CHAPTER XI.

OMNIA VINCIT AMOR.

'In the course of our lives it chances,' says a writer truly, 'that most of us influence directly or indirectly, in a greater or lesser degree, the lives of others; but, as a general rule, we do not recognise this influence until _after_ the effect has taken place.'

The Commandant of the Scots Brigade was yet to realise this.

There was a strange tremor in the usually stout heart of the general now, for though, after the sudden recognition of his first and, sooth to say, only love, he had begun to school himself to meet her with calmness or indifference, as a new friend, or old acquaintance, he felt himself as wax in her hands; and that it was impossible, even after the lapse of all these years, to meet her unmoved, and to sit eye to eye, and listening to her voice--the voice that had thrilled his heart in the old time, and was thrilling it now again.

He took her hand in his, and she permitted him to retain it; but for the life of him he knew not what to say, or how to take up the thread of the old story; so she took the initiative.

'You were but a young lieutenant,' said she softly, 'when last we met.'

'And parted, as I said before.'

His reply conveyed a species of reproach, as he had much to forgive; yet it seemed that there was an almost unconscious appeal in this reference to the old tie that bound them together once, and that now, did not seem to have been so completely severed after all.

'To my dying day, Mercedes, I thought I should remember your farewell glance at me,' said he.

'Forget it now,' she replied softly.

'Can I do otherwise?' he asked, as he read the shy light in downcast eyes. 'But oh, Mercedes, if--if----'

'What?'

'But I must not think it now--if your sweet lips should be but tricking me again!'

'Oh, think not so!'

Round hers his hand closed once again, and with its clasp came the earnest of a promise that each would never fail the other again; and then a great brightness seemed suddenly to fall upon the hearts and lives of both.

'Oh face so loved in the past time!' said Kinloch, as he drew her towards him and kissed her fondly, to the growing amazement of Dolores, who was about to enter the room, but withdrew softly, her heart tremulous with joy, though laughing, as a young girl is sure to do, at what she deemed a pair of elderly lovers; and yet the General was barely in his fortieth year.

It seemed to her that his resentment against her sex in general, and against widows in particular, had evaporated very quickly!

The General had felt the cold coquetry of Mercedes in the past--her desertion of him--too keenly, not to be deeply stirred and to feel her influence now.

The old love that in his heart had never died, but had been curiously woven up with a species of hate, came to the surface once more, and the assurance of it was flattering to the still beautiful Mercedes. 'Love,' it is said, 'cannot be measured by time; it springs up like fungus in the night. It flourishes apace, and, like the wind, none know whence it cometh, or whither it goeth.'

'Could you care still for such a fogey as I have become?' asked the General in a low voice; 'care for me again, I mean?'

'I am not now the thoughtless girl you loved in the past time.'

'But you are the woman I love now--the girl I never forgot and never ceased to love!' he exclaimed, while surprised at his own impetuosity and fluency. 'Once, at least, in our lives heaven seems to open to all of us: it opened to me when I first knew and loved Mercedes; and now heaven seems to have come to me again!'

And now, to the memory of both, there came back the murmur of the Berbice river, with its giant water-lilies; the glorious moon and stars of the tropics, looking down on the grassy ramparts of Fort Nassau, the palisades and spires of New Amsterdam, and the love-scenes of the past time; and when Kinloch rose to depart, it was with the promise that he would return betimes on the morrow.

It would be rather difficult to describe the emotions of the whilom misogynist, as he turned on his homeward way.

Joy at being restored to Mercedes, and gratified vanity that he could yet inspire love, conflicted curiously with a dread that he had compromised his own dignity and his long-vaunted opinions of the sex by this sudden surrender--this yielding to her great beauty and her old influence over him.

What would Drumlanrig, Dundas, and other old chums of the Brigade think of him? and what would Lewie Baronald say?--poor Lewie, whom he had doomed to foreign service to save him, as he had phrased it, 'from the fangs of Dolores'!

He felt his brown cheek blush hotly at the thought.

'That must be amended,' he muttered; 'to-morrow I shall see the Director-General of Infantry.'

It was impossible for him to shut his eyes to the fact that Dolores was every way a desirable bride for Lewie; and that, apart from her being the daughter of his own first and only love, she was the _lionne_ of the Hague, who was fêted and courted, whose toilettes were copied, whose sallies were retailed, and who was the central figure in society there.

At last he stood in his old familiar room, where hung more than one old tattered colour of the Brigade, riven by Spanish bullets and Walloon pikes. How much had passed--how great was the change in his thoughts, hopes, and intentions, since he had left it, but a few hours ago!

He scarcely thought himself the same John Kinloch, as he drew forth the miniature from its secret drawer in the old cabinet, and sat down to contemplate it with loving and tender thoughts, and literally to 'feast' his eyes, as the phrase is, on the face of her who, before she went to sleep that night, pressed her ripe coral lips to her own hand; and they sought the exact place where the General, ere leaving, had pressed _his_.