'Hinton! Jack Hinton!' cried the voice again. At the head of the regiment rode three officers, whose looks were bent steadily on me, while they seemed to enjoy my surprise and confusion. The oldest of the party, who rode between the two others, was a large swarthy-looking man, with a long drooping moustache, at that time rarely worn by officers of our army. His left arm he wore in a sling; but his right was held in a certain easy, jaunty manner I could not soon forget. A burst of laughter broke from him at length, as he called out—' Come, Jack, you must remember me!' 'What!' cried I,' O'Grady! Is it possible?' 'Even so, my boy,' said he, as throwing his reins on his wrist he grasped my hand and shook it with all his heart. 'I knew you were here, and I exerted all my interest to get quartered near you. This is my regiment—eh?—not fellows to be ashamed of, Jack? But come along with us; we mustn't part company now.'
Amid the wildest cries of rejoicing and frantic demonstrations of gratitude from the crowd, the regiment moved on to the little square of the village. Here the billets were speedily arranged; the men betook themselves to their quarters, the officers broke into small parties, and O'Grady and myself retired to the inn, where, having dined tête-à-tête, we began the interchange of our various adventures since we parted.
CHAPTER LV. THE FOUR-IN-HAND
My old friend, save in the deeper brown upon his cheek and some scars from French sabres, was nothing altered from the hour in which we parted; the same bold, generous temperament, the same blending of recklessness and deep feeling, the wild spirit of adventure, and the gentle tenderness of a child were all mixed up in his complex nature, for he was every inch an Irishman. While the breast of his uniform glittered with many a cross and decoration, he scarcely ever alluded to his own feats in the campaign; nor did he more than passingly mention the actions where his own conduct had been most conspicuous. Indeed, there was a reserve in his whole manner while speaking of the Peninsular battles which I soon discovered proceeded from delicacy towards me, knowing how little I had seen of service owing to my imprisonment, and fearing lest in the detail of the glorious career of our armies he might be inflicting fresh wounds on one whose fortune forbade him to share in it. He often asked me about my father, and seemed to feel deeply the kindness he had received from him when in London. Of my mother, too, he sometimes spoke, but never even alluded to Lady Julia; and when once I spoke of her as the protector of Corny, he fidgeted for a second or two, seemed uneasy and uncomfortable, and gave me the impression that he felt sorry to be reduced to accept a favour for his servant, where he himself had been treated with coldness and distance.
Apart from this—and it was a topic we mutually avoided—O'Grady's spirits were as high as ever. Mixing much with the officers of his corps, he was actually beloved by them. He joined in all their schemes of pleasure and amusement with the zest of his own buoyant nature; and the youngest cornet in the regiment felt himself the Colonel's inferior in the gaiety of the mess as much as at the head of the squadrons.
At the end of a few days I received from Paris the papers necessary to relieve me from the restraint of my parole, and was concerting with O'Grady the steps necessary to be taken to resume my rank in the service, when an incident occurred which altered all our plans for the moment, and, by one of those strange casualties which so often occur in life, gave a new current to my own fate for ever.
I should mention here, that, amid all the rejoicings which ushered in the restoration, amid all the flattery by which the allied armies were received, one portion of the royalists maintained a dogged, ungenial spirit towards the men by whom their cause was rendered victorious, and never forgave them the honour of reviving a dynasty to which they themselves had contributed nothing. These were the old militaires of Louis xviii.—the men who, too proud or too good-for-nothing to accept service under the Emperor, had lain dormant during the glorious career of the French armies, and who now, in their hour of defeat and adversity, started into life as the representatives of the military genius of the country. These men, I say, hated the English with a vindictive animosity which the old Napoleonists could not equal. Without the generous rivalry of an open foe, they felt themselves humbled by comparison with the soldiers whose weather-beaten faces and shattered limbs bore token of a hundred battles, and for the very cause, too, for which they themselves were the most interested. This ungenerous spirit found vent for itself in a thousand petty annoyances, which were practised upon our troops in every town and village of the north of France; and every officer whose billet consigned him to the house of a royalist soldier would gladly have exchanged his quarters for the companionship of the most inveterate follower of Napoleon. To an instance of what I have mentioned was owing the incident which I am about to relate.
To relieve the ennui of a French village, the officers of the Eighteenth had, with wonderful expenditure of skill and labour, succeeded in getting up a four-in-hand drag, which, to the astonishment and wonder of the natives, was seen daily wending its course through the devious alleys and narrow streets of the little town, the roof covered with dashing dragoons, whose laughing faces and loud-sounding bugles were all deemed so many direct insults by the ill-conditioned section I have mentioned. The unequivocal evidences of dislike they exhibited to this dashing 'turn-out' formed, I believe, one of its great attractions to the Eighteenth, who never omitted an occasion, whatever the state of the weather, to issue forth every day, with all the noise and uproar they could muster.
At last, however, the old commissaire de police, whose indignation at the proceeding knew no bounds, devised an admirable expedient for annoying our fellows—one which, supported as it was by the law of the country, there was no possibility of evading. This was to demand the passport of every officer who passed the barrière, thus necessitating him to get down from the roof of the coach, present his papers, and have them carefully conned and scrutinised, their visés looked into, and all sorts of questions propounded.