Marget Maclean (or one of her sisters) was accustomed when the mails
contained a letter on His Majesty’s Service for the Paymaster, to put
on a bonnet, and in a mild flurry cross the street, feeling herself a
sharer in the great matters of State. So important was the mission
that she had been known even to shut her shop door for the time of
her absence upon eager and numerous youths waiting the purchase of her
superior “black man,” a comfit more succulent with her than with Jenny
Anderson in Crombie’s Land, or on older patrons seeking the hire of the
new sensation in literature--something with a tomb by Mrs. Radcliffe.
“Tell your mistress I wish to see her,” she would say on these occasions
with great pomp to Peggy, but even Miss Mary was not sufficiently close
to State to be entrusted with the missive. “Goodday, Miss Campbell, I
called to see Captain John on important business,” and the blue document
with its legend and seal would be clutched with mittened hands tight to
the faded bodice.
Miss Mary shared some of this awe for State documents; at least she
helped out the illusion that they were worth all this anxiety on the
part of the post-office, and she would call the Paymaster from
his breakfast. His part on the other hand was to depreciate their
importance. He would take the most weighty and portentous with an air of
contempt.
“What’s this, Miss Maclean?” he would say impatiently with the
snuff-pinch suspended between his pocket and his nose. “A king’s letter.
Confound the man! what can he be wanting now?” Then with a careless
forefinger he would break the seal and turn the paper outside in,
heedless (to all appearance) as if it were an old copy of the _Courier_.
One day such a letter sent his face flaming as he returned to the
breakfast table. He looked at Miss Mary, sitting subdued behind her urn
and Gilian at her side, and then at his brothers, hardly yet awake
in the early morning, whose breakfasts in that small-windowed room it
needed two or three candles to illuminate.
“The county corps is coming south this way,” said he, with a great
restraint upon his feelings.
Cornal Colin turned on him a lustreless eye.
“What havers are you on now, John?” said he, with no pause in the
supping of his porridge. Dugald paid no heed. With a hand a little
palsied he buttered a scone, and his lower lip was dropped and his eyes
were vacant, showing him far absent in the spirit. Conversation was
never very rife at the Paymaster’s breakfast table.
“I’m telling you the county corps is coming south,” said Mars, with what
for him to the field officer was almost testiness. “Here’s a command for
billeting three hundred men on Friday night on their way to Dumbarton.”
Up stood the Cornal with a face transfigured. He stretched across the
table and almost rudely clutched the paper from his brother’s hand, cast
a fast glance at the contents and superscription, then sat again and
gave a little choked cheer, the hurrah of spent youth and joyfulness.
“Curse me! but it’s true,” he cried to the General. “The old 91st under
Crawford--Jiggy Crawford we called him for his dance in the ken at
Madrid before he exchanged--Friday, Friday; where’s my uniform, Mary?
They’ll be raw recruits, I’ll warrant, not the old stuff, but--are you
hearing, Dugald? Oh! the Army, the Army! Let me see--yes, it says six
pipers and thirty band. My medals, Mary, are they in the shuttle of my
kist yet? The 91st--God! I wish it was our own; would I not show them!
You are not hearing a word I am saying, Dugald.”
He paused in a feverish movement in his chair, thrust off from him
with a clatter of dishes and a spilling of milk the breakfast still
unfinished, and stared with annoyance at the General. Dugald picked at
his fish with no appetite, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, a silent old
man palsied on one side, with a high bald head full of visions. “What’s
that about the Argyls?” he said at last, with a start, brought to by the
tone and accent of his brother.
Cornal Colin cleared his throat, and read the notification of the billet
“Friday, did you say Friday?” asked Dugald, all abstraction gone.
“This very Friday.”
The old man rose and threw back his shoulders with some of the gallantry
of his prime. He walked without a word to the window and looked at the
deserted street. Ten--fifteen--twenty years fell from his back as thus
he stood in the mingled light of the wan reluctant morning and the
guttering candles on the table. To Miss Mary, looking at him there
against the morning light, his figure--black and indefinite--was the
figure that went to Spain, the strong figure, the straight figure, the
figure that filled its clothes with manliness. There was but the oval
of the bald high head to spoil the illusion. He turned again and looked
into the candle-lit room, but seeing nothing there, for all his mind was
elsewhere.
“I thought,” he muttered, brokenly, “I thought I would never see
red-coat again.” Then he straightened his shoulders anew, and flexed the
sinews of his knees, and pressed the palsied hand against the breeches’
seam. The exertion brought a cough to his throat, a choking resistless
cough of age and clogging humours. It was Time’s mocking reminder that
the morning parade was over for ever, and now the soldier must be at
ease. He gasped and spluttered, his figure lost its tenseness, and from
the fit of coughing he came back again an old and feeble man. He looked
at his hand trembling against his waist, at his feet in their large and
clumsy slippers; he looked at the picture of himself upon the wall, then
quitted the room with something like a sob upon his lip.
“Man! he’s in a droll key about it!” said the Paymaster, breaking the
silence. “What in all the world is his vexation?”
Miss Mary put down her handkerchief impatiently and loaded Gilian at her
side with embarrassing attentions.
“What--in--all--the--world--is--his vexation?” mocked the Cornal in the
Captain’s high and squeaking voice, reddening at the face and his
scar purpling. “That’s a terribly stupid question to put, Jock.
What--in--all--the--world--is--his--vexation? If you had the soger’s
heart and your brother’s past you would not be asking what an ancient’s
sorrow at his own lost strength might mean. Oh, man, man! make a
pretence at spirit even if the Almighty denied it to you!”
He tossed the letter from him, almost in his brother’s face.
The Paymaster held his anger in leash. He was incapable of comprehending
and he was, too, afraid. With a forced laugh, he pressed the creases
from the document.
“Oh, I’m glad enough to see the corps,” said he, “if that’s what you
mean. If I have not your honours from the Army, I’m as fond of Geordie’s
uniform as any man of my years. I’ll get the best billets in the town
for----”
The Cornal scowled and interjected, “Ay, ay, and you’ll make all the
fraca that need be about the lads, and cock your hat to the fife, and
march and act the veteran as if you were Moore himself, but you’ll
be far away from knowing what of their pomp and youth is stirring the
hearts of your brother Dugald and me. The Army is all bye for us, Jock,
Boney’s by the heels; there’s younger men upon the roster if the foreign
route is called again in the barrack yard.”
His glance fell upon Gilian, wide-eyed, wonderful, in the shade beside
Miss Mary’s chair, and he turned to him with a different accent.
“There _you_ are!” said he, “my wan-faced warlock. What would Colin
Campbell, Commander of the Bath, not give to be your age again and all
the world before him? Do you say your prayers at night, laddie, before
you go to your naked bed in the garret? I’ll warrant Mary taught you
that if she taught you nothing else. Pray every night then that Heaven
may give you thew and heart and a touch of the old Hielan’ glory that
this mechanic body by my side has got through the world wanting. Oh,
laddie, laddie, what a chance is yours! To hear the drum in the morning
and see the sun glint on the line; to sail away and march with pipe or
bugle in foreign countries; to have a thousand good companions round
about the same camp-fires and know the lift and splendour of parades in
captured towns. It’s all bye for me; I’m an old pensioner rotting to the
tomb in a landward burgh packed with relics like myself, and as; God’s
in heaven, I often wish I was with brother Jamie yonder fallen in my
prime with a clod stopping the youth and spirit in my throat.”
“Tut, tut, now we’re in our flights!” said the Paymaster, not very
audibly, so that in his transport the Cornal never heard.
“_Are_ you for the Army?” asked the Cornal, like a recruiting sergeant
bringing the question home to a lad at a country fair; and he fixed
Gilian with an eye there was no baffling.
“I would--I would like it fine,” said Gilian stammering, “if it was all
like that.”
“Like what?” asked the Cornal, subdued, and a hand behind his ear to
listen.
“Like that--” repeated the boy, trembling though Miss Mary’s fingers
were on his. “All the morning time, all with trumpets and the same
friends about the camp-fire. Always the lift inside and the notion to go
on and on and----”
He stopped for want of English words to tell the sentiment completely.
The Cornal looked at him now wistfully.
“I would not say, Gilian,” said he, “but what there might be the makings
of a soger in you yet. If you have not the sinews for it you have
the sense. You’ll see a swatch on Friday of what I talked about and
we’ll--Come away this minute, Mary, and look me out my uniform. Jiggy
Crawford! Young Jiggy that danced in the booze-house in Madrid! He was
Ensign then and now he has his spurs and handles tartan. He is at the
very topmost of the thing and I am going down, down, down, out, out,
out, like this, and this, and this,” and so saying he pinched out the
candle flames one by one. The morning swept into the room, no longer
with a rival, lighting up this parlour of old people, showing the
wrinkles and the grey hairs and the parchment-covered knuckles, and in
its midst the Paymaster’s boy with a transfigured face and a head full
of martial glory.