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If not if not strive to forget for ever, your unhappy "CHARLES. "Perhaps O, glorious thought! Nurse Mackie may know better than the captain, after all; and yet, he seems so positive: if he is right, there is nothing for us both but Wo! Wo! Wo!" Now, to say plain truth, when Emily showed me this, I looked very blank upon it.
The adultery, indeed, was sin; but years of ill-concealings have multiplied its punishment. Wretched father wretched children! that must bear an erring father's curse. Oh! that Jeanie Mackie may have reasons, proofs; and be not an impostor after all, dressing up a tale that over-sanguine Charles may bring her back again to Scotland. Well well!
Charles and Emmy for he called her Emmy still, though Jeanie Mackie would persist in mouthing it to "Aamy," wished to have it delayed a year, in respect for the memory of those who, with all their crime and folly, were not the less a mother and a brother: but the general would not hear of such a thing; he was growing very old, he said; although actually he seemed to have taken out a new lease of life, so young again and buoyant was the new-found heart within him; and thus growing old, he was full of fatherly fear that he should not live to see his children's happiness.
After that, succeeded the monotony of a long sea voyage. The general at first seemed vexed about Mrs. Mackie, and often wished that he had asked her what she meant; however, his brow soon cleared, for he reflected that a discarded servant always tells falsehoods, if only to make her master mischief.
His death proved fatal also to that kind and faithful wife of his a dark Italian lady of high family, whose love for James had led her to follow him even into Central Hindoostan: she died in giving birth to a babe; and Jeanie Mackie, the lieutenant's own foster-mother, who waited on his wife through all their travels, assisted the poor orphan into this bleak world, and loved it as her own.
After those infantine seven years, the captain took her with him to his station up the country, where she lived she knew not how long, in a strong hill-fort, one Puttymuddyfudgepoor, where there was a great deal of fighting, and besieging, and storming, and cannonading; but it ceased at last, and the captain, who then soon successively became both major and colonel, always kept her in his own quarters, making her his little pet; and, after the fighting was all over, his brother-officers would take her out hunting in their howdahs, and she had plenty of palanquin-bearers, sepoys, and servants at command; and, what was more, good nurse Mackie was her constant friend and attendant.
Then, just before embarking, poor nurse Mackie came to her secretly, and said, "Child, I will trust you with a word; you are not what he thinks you." And she cried a great deal, and longed to come to England; but the general would not hear of it; so he pensioned her off, and left her at Madras, giving somebody strict orders not to let her follow him.
That same evening no day is so long as the day of a murder I met Ortheris with the dogs, and he plunged defiantly into the middle of the matter. "I'll be one o' the witnesses," said he. "I was in the verandah when Mackie came along. 'E come from Mrs. Raines's quarters. Quigley, Parsons, an' Trot, they was in the inside verandah, so they couldn't 'ave 'eard nothing.
"Be sure av that," said Terence, spitting over the edge of the verandah. "But fwhat he'll get there is light marchin'-ordher to fwhat he'd ha' got here if he'd lived." "Surely not. He'd have gone on and forgotten like the others." "Did ye know Mackie well, Sorr?" said Terence.
Mackie went and spoke to the princess, and soothed her, that she let the child depart peacefully. Most of her gorgeous jewellery dated from that earliest time of inexplicable oriental splendour.
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