“Mind you say what you mean, and don’t make a mull of the whole concern. ’Pon my word, I think you had better let me draft you a copy.”
For an answer his comrade took up a volume of the Queen’s Regulations and shied it at Jack, who, ducking his head, just evaded the missile, and, with another ear-splitting screech, mounted his barrack tat, and gleefully decamped.
Jack was a merry subaltern, whose gaiety never knew a cloud, whose face was never overcast, and who found existence intensely amusing, thoroughly enjoyed life, and the pleasures, excitements, duties, and diversions that it brought him.
It was no easy matter to Tom Galway to indite any letter—much less a love-letter. (His departed friend could have knocked off a billet-doux in less than five minutes.) How he bit the end of his pen, how he tore up sheet after sheet of the best crested regimental notepaper, how he wished he had taken Jack Murray’s offer, I will not linger to relate. In the end, he contrived to concoct and finish a missive, and was so completely exhausted and done up, that he was obliged to relieve his flagging faculties with a stiff whisky and soda.
“A letter like that takes it out of a fellow frightfully!” muttered Tom, mopping his forehead. “However, it’s done, and off my mind.”
He was a person of slow mental evolution; he had been deliberating over this step for months, and he had taken it at last. He dressed, carried the letter over to the mess, saw it placed in the post-bag and started on the first stage of its long journey. He stood and looked after the letter-corporal with an unusually solemn face. Would he recall the epistle if he could? No, no; ten thousand times, no. Nevertheless, between the important invitation just despatched and the responsibility of being actually captain of F company, our hero was considerably sobered, and that night at mess his silence and abstraction, despite several beakers of his own champagne, was the subject of unlimited remark and chaff. He did not fire up at the news of a polo scurry, nor join a tug-of-war with one of the punkah ropes, nor even jump at the proposal to put a buffalo calf into Major Pratt’s bed! [N.B.—Major Pratt was dining elsewhere. He was a little, lean, hungry-looking man, with a sharp nose and red moustache, adored by his regiment, and the idol of the fair sex—according to his own account. A less partial view was taken by the world, but is not that generally the case? Men who had a good opportunity of knowing the major, said that he was as deep as a draw-well; that he shirked his work; that he funked riding, and that he was a regular little screw! The fair sex said—but no matter! it is enough for me to chronicle that they did not accept him at his own valuation.]
Weeks rolled by, and then one happy, happy day the post-office peon, with his tri-coloured turban, brought Captain Galway a telegram, that had come all the way from England! It was brief, to the point, and most satisfactory, and said—
“Yes—letter follows.—L. Browne.”
Tom showed this precious document to Jack Murray with undisguised triumph, for Jack had been dubious of the answer, and when his chum had talked, in foolishly sanguine moments, of “doing up the garden” and “buying a piano, which was going a dead bargain,” Jack had thrown cold water on these designs, and said, “I would not be so dead sure, that she will come, my Thomas! It strikes me that you are counting your chickens before they are hatched.”