VC - A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea Part 17

'You are right, Captain Tompson, it is abominably unlucky; I had reckoned on seeing the finish of the campaign, and it's hard to find oneself bowled over now, and sent home again like a useless old bale of damaged goods.'

General Boswell was stumping the sloping deck with the aid of the Captain's arm, getting his first hour of exercise since he came aboard.

All the snowy canvas was filled hard as iron with a n.o.ble level breeze, and the ship was making a speed which would hardly have disgraced an Atlantic liner of the modern day. She made a prettier sight than any steam-driven craft ever made, or ever will make; and she carried a better music with her in the taut wind-smitten cordage of the shrouds and the deep organ hum of the stretched canvas.

'I am saying, Polson,' said the General, encountering the Sergeant halfway along the deck, 'that it's unluckier for an old fellow to get bowled over than it is for a young one. You may be as fit as a fiddle again in a month or two, and may have your fill of fighting for Queen and country; but I have done my last day's work, and that is a weary thing to think of.'

'Last day's fighting, sir?' said Polson, 'but not the last day's work.

There's a heap to be done for the old country yet, and I hope that Irene's dream may come true and that you may go into the House of Commons and give those beggars at the War Office their proper fodder.'

'That is the business of a younger man than I am,' said the General, 'and I doubt if there's any mending in that direction. I have been at the game now, off and on, for something like forty years, and I know we have the best fighting stuff in the world at our command, but the Department have always made it their business to cripple it and starve it, and leave it naked and hungry. I've seen it in Spain, and in the Low Countries, and I've dragged out three years of it in the old Mahratta country, and it has always been the same. I suppose it always will be until we learn that it is as necessary to have a soldier to look after things at home as it is to have a soldier leading in the field. When we get you home again, my lad, well run you for the Southern Division of the county and you shall talk to 'em across the floor of the House of Commons.'

The three men reached the bows of the good boat and turned, and there was De Blacquaire before them with a weather-beaten servant holding him by the elbow and piloting him along the deck. He saluted in pa.s.sing, and the General laid a hand upon his shoulder.

'I should like half an hour with you this morning,' he said, 'if you can spare the time to come into my stateroom for a talk.'

'I am at your service now, sir,' said De Blacquaire.

'Shall we go down?' asked the General. 'One tires easily still, and this May wind gets into an old man's head like wine.'

'And into a young man's, too,' said De Blacquaire. 'I am half tipsy with it, and shall be glad to get into shelter.'

'We'll see you at breakfast, Polson,' said the General, 'and until then, good-bye.'

The two men reached the General's cabin and sat down together.

'When we touched at Corfu,' said the General, 'I found a letter from my London agents--I'd like you to see it, and I shall be glad if you can confirm its contents, or at least a part of them.'

De Blacquaire took the proffered letter and read:

'Sir,--: We are instructed to inform you that a sum of fifty thousand pounds has been deposited with us to your credit by Mr. John Jervase, of Beacon Hargate. Mr. Jervase requests us in communicating with you to say that a further sum of one hundred thousand pounds, making in all one hundred and fifty thousand, has been deposited by him in the interest of Major de Blacquaire with that gentleman's agents. We are desired to add further that Mr. Jervase has joined his brother in South America, that he proposes to establish business relations there, and does not intend to return to England. We are, sir, your obedient humble servants, E. A.

c.o.x & Co.'

'Except,' said De Blacquaire, 'that the sums mentioned here are reversed in order, I have a letter identical in terms. The old scoundrel has bled very freely.'

'And there's no vendetta?' said the General, smiling.

'Vendetta?' said De Blacquaire. 'You can hardly have a vendetta with a man who has saved your life, even though the beggar did it for no other reason than to show how much he despised you. I was wrong about the lad, General; he's a very fine fellow.'

'I could have told you that much long ago,' said the General. He reached out a lean brown hand and rang a bell which stood upon the stateroom table. 'You'll take a gla.s.s of wine, Major? It's against my rule, but I feel like breaking rules today.'

'And so do I, sir,' said De Blacquaire.

So the wine was brought, and the gla.s.ses were filled, and the two men drank to each other. The General lit a cheroot, and sat in a deck chair; but the younger man fidgeted and was obviously ill at ease.

'There is one thing on my mind, General Boswell,' he said at last, 'and I should like to get it over. I had two or three months at Scutari and I was nursed by an angel all the while.'

'Don't go on, my lad,' said the General, reaching a hand towards him.

'If I understand you, it's useless to talk of that.'

'Very well, sir,' said De Blacquaire, sipping gloomily at his wine; and nothing more was said for a minute or two, but the younger man gradually brightened, and it could be plainly seen that he was squaring his mental shoulders for the reception of a burden which he meant to cany.

'The Sergeant is a lucky dog, sir.'

'My dear fellow,' said the General, 'he has deserved to be a lucky dog.

It is one of the ordinances of this life that a fellow can't choose his own father. If the lad had had a choice and had exercised it, I should have had no great respect for him. And yet I had a sort of liking for old Jervase. He was a bounder always, but I thought he was an honest bounder.'

'They tell me,' said De Blacquaire, 'that the Sergeant's to have his V.C. for that business in front of the first parallel.'

'That's a settled thing, I fancy,' said the General 'Sir Colin's word ought to be good for anything at home, and my own should go for something.'

'Mine won't be wanting, sir, if they think it worth listening to.'

'What did you two fall out about?' the General asked.

Major de Blacquaire dipped into the cigar box which had been pushed over towards him long before, and very thoughtfully fingered an evil-looking Trichinopoli.

'Why, sir, I believe if the whole truth were told we fell out mainly because I was a bit of a puppy. You're an older man of the world than I am, sir, and I dare say you can't have failed to notice that some men who think they are insiders are outsiders, and that some of the fellows they despise are better than themselves.'

'Do you know, De Blacquaire,' said the General, 'I like that?'

'A year in camp, and two or three months in hospital, will do a lot towards changing a man's opinions.'

'Won't they?' cried the General. 'Egad! Won't they?' The old Christian Quixote mounted his hobby, and rode. 'There are things in war that n.o.body wants to think about. It's an ugly trade. When I was a youngster, and in my first action I was very hard-pressed, and I caught a bayonet out of the hand of a fellow who was dropping at my side, and I had to use it. It's fifty years ago now, but the man squealed and I haven't forgotten it, and I'm never likely to forget it. But a man is born to die, sir, and he's born to do his duty. I dare say I'm a simple thinker, Major de Blacquaire, but there are things a hundred times worse than war, and if you didn't believe that G.o.d sent them, you would have to turn infidel. I've seen two or three choleras, here and there, and a Black Death and a bubonic plague. What does it all mean? Jarring forces, sir, which Heaven will reconcile in its own good time. And that's what war means to my mind. You go where you're sent, just as the germ of disease, or whatever you call it, goes, and you do what you are set to do. And I'll say this for war, sir, as an old Christian man who has spent his life at it. It's the fire of G.o.d, to my way of thinking, and it burns out all manner of meannesses, and hypocrisies, and we should have a devil of a lot more to be ashamed of than we have if we didn't get into a solid fight now and again.'

'It is a school, sir,' said De Blacquaire.

'By heaven, sir,' said the solemn General, 'it is a school.'

'But there are more cla.s.s-rooms than one in the great school house of human nature, and whilst the General was setting forth his theories of war, young Polson Jervase was setting out a theory of another and an opposite fashion as he walked the deck with Irene.

He was deadly serious also, for all that part of life which seems best worth having lay before him. And the two had many talks as they paced the decks, morn and eve together. Irene was almost the only lady on board, and most of the dot-and-go-one boys who had exchanged a natural limb for a timber toe, and the loose-sleeved men who had left an arm behind them at Sevastopol, had been beneath her care. And those who did not know her ministrations in effect knew them by oral tradition, and the bronzed fellows stumping and tramping up and down saluted her with such a worship that her heart was like a fountain of glad tears a hundred times in a day.

A girl has a natural and inborn right to be proud of her sweetheart in any earthly circ.u.mstances whatsoever, if he were the merest snub-nosed, freckled, and chinless Jones that ever skipped over a counter. But to have an approved and veritable here for a lover, and to live at the same time as the sole heroine of so narrow a little world as a shipful of soldiers the incense of whose hearts went up about her constantly, was to be more than merely proud and happy. Polson had got a permanent crick in his neck from that bit of Russian lead which had caught him just as he dropped into the trench with De Blacquaire. In the course of time he began to carry it naturally, so that it looked like the merest little mannerism, but it could never have been handsome by any conceivable chance except in the eyes of a wife or a sweetheart. Irene adored it, and would have made it a rule of fashion, as the Grecian bend and the Alexandra limp came to be in later years, and no man would have been allowed to carry his head in any other fashion than Polson did save under heavy pains and penalties.

'When everybody can see how a story will end,' said one of the greatest masters of the narrative art, 'the story is ended,' and the written history of Polson Jervase is coming to a close.

There were certain things about which he was naturally anxious and about which it was impossible to ask any questions. But the truth came out little by little, and it appeared in the end that the world knew nothing of the secrets which had escaped between the partners in the firm of Jervase & Jervoyce in the course of that wild night which had brought to England news of such portentous moment. There were rumours, of course.

There was a gossip to the effect that the firm had been on the edge of ruin, and that Polson, rather than miss the fighting, had elected to go out as a private soldier, dropping his hope of a commission for the time being. This was a fancy which hurt n.o.body. John Jervase had left his affairs in excellent order when he had established his own line of retreat, and since he had been known to have made money hand over fist within the last year or two, the halo which surrounds the millionaire was about him, and it would have been hard to say whether he or the boy were more popular in the Castle Barfield region. The general idea was that they were a pair of valiant fellows; the one in the commercial and the other in the warlike way.

Poor Raglan's heroisms and blunders were buried together before the day came when in the ordinary course of events he would have led his troops along the saluting line and have received the honours due to him from his Sovereign.

The scent of hot gra.s.s was strong in the flaming noontide in Hyde Park when London poured out its scores and scores of thousands to witness the ceremonial which crowned a foolish and disastrous war with a triumph better earned by the valour of the men who fought there than by the statecraft of the other men who sent them into combat. Ragged and lean and bearded, with the soil of the Crimea still upon them, the men of Alma and Inkerman, of Balaclava and Sevastopol, marched through the roaring citizen crowd and formed up in the Park. There were many men of valour there--many who had earned as well as any other the mark of honour which was that day to be bestowed; but opposite the bright pavilion with the raised crimson dais on which the Queen was to take her seat there was but a mere handful of the halt and maimed, upon whom the eyes of the vast mult.i.tude, whether civil or military, were fixed. They were no more than specks in the great open s.p.a.ce--just so many little coloured ants to the eye--and the gaze of the spectators gloated on them. For they were Britain's chosen. These were the men of whom all London had been reading with bated breath for well nigh three years past. These were the men of Alma's heights and Balaclava's charge and Inkerman's fog, and the frost of the trenches--the pick and pride of the whole contingent which had gone out to do battle for England's honour.

That they had never been truly called upon to go made little if any difference at that hour, for London was in the mood for hero-worship rather than political criticism just then, and not the rudest judge of British policy would have cared to speak a word against the ceremony of the day.

And when, after long waiting, the royal carriage came, with the pretty, smiling little matronly figure bowing and swaying amidst the ringing thunders of the world's greatest city, and the bands rolled out their 'G.o.d Save the Queen' as she pa.s.sed them one after another, one happy, happy onlooker looked up at one war-hardened old veteran through tears.

'Upon my word,' said the General, with a grimace which was really much less humorous than he meant it to be, and in a voice which was hardly as steady as he would have liked to have it--'upon my word, Irene, I'd give twopence to be in your shoes at this moment.'