With a groan of “Oh, my brain’s softening and I’m becoming a sentimentalist,” he opened the letter and read Lucille’s loving, cheering—yet agonizing, maddening—words:—
“MY OWN DARLING DAM,
“If this letter reaches you safely you are to sit down at once and write to me to tell me how to address you by post in the ordinary way. If you don’t I shall come and haunt the entrance to the Lines and waylay you. People will think I am a poor soul whom you have married and deserted, or whom you won’t marry. I’ll show up your wicked cruelty to a poor girl! How would you like your comrades to say ‘Look out, Bill, your pore wife’s ’anging about the gates’ and to have to lie low—and send out scouts to see if the coast was clear later on? Don’t you go playing fast and loose with me, master Dam, winning my young affections, making love to me, kissing me—and then refusing to marry me after it all! I don’t want to be too hard on you (and I am reasonable enough to admit that one-and-two a day puts things on a smaller scale than I have been accustomed to in the home of my fathers—or rather uncles, or perhaps uncles-in-law), and like the kind Tailor whom the Haddock advertises (and like the unkind Judge before whom he’ll some day come for something) I will ‘give you time’. But it’s only a respite, Mr. de Warrenne. You are not going to trifle with my young feelings and escape altogether. I have my eye on you—and if I respect your one-and-twopence a day now, it is on the clear understanding that you share my Little All on the day I come of age. I will trust you once more, although you have treated me so—bolting and hiding from your confiding fiancée.
“So write and tell me what you call yourself, so that I can write to you regularly and satisfy myself that you are not escaping me again. How could you treat a poor trusting female so—and then when she had found you again, and was showing her delight and begging to be married and settled in life—to rush away from her, leaving her and her modest matrimonial proposals scorned and rejected! For shame, Sir! I’ve a good mind to come and complain to your Colonel and ask him to make you keep your solemn promises and marry me….
“Now look here, darling, nonsense aside—I solemnly swear that if you don’t buy yourself out of the army on the day I come of age (or before, if you will, and can) I will really come and make you marry me and I will live with you as a soldier’s wife. If you persist in your wrong-headed notion of being a ‘disgrace’ (you!) then we’ll just adopt the army as a career, and we’ll go through all the phases till you get a Commission. I hope you won’t take this course—but if you do, you’ll be a second Hector Macdonald and retire as Lieutenant-General Sir Damocles de Warrenne (K.C.B., K.C.M.G., K.C.S.I., D.S.O., and, of course, V.C.), having confessed to an alias. It will be a long time before we should be in really congenial society, that way, darling, but I’m sure I should enjoy every hour of it with you, so long as I felt I was a comfort and happiness to you. And when you got your Commission I should not be a social drag upon you as sometimes happens. Nor before it should I be a nuisance and hindrance to you and make you wish you were ‘shut of the curse of a soldier’. I could ‘rough it’ as well as you and, besides, there would be no ‘roughing it’ where you were, for me. It is here that I am ‘roughing it,’ sitting impotent and wondering what is happening to you, and whether that terrible illness ever seizes you, and whether you are properly looked after when it does.
“Now, just realize, dearest Dam—I said I would wait twenty years for you, if necessary. I would and I will, but don’t make me do it, darling. Realize how happy I should be if I could only come and sew and cook and scrub and work for you. Can you understand that life is only measurable in terms of happiness and that my happiness can only be where you, are? If you weren’t liable to these seizures I could bear to wait, but as it is, I can’t. I beg and beseech you not to make me wait till I am of age, Dam. There’s no telling what may happen to you and I just can’t bear it. I’m coming, if I don’t hear from you, and I can easily do something to compel you to marry me, if I come. You are not going to bear this alone, darling, so don’t imagine it. We’re not going to keep separate shops after all these years, just because you’re ill with a trouble of some kind that fools can’t understand.
“Now write to me at once and put me in a position to write to you in the ordinary way—or look out for me! I’m all ready to run away, all sorts of useful things packed—ready to come and be a soldier’s girl.
“You know that I do what I think I’ll do—you spoke of my ‘steel-straight directness and sweet brave will’ in the poem you were making about me, you poor funny old boy, when you vanished, and which I found in your room when I went there to cry, (Oh, how I cried when I found your odds and ends of verse about me there—I really did think my heart was ‘broken’ in actual fact.) Don’t make me suffer any more, darling. I’m sure your Colonel will be sweet about it and give us a nice little house all to ourselves, now he has seen what a splendid soldier you are. If you stick to your folly about ‘disgrace’ I need not tell him our names and Grumper couldn’t take me away from you, even if he ever found out where we were.
“I could go on writing all night, darling, but I’ll only just say again I am going to marry you and take care of you, Dam, in the army or out of it.
“Your fiancee and friend,
“LUCILLE GAVESTONE.”