'Sheikh,' said he, 'you will consider me as a prisoner of war, I trust?'
'We shall see--there are things that are as bad as death, and yet are not death,' was the grim and enigmatical reply of Moussa Abu Hagil, which Skene knew referred to torture or mutilation, by having his hands struck off, like those of some prisoners he had seen.
For many a day after, the friends of Malcolm Skene searched the public prints in vain for further tidings of him than we have given three chapters back.
Applications to the War Office and telegrams to headquarters at Cairo were alike unavailing, and received only the same cold, stereotyped answer--that nothing was known of the fate of Captain Malcolm Skene but what the news papers contained.
His supposed fate and story were deemed as parallel with the Palmer tragedy on the shore of the Red Sea; but more especially with that of his countryman, Captain Gordon, an enthusiastic soldier, who, missing Colonel Burnaby's party which he was to accompany with the desert column, perished in the wilderness, far from the Gakdul track--but whether at the hands of the Arabs, or by the horrors of thirst, was never known.
In his anxiety to leave Earlshaugh, Roland writhed under his convalescence, thus retarding in no small degree his complete recovery, and keeping him chained to a sofa in his sitting-room, when otherwise he might have been abroad in the grounds, though the brown foliage and the falling leaves, with the piping of the autumn winds, were not calculated much to raise the spirits of the ailing.
The partridges had become wild; the pheasants were still in splendid order, and cub-hunting was beginning in those districts where it was in vogue; but no one in Earlshaugh House thought of any of these, yet cub-hunting, as an earnest of the coming season, had been one of Roland Lindsay's delights.
However, he had other more serious and bitter things to think of now; and for cub-hunting or fox-hunting, never again would he set out from Earlshaugh and feel the joyous enthusiasm roused by seeing the hounds 'feathering' down a furrowed field with all their heads in the air, or find himself crossing the fertile and breezy Howe of Fife, from meadow to meadow, and field to field, over burns, hedges, and five-foot drystone dykes, then standing erect in his stirrups and galloping as if for life after the streaming pack, as they swept over 'the Muirs of Fife' which merge in the rich and extensive plains of the famous East Neuk.