“What was your last remark?” inquired Wallis, taking his pipe from his mouth to grin. Even a superior officer might be chaffed a little in the darkness.
“I made no last remark,” asserted the Colonel with dignity. “I’m not a-dying yet. If I said anything last it was a mere exclamation of disgust—the disgust of an officer and gentleman. I suppose you know something about our would-be Brigadier. I suppose you think you know something about him.”
“Bet you I know all about him,” affirmed Wallis. “He enlisted in the Old Tenth as a common soldier. Before he had been a week in camp they found that he knew his biz, and they made him a sergeant. Before we started for the field the Governor got his eye on him and shoved him into a lieutenancy. The first battle h’isted him to a captain. And the second—bang! whiz! he shot up to colonel right over the heads of everybody, line and field. Nobody in the Old Tenth grumbled. They saw that he knew his biz. I know all about him. What’ll you bet?”
“I’m not a betting man, Lieutenant, except in a friendly game of poker,” sighed Old Grumps. “You don’t know anything about your Brigadier,” he added in a sepulchral murmur, the echo of an empty canteen. “I have only been in this brigade a month, and I know more than you do, far, very far more, sorry to say it. He’s a reformed clergyman. He’s an apostatized minister.” The Colonel’s voice as he said this was solemn and sad enough to do credit to an undertaker. “It’s a bad sort, Wallis,” he continued, after another deep sigh, a very highly perfumed one, the sigh of a barkeeper. “When a clergyman falls, he falls for life and eternity, like a woman or an angel. I never knew a backslidden shepherd to come to good. Sooner or later he always goes to the devil, and takes down whomsoever hangs to him.”
“He’ll take down the Old Tenth, then,” asserted Wallis. “It hangs to him. Bet you two to one he takes it along.”
“You’re right, Adjutant; spoken like a soldier,” swore Gildersleeve, “And the Bloody Fourteenth, too. It will march into the burning pit as far as any regiment; and the whole brigade, yes, sir! But a backslidden shepherd, my God! Have we come to that? I often say to myself, in the solemn hours of the night, as I remember my Sabbath-school days, ‘Great Scott! have we come to that?’ A reformed clergyman! An apostatized minister! Think of it, Wallis, think of it! Why, sir, his very wife ran away from him. They had but just buried their first boy,” pursued Old Grumps, his hoarse voice sinking to a whimper. “They drove home from the burial-place, where lay the new-made grave. Arrived at their door, he got out and extended his hand to help her out. Instead of accepting, instead of throwing herself into his arms and weeping there, she turned to the coachman and said, ‘Driver, drive me to my father’s house.’ That was the end of their wedded life, Wallis.”
The Colonel actually wept at this point, and the maudlin tears were not altogether insincere. His own wife and children he heartily loved, and remembered them now with honest tenderness. At home he was not a drinker and a rough; only amid the hardships and perils of the field.
“That was the end of it, Wallis,” he repeated. “And what was it while it lasted? What does a woman leave her husband for? Why does she separate from him over the grave of her innocent first-born? There are twenty reasons, but they must all of them be good ones. I am sorry to give it as my decided opinion, Wallis, in perfect confidence, that they must all be whopping good ones. Well, that was the beginning; only the beginning. After that he held on for a while, breaking the bread of life to a skedaddling flock, and then he bolted. The next known of him, three years later, he enlisted in your regiment, a smart but seedy recruit, smelling strongly of whiskey.”
“I wish I smelt half as strong of it myself,” grumbled Wallis. “It might keep out the swamp fever.”
“That’s the true story of Col. John James Waldron,” continued Old Grumps, with a groan which was very somnolent, as if it were a twin to a snore. “That’s the true story.”