CHAPTER VII
General Boswell’s coachman was a Scot; a grim, taciturn, brickdust-coloured fellow, who had been in his present service for a quarter of a century. He had been bred amongst horses from his boyhood, for his father had been a horsebreaker, and when he had run away from home and enlisted, he had satisfied ambition by becoming a driver of artillery. Then he had been wounded, and had turned batman for awhile. He had gone to the General as valet, but his stable love had broken out again, and he had gravitated by force of nature to the place of coachman. Polson’s mind did not go back to a time when he did not remember Duncan, and to Irene he was like a fixed part of the scheme of nature. He had one defect which at this instant made him invaluable. He resented any imputation of the fact angrily, but he had been deaf as an adder for years.
There was no great privacy in a barrack square, to be sure, but it was as safe to talk within arm’s length of Duncan as if he had been a stone Sphinx. Duncan was a man of rare discretion, and, though it must have been like an upheaval of the world to him to see the most constant of visitors at the General’s modest little mansion, walking in shabby raiment in a barrack square with a recruit’s ribbons fluttering from his cap, he saluted imperturbably as the young man came up, and then sat motionless.
Polson came to the side of the carriage, cap in hand.
‘Your father told me I might speak to you,’ he said wistfully. ‘I hope I am not wrong in coming to you.’
‘You have enlisted?’ she asked him. ‘You are going to the war?’ Her self-possession cost her an effort, but she maintained it She had a soldier’s daughter’s pride, and though she had met this first great trouble so brief a time ago she had already taught herself to face it. Her father was a man conspicuously brave among the brave, and he had told her of his very first experience of war—a period of prolonged inaction under fire. ‘A trying thing at first,’ he had said, ‘but duty will reconcile one to anything.’ This memory had been present with her all the morning, and though the unexpected sight of her lost lover almost broke her down, the thought had had power to nerve her.
‘Yes,’ he answered simply. ‘I have enlisted. I shall have to go through a certain amount of drill, but that will soon be over, and then, I suppose, I shall get my marching orders.’
‘Father approves of what you have done,’ she said.
‘He has told me so,’ he responded. ‘I am very glad of it. God is good to me,’ he went on, turning half away from her and gazing across the square. ‘I had not hoped to see you again for years, if ever, and there is just one thing I wanted very much to say. It is of no use to have reserves and disguises at a time like this. I shan’t distress you? Can you let me speak?’