BEL RUBIO; OR, THE CHILDREN of the EARTHQUAKE

New Zealand Mail, Issue 754, 13 August 1886, Page 8

BEL RUBIO; OR, THE CHILDREN of the EARTHQUAKE

BY CAPT. FREDERICK WHITTAKER

A STORY OF THE NEVILLES OF GUY’S TOWER.

CHAPTER XXV. ' THE NEW OFFICER. Hubert Seymour had been on duty all night, and knew nothing of the departure of his cousin till next morning, when he went to his quarters in the heat of the cannonade that begin with daylight. The men of the garrison were getting used to it now, for there was no more town left to destroy, and Herbert’s quarters were one of the few sheltered places, though General Ross’ house, not a hundred yards off, had been exposed to the fire when the ships opened on the town. The younger officer found his cousin not there ; but, thinking him on duty, thoughtnothing more of it, and went to sleep while he had° the time. When he woke it was near noon, and as he opened his eyes he was amazed to see Martin Diaz in the uniform of an officer of his own regiment, seated by the bedside, his face pale from his recent hurt, but otherwise unchanged, the bandage being gone from his head. The expression of the young Spaniard s face was grave and thoughtful, and Herbert rubbed his eyes to make sure he was awake, and asked: ‘Why, what’s the matter with you ? What are you doing in that dress, Martin V The last time he had seen _the_ contrabandista the latter had saluted him in the manner of an inferior who respects himself too much to render aught but respect to his superiors. This time there was an undefinable change in the tone and manner, as Martin said : ‘ Governor Elliott ordered me to report to you to-day, to replace Lord Neville.’ Herbert raised himself on his elbow, staring hard at Martin. ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean ?’ Martin drew himself up with a movement of pride that was unmistakable. ‘lt means that his excellency has been pleased to give me a commission in this regiment, sir, and that I am attached to your company. His excellency offered me a place on the staff, but I prefered the company till ( I have learned my duties better.’ Herbert had got over his first stupor of astonishment enough to ask : _ ‘ Do you mean you have been commissioned in this regiment ?’ , ‘I have said so, was the quiet reply. ‘ Then you will have a hard time,’ said Herbert, frankly. * I have, I can assure you. These Scots hate me, and they will hate you ■ worse.’ . Martin gave a slight shrug to his shoulders, as he replied : * I thought that our only foes were to be found in the ranks of the enemy. But if you can stand it, I think I can.’ Then he added with hardly a cnange of voice, in spite of the words he uttered : ‘ There was very bad news came last night after you were asleep. Jose Gomez and some of his friends made a dash at the hospital, stabbed a doctor, and carried off my sister, Concha, and Miss Ross, daughter of the general.’ Herbert sat up in bed and stared at Slari tin.

The quiet way in which the young man spoke did not show sorrow or emotion. ‘ Well, I must say,’ he observed, ‘ that you take the news pretty coolly. If those scoundrels had ray sister, I should be half mad with anxiety.’ Martin set his lips together firmly, and his white face grew whiter but he showed no other sign of emotion, as he said : ‘ Anxiety helps nothing. What is to be, is to be; and nothing can prevent it. I have found out that they are on board! a French ship of war ; and the are not robbers, like Jose Gomez. Besides, however anxious I might feel, I know that God will take care of them. Have you any orders for me, sir’?’ _ Herbert could not but admire the marble

calm of this singular young man, and he got off the bed, where he had lain down in his clothes, and began to arrange his toilet, saying : ‘ None, Mr Diaz. I beg your pardon for not remembering that it is my duty to welcome you to the company. I hope ,we shall have pleasant times together ; for I have been all alone in the regiment'; and a friend and brother officer will be an agreeable change for me, I assure you. I will take you to the barracks and tell the men that you are on duty here, for the future.’ He was soon ready, and they sallied into the streets, and thence to the barracks. On the way Herbert questioned Martin, and obtained from him the particulars of the last night’s daring'abduction. ‘ They have placed a guard on the hospital now that the damage is done,’ said Martin rather bitterly : ‘ but I suppose we must not complain. The governor is thinking of the general welfare and can find no time to attend to individuals. Your cousin, the young lord, got off safely last night. You know the general sent him away. ‘ No, I did not.’ Herbert thought to himself that he knew the reason pretty well, but did not say so to Martin ; for he remembered the scene he had interruped at the sea-front of the hospital. They went to the barracks, and the rest of the officers in the regiment, who had been informed by orders of the new acquisition to their numbers, cane up and greeted the young Spaniard with a strange mixture of respect and haughty jealousy. The orders, in announcing his name, had stated that the commission had been conferred for ‘ important services to the king,’ and the particulers had leaked out, so there was less disposition to be disagreeable than Herbert had anticipated. Moreover, the presence of constant danger was having its effect on the Scots, to knit them closer to their companions of a different race, and Herbert felt this in a cessation of the petty persecutions of Captain Matthew Fraser, the more so that he was now in command of a company, and not under the captain’s thumb any more. The day wore on in a renewal of the bombardment, and when night came staff officers went round to the quarters of the different regiments in the garrison to warn them to be * under arms at midnight to make a sortie on the enemy’s works,’ which were minutely described in the order read in all the company rooms. General Elliott, not satisfied with the return he had been able to make from his guns at the top of Sugar Loaf Hill, had determined to make an assault by night on the Spanish works, and try what he could do to gain time for his rock galleries by destroying the batteries of the enemy. He knew they were carelessly guarded, from confidence in the strength of the army besieging the garrison. At midnight the designated regiments were assembled by the curtain, in front of the Neutral Ground, under the frowning rocks of the northern face of Gibraltar. I Martin Diaz found himself beside Herbert Seymour, in front of a company of the Highlanders, waiting in the solemn silence which preceeds an order of battle for the word to advance to a desperate exploit. No man knew what would become of it, or who would come back alive. And Martin’s sister, and the woman he loved, were both in the power of the enemy.

CHAPTER XXVI. IN GUY’S TOWER. The grey walls of Guy’s Tower rose from the grove beneath them, as proudly as they had risen on the day when the news came to England of the great Lisbon earthquake ; and the table was spread in the same room at the summit, where Lord Warwick had taken his morning meal for half a century. The old earl —changed only in that his gray hair was now as white as snow, and his erect form slightly bent when he forgot himself wa3 seated in the same place he had occupied when he had opened the fatal news-letter ; and his glance from the window roamed over the same prospect, under the sunlight of early summer. But there was a change, for all that, m the room and its inhabitants, in none more than in the stately and respectable Matthew, who waited at table a 3 he had twenty-five years before. Matthew had grown corpulent, and his hair had gone from the top of his head, leaving a shining poll, fringed with white round the ears. The increased dignity of his air was worthy of the rank he held of ‘ butler,’ set over the ‘ servants’ hall ’ at the castle, and supreme over the wine cellar ; but his dignity was accompanied by some shortness of ° breath, and he often wished that his master would not persist in taking his breakfast at the very top of Guy’s Tower. The other change in the room sat at the opposite side of the table from the earl; and a very agreeable change it was. Hester, Lady Warwick, at forty-five, was as fair as ever, though, fuller in the bust. She was one of those gentle, amiable creatures that wear well; and she had become accustomed to her position by this The ‘ nobility and gentry ’ had accepted her long ago as a very good countess. The death offher father, which had taken place only three years after her sudden marriage, had obliterated her past, as far as the fashionable world was concerned. It was voted * bad taste ’ to speak of Lady Warwick in any but terms of the highest respect ; and she had long ago lost any trace of self-consciousness as to her humble origin. The earl, who declined to grow old, was, nevertheless, in the habit of making his wife read him the paper in the morning. The Morning Chronicle had by this time replaced the old news-letter, aud the earl had supported it from the first issue. That morning it had just come in, and, as usual, my lord, with an affectation he never forgot, and which his wife invariably respected, took it and cast a glance at it, with the observation : * I think I must have caught cold in my eyes, my lady. I don’t seem to see as well as usual. Will you oblige me '?’ And Hester, without a trace of a smile save that of courtesy, responded readily : 1‘ By all means, my lord. I noticed thai you had a slight cold last night. The doctoi

says one cannot be too careful of one's eyes. Thank Heaven, mine are as good as ever, which is wonderful at my time of life.’ Heater always made a point of talking of herself as growing old ; ignoring the same fact with her husband; and the earl pretended not to notice.it, though it made him love her more than ever. -

She turned to the place 3he knew he wanted to hear from first, and for which she herself had the greatest partiality—the ‘ Gazette ’ which recorded the movements of army officers.

Was not their only son and heir in the Guards, and did they not hunger for news of him at all times ?

The last they had heard from him he had been at Dublin having ‘ lots of fun,’ as he wrote; but his letters—never very frequent —had vanished for nearly three weeks, and the Countess was beginning to feel a vague anxiety that all was not well with her darling. She cast her eyes over the ‘ Gazette,’ and began to read aloud, without thinking what she was reading, till the name of her son arrested her attention.

‘ Horse-Guards, Blue—Promotions : Leslie, Lord Randal ; to be Mayor, vice Strang, to be Colonel of the < wenty-Sixt'a Foot. Neville, Lord, to be Captain, vice Leslie, promoted Major.’ ‘ That’s good,’ said the earl, rubbing his hands. ‘ Hope the boy won’t stay in Dublin long, Hester. Those confounded Irish girls are dangerous, they say. Go on. please. Anything more about our boy ? Why, my lady, what’s the matter ?' For he noticed that Hester’s face had grown paler as she looked at the paper, and that she had compressed her lips as if to suppress an exclamation of pain. ‘ What’s the matter ?’ repeated the earl, nervously ; and his wife, with an effort, read aloud :

‘Special Orders No. 488-Horse-Guards. At his own request, Lord Neville, Captain in the Blues, has been assigned to special duty, to take despatches to Gibraltar, with orders to report to General George Augustus Elliott, in command at that place, for such duty as the governor shall be pleased to assign to his lordship.’ Then she hurried to another part of the paper, and continued her news : * The order we publish to-day concerning Lord Neville, of the Blues, was issued some time ago, and has not been published, at the request of his lordship, who sailed for the Rock of Gibraltar, three weeks ago in the brig Sea-Bird; Stephen Hodge, master. Lord Neville has set a good example to a great many of our sprigs of nobility, by petitioning for active service, instead of dangling attendance at balls and routs in the capital. Hi 3 lordship will have a chance to see plenty of service, for our foreign news is explicit on the subject of the siege of Gibraltar, which has languished so long. It is to be pushed with vigor now, and English soldiers will have an opportunity of showing that the days ot Agineourt and Creasy have not changed the valor of our sturdy islanders.’

Lady Warwick read it all through with a steady voice, and when she had finished, stole a glance at her husband. The earl’s blue eyes, that had been growing dim of late, were flashing like live coals, and as she read the vaunting lines the old man sprang up, and cried aloud : ‘ Hurrah for George ! The boy’s a chip of the old block, after all, my lady, God bless him !’ He did not seem anxious at all till he noticed his wife’s pale face and the tears she co dd hardly restrain from running over. Then he came close to her, and his own voice trembled, as he said : * Hester, dearest, I couldn’t have done it, but the boy has done it for us. I could not I own it—l could not send him away. But now he's gone, I’ll own that I’m the proudest man in England, my lady. Do you hear? Your son—my son—has set ’em a good example ! Did you hear what the Chronicle said ? A good example ! Ay, ay, my lady ! New blood never comes amiss. The boy’s a Neville to the backbone, and he won’t disgrace us.’ But poor Hester could only say, with a pitiful smile : «Oh, my lord, he’s all I have in the world, beside you. Suppose—oh ! suppose—he should be killed there !’ Her words struck the earl with a memory of the past, as he looked round the room and out of the window. A 3 if to remind him still more of what had taken place in that room so long ago, the mellow tones of the post-horn, as the London coach rolled by beneath the windows, came to his ears, and a shade crossed his face. ‘Yes, yes,’ he muttered, ‘that’s true, Hetty ! It is true ! The toy could not fce replaced now.’ Then he gave a heavy sigh at the thought of what would happen if the son of his old age should meet the fate of a soldier; and his wife, observing his grave face, added,, hesitatingly: « My lord, could I ask a favor of you ? ‘ A favor, my dearest ! A thousand if you like! You Know I never can refuse you aught.’ . „ _ t ~, * Then, my lord,’ said Hester, rapidly, ‘why should we not go to Gibraltar, too?’ The earl regarded her with astonishment. *We go to Gibraltar, my lady ! You don’t know what you are talking about. In the first place, we couldn’t get in. The place has been closely besieged for four years, and the French and Spanish fleets are all around it. We couldn’t get in. We couldn t get in, unless we went in a fleet big enough to give them what Rodney has just done in the West Indies —that is, a good British thrashing.’ «But, surely, in that case we could gc with one of the admirals,’ she urged. ‘ You know, my lord, that Admiral Howe told us when we were at the review at Portsmouth that he would fce only too happy to take vu passengers any time I wanted to see for my self what a life at sea might be. Why no take him at his word now, and go with hm to Gibraltar? I see, hy the other news that he is under orders to take a great flee to relieve the garrison, and that the convoy are collecting at Plymouth even now.’ She looked so earnest and pleading tha her husband could not find it in his heart t Isay ‘ No * outright, but he knew better tha she the difficulty of the request she made and he said, kindly :

‘ Well, my lady, we’ll see about Howe is a good fellow, but in a case likflf this he might hesitate about cumbering his* flag-ship with passengers, especially women. I'll write to him and ask him, but that is the best I can do. I can’t promise he’ll say “yes” you know.’ - ‘ I’m-sure he will,, if I ask him.* said the countess,, with an accent of conviction. *He cannot deny the prayer of a mother,, who wants only to see her son, on whom so muchdepends. Think of it, my lord, if anything, should happen to our George ! Why, it would be frightful.’ Lord Warwick shivered slightly. ‘ That’s true, my lady, and I’ve given one son to the country already. I’ll write- to Howe at once. I’m glad we were civil to him when he was here, off duty. He will be disposed to stretch a point to oblige me,. I think.’

The letter was duly written,, and dispatched by the next morning’s coach, accompanied by a second, written by Lady Warwick, in a strain of earnest entreaty, with all sorts of feminine arguments, that might or might not have had their influence on the admiral.

A reply came in due time that ‘ Admiral Howe would be happy to take his lordship and Lady Warwick as passengers in the flag-ship, but he warned them that the voyage would be full of disagreeables, and that if the fleet went into action he might be compelled to put her ladyship down in the run, if he could not transfer her to some vessel that was not in action. (To be continued.)