“Yes,” he said, “few people know of it; and perhaps it is as well, for it might not be counted wholly to the credit of an R.S.A. if it were known; but for seven years I played the side-drum in the ranks of the 71st. I played from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, at Vimiera, Corunna, Talavera, Busaco, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Quatre Bras, and Waterloo. Lord! the very names go dirling through my heart. They were happy days, I assure you, when I—when I—”
“Thumped the skin,” I ventured foolishly, as he paused to make a line of some importance on my effigy.
He corrected me with a vexed air.
“Thumped, my dear sir, is scarcely the word I should use under the circumstances. That hackneyed verb of every dolt who has neither ear nor imagination should not be chosen by a fellow-artist, a man of letters, to describe the roll of the drum. My happiest days, as I was about to say, were when I carried Kildalton’s silver drum, for which this one is but an indifferent substitute.”
“Well, at least,” said I lamely, “the drummer of the 71st has gone pretty far in another art than music.”
“It is very good of you to say so,” remarked Urquhart, with quiet dignity and an old-fashioned bow. “I trust, by-and-by, with assiduity to become as good a sculptor as I was a drummer.”
“How did you happen to join the Army?” I asked, anxious to have him follow up so promising an introduction.
“Because I was a fool. Mind, I do not regret it, for I had at the same time, in my folly, such memorable and happy experiences as quite improperly (as you might think) never come to the doorstep of the very wise. Still, I joined the Army in a fool’s escapade, resenting what seemed to me the insufferable restrictions of a Scottish manse. My father was incumbent of a parish, half Highland, half Lowland. At sixteen I came home from Edinburgh and my first session of the University there; at sixteen and a half I mutinied against sixpence a week of pocket-money and the prospect of the Divinity Hall for one (as I felt) designed by Heaven for Art, and with a borrowed name and an excellently devised tale of orphanhood, took a bounty in the territorial regiment. They put me to the drums. They professed to find me so well suited there that they kept me at them all the time I was a King’s man, in spite of all my protests, and there, if you are in the mood for a story, I had an experience.
“The corps had two drums of silver, one of which was entrusted to me. They were called ‘Kildalton’s drums,’ in compliment to their donor, from whose lands no fewer than four companies of the 71st had been embodied. They were handsome instruments, used only for stately occasions, and mine, at least, so much engaged my fancy that I liked to keep it shining like a mirror; and the cords and tassels of silk—pleated, as we were told, by Kildalton’s daughter—appealed so much to the dandiacal in me, I fretted to have them wet on a parade. You can fancy, therefore, my distress when my darling was subjected to the rough work and hazards of the sack of Ciudad Rodrigo.
“Our corps on that occasion was in the Light Division. While Picton’s men, away to our left and nearer the river, were to attack the great breach made in the ramparts by our guns on the Tessons, we were to rush into a lesser breach farther east. The night was black and cold to that degree I could not see the fortress at a hundred yards, and could scarcely close my fingers on the drum-sticks as I beat for the advance of Napier’s storming party. The walls we threatened burst in tongues of flame and peals of thunder. Grape-shot tore through our three hundred as we crossed the ditch; but in a moment we were in the gap, the bayonets busy as it were among wine-skins, the footing slimy with blood, and a single drum (my comrade fell mortally wounded in the ditch) beat inside the walls for the column outside to follow us.”