Mary Gray

by Katharine Tynan

CHAPTER V

"OLD BLOOD AND THUNDER"

Sir Denis Drummond had been his brother Gerald's senior by some seven or eight years. He, too, was a soldier, and had inherited the baronetcy from his father, upon whom the title had been bestowed by a grateful country for services in the field. A second baronetcy in the family had been specially created for Sir Gerald. It would not have been easy to say which was the finer soldier of the two brothers; for while Sir Gerald had made his name famous by the most dare-devil and brilliant feats, Sir Denis was rather the old type of soldier—cool as well as daring, always reliable and steady. Worshipped by his men, his name was one to be held in constant regard by the British public, which calls its heroes by their Christian names abbreviated, if they do not happen, indeed, to have a nickname for them.

"Old Blood and Thunder" was the name by which Sir Denis was known to his men, and that from a certain violence of speech of which he had never been able, or perhaps had never desired, to divest himself. This violence had somewhat annoyed his brother Gerald, who could get as much exhortation out of a verse of Scripture as ever he needed. Sir Denis, like many old soldiers, was quite a devout man in his way; but he had none of the zealot passion of his younger brother. The hidden fires which had given Sir Gerald a certain haggardness of aspect, as though a sculptor had hewed him roughly in marble, had never burned in Sir Denis's breast. He was a red-faced, white-moustached veteran, as blustering as the west wind, but with a heart as soft as wax in the hands of his daughter Nelly, and, indeed, in the hands of anyone else who knew the way to it.

His servants adored him, as did the dogs and all animals and children. He was beautiful in his manner to women of high and low degree, with perhaps one exception. He was as simple as a child, and loved the popular applause which fell to him whenever he made any kind of public appearance, for he had been so long a Londoner that now the London crowd knew him and had a sense of possession in him. His rosy face would beam all over when the crowd shouted itself hoarse for "Old Blood and Thunder." He did not at all object to the name, which had filtered from regimental into common use. The crowd was always "Boys!" to him. He had a most amiable feeling towards it, were it ever so frowsy and undersized and sallow. But he loved a soldier-man, and could hardly bear to pass one in the street without stopping to speak to him.

One delightful thing about Sir Denis was the esteem in which he held his own calling of arms. It might be questioned whether he held the Church even in higher honour. He was no subscriber to the belief that the army must necessarily be a refuge of rapscallions. "Straighten your shoulders, sir; hold your head high; for, remember that you are now a soldier!" he would say to the newest recruit who had just scraped through with a margin of chest. His thunderous wrath and sorrow when one of his "boys" was guilty of conduct unbecoming a soldier were something which, in time, impressed even the least impressionable. His old regiment, which he delighted to talk about, he had left a model regiment.

"There's a deal of good in the soldier-man," he would say to his daughter Nelly. "The poor fellows, they're good boys, they're very good boys."

Sir Denis had married, as he was approaching middle age, a very beautiful young girl, who had fallen in love at first with the soldier, and afterwards with the man.

His Nell had left him in his daughter Nelly a replica of herself. During the years of service that remained to him the child was always as near to him as might be. Fortunately, by this time the period of his foreign service was all but at an end. Wherever he had his command the child and her nurse were always within riding distance. He did not believe in barracks and towns for the rearing of anything so fresh and tender. His Nelly must have the fields and the woods and the waters. In later years her milkmaid freshness owed, perhaps, something to this upbringing.

Later, she went to school. Sir Gerald's widow, to whom Sir Denis always referred as the Dowager, who had taken an unasked-for interest in the motherless child from her birth, had found the ideal school for Nelly—a school where the daughters of the aristocracy were kept in a conventual seclusion while they learnt as little as might be of the simpler virtues, but a deal of the way to step in and out of a carriage, to comport themselves with dignity, to bear themselves in the presence of their sovereign, and so on.