“Goodness gracious!—then you’re not even an officer!”
“A private of the yeomanry, Miss Bogle, is, let me inform you, totally independent of rank. We enrol ourselves for patriotism, not for pay. We are as honourable a body as the Archers of the Scots Guard, the Cavaliers of Dundee, or the Mousquetaires”——
“How romantic and nice! I declare, you are quite a D’Artagnan!” said Edith, who had just read the Trois Mousquetaires.
“Don’t they pay you?” said Roper. “’Pon my honour that’s too bad. If I were you I’d memorialise the Horse Guards. By the way, M’Whirter, what sort of a charger have you got?”
“Why, to say the truth,” replied I, hesitatingly, “I am not furnished with a horse as yet. I am just going to look out for one at some of the livery stables.”
“My dear friend,” said Roper, with augmented interest, “I strongly recommend you to do nothing of the kind. These fellows will, to a dead certainty, sell you some sort of a brute that is either touched in the wind or dead lame; and I can tell you it is no joke to be spilt in a charge of cavalry.”
I felt a sort of sickening sensation as I recalled the lines of Schiller—
“Young Piccolomini, known by his plume
And his long hair, gave signal for the trenches;
Himself leapt first, the regiment all plunged after.
His charger, by a halbert gored, reared up,
Flung him with violence off, and over him
The horses, now no longer to be curbed”——
The fate of Max might be mine, and Edith might be left, a mournful Thekla, to perform a moonlight pilgrimage to my grave in the solitary churchyard of Portobello!