The month’s installment of a Serial Tale then running in The Ladies’ Mentor contained a harrowing description of a similar leave-taking between husband and wife. But it seemed to my Aunt Julietta that the gallant and high-souled Colonel Reginald de la Vaux and his young and sensitive bride said too much—and said it too coherently to be quite real.
They ought to have gulped out trivialities until the last minute, such as: “Don’t forget the whisky-flask!—it’s in your great-coat pocket.” “Not me, egad! trust a British soldier!” and “Do, now, remember, love!—always to change wet socks!” Then, as the Fifes and Drums squealed, and company after company marched up the gangway, and the Colors were displayed on the quarter-deck, they should have choked and grabbed each other. And with the rasping scrub of a wet mustache upon her mouth, and the smell of wet umbrellas and oilskins in her nostrils, and the strains of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” and “Cheer, Boys, Cheer” in her ears; and the tears rolling down her cheeks as heavily as the rain dripped from the eaves of her bonnet—as the big steamer moved slowly, remorselessly away from the quay amidst cheering and good-byes—my pretty Aunt was left standing in a puddle—much to the detriment of a smart pair of velvet boots.
Heaven knows how long the poor soul would have stood there, but that her children’s nurse—a Sloughshire girl, married to a private of the Rathkeales—who made one of a group of disconsolate dripping soldiers’ wives—perching amongst piles or crates and timber-balks and coils of tarry rope to see the last of their men—ran to her, crying wildly: “Oh, ma’am!—ma’am!... my Tom!... Will he ever come back, do you think, ma’am?... Shall I ever see him again?...” And my Aunt wakened out of her desolate stupor, and took the weeping creature’s cold wet hand, and kissed her swollen cheek, and told her: “Of course you will, Mrs. Kennedy! They’re only sending them out to the East to send them home again!”
Ensign Mortimer Jowell—who for two years now had held Her Majesty’s Commission, did not sail with his regiment. A common, infantile complaint, characterized by a rubious rash and yclept the measles—had stricken the only hope of the House of Jowell down on the very threshold of Active Service, much to his indignation and chagrin.
The young man’s bosom-friend and brother-officer Ensign Lord Adolphus Noddlewood, marched in the uniform of a private of the Cut Red Feathers, from the train to the Docks between two of the men of his own company, thus avoiding a sheriff’s officer who—armed with a writ issued by Nathan and Moss of Giltspur Street—had been sent down to arrest this gay young nobleman.
But Morty, frying with fever and boiling with vexation, must perforce remain a prisoner in the huge palatial four-poster in the luxurious bedroom of the suite of private apartments which the fond father had caused to be specially decorated and furnished for his only son at the Jowell mansion in Hanover Square. Instead of farewell banquets washed down with the golden, creaming nectar of Sillery and Épernay—followed by bumpers of the Port of Carbonell—the young man perforce must subsist on blameless slops of chicken-broth and barley-water—must be regulated with saline doses of the cooling, nauseous, fizzy kind....
His mother presided over the medical regimen; administered the medicines, turned the pillows—pounded into feather-pancakes by her boy’s aching bullet-head—read him the newspaper-accounts of the departure of his comrades—washed him—scolded him—bore with his fevered grumblings; and—reverting to the days when the big young man was a mere topknotted youngster in plaid frocks, diamond socks, and strap-shoes—heard him say his nightly prayers.
In those early days referred to, young Mortimer—proving himself a true sapling of that sterling stem of stout old British oak, his father,—had been wont to derive profit of the solid, terrestrial description from these orisons, by tacking on to the supplementary petition for parents, requests for toys and treats particularly desired.