“There is the proper course open to me, Vincent, and that I am about to do.”
“Fight him?” I cried eagerly, and the miserable sensation of dread began to pass off.
“No, boy; I am going to explain everything to Major Lacey, who will report to head-quarters if he considers it right.”
He passed slowly out of the room, and I heard his step echoing beneath the broad verandah, as he went in the direction of Major Lacey’s, while, unable to restrain myself in my bitterness and contempt, I too got up and hurried out.
“He is a coward!” I muttered; “a coward!”—for I could not see the bravery of the man’s self-control; “and I have been gradually growing to like him, and think of him always as being patient and manly and noble. Why, I would have tried to knock Barton down, if he had killed me for it.”
“Gone to report,” I thought again, after a pause; “gone to tell, like a little schoolboy who has been pushed down. Him a soldier; and a coward like that!”
Chapter Eleven.
Joined to the love of a military life, I had all a boy’s ideal notions of bravery and chivalry. By which I mean the frank, natural, outside ideas, full of the show and glitter, and I could not see beneath the surface. I did not know then that it might take more courage to refuse to fight and face the looks and scorn of some people than to go and meet an adversary in the field, after the braggart fashion of some of our French neighbours, whose grand idea of honour is to go out early some morning to meet an enemy about some petty, contemptible quarrel, fence for a few moments till one or the other is pricked or scratched, and then cry, “Ah, mon ami! mon ami!” embrace, and go home to breakfast together.