"OLD BLOOD AND THUNDER"
Sir Denis Drummond had been his brother Gerald's senior by some seven or
eight years. He, too, was a soldier, and had inherited the baronetcy
from his father, upon whom the title had been bestowed by a grateful
country for services in the field. A second baronetcy in the family had
been specially created for Sir Gerald. It would not have been easy to
say which was the finer soldier of the two brothers; for while Sir
Gerald had made his name famous by the most dare-devil and brilliant
feats, Sir Denis was rather the old type of soldier--cool as well as
daring, always reliable and steady. Worshipped by his men, his name was
one to be held in constant regard by the British public, which calls its
heroes by their Christian names abbreviated, if they do not happen,
indeed, to have a nickname for them.
"Old Blood and Thunder" was the name by which Sir Denis was known to his
men, and that from a certain violence of speech of which he had never
been able, or perhaps had never desired, to divest himself. This
violence had somewhat annoyed his brother Gerald, who could get as much
exhortation out of a verse of Scripture as ever he needed. Sir Denis,
like many old soldiers, was quite a devout man in his way; but he had
none of the zealot passion of his younger brother. The hidden fires
which had given Sir Gerald a certain haggardness of aspect, as though a
sculptor had hewed him roughly in marble, had never burned in Sir
Denis's breast. He was a red-faced, white-moustached veteran, as
blustering as the west wind, but with a heart as soft as wax in the
hands of his daughter Nelly, and, indeed, in the hands of anyone else
who knew the way to it.
His servants adored him, as did the dogs and all animals and children.
He was beautiful in his manner to women of high and low degree, with
perhaps one exception. He was as simple as a child, and loved the
popular applause which fell to him whenever he made any kind of public
appearance, for he had been so long a Londoner that now the London crowd
knew him and had a sense of possession in him. His rosy face would beam
all over when the crowd shouted itself hoarse for "Old Blood and
Thunder." He did not at all object to the name, which had filtered from
regimental into common use. The crowd was always "Boys!" to him. He had
a most amiable feeling towards it, were it ever so frowsy and undersized
and sallow. But he loved a soldier-man, and could hardly bear to pass
one in the street without stopping to speak to him.
One delightful thing about Sir Denis was the esteem in which he held his
own calling of arms. It might be questioned whether he held the Church
even in higher honour. He was no subscriber to the belief that the army
must necessarily be a refuge of rapscallions. "Straighten your
shoulders, sir; hold your head high; for, remember that you are now a
soldier!" he would say to the newest recruit who had just scraped
through with a margin of chest. His thunderous wrath and sorrow when one
of his "boys" was guilty of conduct unbecoming a soldier were something
which, in time, impressed even the least impressionable. His old
regiment, which he delighted to talk about, he had left a model
regiment.
"There's a deal of good in the soldier-man," he would say to his
daughter Nelly. "The poor fellows, they're good boys, they're very good
boys."
Sir Denis had married, as he was approaching middle age, a very
beautiful young girl, who had fallen in love at first with the soldier,
and afterwards with the man.
His Nell had left him in his daughter Nelly a replica of herself. During
the years of service that remained to him the child was always as near
to him as might be. Fortunately, by this time the period of his foreign
service was all but at an end. Wherever he had his command the child and
her nurse were always within riding distance. He did not believe in
barracks and towns for the rearing of anything so fresh and tender. His
Nelly must have the fields and the woods and the waters. In later years
her milkmaid freshness owed, perhaps, something to this upbringing.
Later, she went to school. Sir Gerald's widow, to whom Sir Denis always
referred as the Dowager, who had taken an unasked-for interest in the
motherless child from her birth, had found the ideal school for Nelly--a
school where the daughters of the aristocracy were kept in a conventual
seclusion while they learnt as little as might be of the simpler
virtues, but a deal of the way to step in and out of a carriage, to
comport themselves with dignity, to bear themselves in the presence of
their sovereign, and so on.
Sir Denis, who had not been consulted, made a pretence of interviewing
the Misses de Crespigny, by whom this aristocratic preserve was
safeguarded.
He had listened to Miss Selina de Crespigny's eloquent exposition of the
system adopted at De Crespigny House. Then he had torn it all to pieces
as one might the delicate fabric of a spider's web, constructed at
infinite cost.
"And, tell me now, do you teach them to be good daughters and wives and
mothers?" he asked, with his air of convincing simplicity. "Do you teach
them their duties to their husbands and children, ma'am, may I ask?"
Miss de Crespigny positively gasped. There was an indelicacy about the
General's speech, to her manner of thinking.
"We expect our young ladies' mothers to teach them all that," she said,
stiffly.
"And they don't. In nine cases out of ten they don't. They've too much
to do otherwise. Whether it is philanthropy or politics, or just amusing
themselves, they've all got too much to do," Sir Denis said, with a
simple air that made it doubtful if this criticism of Society's ways was
adverse or not.
Nelly did not go to De Crespigny House. She went, instead, to a much
less pretentious school, kept by a family of four sisters, for whom the
dry bones of teaching had been clothed with life. The house was perched
on a high, windy cliff. The sisters, Miss Stella and Miss Clara, Miss
Lucy and Miss Marianne, did their own teaching, and did it in a
perfectly unconventional way to the twenty or so girls who made up their
school.
When Nelly came home to her father at seventeen years of age, it would
not have been easy to find a fresher, franker specimen of young
girlhood. In fact, to her father's eyes she was somewhat alarmingly
bright and fair.
"The young fellows will be about her thick as bees," he said to himself
in a frightened way. "I won't have any nonsense about Nelly. I want my
girl to myself for a little while. Afterwards there is that arrangement
of the Dowager's about Nelly and Robin. I don't care for the marriage of
first cousins. And I'm not sure that I care for Robin; still, he is poor
Gerald's son. There can be nothing against poor Gerald's son."
He was so afraid of possible lovers for Nelly that he actually suggested
to her that she should go to a smart finishing school for the couple of
years that separated him from the sixty-five limit.
"After that," he said, faintheartedly, for there was a sparkle in
Nelly's eye which discouraged him, "we shall settle down in London, and
you shall see all you want to see. There are quiet nooks and corners to
be had, even in London. I think I know the one I shall choose. Be a good
girl, Nelly, and go to Madame Celeste's. A garrison town is no place for
you. Unless, indeed, you would like to go to the Dowager, as she
wishes."
"I shan't go to the Dowager, and I shan't go to Madame Celeste's," said
Nelly, dimpling and sparkling. "I shall stay with my old Dad and take
care of him."
"What, Nell? 'Shan't'! You forget you're talking to your commanding
officer. Rank insubordination--that is what I call it!"
"Call it what you like," Miss Nelly replied. "I'm going to stay. A
finishing school at seventeen! I never heard the like!"
With that she put her arms round the General's neck, and that was the
final argument. Secretly, indeed, he was not altogether sorry to be
worsted. He had done his best to ward off the things that might happen.
Now he was going to trust in Providence and keep his little girl with
him. To be sure, he had known that she would never go to the Dowager's.
Nelly had never considered that possibility. After all, it was a relief
that they were not going to be parted.
During the two years Nelly, indeed, had many admirers and lovers, but
she was not attracted by any of them. She was kind and friendly and
engaging; but she was unconscious with her lovers, or so it seemed to
the jealous, fatherly eyes, to the verge of coldness.
He often said to himself that he could not understand Nell. None of the
gay, handsome, gallant soldier lads seemed to have the least attraction
in that way for her. To be sure, she was a child, and there was plenty
of time. Why shouldn't her old father keep her for the years to come?
Unless--unless, that fellow Robin had been beforehand with the
others--Robin, who had refused point-blank to be a soldier, and had
even, to the General's bitter offence, actually spoken at the Oxford
Union "On the Waste and Wickedness of a Standing Army." The General had
nearly had a fit over that. Good Heavens! Gerald's son, Sir Massey
Drummond's grandson, to be found on the side of the Philistines like
that! What chill was in the boy's blood? What crook in his character?
What bee in his bonnet?
The General had sworn then that Robin never should have his Nelly. But
the Dowager had been sapping and mining and laying plans to bring about
the marriage almost from Nelly's infancy, when she had come in and
altered the constituents of Nelly's baby bottles, and had infuriated
Nelly's wholesome country nurse to the point of departure. The General
had come just in time then to find Mrs. Loveday fastening the
cherry-coloured strings of her bonnet with fingers that trembled, and
had been put to the very edge of his simple diplomacy to undo the
Dowager's work. He knew his own helplessness where women were concerned.
Nelly might see something in Robin, confound him, that the General could
not.
At this point he would remember that, after all, Robin was poor Gerald's
son, if an unworthy one, and be contrite. But then the grievance would
revive of a far-back Quaker ancestor of Lady Drummond, whom the General
blamed for the peace-loving instincts of poor Gerald's boy; and once
again he would be furious.
Meanwhile, Nelly's frank, innocent eyes, blue as gentians, had no
consciousness of a lover. Her old father seemed to be enough for her. At
one moment they gave him the fullest assurance; the next he was in heats
and colds of apprehension about the lover, be it Robin or another, who
would take his little girl from him.