HOW I BECAME A YEOMAN.
BY PROFESSOR AYTOUN.
[MAGA. September 1846.]
CHAPTER I.
Had the royal army of Israel been accoutred after the colour and fashion of the British battalions, I am quite satisfied that another enigma would have been added by King Solomon to his special list of incomprehensibilities. The extraordinary fascination which a red coat exercises over the minds and optics of the fair sex, appears to me a greater phenomenon than any which has been noticed by Goethe in his Theory of the Development of Colours. The same fragment of ensanguined cloth will irritate a bull, charm a viper, and bewitch the heart of a woman. No civilian, however good-looking or clean-limbed—and I rather pique myself upon my pins—has the ghost of a chance when opposed in the lists of love to an officer, a mail-guard, a whipper-in, or a postman. You may be as clever a fellow as ever coopered up an article for the Magazine, as great a poet as Byron, in beauty an Antinous, in wit a Selwyn, in oratory a Canning—you may dance like Vestris, draw like Grant, ride like Alexander; and yet, with all these accomplishments, it is a hundred chances to one that your black coat, although fashioned by the shears and polished by the goose of Stultz, will be extinguished by the gaudy scarlet habiliments of a raw-boned ensign, emancipated six months ago, for the first time in his life, from the wilderness of a Highland glen, and even now as awkward a cub as ever presumed to plunge into the perils of a polka.
Let no man, nor woman either, consider these observations flummery or verbiage. They are my calm deliberate opinions, written, it is true, under circumstances of considerable irritation, but nevertheless deliberate. I have no love to the army, for I have been sacrificed for a dragoon. My affections have been slighted, my person vilified, my professional prospects damaged, and my constitution fearfully shaken in consequence of this military mania. I have made an idiot of myself in the eyes of my friends and relatives. I have absolutely gone upon the turf. I have lost some valuable inches of epidermis, and every bone of my body feels at the present moment as sore as though I were the sole survivor of a terrific railway collision. A more injured individual than myself never mounted upon a three-legged stool, and from that high altitude I now hurl down defiance and anathemas upon the regulars, be they horse or foot, sappers or miners, artillery, pioneers, or marines!
It was my accursed fate to love, and love in vain. I do not know whether it was the eye or the instep, the form or the voice, of Edith Bogle, which first drew my attention, and finally fascinated my regards, as I beheld her swimming swan-like down the Assembly Rooms at the last Waverley Ball. A more beautiful representative of Die Vernon could not have been found within the boundary of the three kingdoms. Her rich auburn hair flowed out from beneath the crimson network which strove in vain to confine within its folds that bright luxuriant sea—on her brow there lay one pearl, pure as an angel’s tear—and oh! sweet even to bewilderment was the smile that she cast around her, as, resting upon the arm of the moody Master of Ravenswood, she floated away—a thing of light—in the mazy current of the waltz! I shall not dwell now upon the circumstances of the subsequent introduction; on the delicious hour of converse at the supper-table; or on the whispered, and—as I flattered myself—conscious adieux, when, with palpitating heart, I veiled her fair shoulders with the shawl, and felt the soft pressure of her fingers as I tenderly assisted her to her chair. I went home that night a love-sick Writer to the Signet. One fairy form was the sole subject of my dreams, and next morning I woke to the conviction, that without Edith Bogle earth would be a wilderness, and even the bowers of Paradise damp, chilly, and uncomfortable.
There is no comfort in looking back upon a period when hope was high and unchecked. I have met with men who, in their maudlin moments—usually towards the close of the evening—were actuated by an impulse similar to that which compelled the Ancient Mariner to renew his wondrous tale: and I have heard them on such occasions recount the whole circumstances of their unfortunate wooing, with voices choked by grief, and with tears of tender imbecility. I have observed, however, that, on the morrow succeeding such disclosures, these gentlemen have invariably a shy and sheepish appearance, as though inwardly conscious that they had extended their confidence too far, and rather dubious as to the sincerity of their apparent sympathisers. Warned by their example, I hold it neither profitable nor wise to push my own confessions too far. If Edith gave me at the outset more encouragement than she ought to have done—if she systematically led me to believe that I had made an impression upon her heart—if she honoured me with a preference so marked, that it deceived not only myself, but others—let the blame be hers. But why should I go minutely into the courtship of half a year? As difficult, indeed, and as futile, would it be to describe the alternations of an April day, made up of sunshine and of shower, of cloud and rainbow and storm—sometimes mild and hopeful, then ominous of an eve of tempest. For a long time, I had not the slightest suspicion that I had a rival. I remarked, indeed, with somewhat of dissatisfaction, that Edith appeared to listen too complacently to the commonplace flatteries of the officers who are the habitual haunters of private ball and of public assembly. She danced too often with Ensign Corkingham, flirted rather openly with Major Chawser, and certainly had no business whatever to be present at a military fête and champagne luncheon given at the Castle by these brave defenders of their country. I was not invited to that fête, and the circumstance, as I well remember, was the cause of a week’s coolness between us. But it was not until Lieutenant Roper of the dragoons appeared in the field that I felt any particular cause for uneasiness.
To give the devil his due, Roper was a handsome fellow. He stood upwards of six feet in his boots, had a splendid head of curling black hair, and a mustachio and whiskers to match. His nose was beautifully aquiline, his eyes of the darkest hazel, and a perpetual smile, which the puppy had cultivated from infancy, disclosed a box of brilliant dominoes. I knew Roper well, for I had twice bailed him out of the police-office, and, in return, he invited me to mess. Our obligations, therefore, to each other might be considered as nearly equal—in fact, the balance, if any, lay upon his side, as upon one occasion he had won from me rather more than fifty pounds at ecarté. He was not a bad fellow either, though a little slap-dash in his manner, and somewhat supercilious in his cups; on which occasions—and they were not unfrequent—he was by far too general in his denunciation of all classes of civilians. He was, I believe, the younger son of a Staffordshire baronet, of good connections, but no money—in fact, his patrimony was his commission, and he was notoriously on the outlook for an heiress. Now, Edith Bogle was rumoured to have twenty thousand pounds.
Judge then of my disgust, when, on my return from a rent-gathering expedition to Argyllshire, I found Lieutenant Roper absolutely domiciled with the Bogles. I could not call there of a forenoon on my way from the Parliament-House, without finding the confounded dragoon seated on the sofa beside Edith, gabbling away with infinite fluency about the last ball, or the next review, or worsted-work, or some similar abomination. I question whether he had ever read a single book since he was at school, and yet there he sat, misquoting Byron to Edith—who was rather of a romantic turn—at no allowance, and making wild work with passages out of Tom Moore’s Loves of the Angels. How the deuce he got hold of them, I am unable up to this day to fathom. I suspect he had somehow or other possessed himself of a copy of the “Beauties,” and dedicated an hour each morning to committing extracts to memory. Certainly he never opened his mouth without enunciating some rubbish about bulbuls, gazelles, and chibouques; he designated Edith his Phingari, and swore roundly by the Koran and Kiebaubs. It was to me perfectly inconceivable how any woman of common intellect could listen to such egregious nonsense, and yet I could not disguise from myself the consciousness of the fact, that Miss Bogle rather liked it than otherwise.