I made them lay their hands in mine and swear
To reverence the King as if he were
Their conscience and their conscience as their King;
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honour his own word as if his God's,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her
And worship her by years of noble deeds
Until they won her....
These stirring lines, from the beginning, had filled him with strange longings and given him a great ideal.
Besides these more general things, much of the Colonel's teaching had been devoted to building up the boy into that splendid product, 'an officer and a gentleman.'
Then there was his mother—a sweet, gentle, dainty woman, of marvellous housekeeping ability. From her, Hector had learned such of those fine, old-fashioned principles as the Colonel had been too busy to teach. Hector's little sister, Nora—his constant companion in his boyhood doings, rendering him profound homage and devotion and regarding him as a demigod, the mover of mountains, the achiever of impossibilities—had done much to make him chivalrous. His cousins Hugh and Allen, boys of his own age who lived close by, could not be said to have much influenced him, except to make him one of the most reckless lads and finest sportsmen in the county, though from his older cousin, John, he had learnt all he knew of woodcraft and athletics.
But the men on his father's farm had done more to make a soldier out of Hector than even the Colonel. They were all veterans of many campaigns, or at least members of the local militia—none but these were granted work at Silvercrest. Grey old, lean old Sergeant Pierce, the Colonel's right-hand man, had marched with the 28th, the Colonel's own Regiment, from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees. Corporal Hardwick, late of the 95th, had served in the Kaffir Wars and accompanied the 'Green Jackets' in the attack on the Sevastapol Ovens. Private Toombs had aided the 57th—the famous 'Die-hards'—in suppressing the 'Sepoy Rebellion.' 'Maintop' MacEachern, senior naval representative, a lean, white-whiskered old sea-dog, had been a powder-monkey under Broke when the Shannon took the Chesapeake. And 'Long Dick' Masters, the 'daddy' of the whole crowd, barring Sergeant Pierce, and so tall that he could give even the Sergeant a couple of inches, had long ago led the rush of the York Volunteers at Queenston Heights.
The influence of such men on a youngster's development was inevitably potent. Thanks to them, Silvercrest had overflowed with Service tradition. As a small boy, Hector had been allowed to form them into a little company, which, under the Sergeant's supervision, he drilled with unflagging zeal, until he was as efficient as the smartest instructor in the smartest regiment of the Guards. They told him yarns of a hundred fights and fields. They sang him marvellous choruses—'Ranzo,' 'We'll Fight the Greeks and Romans on the High Seas-O,' 'The Bold Soldier Boy' and many others—which in their day had startled the French outposts in Spain or enlivened the fo'c's'le of the Victory. They gave him such formulæ as this, which he had from Sergeant Pierce: 'Don't knuckle down to a bully. Don't start the trouble but take on anything that breathes if there's good reason. Stand up to your man like a soldier, even if you know you're licked, and fight—d'you see, little master?—till the last shot's fired.' And, between them, they drove him wild to serve the Queen.
No wonder, then, that he rode out today in the midst of the Mounted Police.
But why was he only a ranker—when the Colonel, from the first, had trained him for a Commission?
Of this—a word later.
III