‘We must all face the fortune of war, my lad,’ he said. ‘The best of good luck go with you. If you hear of me out yonder, as you may, don’t forget to report yourself. Good-bye.’
There were a good many eyes at the barrack windows, and the minds of many dragoons were inspired with wonder. For a General and a Waterloo veteran was a personage, and the daughter of the same was a personage, and it was out of the common for a newly-joined recruity to engage in intimate talk with the like of them for half an hour together, and to be shaken hands with by the veteran, and saluted as if he were an officer by the veteran’s coachman, and personally introduced to ‘Old Stayce’ into the bargain.
And amazement sat on many foreheads when the carriage rolled away, and the General stood up to wave his hat to the recruity, and the lady stood up to wave her hand, and the recruity, unconscious of the interest he excited, waved the shabby old sealskin cap in answer until the equipage was ringingly saluted at the gate, and swung swiftly out of sight.
And then, it was over. Oh, it was all over, and one manly heart was sore and cold. The new recruity stood there planted in the barrack square, as innocent of his surroundings as if he had been asleep, and mechanically filled and lit his pipe, and stood on with his chin sunk upon his breast, scarcely aware of his own thoughts, and as yet realising little but solitude and an ache in the doleful middle of it. But a warmth stole into the cold. When everything was said and done, there was one thing left. Irene loved him. Loved him! How sweet and sacred a wonder. Yet her own dear lips had told him that she would have been proud and happy to be his wife, and that nothing should change her. And she had given him an ambition. The lofty and inspiring words were not yet written, but their purport thrilled him, as it thrilled many who went out to fight and bleed for a cause which may not have been wholly worthy of their devotion, and yet in a sense was worthy because they believed in it with all their hearts and souls. For, after all, what is it but the purpose which ennobles action? If the greatest Englishman since Shakespeare had not yet given Polson Jervase the words in which to speak his thought, it lightened his breast all the same.
I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d,
Tho’ many a light shall darken, and many shall weep
For those that are crush’d in the clash of jarring claims,
Yet God’s just wrath shall be wreak’d on a giant liar;
And many a darkness into the light shall leap,
And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,
And noble thought be freer under the sun.
And the heart of a people beat with one desire;
For the peace, that I deem’d no peace, is over and done,
And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.
So thought Polson Jervase, and so thought hundreds of valiant men who were ready to lay down their lives in a quarrel which the years have proved unprofitable.
But a voice awoke the recruity from his reverie—a voice of authority which asked with a most unnecessary emphasis what the blank, blank he meant by skulking there, when he knew conventionally well that he had been conventionally well ordered to the quartermaster’s stores to get his conventional kit. The recruit was not accustomed to hear himself addressed in this manner, and his earliest impulse was to hit the pug nose of the person who accosted him, but he remembered himself in time, and bethinking him of the wise man’s saying, that a soft answer turneth away wrath, he asked meekly where he should go. Then the Sergeant, who was so straitly trousered and jacketted that he pranced in his going, ordered him to follow his nose, adding that if he conventionally well supposed that because a conventional General in a conventional carriage came to see him off, he was entitled to shirk his conventional duties, he was conventionally well in error.
‘I say, Sergeant,’ said Polson, turning to face his conductor, ‘that’s a filthy bad habit. If you want to be respected, drop it.’
The Sergeant went as scarlet as his stable-jacket, and said that any conventional recruit had conventionally well got to respect him any conventional how.
‘My dear sir, no,’ said Polson. ‘It’s quite impossible to respect a man who talks like a foul-mouthed parrot.’