Food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well
as better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.
_King Henry IV._
Although Cuthbert Noble was by degrees gaining a little experience in
his new and unsuitable calling, yet it must be confessed that a little
of his enthusiasm evaporated under the necessary process of being
drilled and taught his exercise; and not only so, but he began to be
very much puzzled and perplexed at the opinions and the conduct of
many with whom he was now to live and to act. The Colonel of the
regiment in which he had received his appointment was, indeed, a man
eminently worthy of respect and esteem. He was a devout, reserved
person, of a noble and grave presence,--an approved soldier, and a
sincere and sound patriot. He considered himself to be opposing the
crown upon strict constitutional principles; and, being
conscientiously attached to the Presbyterian form of church
government, desired the overthrow of the prelacy, and the total
abolition of episcopacy. Nevertheless, he viewed with distaste and a
cold sufferance the extravagant proceedings of the various independent
sects now loose upon society; and discouraged, as far as he could,
without danger to the one great and common cause, the practices which
already obtained in the ranks of the Parliament levies. Every vain and
intoxicated fanatic, who had the power of uttering a few dozen
unconnected and rambling sentences without book, claimed for his
shallow babbling the authority of inspiration, and asserted his gift
of speech as a divine commission, by which he was called to the office
of a preacher of the word of God. His own religion was serious,
practical, intelligible; and he had a sternness of sound judgment,
before which all flighty pretensions and false confidences fell down
or fled away. His name was Maxwell: he had been a friend of the father
of Francis Heywood, and was very well acquainted with Francis. Owing
to this circumstance Cuthbert was favourably introduced to him, and
was always very considerately treated; but their characters, their
ages, and their relative situations in the regiment, made it
impossible for them to become intimate with each other. Moreover, the
earliest and latest waking thoughts of Colonel Maxwell were wholly
taken up with the very important duties of preparing his corps by
strict discipline and close training for the day of trial, which could
not be very far distant; therefore Cuthbert was left, soon after he
joined, to make out as well as he could with the society of the
captain of his company and his brother lieutenant. At first, indeed,
for a very few days, he had enjoyed the comfort of having Francis
Heywood in the same quarters, but the horse had marched down to
Northampton, and they were thus separated. Now the captain of
Cuthbert’s company had been a master butcher, of the name of Ruddiman,
about forty years of age: a fine portly man, standing about six feet
three inches in height, with ample chest and broad shoulders, little
eyes, red cheeks, a low forehead, and coarse greasy black hair. He
had a fist that would fell a bullock, and a voice that would frighten
a herd of them. In spite of the very hardening influence of his
calling, he had nothing unkind in his temper. He had thrived greatly
in his business, was honest and just in all his dealings, a good
husband, a good father, and a good citizen--with a house full of
children, and a pretty pasture farm in the county of Hertfordshire. He
was as bold as he was strong; but was here, nevertheless, solely in
obedience to the wishes of an active, ambitious, meddling wife, who
was a bitter, censorious, religious politician, and whose pride it was
that her husband should be a down-king man, and a captain in the
Parliament army. The good captain himself, meanwhile, barring his
wife’s sovereign will, and the honour of the title, would much rather
have looked after his business at home; or, at all events, have been
permitted to join a horse regiment, though only as a sergeant. But
Mrs. Ruddiman had decided otherwise, and had told him that, if he only
served for a few weeks or months as a captain, and looked well about
him, he might get made a commissary and get a contract, and make his
fortune. This last consideration was not without its weight; for
Master Ruddiman had always a keen eye to the main chance. The brother
lieutenant of Cuthbert was a very different sort of personage. He was
a thin man, of middle stature, with a pale face and red hair, under
thirty years of age. His trade had been that of a dyer: he had
rendered conspicuous service at the last election, in securing the
return of a Puritan to Parliament, and had been rewarded thus: he was
needy, and the pay of his humble rank an object to him. He had great
fluency of words, and was a raving Independent of the most virulent
order. His name was Elkanah Sippet: he was ignorant, irritable, and
vain. He knew a little Latin, with which he was wont to garnish his
talk when he wanted to pass off for a scholar, and puzzle big Captain
Ruddiman; and he could fill his mouth with Scripture phrases and texts
when he wished to impress Cuthbert with a favourable notion of his
piety. Ruddiman and Sippet hated each other with about as natural and
as cordial a hatred as might consist with their being on the same side
in this contest. Neither of them could understand or like poor
Cuthbert; but both took refuge from the uneasy contempt with which
they regarded each other, by endeavouring to conciliate his good
opinion, or rather his preference.
To choose between them was easy: Ruddiman was worth a dozen Sippets in
the qualities of his nature; nor was there any thing of the hypocrite
in him. He was dull, and slow of comprehension; therefore he seldom
suffered himself to speak about religion, but passively knelt and
passively listened to the long prayers and longer preachings of the
chaplain. He had been so stupified and subdued at home about points of
faith and church government by his wife’s brother, a warm and wordy
brazier, the godly elder of the congregation to which his wife
belonged, that he yielded, partly for the sake of peace, and partly in
distrust of his own reason. Thus, in plain fact, he feared God truly
for himself, and received the interpretations of Scripture delivered
by the clergy, and the lay elders of his sect, with a submission as
implicit, and an apprehension as confused, as the Italian peasant
listens to the Latin oration of a Franciscan friar. His politics were
more simple; and he was in the habit of expressing what he felt about
them by always calling the King _the man Charles Stuart_, and all the
principal leaders of the Parliament party right honest and God-fearing
worthies. “A man’s a man,” he would say: “I don’t see why any one
should be called lord over another; and as for bishops, bless us, why
should they live in palaces, and hold forth about taxes in the House
of Lords?--Don’t you think that’s wrong, Master Noble, quite wrong?
Why it is writ in the Bible that the kingdom of Christ is not of this
world.” To this political creed Cuthbert would give assent; but a
quick memory whispered to his inner man, “Why then do my servants
fight?” As for his brother lieutenant, his tone was always rancorous
and unchristian: he was of a mean and narrow mind, without charity and
without patience; selfish and tricky, and, withal, quite intent on
rising upon the ruin of his betters. He felt a sort of inferiority in
the presence of Cuthbert that a little awed him; but his nature would
break out occasionally. It was no small advantage to Cuthbert that his
two companions had seen him, for a few days, often walking and
conversing with Francis Heywood, whose soldierly appearance had
attracted general attention among the troops. Moreover, though far
indeed from the aptitude desired by Colonel Maxwell, the intelligence
of Cuthbert in the field of exercise was greater than that of either
Ruddiman or Sippet. Perhaps, after all, the greatest trial of Cuthbert
arose from the manners of those with whom he was now compelled, by the
distribution of quarters, to live night and day. As officers of the
same company, Captain Ruddiman, Sippet, and himself, took their meals
together, and he was compelled to occupy a stretcher in the same
sleeping chamber with Sippet. Now Ruddiman was a very gross and
unclean feeder, and had a most disgusting habit of hawking and
spitting on the floor all day long; while Sippet, who secretly
indulged in the too frequent use of strong waters, always stunk of
spirits, and snored through his nights so loudly, as very seriously to
disturb the rest of Cuthbert: nor was it possible, with so irritating
an accompaniment, to comfort his wakeful hours with those meditations
with which he had often solaced his night watches at Milverton while
confined by his wound. However, his spirit, though fretted, did not
sink under these annoyances: he rose constantly with the first glimmer
of dawn: he did his utmost to perfect himself in all matters of drill
and discipline. He gave his best attention to all his instructors, and
he performed all his duties with manly cheerfulness, and in the best
possible spirit. Colonel Maxwell saw this with silent satisfaction;
but he was not a man for lavish praises and sudden intimacies, nor was
he without a clear perception that Cuthbert would never make a
thorough soldier; indeed his immovable gravity was sometimes very near
being altogether conquered by a burst of laughter at the mode in which
Cuthbert exhibited the solemn earnestness of his desire to learn his
exercises thoroughly, and to command his men properly.
One day, for instance, very soon after Cuthbert’s arrival, as he rode
through the different squads of recruits who were learning their
facings, he found Cuthbert in one corner of the field, with his head
in the air, and a corporal giving him private instructions; and,
unperceived by the former, he heard the following strange
query:--“Now, my brave man, pray have the goodness to explain to me,
very exactly, how it is, that is, upon what principle it is, that, if
I place my feet in this extraordinary manner, I shall come to what you
call ‘the right about face?’”
“Principle! God save you, master! I know nothing at all about
principles; but I know, if you do as I bid you, and put the ball of
your right toe to your left heel, and raise the fore part of your
feet, and come smartly, heel round, on your two heels, and bring back
your right sharply and square with the left, you will come to the
right about like a man and a musketeer.”
Again, at an after period, as the Colonel passed the spot where a
company of pikemen was parading under the orders of Cuthbert, the
warlike student, who was just fresh from the perusal of a military
treatise in Greek, having taken post at a farther distance than usual
in the front, and noticing a little whispering and unsteadiness,
called out with most innocent seriousness,--“Silence, men, silence:
the Lacedæmonians never spoke in the ranks.”
The pikemen seeing the Colonel near became silent, rather in respect
to his presence than obedience to their simple-hearted lieutenant, and
wondered the while what county militia these Lacedæmonians might be.
The commanding officer, averting his head to conceal his irrepressible
smiles, went forward; and Cuthbert, quite unconscious of any thing
strange or ridiculous, proceeded to number off, and prove his pikemen
according to the intricate system of the slow and cumbrous movements
of those days.
Never, however, was a human being more thoroughly out of his element
than Master Cuthbert as lieutenant in this said company of pikemen
under the orders of Captain Ruddiman. He could contrive, indeed, a
little leisure and a little solitude most days; but even those brief
seasons of meditation and enjoyment were often broken in upon by a
sergeant hurrying after him to say that perhaps eleven set of new
straps for back and breast pieces were wanting, or that two pikes were
broken, and three men had lost the scabbards of their tucks.
Moreover, he could hardly find a private path or walk near St. Albans,
where he did not come suddenly upon a few military sinners, who had
stolen out of the sight of their preaching officers and praying
comrades to have a game of trap-ball, tip-cat, or the greater
abominations of cross and pile, pitch and hustle, and chuck farthing.
Nay, upon one occasion, he surprised a little party under a buttress
of the abbey playing at primero, trump, put, or beat the knave out of
doors, with two dollys sitting in their company, of whom it might be
plainly seen that they had no business in a garrison of Puritans. But
he was in these moments usually in too absorbed a mood to take notice
of and reprove these transgressors, and was quite as anxious to turn
away his eyes as the soldiers were to see them so averted.
One day, as he wandered into the abbey a little before sunset, and was
standing lost in thought before the monument of Lord Bacon, and
contemplating the fine alabaster effigy of that great philosopher, he
heard himself gently addressed by name, and turning to the speaker, he
recognised, with as much surprise as delight, his worthy and
invaluable friend Randal, the surgeon of Warwick, to whose skilful
care and kind treatment he held himself indebted, under God, for his
life.
Their pleasure at meeting was mutual, and was increased when they
found that they were again providentially brought together, and held
commissions in the same corps. Randal had offered his services to the
Parliament, and had been appointed the surgeon of this levy.
Henceforth Cuthbert would enjoy the comfort of his society and the
advantage of his counsel. They agreed instantly to live and mess
together; and, after a long and interesting conversation about
Milverton, the Heywoods, and his friend Juxon, they walked together to
the Colonel’s quarter, where Randal had been invited to sup; and
Cuthbert returned, in high spirits, and with a heart full of joy and
thanksgiving, to take his own meal with Ruddiman and Sippet, and to
make known to them his intention of leaving their mess, and living in
future with his old friend Randal. Ruddiman was sincerely vexed, ate
less, and hawked rather more than usual, and proposed as an
arrangement, not unnatural, that the surgeon should join their party
instead of this breaking up; and Lieutenant Sippet, who wished much to
avoid being left alone with Ruddiman, very earnestly seconded this
proposal; observing, that he thought it a very proper subject for most
serious consideration, and that they ought to seek the Lord for
guidance, that they might plainly discern his will in this important
matter.
This, Cuthbert said, he deemed to be an occasion on which so solemn a
proceeding was altogether uncalled for and improper. Sippet misquoted
and misapplied a shower of texts, which, in a sadder mood, would have
made poor Cuthbert’s head ache. Ruddiman did not see what they were to
pray about, for his part, and thought a man might do his duty to God
and his neighbour very well without so much prayer. “But if you must
pray,” said he, “Friend Sippet, pray to be kept from putting your
mouth so often to that stone bottle of strong waters at the corner of
your bed, and from snoring so loud every night, man. Why, though I am
next room, you waked me this morning before cock-crow; and I doubt if
Master Noble has had a sound night’s sleep since he joined us.”
Cuthbert hastily wished them good night, and withdrew; so in what
manner the wrathful Sippet resented this affront, or whether he did so
at all, he never heard.