‘“Oh! not at all,” said he. But I could see that suspicion was raised in his mind. Had he been a man whom I could have trusted, I would have told him the whole story; but I was too well aware of his disposition to say anything about it; and as I knew he would be questioning the woman concerning the circumstance when my back was turned, I sought out Rooney and told him every particular of the affair, and charged him to say nothing about it. It was lucky I did, for Mr —— had them examined very minutely on the subject next day, and endeavoured to draw something from them in confirmation of my being implicated in the affair: but Rooney kept his promise faithfully, and the woman told him that she was sure now I was not the person she had seen. What she said about the blood on my face was perfectly correct, for my nose must have bled profusely when I was knocked down, as I found it crusted on my clothes next morning.
‘I have since assisted Rooney, and you see how grateful the poor fellow is.
‘This affair has induced me to be more cautious, for the magistracy are so perfectly absolute, that I might have been sent off to New South Wales (if I got off with that) for my exertions on that night. Law is so summary here, and so little evidence required against a man whom they wish to ruin, that it reminds me of some place in your country, where it is said they were in the habit of hanging people first and then trying them.’
When we parted, Eugene made me promise to pay them an early visit; but being unexpectedly relieved from the duty on that station, I never had the pleasure of seeing them again. Shortly after, I received several letters from him, wherein he detailed his sister’s marriage and happiness with her husband, and when I last heard from him she was the happy mother of three children.
CHAPTER XV.
A DRUNKEN FROLIC.
While here, two of our sergeants, in a drunken frolic, took it into their head to go and see their sweethearts in Wexford. When they came thoroughly to their senses, they were far on the journey, and thinking their crime would be the same, they entered the town. Their absence being discovered, a party was sent after them, and they had not been many hours in the place, when they were found, and marched back prisoners to their regiment.
We expected they would have got off, by being reduced from their rank; but the commanding officer seemed to consider their crime of too heinous a nature, to let them escape with an ordinary punishment. They were tried by a General Regimental Court Martial, and sentenced to be reduced to the rank and pay of private, to receive five hundred lashes, to be branded on the side with the letter D, and afterwards to be sent to (what is usually termed) a banished regiment. One of them was an intelligent man, who had been respectably brought up—the other a young man scarcely twenty years of age; the former did not live to go abroad—he died in Dublin, I believe of a broken heart; the other went abroad, but I never heard what became of him.
The impression throughout the regiment at the time was, that the sentence was most unreasonably severe, particularly that part of it that awarded the corporeal punishment. Will that disgrace to the country never be done away with? I am perfectly convinced it could be done without, and those who advocate it, must be men who are either wofully ignorant of human nature, or whose passions obscure their reason, and induce them to act contrary to their better judgment; the latter is the most common of the two. I have known commanding officers who have acted in this respect rationally and wisely, while their personal feelings were not strongly excited; but who, when they were so, committed the most flagrant injustice.
Why should there not be a definite code of military laws for the army? for that abstruse, vague, and indefinable thing called ‘the mutiny act,’ surely does not deserve the name. I defy any two persons separately, to make the same commentary on it. In it so much is left to the private opinion of courts martial, that the sentences passed by them are often preposterously unequal: for instance, I have known a man tried by one court martial, and sentenced to three hundred lashes, and another for the same crime, without any palliating circumstance in his favour, sentenced to fourteen days’ solitary confinement. What are we to make of this inconsistency? It is evident it proceeded from the temper of the individuals composing the court.