Tuck-of-Drum
BY ALFRED TRESIDDER SHEPPARD
(Copyright in Great Britain by A. T. Sheppard.)
AT nine o’clock Josephine beat a vigorous reveille on the drum that had led old troops into action. It was the second of December; the sun of Austerlitz shone on the grass and trees in the little front white garden, and was fast melting the delicate tracery of fern and frond on the oval window of Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum’s bedroom.
A curious name, Tuck-of-Drum; the echo of an ancient story told round camp-fires long burned out; a scrap of wreckage floating, like its owner, when the seas of years held so much that was forgotten. Dominique Laplume was proud of the name; for even the village children, whispering “Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum” behind his back, brought the flicker of a smile to his grizzled face and the ghost of a flash to eyes dim and watery with age.
On Austerlitz day, for many years, the drum had roused him from his slumbers. He had slept heavily, this old warrior; “a thousand thunders!” he said sometimes in self-excuse, “when one has made one’s bed as often on straw or the solid ground——”
His son, growing from childhood to manhood, plied the drumsticks in his time; he fell at Solferino. His son’s son held them in his turn; the earth still lay bare and trampled over him at Gravelotte. They had given much to France, these Laplumes. Now Josephine, with her black sleeves rolled high on her thin white arms, and her dimpled face set into desperate earnestness, took her dead father’s place, and thundered at the parchment until the old man’s husky voice answered the summons.
Her sabots clattered down the stairs. Coughing and grunting, Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum began to dress. The clothes he had worn the day—and many days—before hung from their pegs in a chintz-covered recess. On a rush-bottomed chair near the bed, carefully brushed and pipeclayed, lay coat, and belts, and breeches, and gaiters that had gathered mud, in their time, from half the kingdoms of Europe. On the dressing-table the cross of the Legion of Honor rested in its little leather case.
At last his shaking fingers opened the door. The drum lay outside; the drum, and, on the drum, the gigantic bearskin, bullet-bitten in old fights, moth-marked during long, idle years. He came downstairs in full regimentals. Madame Laplume was talking to the village postmaster at the open door. She ran to meet him. Her eyes were misty, for she remembered last year’s reveille; but there was a ring of gladness in her greeting.
“Good morning, grandfather!” she cried, kissing him on both cheeks; “a happy Austerlitz day. There is news, too——”