COLONEL AND SERGEANT
There was no difference of feeling betwixt the father and mother in
regard to this devotion of Kirsty’s very being to her Steenie; but the
mother in especial was content with it, for while Kirsty was the apple
of her eye, Steenie was her one loved anxiety.
David Barclay, a humble unit in the widespread and distinguished family
of the Barclays or Berkeleys, was born, like his father and grandfather
and many more of his ancestors, on the same farm he now occupied. While
his father was yet alive, with an elder son to succeed him, David
_listed_--mainly from a strong desire to be near a school-friend, then
an ensign in the service of the East India Company. Throughout their
following military career they were in the same regiment, the one
rising to be colonel, the other sergeant-major. All the time, the
school-boy attachment went on deepening in the men; and, all the time,
was never man more respectfully obedient to orders than David Barclay
to those of the superior officer with whom in private he was on terms
of intimacy. As often as they could without attracting notice, the
comrades threw aside all distinction of rank, and were again the Archie
Gordon and Davie Barclay of old school days--as real to them still as
those of the hardest battles they had fought together. In more
primitive Scotland, such relations are, or were more possible than in
countries where more divergent habits of life occasion wider social
separations; and then these were sober-minded men, who neither made
much of the shows of the world, nor were greedy after distinction,
which is the mere coffin wherein Duty-done lies buried.
When they returned to their country, both somewhat disabled, the one
retired to his inherited estate, the other to the family farm upon that
estate, where his brother had died shortly before; so that Archie was
now Davie’s landlord. But no new relation would ever destroy the
friendship which school had made close, and war had welded. Almost
every week the friends met and spent the evening together--much
oftener, by and by, at Corbyknowe than at Castle Weelset. For both
married soon after their return, and their wives were of different
natures.
‘My colonel has the glory,’ Barclay said once, and but once, to his
sister, ‘but, puir fallow, I hae the wife!’ And truly the wife at the
farm had in her material enough, both moral and intellectual, for ten
ladies better than the wife at the castle.
David’s wife brought him a son the first year of their marriage, and
the next year came a son to the colonel and a daughter to the sergeant.
One night, as the two fathers sat together at the farm, some twelve
hours after the birth of David’s girl, they mutually promised that the
survivor would do his best for the child of the other. Before he died
the colonel would gladly have taken his boy from his wife and given him
to his old comrade.
As to Steenie, the elder of David’s children, he was yet unborn when
his father, partly in consequence of a wound from which he never quite
recovered, met with rather a serious accident through a young horse in
the harvest-field, and the report reached his wife that he was killed.
To the shock she thus received was generally attributed the peculiarity
of the child, prematurely born within a month after. He had long passed
the age at which children usually begin to walk, before he would even
attempt to stand, but he had grown capable of a speed on all-fours that
was astonishing. When at last he did walk, it was for more than two
years with the air of one who had learned a trick; and throughout his
childhood and a great part of his boyhood, he continued to go on
all-fours rather than on his feet.