“Oh I thank you, sir,” said Tom, shaking the old veteran heartily by the hand. “Oh! thank you, Colonel; I’ll never forget your kindness.”
“There, there, my boy—take it easily. And now if you will kindly let me have my arm to myself, I will sit down and write you your letter at once, and also one to the commander-in-chief, which will facilitate your movements.”
The Colonel then sat down and wrote as he promised; and Tom was off in a jiffey to London. In the joy of going off, he had for a moment forgotten Lizzie, only to remember her with a ten times greater fondness a moment or two later.
Being diligent in his explorations, Tom speedily found his new chief, who received him very cordially, and said how very glad he was to be able to do anything for the old Plunger veteran, from whom he had just come. Tom, to his great joy, was appointed one of the aides-de-camp of the general who was going off with the expeditionary force to Abyssinia. He was only just in time, however, for the places had all been filled up. Tom indeed owed his luck to the sudden illness of one of the officers already appointed.
What a wonderful thing that Abyssinian Expedition was! The world sees some queer changes in its time. Twenty-eight hundred and fifty years ago the Queen of Sheba paid her celebrated visit to King Solomon at Jerusalem, and here, so many centuries after, we have the children of the Gentiles and the inhabitants of the Isles of the West sallying out and getting them ready to battle against the descendants of the self-same King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba across the waters of the Red Sea.
Tom had very few days in which to prepare for his departure. It was now October, and he had to go by the overland route to India first, and then to sail from Bombay with the advance guard of the invading army.
His mother was very much vexed at his going away. She did not think he would have acted up to what he had threatened; but Tom had the same stubborn temper at bottom, and what he had said he would stick to, so she could not alter it. As she saw this she did not press him, for she knew it would be no use; his preparations were therefore rather hurried.
Tom, however, was not going to part from Lizzie in that way. He had rushed off that time in a passion, but he was not going to leave her so abruptly, and he went down again to the parsonage to make his peace in his own way.
The little conservatory witnessed many little tender scenes before the day of his departure came, although the time was but short for them to be acted in. Pringle had interposed scruples at first, but his calm course of ecstasy with the languid Laura made him somewhat more lenient than the campaigner, his future mother-in-law—the time was drawing on now—would have approved.
Tender little scenes of love these were in that romantic conservatory, which had witnessed all Tom’s love-making and all his short happiness. Little repetitions and conjugations of the same verb amo over and over again, with its present, and its past, and its future subjunctive tenses. Who has not lived and loved and can fill in all these details? Ah! how well remembered they are—the looks, the smiles, the tears, the joys, the sorrows, the ecstasies of love’s young dream! Tom Moore was more eloquent on the subject than Goethe, who told—