“Tut, tut, now we’re in our flights!” said the Paymaster, not very audibly, so that in his transport the Cornal never heard.
“Are you for the Army?” asked the Cornal, like a recruiting sergeant bringing the question home to a lad at a country fair; and he fixed Gilian with an eye there was no baffling.
“I would—I would like it fine,” said Gilian stammering, “if it was all like that.”
“Like what?” asked the Cornal, subdued, and a hand behind his ear to listen.
“Like that—” repeated the boy, trembling though Miss Mary’s fingers were on his. “All the morning time, all with trumpets and the same friends about the camp-fire. Always the lift inside and the notion to go on and on and——”
He stopped for want of English words to tell the sentiment completely.
The Cornal looked at him now wistfully.
“I would not say, Gilian,” said he, “but what there might be the makings of a soger in you yet. If you have not the sinews for it you have the sense. You’ll see a swatch on Friday of what I talked about and we’ll—Come away this minute, Mary, and look me out my uniform. Jiggy Crawford! Young Jiggy that danced in the booze-house in Madrid! He was Ensign then and now he has his spurs and handles tartan. He is at the very topmost of the thing and I am going down, down, down, out, out, out, like this, and this, and this,” and so saying he pinched out the candle flames one by one. The morning swept into the room, no longer with a rival, lighting up this parlour of old people, showing the wrinkles and the grey hairs and the parchment-covered knuckles, and in its midst the Paymaster’s boy with a transfigured face and a head full of martial glory.