asked in his usual tone of sympathy.

“Bad is it?” said Flynn. “Och! it’s worse nor bad I am! Couldn’t ye ax the captin to heave-to for a—”

The suggestive influence of heaving-to was too much for Flynn. He pulled up dead. After a few moments he groaned—

“Arrah! be off, Moses, av ye don’t want my fist on yer nose.”

“Extraordinary!” murmured the kindly man, as he removed to another hammock, the occupant of which was differently constituted.

“Moses,” he said, as the visitant approached.

“Yes, Gaspard,” was the eager reply, “can I do anything for you?”

“Yes; if you’d go on deck, refresh yourself with a walk, and leave us all alone, you’ll con—fer—on—”

Gaspard ceased to speak; he had already spoken too much; and Moses Pyne, still wondering, quietly took his advice.