The lady scanned face after face in vain. Hayward undertook that she might be present at muster parade on the following morning, so that she might have the opportunity of seeing every man in the regiment. This gentleness, and the concern of all of us, seemed to soothe her; she sat quiet and silent with folded hands. Jack Dalrymple—I saw him the other day on the box of his drag at the parade of the Coaching Club—boiled some water in a pannikin and made the lady a cup of tea. As she sipped it, she began to talk—to tell us the story of her lost son.
He had been for two years in India, a subaltern in one of the Company’s native cavalry regiments. She had not heard from him for several months when, in the late autumn of ’53, she read in an Anglo-Indian newspaper that he had resigned his commission. Greatly distressed, she wrote out to one of his brother-officers begging for tidings of him. The reply came that he had got into a scrape in which there was nothing dishonourable, but which had ruined him financially, that he had persisted in throwing up his commission and returning to England, intending, so his comrade stated, to enlist in one of the Queen’s light cavalry regiments in time to take part in the war with Russia which he had assured himself was impending. Before those tidings reached England, the light cavalry brigade had already sailed for the East; but the poor mother had gone to London and devoted herself to inquiries among the recruiting sergeants in Charles Street, Westminster. One of the fraternity had professed to recognise the son by the description given by the mother, and from the circumstance that the former had told him he had been an officer in the Company’s native cavalry; but since the old sergeant had forgotten the name of the intending recruit and did not recollect in what regiment he had enlisted, the quest had run to ground. After the return of the brigade to England on the termination of the Crimean War, the mother had been searching without result among the regiments of it quartered in the South-country stations, and it was finally, on the advice of a Lancer major, who had recently exchanged from the “Skilamalinks,” that she should visit Captain Jolliffe’s troop in that regiment, since in it there was an exceptional number of gentlemen rankers, that she had come to Sheffield. And now, she piteously said, her last hope seemed dead; she would search no further, but go home and die, the light of her life gone out.
Hayward, tender and anxious as he was, did not dare to speak words to her that might inspire her with false hope. But it had been growing upon me, as she told her simple mournful story, that I had the power to do more than inspire her with hope—to give her, in very truth, the sweet joy of its realisation. Stronger and more strong had grown my conviction, as I listened to her, that my chum was none other than her lost son. Everything of his life that he had confided to me—and to me alone—tallied closely with the story related by the white-haired lady sitting in Hayward’s windsor-chair. Soon after dinner he had become silent and abstracted, and presently he had risen and left us. But I knew perfectly well where to find my poor brooding comrade—up in the stall alongside that vicious old chestnut jade which had carried him through Russian cannon-fire and Cossack spears on the sad, glorious day of Balaclava.
I had only to descend the staircase and go a little way to the left, to reach the door of the stable in which was old “Termagant’s” stall. Before I threw open the door, indeed before I reached it, I heard an unwonted din of hoofs clattering on the cobblestones, of vicious kicks against bales and pillar-posts, of scared snortings and squealing. The usually quiet troop horses I found infected with a wild delirium of mingled fury and panic, as the sweat poured down their flanks, and as they snuffed a strange fresh odour which pervaded the stable. I called my chum; there was no answer. No; but in the farthest stall I found him—found him down among the infernal hoofs of that vicious old hell-jade, the chestnut of the Balaclava Charge. She had trodden him almost into pulp. The odour which was maddening the other horses was the smell of his blood. She was kneeling on his chest with her forelegs. She was off the short jib, and was tearing pieces off his face and skull with her cursed long yellow fangs.
The sight whirled me into a reckless fury. I dashed at her head, caught her hard by the nose, half stunned her with swinging blows from the horse-log that sent her bloody tusks down her throat as she came at me, forced her back into the gangway, and fastened her up in a spare stall. Then, dodging her final vicious lash out, I ran to where my comrade lay. No one could have recognised him; hardly in the crushed, torn, and bleeding mass could there be discerned aught of human being. Yet he was not quite dead. I felt the last beats of his heart, and it seemed to me that he tried in vain to speak ere his shattered head fell back over my knee. I laid him quietly down, ran under the window of our room, and called for Hayward.
He came down. We went into the stable together where my comrade’s remains lay, and I told him I was sure that the dead man was the old lady’s son. He went across the barrack-yard to Captain Jolliffe’s quarters, and told him of the double tragedy of this Christmas afternoon. His wife put her bonnet on, went with her husband to the “Gentlemen’s Room,” and carried the white-haired lady with her to her own quarters, her guest for the night. Four of us took a table-slab off its trestles, and on it carried the mangled corpse to the little hospital in the corner of the barrack-yard, Captain Jolliffe accompanying us. There was no need to send in a hurry for the civilian doctor who had medical charge of the detachment. We gently cut the clothing off the wrecked form, and straightened the mangled limbs. Then my assurance became doubly sure. On the crushed chest, yet itself intact, hung by a ribbon round the neck a locket containing a miniature of the white-haired lady who had come to the “Gentlemen’s Room” in search of her son. It was her likeness to him that from the first had made her face seem familiar to me, although I did not grasp the resemblance until she was telling her story.
The woful task fell to Mrs. Jolliffe of breaking to the poor mother the grievous tidings that she had found her son only to lose him for ever in the grave. But God in His mercy averted the blow. The Captain’s wife began the duty devolved on her by showing to the mother, without a word, the locket and the miniature. The poor woman devoured it with eager eyes, made a futile clutch at the trinket she recognised: her arms fell, she heaved one quick, sudden sigh, and fell back dead in her arm-chair. We knew afterwards she had been suffering from advanced heart disease.
Friends came to carry home to the Wiltshire village the dead mother and son. Captain Jolliffe went to be present at the funeral of the gentleman private of his troop, who had been a good soldier in war-time and peace-time; and he took Hayward and myself with him that we might lay our comrade’s head in the grave. There was no Dead March in Saul to which to keep the measured time as the little procession wended its way under the gaunt elm-trees to the rural churchyard, nor did any firing-party ring out the triple volley over the soldier’s corpse; but there lay on his coffin the sabre whose edge his country’s enemies had felt, and from under the busbies of hussar-comrades tears dropped on his coffin as it lay in the open grave.