"She is so young," he said. "Her judgment may be overpowered. The disparity of age is not, perhaps, at present very apparent. My position here, my reputation as a soldier of service, and my intimacy with her father, may influence her to an irretrievable error for her own future contentment. My feelings, therefore, must be suppressed, that she may not have to suppress hers hereafter, with loss of happiness."
Can anything surpass the quiet grandeur of that must?
He was a man in the prime of life, eminently handsome, accomplished, fascinating, the idol of his friends, the darling of his country, with every hope of a splendid career still before him. That such a man, when profoundly in love, should pause to view the question solely with respect to the girl's happiness, not his own—that he should humbly question whether, though he might win her, she might not in after years regret her action and wish herself free;—this, no doubt, is such a hero as has often figured in fiction. Quite an ideal hero! So some may object.
But the whole is true. There is no idealising in the question. John Moore, actually and literally, less than one hundred years ago, loved and decided thus. The grandeur of this man was that he thought always of others before himself, that he lived for duty. Where duty pointed or seemed to point down a pathway, no matter how hard and thorny the road, there unhesitatingly he walked. Questions as to the wisdom of his decision do not touch the splendour of his self-sacrificing conduct.
He never did propose for that young girl. Whether he would have done so in after years cannot now be decided. In 1806, when this hard conflict was fought out, less than three years of his fair life on earth remained.
After his four months' holiday at home—just at the close of which Roy Baron reached London—Moore was despatched on another expedition to Sweden. It was an expedition rendered especially trying to its Commander, and abortive in itself, by the crazy conduct of the King of Sweden, who, not long after, went mad and had to be deposed. Moore, when setting sail for England, wrote to his mother: "This campaign in Sweden has proved the most painful to me I ever served."
One trial followed another in these later years of his life. The heaviest of all was yet to come.
In the autumn of 1807, when Italy, Holland, Prussia, Austria, and Russia had been all either conquered or humiliated and crushed, Portugal next fell a victim to the rapacious Conqueror; and Portugal was made a steppingstone to the conquest of Spain. Before the end of May 1808, when Sir John Moore was sailing for Sweden, the French army entered Madrid, declaring the whole country subject to the Emperor of the French, and proclaiming Joseph Buonaparte king.
Then it was that the tide of Napoleon's successes reached high-water mark. From this date, it may be said, the retreat of the waters began on land, as their fall had earlier begun upon the ocean—at first imperceptibly, for a long while fitfully, yet with accelerating speed.
Again and again the Spaniards had fought on the side of the French against the English. But now at last the spell seemed to be broken; now at last their eyes were opened. "As a man," it was declared, Spain had risen against the Emperor; and a burst of enthusiasm, of generous and vehement sympathy, rushed through the length and breadth of England. A passionate longing to be led against the enemy pervaded all ranks in the Army.