“I do, sir, and I pray your business with that gentleman be more agreeable than mine,” was his reply.
“I hope at least that yours will be brief, for I suppose you pass before me,” said I.
“All pass before me,” he said, with a shrug and a gesture upward of the open hands. “It was not always so, sir, but times change. It was not so when the sword was in the scale, young gentleman, and the virtues of the soldier might sustain themselves.”
There came a kind of Highland snuffle out of the man that raised my dander strangely.
“Well, Mr. Macgregor,” said I, “I understand the main thing for a soldier is to be silent, and the first of his virtues never to complain.”
“You have my name, I perceive”—he bowed to me with his arms crossed—“though it’s one I must not use myself. Well, there is a publicity—I have shown my face and told my name too often in the beards of my enemies. I must not wonder if both should be known to many that I know not.”
“That you know not in the least, sir,” said I, “nor yet anybody else; but the name I am called, if you care to hear it, is Balfour.”
“It is a good name,” he replied civilly; “there are many decent folk that use it. And now that I call to mind, there was a young gentleman, your namesake, that marched surgeon in the year ’Forty-five with my battalion.”
“I believe that would be a brother to Balfour of Baith,” said I, for I was ready for the surgeon now.
“The same, sir,” said James More. “And since I have been fellow-soldier with your kinsman, you must suffer me to grasp your hand.”