'Thaanks,' said De Blacquaire. 'Don't trouble. I shall find it my duty to report this scene of riot and disorder. Forward. March.'

Grand rounds went by, and the scattered fire faded.

'If you can manage to hack a slice of that pork off, Sergeant!' said Volnay, 'I'm beastly hungry.'

'Done, I think, to a turn,' said Polson. 'Who's got anything that will cut?'

'I'm tould, sir,' said a voice out of the darkness, with a rich oily brogue in it, 'that there's hours of difference between here and Limerick. Won't it be Christmas morning in old Ireland, sir? And will the bells be ringing?'

'Ye're out in your reckonin',' said another voice amid the shadows. 'It's exactly the other way. Your folks is going to bed in Limerick. The sun has a knack of risin' in the east, my lad, and we're far east of Ireland, or Aberdeen for that matter. I'm not mindin' the exact particulars, but it's a matter of some two hours, I'm thinking. It's deep midnight here, and an hour or so beyond it, and they'll be over their punchbowls, yonner. That's so, sir, I'm believin'?'

'I don't know, upon my word,' said Volnay. 'You're out of my depth, my lad. But it's a bit of a sin to talk about punch-bowls, isn't it, on a night like this, when there isn't a hot drink within a hundred miles? Sergeant, this pork is like manna in the wilderness. Look me up before you report yourself to Major de Blacquaire, will you? I'm responsible for the fire, you understand. It was my duty to retire the whole crowd of you under arrest, I know, but there isn't a lot of fun going for you beggars here, is there? Goodnight, Sergeant, and don't forget the hour in the morning.'

'Good-night, sir.' 'God go with you, sir.' 'A merry Christmas and a loight harrut to you, sir, for many a year.'

'That's your man, nah, Sergeant,' said one man out of the shadow in a tone that was learned in Rotherham, or very near it. 'Ah like Captain Volnay as mooch as ah like anybody. He's got a kind of a way with him an' he sits dahn with the like of huz, and he talks to us as if we was men in place o' bein' cattle, which is the way with most on 'em. Here's good luck to Captain Volnay, an' if ah'd got a glass o' that steamin' poonch they'n got in Aberdeen, ode bird, ah'd scald my throat with a relish.'

They were all full of roast pork, or of pork more or less roasted, and the scent of the sacrifice was yet in the air, and their war-bitten souls were cheered and warmed, if ever so little.

'Yis,' said one lad, 'if half the quality knowed!'

'Hallo!' said Polson, turning in the fragrant dark. 'How far from Bilston were you born?'

'Wedgebury,' said the voice. 'No furder.'

'Beacon Hargate, me,' said Polson. 'I'd ha' guessed it, Sergeant. I'd ha' guessed it. I niver heerd your voice afore to-night, but there's a kind of a turn of the tongue in it now and then.'

The contingent fell to silence, and a wet clinging snow began, ruled in straight lines. The embers of the fire hissed under it, and the men drew themselves into such shelter as they could find, and waited in the grey, cold patience for the expected relief from duty. It was long in coming, and they learned afterwards that the regimental Sergeant-major, whose duty it ought to have been to relieve them on that Christmas morning, was dead from dysentery, poor fellow, and as a matter of fact it turned out that he was buried in the muddy earth and half frozen in there before anybody remembered to take up his duty.

The long, long night went on, and the Russian gunner, finding his attention no longer drawn to the distant fire, had gone to sleep or anyhow fallen silent, when a witching noise rose upon the air, and all the worn, half-sleeping men sat up to listen. Surely there was the sound of church bells, and there was a rush towards the pleasant noise. It was only a man from the smithy who happened to have a musical ear and had rigged up a kind of gallows from which he had hung carbine and rifle barrels of varying lengths and calibre, on the which he was beating with an iron rod. The sulky dull beginning of the dawn on Christmas Day, and there in the trenches the Christmas bells ringing as they might have rung in any village church in old England, two thousand miles away. And the hearts of the listeners rose to their throats, and men were quiet whilst the music sounded. The notes reached far, and fell on many a drowsy ear, conjuring up visions in the half-slumbering minds of humble whitewashed village steeples, far and far away. Polson's contingent, drawn from a distance of some two hundred yards, stuffed that ingenious musician with half-cold roast pork, and left him well rewarded for his toils.

By one of those surprising fatuities which distinguished this particular campaign almost above all others in which the English private soldier has been engaged, an attack which was ordered for black midnight was ready just in the grey of dawn, and Polson's ear caught a whispered word of command here and there, and a noise of careful footsteps. The trench of the second parallel was ten feet deep, but there was a ladder of foot-holes just behind him, and he turned and climbed, digging his fingers into the half-frozen turf on the Russian side. There was the grim Redoubt at which the English guns had hammered in vain this many and many a day, still solidly silhouetted against the clearing sky of morning, dark and lowering, quiet as death and yet from old experience holding a threat in the entrails of it. The men—three or four thousand of them, as one might guess—climbed into the trench of the first parallel and were lost to sight. They emerged crouching, and raced across the space which intervened between them and the second, where Polson's own post lay. They were down like a dumb wind on the one side and up again on the other, and raced, crouching, for the first, into which they again disappeared. The man who shouldered Polson from his place, and whose face as he went by might be distinctly seen, was Major de Blacquaire.

'Leading a forlorn hope, you devil, are you?' said the Sergeant to himself; but the words were silent, and he felt a simple throb of admiration for the set mouth and resolute eyes of the man who had climbed past him, and wished himself in his place.

The racing, crouching crowd had dived into the foremost trench and had reappeared again before it was discerned by the Russian sentries; but a hundred yards away from the foot of the glacis, the whole advance was caught and swept and twisted, as by a whirlwind, by a hail of gunshot, canister and rifle fire. The half-melted, new-fallen snow clung to the sloping glacis of the Redoubt, and made a greyish background of dim light against which a watcher could perceive not only the whole motion of the line, but the gesture of any single figure in it. Hate and interest and admiration alike prompted Polson's eyes to follow the slim, active figure with the waving sword which silently beckoned on his followers. The Redoubt opened, as it were, with an earthquake crash, and all the black front of it went fiery red and yellow, and at the first discharge of this inferno, the figure with the flourished sabre in his right hand fell prone. The double line of the invaders shook and wavered from right to left, and men dropped amongst them as if the scythe of Death were literally sweeping there. The lines advanced, wavered, paused, turned, turned again, advanced again with mad cheering, scarce heard amid the rattle of musketry and the roaring of the guns; and finally broke and ran, utterly routed. The onlooker had no part in this conflict except to bite and ram down a cartridge or two and to send a shot more or less at random into the black oblong of the opposing fort; but clinging with his feet on that precarious muddy ladder, and with his elbows to the frozen turf, he saw clearly the convulsive gesture with which De Blacquaire lifted his sabre in a last effort to wave on his men.

Man is a very complex creature, and he will not be finally analysed and done with until this planet is very much older than it was in the nineteenth Christian century. Whether it was hate, or personal pride, or a sudden flash of admiration for a man whom he had hitherto despised, Polson Jervase could not have told you to his dying day.

But though the motives which inspired him were very wildly mixed and very uncertain in their origin, there is no doubt whatever as to the deed to which amongst themselves they inspired him that Christmas morning. The Malakoff belched hell. The flying crowds hustled him and threw him twice or thrice. But he was on his feet again, racing towards that prone figure. He dropped into the front trench and trod upon a wounded man who screamed beneath his heel, and climbed out on the further side. The air was musical with hooting shell and singing shot and hissing bullet as if a whole diabolic orchestra were fiddling and bugling. Polson found the fallen body of his foe, and hugged it in his arms, and raced back as hard as he could tear. He tumbled into the trench of the first parallel almost anyhow; but he gripped the man he hated, and in his soul was a great rejoicing. He tore up the opposite side, and came out upon the open slope again, with the unconscious man still in his arms.

'You'll ruin me, you devil!' said Polson, as he ran breathlessly with the wind of shot and shell in his ears. 'And I'm to report myself to you to-morrow, am I? We may report ourselves to Almighty God together, but you are safe for the minute, I guess.'

He was within a yard of his own post when these mad exaltations of an excited fancy crossed his mind, and at that instant a musket shot took him in the neck and he fell with his burden into the trench before him.



CHAPTER XI

We swoop, as it were, to the skies, and we drop, as it were, to the very sea bed, and we are seasick to the souls of us, one and all; and of the five hundred men the staunch boat carries, there are a round four hundred and fifty wounded, and a round four hundred who will never see the skies with conscious eyes again. We are bound for Scutari, where an enlightened intelligence, awakened at last to some beginning of elementary necessity, has established a hospital; for Government, as usual in such matters, after five hundred years of more or less victorious prowling to and fro in the world and more of gathered experience than any other body of men ever had in the history of the world, has positively made up its mind to shelter broken bones and sick bodies from the mere inclemencies of the weather.

It would not have done so much had it not been for the intervention of a lady whose name deserves to be immortal so long as the British Empire paints itself red upon the map; but Florence Nightingale had enlisted the sympathy of English hearts more quickly than the Queen's shilling had enlisted fighting men, and the Crimean hospitals were the centre of a thousand human interests. The authorities had somehow caught and impounded the good ship Caesar at Odessa, and had despatched it to a desert bay with no landing place or chartered sounding, near Ouklacool Aides, and, having loaded it there with wounded, had ordered it across to the Black Sea and down the Dardanelles. The stout Ayrshire heart of the captain was sick and sore within him many a time on that grim voyage, for before it was half over he had spent his last round shot on board and his last bit of spare canvas in the sewing up and weighting of men who were fated to be buried in the deep.

Amongst those who escaped this dreary fate were Polson Jervase and the enemy he had rescued at so grave a risk of his own life, and they two, with about one half the original human cargo of the ship, reached Scutari, and were landed there, and carried into hospital. A rough sea voyage in January weather in the Black Sea affords no pleasant nurture for a wounded man, and the poor fellows who were carried or helped ashore were a pitiable crew indeed. Neither Polson nor his enemy was conscious at the hour of landing, or had been truly conscious throughout the whole of the long and trying voyage. They were lowered in their stretchers from the ship's side to the caiques which were brought alongside, pulled to the shore and carried by hand to the hospital. They were luckier in this respect than the majority of the men, who were huddled into the straw of the lumbering octagonal-wheeled arabas. The rustic Turk had not yet mastered the art, even if he has mastered it to-day, of constructing a cartwheel in a circle. He makes it eight-sided, and builds his vehicles without springs, and the wounded went along the vile road with a compound jolt for every foot of ground they traversed. There are men yet living who remember that piercing scene, and the cries which were wrung from the hearts of the stoutest fighting men in the world along that via dolorosa. It happened that the rescued and the rescuer were laid side by side, each on a bed some twenty inches in width; and there they were tended many days before either of them awoke to a real knowledge of his surroundings. In their waking hours they babbled deliriously, the pair of them, letting out the secrets of their very souls, if anybody had been there to listen. Day by day, and night by night, Polson, as he remembered afterwards, heard the best loved voice in the world from time to time, and sometimes with it and sometimes alone the voice he hated most. The wind was blowing the rain against the windows of the grey-stone house on Beacon Hill, and Irene and his father were whispering secrets together in the parlour. Then De Blacquaire was chattering there and saying all manner of things which were not pertinent to the case in hand, and Irene was answering him. John Jervase was talking by turns to all three, and was sometimes absurdly sentimental, dropping tears on the listener's upturned face. All this was so strange and confused, so much a dream of delirium, that when at last the sufferer awoke to reason, he attached no meaning to it.

It was the 1st of February, as he found out afterwards, and he had been crazy for five weeks. He stared feebly up at the ceiling and wondered as to his whereabouts. He tried to lift a hand, but he might have worn a gauntlet of lead, it felt so heavy; though, when at last he struggled into a changed posture, it looked as if it were made of egg-shell porcelain, it was so thin and worn.

'I wonder,' he said within himself—and this was his first conscious thought, 'I wonder if I saved that sweep.' And then at his side he heard De Blacquaire's voice.

'Thank you,' it was saying. 'You're awfully sweet and kind, and I'm very much obliged to you. That is much easier.'

Polson was greatly interested, but in the very act of turning over to look at his enemy, and to find out whom he was addressing, he fell into a deep sleep. The next time he came back to consciousness it was dark, except for a sickly burning oil lamp on a sconce fixed against a wall at a little distance. He began to be aware of the fact that he was amazingly hungry, and the memory of what he imagined to have been his last meal came back to him. He laughed feebly, and he spoke.

'I wonder what the beggars did with the rest of that pig.'

There was the sound beside him as of an emotional snuffle, and John Jervase blew his nose resoundingly, so that Polson knew that his father was there before the old man bent his head above him. He was too weak to be surprised at anything, and had no earthly notion as to his own whereabouts.

'Why, you've come round again, Polly,' said his father. 'You know me, don't you?'

It was in Polson's mind to return a hearty nod in the affirmative, but all he managed to do was to close his eyes and open them again.

'Why, that's hearty!' said Jervase, smoothing the bedclothes above him with a tremulous hand. 'That's hearty, old chap. They said you wouldn't pull through, but I knew better all along. Now, you was to take this, if you woke up, and you've got to keep very still and quiet. This is the very best beef tea as you can get for love or money in all Asia Minor. You let me tuck this napkin under your chin, Polly, and I'll feed you with a golden tablespoon. You'd 'ardly believe it, but I bought this in Vienna on my way out here, and it used to belong to the Empress Catherine of Rooshia, and I gave a twenty-pun' note for it, and it's got her monogram. You don't mind me chattering, old chap, but I don't want to excite you, and it's the doctor's orders that I mustn't; but it's pretty nigh on two years now since I set eyes on you, and when you get stronger and begin to walk about again, I shall have a heap of things to tell you.'

The wounded man lay face upwards, and sipped at the tepid liquid presented to his lips with a huge physical enjoyment. In his whole life he had never conceived of so complete a pleasure. Only the convalescent knows the joys of the table.

'That's the last spoonful, Polly,' said John Jervase, wiping the pale lips with the napkin he had tucked beneath the invalid's chin at the beginning of the meal. 'You'd like more, wouldn't you?'

Folson tried to nod again, and again achieved nothing more than a lowering and raising of the eyelids.

'You haven't got to have it, you know, old chap. You've got to be kept hungry. It's been touch and go for weeks, but you'll be all right now, if we take care of you. And I reckon we'll do that amongst us.'

A weary voice rose from the neighbouring bed.

'Stop that infernal cackle, whoever you are, and let me sleep. Don't you know better than to make a row like that in a hospital?'

Once more Polson—this time wide awake—was conscious of the voice of his enemy.

'It's all right,' his father whispered. 'I'll come back next time you've got to be fed, old chap, but he doesn't like me, and he's been down on me a hundred times already.'

The sick man stared at the ceiling where the oil lamp in its sconce on the wall had made a smoky semi-circle, and where the yellow light now slept upon the whitewash within the limits of the smoked half-ring. He was too weak to think very deeply, and too weak to feel very strongly; but the sense of home within his mind, and the father was the father, and the voice and the hand had never been unkind since he could remember, and the scorn and passion of his heart had somehow worn away, and he was not angry or contemptuous or full of hatred as he had been.

Jervase leaned over him in a momentary farewell, and Polson saw that the old man's eyes were full of tears. One dropped plump and warm on the tip of his own nose, and there was something comic and touching in the fact, and he giggled and snuffled over it to the verge of a weak hysteria.

'I wasn't to disturb you, Polly,' said Jervase, 'and I'm misbehaving myself. I've got to go, and you've got to go to sleep; but I'll be back as soon as ever they'll let me, and in a day or two's time you'll be strong enough for you and me to have a talk together.'

'I wish,' said the feeble, drawling voice from the neighbouring bed, 'that you would hold your tongue or go. I want to sleep.'

John Jervase stooped to kiss Polson on the forehead, and went his way down the silent ward, with his boots creaking with a fainter and fainter sound, until he reached the folding doors at the far end of the dormitory.

The lad lay quiet. He had parted with his father in bitter disdain and anger, but somehow these emotions had all departed from him by this time, and had left him as if they had been an evil spirit, banished by some better influence. He did not know—he was too weak and tired to think about things—but at his side there was an angry stirring and a peevish voice spoke to him.

'That's you, is it?'

Polson, a little strengthened by the food he had taken, managed to roll round upon his shoulder, and looked his late enemy in the face.

'It's I,' he said. 'Indubitably. And it's you, to a certainty. Where did you get hit?'

There was so long a silence that each thought that the other had fallen asleep; but when it had endured for perhaps the space of twenty minutes, De Blacquaire began to turn and murmur, and at last his words found an articulate form.

'I say,' he began, 'you there! You! Sergeant! Are you awake?'

'Wide,' said Polson.

The man beside him lay with pallid face and big bird-like eyes, staring at the smoked semi-circle on the ceiling, and after the inquiry he had offered and the answer given, there was silence again, whilst a man might have counted twenty.

'They've told me all about it,' said Major de Blacquaire, 'and I don't understand it.

And I want to understand. What in the name of hell did you fetch me out for?'

'You go to sleep,' said Polson, 'and don't ask ridiculous questions.'

'I want to know,' said De Blacquaire.

'I'll tell you to-morrow,' the Sergeant answered. 'But it's no good thinking about things just now.'

Again there was a silence, and it lasted for a full hour. The rank petroleum lamp in the sconce burnt out and left a sickening stench upon the air. The whole space in which the wounded men lay went dark, and the wild free wind and the cruel driving rain beat at the window. In the black darkness voices spoke here and there. There were notes of fever from wounded men, and once or twice there was a last message whispered to a nurse's ear, never to be delivered. Dark and storm, and the heroic long-suffering soul released from the heroic long-suffering body, and going home at midnight.

Sick men who have been half-starved for a year or two, and who have run through every note of the gamut of emotion, may be quicker to appreciate these influences than common people are: but Polson Jervase, lying on his back and staring upwards in a futile endeavour to trace the semi-circular ring of smoke upon the ceiling, felt them all deeply.

Whilst he lay there, staring upwards, there was a sudden patter of bare feet on the bare floor at his side, and a hand clutched him.

'Look here,' said Major de Blacquaire, and even in his half dream he knew the voice instantly, as if he had been wide awake and the room had lain in broad daylight. 'Look here, what the devil did you do it for?'

'Get back into bed,' said Polson, 'and I'll try to talk to you.'

The beds were not more than twenty inches in width, and there was barely a foot between them, so that a man by the stretching of a hand could touch a comrade.

Out of the dark, to the Sergeant's intense surprise, there came a groping hand, which sought his own, and found it and Clutched it.

'What the devil did you do it for?' said De Blacquaire.

'Well,' said the wounded Sergeant, 'it's pretty hard to say. I suppose it's a mixed-up kind of thing altogether. I saw you drop, and you promised to break me in the morning, and if I'd let your chance go by, d'ye see——'

'See! 'said De Blacquaire, holding on to the hand in the darkness. 'You're not half a bad fellow, Jervase.'

'Ain't I?' said Jervase. 'You go on like this, Major, and I shall begin to think that you're a better sort than I fancied you were.'

The two men went to sleep together, each holding the other's hand. It was an odd thing, and quite unlikely to have been prophesied by anybody; but it happened.

An hour or two later, when the elder Jervase stole in on tiptoe, with a new cup of priceless beef-tea, he saw the two men lying there, with their faces turned to each other, as if they had been lovers, and hand holding hand. He took Polson by the wrist, and shook the grasp gently asunder.

'You've got to take this, old chap,' he said, and setting down the candle he carried, and fixing it by its own grease to the rough hospital table at the bed head, he began to feed the boy once more.

You are not to imagine the ward silent all this time. There are valiant souls of men passing with every hour, and groans of death and anguish, and all the living axe conscious.

When Jervase had fed the Sergeant to the last teaspoonful, he retired again, leaving the candle burning on the table at the bed head.

'These poor chaps,' he said, 'may find a little bit of comfort in a light, and any way, good English wax don't stink like Turkish lamp oil, does it, old chap?'

The 'old chap' winked. He had no strength to express himself in any more emphatic manner; but he had got to love his father once again, for, after all, the ties of blood are strong, and a man may have been a wrong doer without giving his own son an eternal cause to hate him. And when a man has a bullet hole through the neck, and has been unconscious for many days, and delirious for many weeks, and finds a once familiar face bending over him, habit asserts itself; and any hatred or despite which may have come in between two people long ago is likely to be scattered. It was a foreign air which howled about the gables and chimneys. It was a foreign wind which wept and moaned about that abode of sorrow, and drove the rain against the window panes. But to the boy, the feel of whose father's hand was still warm in his own, it was home, home, home. The candle dwindled down, and he had been watchful enough to prevent the whole place being set on fire by waiting to blow out its final flame as it drove towards the bare wood on which it rested. Darkness came down and slumber with it; and then on the top of slumber a quiet whisper and a dawning light which waked many men in the long bare corridor. There was a candle carried by a hospital nurse in the sombre uniform of her craft, and behind it came a lady whom every waking man there present turned to thank, if it were only by a movement of the enfeebled hand, or a droop of the eyelid, or a motion of the deadened lips. Men who are dying after long sickness in hospital cannot cheer. Men who fall in the full tide of the strength of manhood on the battlefield can acclaim their leader. The wasted forces had naturally gone, but as the gleaming candle light led Florence Nightingale from couch to couch, the wakers turned and gave such signals as they could. The pitying, watchful, gracious face went by, and the candle light departed.

A good many weeks and months went by before the name of the owner of that gracious face and that memorable smile was known even to the parting souls and suffering bodies which were cheered by it.

Spring comes up earlier in the region of Scutari than it does in London, and there were many scores of ragged silken-bearded fellows rambling up and down the streets of the place on crutches before the first leaf had declared itself in any park in London, and almost before the first wayside flower had bloomed in any English country hedgerow.

Away to the north-east of the hospital lies that cemetery which for many a year to come will be a place of pilgrimage for the British globe-trotter. There are the hunched, high-shouldered monuments of many buried men, with the turban with its wreathen carvings to indicate the resting place of the master sex. In those days, when the shallow graves were being very quickly filled, the convalescent inmates of the hospital made the cemetery their favourite promenading ground, and it was here, upon a shining March Monday, that Polson and Major de Blacquaire encountered each other on their wanderings amid the tombs, the one on crutches, and the other painfully supporting his footsteps by the aid of a walking stick.

'Since they began to sort us about,' said De Blacquaire, 'I've lost sight of you. And you've never answered my question. Now, what the devil did you do it for?'

'Look here,' said Polson, using his favourite locution, 'you've threatened two or three times to make an end of me.'

'Yes,' said the Major, nodding and drawling on the word. 'That's right enough, But what's that got to do with it?'

'Well, you see,' said Polson, 'I'd got to give you the chance to do it.'

'Had you?' said Major de Blacquaire.

The one man was leaning on his crutches, and the other was stooping on his crutch walking-stick, and there was nobody near so far as either of them could see.

'I don't know,' said De Blacquaire, in a drooping voice. 'I may be all wrong, and in a sort of way knocked to pieces, don't you know. But I think on the whole, Sergeant, that you have acted like an unusually damned good fellow. Do you mind?'—he pointed to a sunken tomb by a motion of one of his crutches, and he sat down upon it. 'What has a fellow got to do when another fellow has fetched him out of the fire at the risk of his own life, and one fellow hates the other fellow like the very devil? I'll tell you straight, Polson,' said De Blacquaire, in his old-mannered drawl, 'I'd have seen you damned and done for before I'd have reached out a finger to save you. And I think that you are the blamedest kind of an ass and a duffer to have pulled me out. And yet I don't know—I'm not so cursed certain that you'll suffer for it.'



CHAPTER XII

In the pale spring sunlight where they sat, there came a wholly incongruous figure. It was clad in black broadcloth, and black kid gloves, and there was a black shining silk hat on the top of it; and in one of the black kid gloved hands was balanced a black silk umbrella. The figure was that of John Jervase, and he was walking amidst the tombs of Scutari with about as much visible emotion as he would have shown if he had been on his daily walk to the Stock Exchange in Stevenson Place, Birmingham.

'They told me at the hospital as you'd got leave for a bit of a walk, Polly, and one of the chaps said it was likely I should find you here. You're better, ain't you? There's a little bit of colour in your face this morning.'

He was altogether gay and friendly, and his voice and manner alike were cheerful, but he fell into a ludicrous consternation as he turned to find Major de Blacquaire seated between two turbaned tombs at his left hand.

'I say, Sergeant,' said the Major, with his University drawl, 'I wish you'd go away for half a minute, and leave me to talk things over with your Governah?'

'As you like,' said Polson, and hobbled away towards the south end of the cemetery, where the bay lay gleaming that mild morning, and French and English troopships were landing men who were as broken as he himself had been a month ago.

'I suppose,' said De Blacquaire, scratching lines on the ground before him with one of his crutches, 'that you're one of the beastliest old bounders that one could find on the face of the earth, and I have the best sort of a good mind to get you into trouble. I suppose you know that?'

'Very well,' said John Jervase. 'If you won't get me into any sort of trouble that won't leave my boy outside, you're welcome.'

'Yes,' said the Major, 'that's where you come in. You go and rob your neighbour for a matter of about twenty years, and when I drop into his property you go on robbing me, and then because your son's a good chap a man is obliged to let you alone. I don't think that that is fair.'

John Jervase had seated himself at the opposite side of the cemetery path, and was as busy in the making of hieroglyphics with the point of his neatly folded silk umbrella as Major de Blacquaire was with the point of his crutch.

'Hit me,' he said, 'without hitting the boy and you are welcome.'

Major de Blacquaire scored the wet gravel with the crutch, looking frowningly down upon the ground, and Jervase scored the earth on his side with the neat brass ferrule.

'I don't quite see what I am to do with you,' said the Major. 'It isn't the boy's fault that he has a rotter for a father, is it?'

'Now you look here,' said John Jervase, heavily and solidly, 'I've had pretty nearly two years to think this thing over in. I've done wrong, and I own up to it There's my boy, Polly, as is recommended for the Victoria Cross by Sir Colin Campbell, and fetched you out of the fire under the Malakoff, so I'm told, as if you'd been his very born brother. I've been sitting by his bed for more than a month past, and if I'm not a Dutchman he hates you like poison. He'd only got to leave you there and everything would have been at an end betwixt us; and what on earth he fetched you out for, I don't know. If you think, Major, that I'm appealing for myself, you're the most mistaken man in the whole wide world. If you can find a way of hitting old Jack Jervase without hitting the boy, find it and do it. But ever since I've heard about you, folks have told me that you pride yourself on being a gentleman; and if a gentleman is going to take it out of a chap who has nearly died for him, when he had every right to leave him alone, and when it was the biggest kind of blunder to rescue him, I'm no judge of what a gentleman ought to be.' Major de Blacquaire moved the point of the crutch to and fro on the moist gravel, and made his hieroglyphics in the soil without response for a minute or two. But at last he said, in his Cambridge drawl:

'You're an illimitable old bounder, but you're rather a clever old bounder, when all is said and done, and I suppose I shall have to let you go.'

'Major de Blacquaire,' said Jervase, 'if ever there was a man mistaken in this world, you're a mistaken man. I don't want your ticket, and I don't want your pardon. I've had two years to think this over in. I've been without my lad all the time, and I've come out here to find him broke and wandering in his mind. I've sat down between your bed and his, and I've heard him in his wanderings say how he hated you, and I've heard you say how you've hated him. And now I tell you, fair and square, find a way of hitting me that won't hit the lad, and I'll take anything that you can do to me.'

'There isn't any way,' said De Blacquaire, 'worse luck! I'm told that there's a doctrine of heredity, and we've got to believe that men are like their fathers. Personally, I'm not going to believe it And I shall be obliged to you if you will go and send back a lad who's about as much like you as you're like the Apostle Paul. Now—vanish! and behave like an honest fellow for once in your life for the sake of an honest son.'

John Jervase rose. 'It's all very well,' he said, 'for you to talk. You've never been poor and ambitious and hard run, and you don't know what temptation can amount to. You've got your money back again to the last penny. It's in Stubbs' hands, and I've stood the racket. And if the father did you a bad turn the son has done you a good one.'

'Will you kindly go away, Mr. Jervase?' said the Major.

'Yes,' said Jervase, 'I'll go away. But since I'm here, I'm going to ask you one question. Are you going to hit the boy through me?'

'Will you oblige me,' said Major de Blacquaire, 'by going to the devil?'

'Are you a-going,' said John Jervase, 'to make a scandal of this business when you get home again? I've paid your lawyer to the last farthing. My cousin's hooked it with pretty near a quarter of a million sterling, and gone out to Venezuela. And if I hadn't struck on a pretty fat thing in the way of a contract for forage and horseflesh for these French chaps here, I should have been pretty well a bankrupt. But I found the money, and you're as well off as you would have been if old General Airey had never heard my name.'

'That is good news to a poor man,' said De Blacquaire. 'And now, my dear sir, will you oblige me by going to the devil?'

'Are you a-going to make a scandal about this business when we get home again?' Jervase asked.

'No, you purblind clown,' said Major de Blacquaire, rising, and fitting his crutches to his armpits. 'I am not. You have about as much notion of what a man is bound to do under these conditions as an ox would have. Please do as I have asked you, and leave me, and send the boy along. I don't think that he will leave the same flavour on the palate as the father does.'

'I suppose,' said Jervase, 'that from your point of view I've been a badish sort of a lot?'

'I suppose you have,' said Major de Blacquaire.

'But Polly never knew about it, and you've never had any sort of a right to look down on him. Old Sir Ferdinand was the first of your crowd as ever climbed to the top of the tree, and I can remember him when he was no better off than I am.'

'I do not think,' said Major de Blacquaire, 'that I have ever encountered quite so pestiferous a stupidity. Will you go?'

The tension of the curious interview was relieved, for Polson, who had slowly paced the circular path which ran round the cemetery, came limping back again, dinting the wet gravel with the crutch-headed stick and leaning on it like a man who had achieved a forced march of many miles.

'That's the chap,' said John Jervase, 'as fetched you out from under fire.'

'I have a right,' said Major de Blac-quaire, 'to be as well aware of that fact as you are, Mr. Jervase. Sergeant, I've been mistaken about you all along. Do you mind——' he paused, and there was a break in the aristocratic drawl he had so long affected that it had grown to be a trick of second nature with him, 'd'you mind shaking hands, Sergeant?'

Polson Jervase reached out the hand which was not engaged with the stick, and it happened to be the left.

'I don't want that, Sergeant,' said the Major.

'My dear fellow,' said Polson, 'it's the nearest to the heart.'

And De Blacquaire took it with a glint of moisture in his eyes.

'You ain't done that to me, Polly,' said Jervase. 'It's pretty near two years since you've done that to me. Are you ever going to shake hands with me again?'

Major de Blacquaire fitted his crutches to his shoulders, and stumped away, leaving father and son together.

'There's nobody seems to understand me, Polly,' said the elder. 'I ran my risk of getting into quod along with your Uncle James, and for a man who's been brought up respectable, that ought to count for something. I've owned up to everything, and I've paid for everything, and I'm a solid man this minute. Ain't you going to shake hands with your old father, Polly? I followed you out to the Crimea, and I learned where you was a-lyin', wounded, and I've nursed you from the minute I found you up till now. Shake hands, Polly.'

Father and son shook hands, with no very great good will, if the truth must be told, on the side of the younger; for Polson had yet to learn a lesson or two and had not caught the art of forgiveness for the repentant sinner who was still prosperous. It is a great deal easier for almost anybody to forgive the criminal who has fallen to hunger and tatters than it is to find an excuse for him when he goes in shining broadcloth and lustrous silk and patent leather.

De Blacquaire went stumping along on his crutches in the weak spring sunshine, and Polson and his father, by mere chance, were looking after him when he paused at the corner of the one important monument in the grounds, and raised his forage cap to some person as yet unseen.

There is a sort of legend often taught in verse and fiction to the effect that no one true lover can be near another without the presence being felt. But Polson had turned away when his father laid a hand upon his sleeve, and asked him, 'Don't you see who that is, Polly?' And the lad, turning, saw the goddess of his dreams. It was Irene, and he recognised her face almost without surprise, for it flashed upon him instantly that her voice had sounded through all his fevered dreams since he had first laid his head upon the clean, sweet-smelling hospital pillow. The girl was dressed in black, and her slight figure looked the slighter for its garb. She came forward with a smile in her eyes, and with a quickened step.

'I've kept my promise,' said Jervase the elder, 'and I haven't spoke a word.' And with that he exhibited a tact he had not shown before, and walked smartly away, leaving the boy and girl together.

'I have wanted to see you,' she said amply, 'but I have kept away until I could be sure of bringing you good news. You know that my father is here?'

'I saw him on Lord Raglan's Staff at the Alma,' said Polson, 'and I have heard about him since from time to time.'

De Blacquaire was hobbling away on his crutches towards the hospital, and by this time was barely visible. Jervase in his black broadcloth and shining silk hat brandished his umbrella in the rear, and there was not another soul in sight.

'I knew you, dear,' said Polson. 'I have had your voice and hand about me for a month past.'

'I came out with my father,' said Irene, 'more than a year ago. Lord Raglan gave him some sort of work to do at the Embassy at Constantinople to begin with, and when the fighting began he was attached to the Staff and I was left behind. So I turned to the hospital and I have been at work here for a year and more.'

He forgot his wound, and stood upright with the crutch stick in one hand and held out both arms to her.

'I haven't the least little bit of a right, my dear,' he said, but she laughed tenderly, and ran to the offered shelter. All around were the unlettered, turbaned memorials of the dead, and there was just this one bit of youth and love in the middle of that record of a thousand tragedies.

'Have you heard the news?' she asked, looking up at the worn young face with its late sprung growth of silky beard.

'What news?' he asked.

'The news about yourself,' she answered.

'News about myself?' said Polson. 'What news is there about me?'

'You don't know?' cried Irene, recoiling from him a little with clasped hands and sparkling eyes. 'Is it going to be my good luck to tell you? You don't know any news about yourself?'

'I don't know any news about myself,' he answered; 'since I was bowled over on Christmas morning at Sevastopol, I haven't had a chance of hearing any, I've had your voice and this dear little hand about me all the time—I've known that.'

'And you don't know?' she asked him, 'you don't know what's waiting for you when you get back to England?'

A cloud fell upon him at the question. 'I don't know, dear,' he answered. 'I don't know what's waiting for me when I get back to England. But I do know that I'm a bit of a fool and a bit of a scoundrel to forget the reason why we said good-bye. I was so glad to see you again that it came natural to forget. And you'll forgive me sooner than I shall forgive myself.'

'Wait one minute, Polson,' said Irene. 'Here is a letter from papa. So soon as you can recover you are to be invalided home, and the gem of the letter is—do you guess? Do you guess? You are recommended by the Commander-in-Chief for the Victoria Cross. Here it is.' And she read, dancing on tiptoe. '"Our young friend, Polson, has magnificently distinguished himself, having rescued under heavy fire a wounded officer, whose name I have not yet been able to discover. But the gallant action was seen by the Chief, who was there in person, and who has told me that he has seen nothing more splendid in the whole course of his career."'

With that, she hid her face upon his breast again, and he folded his arms about her in a sort of stupor.

'I said good-bye, dear, long ago,' he stammered haltingly. 'I've no right to behave like this.'

'Why?' she asked. 'What can make any difference between us?'

He took her to his heart again at those fond words, and laid his lips upon her forehead. De Blacquaire's crutches had long since ceased to crunch along the road towards the hospital, and Jervase's broad shoulders had gone out of sight. There was no human creature near, but far and far away overhead a lark was soaring and singing. Many and many a pair of English lovers had heard the same song as the bird had hailed the rising or the setting sun, and both the young hearts beat to that native sounding music which rang so far away from home. Their lips came together, and there was music in their hearts.

'Take me back to the hospital, Polson,' she said, disengaging herself from his arms. 'I am on duty within a quarter of an hour.'

She took a little watch from her girdle, and looked at it with a cry.

'I have barely five minutes, and I have never failed to relieve guard since I came. Is that the word, dear?' She took his arm sedately, and walked along with him, he prodding at the wet gravel with his stick, and she half supporting him.

'Was that true?' she asked. 'Did you know that I was near you?'

'Did I know!' said Polson in a voice that was worth a thousand protestations to her ears.

'I always thought,' said Irene, 'that I disliked Major de Blacquaire until a week or two ago; but whilst you were lying there ill and delirious, he behaved so kindly that I shall never forget him. And he told me—you won't mind, Polson, dear, you won't let anything I say wound you? He told me that the past was buried. That awful, awful night will never be quite forgotten, but it has left nothing behind it. Your father has paid everything, and there is not a word to be spoken by anybody, ever any more.'

The lark sang in the thin sunlight as if he would break his very heart for joy, and the lovers walked homewards slowly, arm in arm.



CHAPTER XIII

It was the First of May, and that same good three-master, the Caesar, which had carried Major de Blacquaire and Sergeant Jervase from the Crimea to Scutari, was bowling merrily along south of Naples, where Vesuvius had his smoking cap on. There were many invalided men on board, and amongst them three with whom this story has a particular concern.

'You are right, Captain Tompson, it is abominably unlucky; I had reckoned on seeing the finish of the campaign, and it's hard to find oneself bowled over now, and sent home again like a useless old bale of damaged goods.'

General Boswell was stumping the sloping deck with the aid of the Captain's arm, getting his first hour of exercise since he came aboard. All the snowy canvas was filled hard as iron with a noble level breeze, and the ship was making a speed which would hardly have disgraced an Atlantic liner of the modern day. She made a prettier sight than any steam-driven craft ever made, or ever will make; and she carried a better music with her in the taut wind-smitten cordage of the shrouds and the deep organ hum of the stretched canvas.

'I am saying, Polson,' said the General, encountering the Sergeant halfway along the deck, 'that it's unluckier for an old fellow to get bowled over than it is for a young one. You may be as fit as a fiddle again in a month or two, and may have your fill of fighting for Queen and country; but I have done my last day's work, and that is a weary thing to think of.'

'Last day's fighting, sir?' said Polson, 'but not the last day's work. There's a heap to be done for the old country yet, and I hope that Irene's dream may come true and that you may go into the House of Commons and give those beggars at the War Office their proper fodder.'

'That is the business of a younger man than I am,' said the General, 'and I doubt if there's any mending in that direction. I have been at the game now, off and on, for something like forty years, and I know we have the best fighting stuff in the world at our command, but the Department have always made it their business to cripple it and starve it, and leave it naked and hungry. I've seen it in Spain, and in the Low Countries, and I've dragged out three years of it in the old Mahratta country, and it has always been the same. I suppose it always will be until we learn that it is as necessary to have a soldier to look after things at home as it is to have a soldier leading in the field. When we get you home again, my lad, well run you for the Southern Division of the county and you shall talk to 'em across the floor of the House of Commons.'

The three men reached the bows of the good boat and turned, and there was De Blacquaire before them with a weather-beaten servant holding him by the elbow and piloting him along the deck. He saluted in passing, and the General laid a hand upon his shoulder.

'I should like half an hour with you this morning,' he said, 'if you can spare the time to come into my stateroom for a talk.'

'I am at your service now, sir,' said De Blacquaire.

'Shall we go down?' asked the General. 'One tires easily still, and this May wind gets into an old man's head like wine.'

'And into a young man's, too,' said De Blacquaire. 'I am half tipsy with it, and shall be glad to get into shelter.'

'We'll see you at breakfast, Polson,' said the General, 'and until then, good-bye.'

The two men reached the General's cabin and sat down together.

'When we touched at Corfu,' said the General, 'I found a letter from my London agents—I'd like you to see it, and I shall be glad if you can confirm its contents, or at least a part of them.'

De Blacquaire took the proffered letter and read:

'Sir,—: We are instructed to inform you that a sum of fifty thousand pounds has been deposited with us to your credit by Mr. John Jervase, of Beacon Hargate. Mr. Jervase requests us in communicating with you to say that a further sum of one hundred thousand pounds, making in all one hundred and fifty thousand, has been deposited by him in the interest of Major de Blacquaire with that gentleman's agents. We are desired to add further that Mr. Jervase has joined his brother in South America, that he proposes to establish business relations there, and does not intend to return to England. We are, sir, your obedient humble servants, E. A. Cox & Co.'

'Except,' said De Blacquaire, 'that the sums mentioned here are reversed in order, I have a letter identical in terms. The old scoundrel has bled very freely.'

'And there's no vendetta?' said the General, smiling.

'Vendetta?' said De Blacquaire. 'You can hardly have a vendetta with a man who has saved your life, even though the beggar did it for no other reason than to show how much he despised you. I was wrong about the lad, General; he's a very fine fellow.'

'I could have told you that much long ago,' said the General. He reached out a lean brown hand and rang a bell which stood upon the stateroom table. 'You'll take a glass of wine, Major? It's against my rule, but I feel like breaking rules today.'

'And so do I, sir,' said De Blacquaire.

So the wine was brought, and the glasses were filled, and the two men drank to each other. The General lit a cheroot, and sat in a deck chair; but the younger man fidgeted and was obviously ill at ease.

'There is one thing on my mind, General Boswell,' he said at last, 'and I should like to get it over. I had two or three months at Scutari and I was nursed by an angel all the while.'

'Don't go on, my lad,' said the General, reaching a hand towards him. 'If I understand you, it's useless to talk of that.'

'Very well, sir,' said De Blacquaire, sipping gloomily at his wine; and nothing more was said for a minute or two, but the younger man gradually brightened, and it could be plainly seen that he was squaring his mental shoulders for the reception of a burden which he meant to cany.

'The Sergeant is a lucky dog, sir.'

'My dear fellow,' said the General, 'he has deserved to be a lucky dog. It is one of the ordinances of this life that a fellow can't choose his own father. If the lad had had a choice and had exercised it, I should have had no great respect for him. And yet I had a sort of liking for old Jervase. He was a bounder always, but I thought he was an honest bounder.'

'They tell me,' said De Blacquaire, 'that the Sergeant's to have his V.C. for that business in front of the first parallel.'

'That's a settled thing, I fancy,' said the General 'Sir Colin's word ought to be good for anything at home, and my own should go for something.'

'Mine won't be wanting, sir, if they think it worth listening to.'

'What did you two fall out about?' the General asked.

Major de Blacquaire dipped into the cigar box which had been pushed over towards him long before, and very thoughtfully fingered an evil-looking Trichinopoli.

'Why, sir, I believe if the whole truth were told we fell out mainly because I was a bit of a puppy. You're an older man of the world than I am, sir, and I dare say you can't have failed to notice that some men who think they are insiders are outsiders, and that some of the fellows they despise are better than themselves.'

'Do you know, De Blacquaire,' said the General, 'I like that?'

'A year in camp, and two or three months in hospital, will do a lot towards changing a man's opinions.'

'Won't they?' cried the General. 'Egad! Won't they?' The old Christian Quixote mounted his hobby, and rode. 'There are things in war that nobody wants to think about. It's an ugly trade. When I was a youngster, and in my first action I was very hard-pressed, and I caught a bayonet out of the hand of a fellow who was dropping at my side, and I had to use it. It's fifty years ago now, but the man squealed and I haven't forgotten it, and I'm never likely to forget it. But a man is born to die, sir, and he's born to do his duty. I dare say I'm a simple thinker, Major de Blacquaire, but there are things a hundred times worse than war, and if you didn't believe that God sent them, you would have to turn infidel. I've seen two or three choleras, here and there, and a Black Death and a bubonic plague. What does it all mean? Jarring forces, sir, which Heaven will reconcile in its own good time. And that's what war means to my mind. You go where you're sent, just as the germ of disease, or whatever you call it, goes, and you do what you are set to do. And I'll say this for war, sir, as an old Christian man who has spent his life at it. It's the fire of God, to my way of thinking, and it burns out all manner of meannesses, and hypocrisies, and we should have a devil of a lot more to be ashamed of than we have if we didn't get into a solid fight now and again.'

'It is a school, sir,' said De Blacquaire.

'By heaven, sir,' said the solemn General, 'it is a school.'

'But there are more class-rooms than one in the great school house of human nature, and whilst the General was setting forth his theories of war, young Polson Jervase was setting out a theory of another and an opposite fashion as he walked the deck with Irene.

He was deadly serious also, for all that part of life which seems best worth having lay before him. And the two had many talks as they paced the decks, morn and eve together. Irene was almost the only lady on board, and most of the dot-and-go-one boys who had exchanged a natural limb for a timber toe, and the loose-sleeved men who had left an arm behind them at Sevastopol, had been beneath her care. And those who did not know her ministrations in effect knew them by oral tradition, and the bronzed fellows stumping and tramping up and down saluted her with such a worship that her heart was like a fountain of glad tears a hundred times in a day.

A girl has a natural and inborn right to be proud of her sweetheart in any earthly circumstances whatsoever, if he were the merest snub-nosed, freckled, and chinless Jones that ever skipped over a counter. But to have an approved and veritable here for a lover, and to live at the same time as the sole heroine of so narrow a little world as a shipful of soldiers the incense of whose hearts went up about her constantly, was to be more than merely proud and happy. Polson had got a permanent crick in his neck from that bit of Russian lead which had caught him just as he dropped into the trench with De Blacquaire. In the course of time he began to carry it naturally, so that it looked like the merest little mannerism, but it could never have been handsome by any conceivable chance except in the eyes of a wife or a sweetheart. Irene adored it, and would have made it a rule of fashion, as the Grecian bend and the Alexandra limp came to be in later years, and no man would have been allowed to carry his head in any other fashion than Polson did save under heavy pains and penalties.

'When everybody can see how a story will end,' said one of the greatest masters of the narrative art, 'the story is ended,' and the written history of Polson Jervase is coming to a close.

There were certain things about which he was naturally anxious and about which it was impossible to ask any questions. But the truth came out little by little, and it appeared in the end that the world knew nothing of the secrets which had escaped between the partners in the firm of Jervase & Jervoyce in the course of that wild night which had brought to England news of such portentous moment. There were rumours, of course. There was a gossip to the effect that the firm had been on the edge of ruin, and that Polson, rather than miss the fighting, had elected to go out as a private soldier, dropping his hope of a commission for the time being. This was a fancy which hurt nobody. John Jervase had left his affairs in excellent order when he had established his own line of retreat, and since he had been known to have made money hand over fist within the last year or two, the halo which surrounds the millionaire was about him, and it would have been hard to say whether he or the boy were more popular in the Castle Barfield region. The general idea was that they were a pair of valiant fellows; the one in the commercial and the other in the warlike way.

Poor Raglan's heroisms and blunders were buried together before the day came when in the ordinary course of events he would have led his troops along the saluting line and have received the honours due to him from his Sovereign.

The scent of hot grass was strong in the flaming noontide in Hyde Park when London poured out its scores and scores of thousands to witness the ceremonial which crowned a foolish and disastrous war with a triumph better earned by the valour of the men who fought there than by the statecraft of the other men who sent them into combat. Ragged and lean and bearded, with the soil of the Crimea still upon them, the men of Alma and Inkerman, of Balaclava and Sevastopol, marched through the roaring citizen crowd and formed up in the Park. There were many men of valour there—many who had earned as well as any other the mark of honour which was that day to be bestowed; but opposite the bright pavilion with the raised crimson dais on which the Queen was to take her seat there was but a mere handful of the halt and maimed, upon whom the eyes of the vast multitude, whether civil or military, were fixed. They were no more than specks in the great open space—just so many little coloured ants to the eye—and the gaze of the spectators gloated on them. For they were Britain's chosen. These were the men of whom all London had been reading with bated breath for well nigh three years past. These were the men of Alma's heights and Balaclava's charge and Inkerman's fog, and the frost of the trenches—the pick and pride of the whole contingent which had gone out to do battle for England's honour. That they had never been truly called upon to go made little if any difference at that hour, for London was in the mood for hero-worship rather than political criticism just then, and not the rudest judge of British policy would have cared to speak a word against the ceremony of the day.

And when, after long waiting, the royal carriage came, with the pretty, smiling little matronly figure bowing and swaying amidst the ringing thunders of the world's greatest city, and the bands rolled out their 'God Save the Queen' as she passed them one after another, one happy, happy onlooker looked up at one war-hardened old veteran through tears.

'Upon my word,' said the General, with a grimace which was really much less humorous than he meant it to be, and in a voice which was hardly as steady as he would have liked to have it—'upon my word, Irene, I'd give twopence to be in your shoes at this moment.'

For one of the scarlet ants in the far distance, on the green tablecloth of the turf, was just then advancing towards the little figure on the dais, and an instant or two later the Queen was stooping to pin the bronze badge of honour to the coat of Polson Jervase.

THE END.