“Oh, not you,” retorted the medico, scornfully. “Fairfax would—nay, if he has a relapse, will—give three steps. As things are now, a man must stand on his comrade’s grave for promotion, and you are just the very last young gentleman to keep yourself in the background. You would take the step sharp enough if you got the chance, and were not passed over!”
“I don’t know about stepping on Fairfax’s grave, as you call it,” replied Buttons, crimson with anger; “but I know some people’s graves I could dance on with pleasure,” accompanying the remark with a look of the utmost significance.
“Ah, you don’t really mean it? Why are you all in such a desperate state about this fellow? Why is he singled out as an object of so much anxiety and attention? Generally, when a man dies up here, it is not ‘Poor So-and-so is dead, I’m awfully sorry,’ but ‘So-and-so is dead—what kind of a kit had he?’ And away you all tear and bid for his things before the breath is hardly out of his body! Why such great concern about this young major? He has a first-class kit, as kits go, and a couple of good sound horses.”
“You are quite a new-comer, Dr. Bennett,” said the other hussar, who had not hitherto spoken.
“Only a recent arrival,” very loftily, “or you would not talk like this.”
“Fairfax keeps us all going;” then warming to his subject, “he is the best fellow in the world, always thinking for others, always doing the work of three. He looks after the men; he manages the mess; he——”
“Ah, now I can understand your anxiety,” interrupted Dr. Bennett, contracting his fierce brows. “The light breaks at last! The squalid feeding that is set before us, the horribly mysterious joints and leather steaks, are now accounted for. The mess butler has it all his own way now that the mess president is sick?”
“You are quite welcome to adopt this view of the subject if you like,” said hussar number two very angrily; “to some people their food is their only object of interest.”
“Well, well,” said the doctor, surveying the two wrathful young faces before him, and bursting into a loud laugh, “I must try and patch up this interesting patient of mine for many reasons, chiefly because he understands the art of snubbing bumptious boys and keeping them in their places. I am sure it is a mercy that someone can control them, for it is a task that is utterly beyond me,” muttered the gallant surgeon-major, as he walked rapidly away to his eagerly-anticipated breakfast.
There had been a struggle among Sir Reginald’s friends for the post of chief nurse; but his own man Cox would not yield the place to anyone, and they found their would-be office a sinecure. An excellent, firm, and gentle nurse himself, a worse patient than Sir Reginald could scarcely be found! So impatient of being kept in bed, so restless in it—tossing and tumbling to and fro, regardless of his wounded arm. Perfectly deaf to all blandishments that induced him to take proper medicine and nourishment, he would have his own way, and he had it, driving his nurses to their wits’ end and throwing himself into a fever.