As we desire throughout this tale to make the actors themselves, wherever it be possible, the narrators, using their words in preference to our own, we shall now place before the reader a letter written by Colonel Harcourt about a week after his arrival at Glencore, which will at least serve to rescue him and ourselves from the task of repetition.
It was addressed to Sir Horace Upton, Her Majesty's Envoy at Stuttgard, one who had formerly served in the same regiment with Glencore and himself, but who left the army early to follow the career of diplomacy, wherein, still a young man, he had risen to the rank of a minister. It is not important, at this moment, to speak more particularly of his character, than that it was in almost every respect the opposite of his correspondent's. Where the one was frank, open, and unguarded, the other was cold, cautious, and reserved; where one believed, the other doubted; where one was hopeful, the other had nothing but misgivings. Harcourt would have twenty times a day wounded the feelings, or jarred against the susceptibility, of his best friend; Upton could not be brought to trench upon the slightest prejudice of his greatest enemy. We might continue this contrast to every detail of their characters; but enough has now been said, and we proceed to the letter in question:
Glencore Castle. Dear Upton,—True to my promise to give you early tidings of our old friend, I sit down to pen a few lines, which if a rickety table and some infernal lampblack for ink should make illegible, you 'll have to wait for the elucidation till my arrival. I found Glencore terribly altered; I 'd not have known him. He used to be muscular and rather full in habit; he is now a mere skeleton. His hair and mustache were coal black; they are a motley gray.
He was straight as an arrow—pretentiously erect, many thought; he is stooped now, and bent nearly double. His voice, too, the most clear and ringing in the squadron, is become a hoarse whisper. You remember what a passion he had for dress, and how heartily we all deplored the chance of his being colonel, well knowing what precious caprices of costly costume would be the consequence; well, a discharged corporal in a cast-off mufti is stylish compared to him. I don't think he has a hat—I have only seen an oilskin cap; but his coat, his one coat, is a curiosity of industrious patchwork; and his trousers are a pair of our old overalls, the same pattern we wore at Hounslow when the King reviewed us.
Great as these changes are, they are nothing to the alteration in the poor fellow's disposition. He that was generous to munificence is now an absolute miser, descending to the most pitiful economy and moaning over every trifling outlay. He is irritable, too, to a degree. Far from the jolly, light-hearted comrade, ready to join in the laugh against himself, and enjoy a jest of which he was the object, he suspects a slight in every allusion, and bristles up to resent a mere familiarity as though it were an insult.
Of course I put much of this down to the score of illness, and of bad health before he was so ill; but, depend upon it, he's not the man we knew him. Heaven knows if he ever will be so again. The night I arrived here he was more natural, more like himself, in fact, than he has ever been since. His manner was heartier, and in his welcome there was a touch of the old jovial good fellow, who never was so happy as when sharing his quarters with a comrade. Since that he has grown punctilious, anxiously asking me if I am comfortable, and teasing me with apologies for what I don't miss, and excuses about things that I should never have discovered wanting.
I think I see what is passing within him; he wants to be confidential, and he does n't know how to go about it. I suppose he looks on me as rather a rough father to confess to; he is n't quite sure what kind of sympathy, if any, he 'll meet with from me, and he more than half dreads a certain careless, outspoken way in which I have now and then addressed his boy, of whom more anon.
I may be right, or I may be wrong, in this conjecture; but certain it is, that nothing like confidential conversation has yet passed between us, and each day seems to render the prospect of such only less and less likely. I wish from my heart you were here; you are just the fellow to suit him,—just calculated to nourish the susceptibilities that I only shock. I said as much t' other day, in a half-careless way, and he immediately caught it up, and said,
“Ay, George, Upton is a man one wants now and then in life, and when the moment comes, there is no such thing as a substitute for him.” In a joking manner, I then remarked, “Why not come over to see him?” “Leave this!” cried he; “venture in the world again; expose myself to its brutal insolence, or still more brutal pity!” In a torrent of passion, he went on in this strain, till I heartily regretted that I had ever touched this unlucky topic.
I date his greatest reserve from that same moment; and I am sure he is disposed to connect me with the casual suggestion to go over to Stuttgard, and deems me, in consequence, one utterly deficient in all true feeling and delicacy.