THE POOR WOUNDED HUSSAR.
It is small wonder that Mr. Picton Smith was full of anger. His castle
had been invaded and desecrated, his authority as proprietor defied,
his children insulted and abused. As a magistrate he felt bound to
take notice both of the outrage and of the theft of his property. As a
father he could not easily forget the plight in which his three
children had appeared before him.
But in his schemes of vengeance he reckoned without that distinguished
military officer, General-Field-Marshal Napoleon Smith. For this
soldier had been promoted on his bed of sickness. He had read
somewhere that in his profession (as in most others) success quite
often bred envy and neglect, but that to the unsuccessful, promotion
and honour were sometimes awarded as a sort of consolation
sweepstakes. So, having been entirely routed and plundered by the
enemy, it came to Hugh John in the watches of the night--when, as he
put it, "his head was hurting like fun" that it was time for him to
take the final step in his own advancement.
So on the next morning he announced the change in his name and style
to his army as it filed in to visit him. The army was on the whole
quite agreeable.
"But I'm afraid I shall never remember all that, Mr.
General-Field-Marshal Napoleon Smith!" said Priscilla.
"Well, you'd better!" returned the wounded hero, as truculently as he
could for the bandages and the sticking-plaster, in which he was
swathed after the fashion of an Egyptian mummy partially unwrapped.
"What a funny smell!" piped Toady Lion. "Do field-marshals _all_ smell
like that?"
"Get out, silly!" retorted the wounded officer. "Don't you know that's
the stuff they rub on the wounded when they have fought bravely?
That's arnicay!"
"And what do they yub on them when they don't fight bravely?"
persisted Toady Lion, who had had enough of fighting, and who in his
heart was resolved that the next time he would "yun away" as hard as
he could, a state of mind not unusual after the _zip-zip_ of bullets
is heard for the first time.
"First of all they catch them and kick them for being cowards. Then
they shoot at them till they are dead; and may the Lord have mercy on
their souls! Amen!" said General Smith, mixing things for the
information and encouragement of Sir Toady Lion.
Presently the children were called out to go and play, and the wounded
hero was left alone. His head ached so that he could not read. Indeed,
in any case he could not, for the room was darkened with the intention
of shielding his damaged eyes from the light. General Napoleon could
only watch the flies buzzing round and round, and wish in vain that he
had a fly-flapper at the end of a pole in order to "plop" them, as he
used to do all over the house in the happy days before Janet
Sheepshanks discovered what made the walls and windows so horrid with
dead and dying insects.
"Yes; the squashy ones _were_ rather streaky!" had been the words in
which Hugh John admitted his guilt, after the pole and leathern
flapper were taken from him and burned in the washhouse fire.
Thus in the semi-darkness Hugh John lay watching the flies with the
stealthy intentness of a Red Indian scalper on the trail. It was sad
to lie idly in bed, so bewrapped and swathed that (as he mournfully
remarked), "if one of the brutes were to settle on your nose, you
could only wait for him to crawl up, and then snatch at him with your
left eyelid."
Suddenly the disabled hero bethought himself of something. First,
after listening intently so as to be quite sure that "the children"
were outside the bounds of the house, the wounded general raised
himself on his elbow. But the effort hurt him so much that
involuntarily he said "Outch!" and sank back again on the pillow.
"Crikey, but don't I smell just!" he muttered, when, after one breath
of purer air, he sank back into the pool of arnica vapour. "I suppose
I'll have to howl out for Janet. What a swot!"
"Janet!--Ja-a-a-a-net!" he shouted, and sighed a sigh of relief to
find that at least there was one part of him neither bandaged nor
drowned in arnica.
"Deil tak' the laddie!" cried Janet, who went about her work all day
with one ear cocked toward the chamber of her brave sick soldier;
"what service is there in taking the rigging aff the hoose wi' your
noise? Did ye think I was doon at Edam Cross? What do ye want,
callant, that ye deafen my auld lugs like that? I never heard sic a
laddie!"
But General Smith did not answer any of these questions. He well knew
Janet's tone of simulated anger when she was "putting it on."
"Go and fetch _it_!" he said darkly.