Yet Herbert had really some reason to be discontented with his personal appearance. Always a trim and dapper youth, his patroness, Lady Farrington, had loved to see him neatly dressed, and had cheerfully paid his tailor’s bills when at Deadham school. But now, speaking exactly, he was not dressed at all; his figure was only concealed with clothes. His jacket was baggy at the back; the arms were so long that the cuffs came as far as his knuckles; his trousers, if they had been tied in at the ankle, would have suited a Janissary Turk; his forage-cap—it was before the days of smart glengarries—not yet ‘blocked’ and set up, fell like a black pudding-bag, over one forehead and one ear. His boots were quite amorphous, quite without form, and they might have been void were it not probable they encased a pair of feet shaped like wedges of Cheshire cheese. So deteriorating was the effect of these incongruous habiliments, that Herbert Larkins seemed to lose his erect bearing and springy step; and as he reached the barrack-room, to which he was presently marched, carrying his kit-bag full of cleaning utensils under one arm, and his new knapsack under the other, he hung his head and looked utterly ashamed of himself.
‘Oh! it’s you is it?’ said the sergeant in charge of the room, who took him over from the corporal of the pioneers.
Herbert recognised the sergeant with whom he had had the colloquy at the barrack-gate.
‘So you got past the gate, did you? Mind you stop, now you’ve got in. Don’t try and run off again with your bounty and kit.’
The suspicious sergeant scented a probable deserter.
‘I shouldn’t have come in if I’d wanted to go out directly afterwards,’ Herbert plucked up courage to say; but the scene was so new, and he felt so forlorn in his loneliness and his strange new clothes, that he had not much spirit left in him.
‘Don’t answer me with cheek,’ cried the sergeant, very sharply. ‘I want none of your slack jaw or back jaw. Hold your tongue, that’s what you’ve got to do, and do as you’re bid.’
‘Now look here,’ he went on, after a pause; ‘there’s your bed, and that’s your shelf; mind you keep them clean and proper. Don’t you try to lie down on the one before the right time, nor put what ain’t authorised on the other. You’ll be for recruits’ drill at six sharp to-morrow; don’t let me have to tell you twice to turn out, and mind you don’t get straying away so that you can’t answer your name at tattoo roll-call to-night. Mind, too, what your comrade says; I’ll tell you off to Boy Hanlon because you’re much of an age; mind him and what he tells you, and he’ll keep you straight. Lads’—this to the room—‘have any of you seen “the Boy”?’
‘No, sergeant, not these hours past. He’s in the usual place, I’ll go bail.’
‘The canteen?’