The Other World

by Frank Frankfort Moore

His mother watched him, so did Madge.

The glass dropped from his hand and was smashed in pieces on the floor, and he fell back into his chair and gave a loud laugh.

“That’s Kruger!” he cried: “smashed!—smashed!—beyond recovery!—beyond coaguline—smashed—and without a Harland raising his hand against him,—that’s what they are saying—those Harlands that have had their eyes fixed on me, as if I needed their prompting. Come along, sweet womenfolk, and have a look at the sundial that Rogers unearthed when digging the new rose-bed, where the remains of the old maze were,—the date is carved on it, 1472 a.d. Just think of it, hidden for perhaps three hundred years and only unearthed yesterday, at the very hour that you promised to be my own Madge! A good omen! What does it mean except that a new era for the old house is beginning? Come along, my dearest.”

There was no great alacrity in Madge’s response to his challenge.

II.

His father was killed in the Soudan, having inherited the property when his elder brother had been killed, a few years before, in Zulu-land. Four brothers, all of them men of splendid physique, had been slain in battle within a space of four years, and three widows and many children had been left desolate.

He knew the story of heroism associated with every one of the four, and he knew the stories of the heroism associated with the death of his grandfather at the Alma, and his greatgrandfather at Waterloo. That was why he had taken it for granted from his earliest years that he was to be a solder. It never occurred to him that there was any other destiny possible for a Harland of the Hall.

But when his mother came to him one day and poured her plaint into his ear, entreating him for her sake to think of himself as associated with a happier fate, he had yielded to her, though he made no admissions in regard to the comparative happiness involved in the fate of dying on the field of battle, or as a senile fox-hunter after a protracted run to hounds. He showed himself to be a dutiful son, and he went to Oxford and then ate his dinners at the Temple, as he believed a reasonably aspiring country gentleman should do if he wished to retain his self-respect. He had also drilled every year with the Militia regiment in which he held a commission, and was rapidly qualifying for the rank of major.

But during these years the country was engaged in no war that made any great demand upon its resources: he had no great temptation to go against the Afridis, and he felt sure that Khartoum could be reached by Kitchener without his personal supervision. But his mother noticed a change upon him as he read day by day of the probabilities of a war breaking out between England and the Transvaal. A strange uneasiness seemed to have come over him, and he talked of nothing except South Africa as a campaigning ground.

His mother became more uneasy than he was, and she was only in a measure relieved when one day he came to her, telling her that he had asked Madge Winston, the daughter of the Vicar of Hurst Harland, to marry him, and that she had consented. Mrs Harland told him that he had made her the happiest mother in the world; but from the chat, just recorded, which she had with Madge in the hall before Julian had returned with the news of the ultimatum, it will be gathered that she had still some misgivings.