Old John touched his brow with his forefinger significantly, and James muttered to himself—“The wound in his head may have damaged the sergeant-major, to be sure,—but, it is his daughter, poor thing, for all the roses on her cheek, and her sweet voice—!” John did not hear a word his comrade spoke, but his thoughts were in the same channel. “He loves to see us all the same,” he said, “as when he was with the old ‘half-hundred,’ and takes a march through the college every morning, keeping wonderful count of our victories; and then mounts guard over his daughter, as regularly as beat of drum;—he’s constant with her; if the sun’s too hot, under the shade of the avenue trees; or, if it is too cold, in the warmth of Cheyne-walk, or with old Mr. Anderson in the botanic garden, gathering the virtues of the herbs, and telling each other tales of the cedars and plane trees of foreign parts; may be, looking through the old water gate, or at the statue of Sir Hans Sloane. [6] I hear tell that Miss Lucy has great knowledge of such things; but she’ll not live—not she—no more than her mother; I’m sure of that.”
“Who knows?” said James Hardy, “if she had a milder climate, or proper care.”
“Ah! the poor sergeant-major! He’s always leading some forlorn hope!”
The sergeant-major was one of EIGHTY-THREE THOUSAND MEN who are pensioned by a grateful country; an honourable boon—honourable alike to “those who give, and those who take.” A wound in the head had rendered him, at an early period of life, unfit for future service, and he had taken up his quarters in his native village, only to watch by the dying bed of a beloved wife, who, after a few years of gradual decline, left him the fatal legacy of a child as delicate as herself.
Of all the evils that wait on poor humanity, the most sad and the most hopeless, in its progress and its result, is that disease which may be described as peculiar to our climate; acting as a dreadful counterpoise to numerous blessed privileges; the one terrible “set-off” against the plague, the pestilence, the famine, the storm, the earthquake, the wars, which so continually devastate other countries, but from which a merciful Providence has, in a great degree, exempted ours. The raging fever of the blood or the brain, brings the suspense of but a week or two, and busies the mournful watcher; all the ills that “flesh is heir to” have inseparably linked with them some sources of consolation, some motives for hope; they may be borne by the sufferer, and by those who often suffer more intensely than the patient, because of the knowledge that skill and care are mighty to save. But CONSUMPTION—lingering, wasting, “slow but sure”—when the victim has been marked out, the work is, as it were, done! The hectic cheek is as a registered death-doom from which there is no appeal!
Should I not, rather, say that, HITHERTO, it has been so considered:—the Despair engendered by a belief that “all hope” was to be “abandoned,” having—no one can doubt it—largely aided in preventing cure.
The poor sergeant-major! strong and brave as a lion though he was,—a single word had made him feeble as a child. He had defied death, when death assumed appalling shapes; but the memory of his wife’s sufferings was ever a sudden chill upon his heart; he shrank, as at an adders’s touch, from the thought that his child might be the inheritor of the mother’s fatal dowry. Thus, the sound of a hollow cough would shake his rugged nature like an ague fit; his very life was bound up in that of his dear daughter; and, for a moment, the thought that there might be truth in what his aged comrade said, seemed as awful in its consequences as an actual death-knell.
Sergeant-major Joyce was a veteran soldier, who had gained the respect and esteem of his whole regiment officers and men. There was a bond between him and them which his withdrawal from active service could not cancel. So, after his wife’s death, finding that a few of his old companions in arms were inmates of Chelsea College, he removed to its vicinity; passing his time between the lofty corridors of the palace-hospital and the small sitting-room of his child; ever walking with and talking to “the pensioners,” or that dear and delicate “copy” of the wife he had so truly loved. And Lucy was a girl of whom any parent might have been proud. Delicacy of constitution had given refinement to her mind as well as to her appearance: she read, perhaps, more than was good for her, if she had been destined to live the usual term of life, in her proper sphere. She thought, also, but she thought well; and this, happily for herself, made her humble. Faith is the foundation of that righteous affection, without which nought is pure; her faith was clear and firm—in nothing wavering; SHE BELIEVED, and belief had given her, without an effort, tenfold the strength which those who rely for strength upon the broken and bending reed of HUMAN REASON, seek for in vain. You inquire, who taught her this? Was it her kindly but half-crazed father? No: he was full of a rough soldier’s honour, mingled, at times, with the more than woman’s softness, which often tempers dispositions fierce as his; but in all this faith, in the trust and purity, the meek, cheerful, warm spirit of love and tenderness, Lucy—I say it with deep reverence—Lucy, in all these things—the fruits of a regenerate nature—was taught of God. She made no show of piety; but her father knew that every night her Bible was placed beneath her pillow; for he had often seen it there, when stealing into her little room to be assured she slept. She read much besides, and had that youthful leaning towards poetry which is often the sure evidence of a good and highly tempered mind; but many a time she shut her “poesy book” with something like distaste, to fill out her heart with the inspired numbers of Isaiah, or the glories of the holy Psalms. Well might she be her father’s darling; she was more than that, though he did not know it; she was his ministering angel. At times her heart would throb wildly at tales of the wars in which he had borne a part. And even on the sabbath day she seldom knelt beneath the shadow of the trophies of our country’s prowess—trophies which glorify the old Hospital-Chapel of Chelsea—without feeling proudly thankful they were there; but her care was ever to soothe and tranquillize, to watch for and avert her father’s stormy moods, and be ready with a word in season, to recall him to himself.
Mr. Joyce soon reached his home after he left his comrades. “Mary,” he inquired of an Irishwoman, the widow of a soldier, who had nursed his daughter from her birth, and never left them—one of those devotees—half-friend, half-servant—which are found only among the Irish: “Mary, did you ever perceive that Lucy pressed her hand upon her heart—as—as—her mother used to do?”
“Is it her heart? Ah, then, did ye ever know any girl, let alone such a purty one as Miss Lucy, count all out twenty years without feeling she had a heart, sometimes?”