"On reflection it may occur to you that the tardiness of recognition in your case may not be without its advantages."
Hector sat staring at the postscript and then suddenly a light broke in upon him. "Kept it back, I see," he muttered, "till I was a Major, thus giving me double promotion. Lord, but they must think something of me to do that, I wonder who it was? Godwin, I suppose. He wasn't quite such a fool as the rest; he could see what they couldn't. How the old fellow, though, hammers on about reading. I've done pretty well without it, so far, and yet I don't know—he might be right. Hang it, I've a good mind to give the thing a trial; there's nothing else to do here, and the War may go on for months. I'll send for some books to Cape Town. I'll do it now, by Jove!" And, one of those sudden imperative desires coming over him, he left the kopje, and, hurrying back to the blockhouse, wrote out an order for all the military books he could think of, sending it off by mounted orderly the same afternoon, special messengers being daily despatched to the post-office till the literature ordered arrived.
From that time the transformation of Hector's blockhouse apartment into a library, and himself into a book-worm, proceeded apace; weekly consignments of military works thenceforth arrived, and, the heart having been torn out of them, were thrown aside and looked at no more.
In his youth Graeme had been sickly, and on that account had not been sent to a public, or even a private, school, his mental training having been entrusted to governesses and tutors, whose instructions were on no account to force the lad's inclinations, with the result that he grew up practically uneducated. He had managed to scrape through the necessary army examinations, but this was due rather to a certain "crammer's" uncanny knowledge of his art than to any proficiency on the part of the pupil, and a few months after the undergoing of his ordeal Hector's mind had once more relapsed into its former happy state of ignorance, in which condition it had remained till the present time.
Fortunately for him, the mental ground thus left fallow had never been weakened by the rank growth springing from the assiduous reading of novels, and the soil was ready and hungry for such seeds as he might choose to sow. In a very few months—though yawning at times over their dulness—he had easily mastered the contents of the dry and unimaginative text-books. This done and duty satisfied, he thereupon indulged to the full his own peculiar bent for character study, as exemplified in the biographies of the world's great commanders.
These he read from cover to cover, no longer yawning, but eagerly taking in the smallest details; indeed, it was chiefly on the trivial incidents of childish life—revealing, nevertheless, the true unalterable character of the subject—that Hector would dwell, marking as he went the paragraphs in which these particulars were described.
Now, to read with the object of acquiring information is one thing; but to read in order to discover a resemblance between yourself and the subject of a biography is quite another, and a most dangerous one, especially for those to whose nature the abnormal appeals, the inevitable result being an unconscious desire to make the resemblance complete, even to the smallest and most objectionable details.
This is what Graeme now began to do. Since he had received recognition, and with it the birth of ambition, he had become firmly convinced that he was destined to join the ranks of the great, and the more he read about them the surer and more exultant he grew, for in the story of their lives he recognised a hundred traits of character similar to his own, particularly in their oddities and eccentricities, on which his mind eagerly seized.
There were some among them, it is true, in whom no sign of himself was to be met with, these the eminently sane and methodical characters; but such he passed over as lacking in the true fire of genius, and their biographies, once scanned, were thrown aside and looked at no more. Of the others, however, there was one in whose character he especially delighted, that one being Prince Suvarov, the great Russian.
His power over his soldiers, eccentricity of attire, recklessness of consequences, and, above all, the ingrained determination to attack and never wait on the defensive, all these characteristics he felt himself to possess; and inasmuch as Suvarov not only scorned to conceal, but gloried in, the revelation of mental peculiarity, so now did Hector do the same, giving full rein to that passion for difference from his fellows which hitherto, chiefly from the wish to please Lucy—to whom such was anathema—he had to a certain extent concealed.