The Adventures of Harry Revel

S >> Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch >> The Adventures of Harry Revel

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"Take the child to bed," said Miss Belcher, as we reached the door:
and so to my room Isabel conducted me, the others waiting below.

She lit my candles and kissed me. "You won't forget your prayers
to-night, Harry? And say a prayer for me: I shall need it, though I
have more call to thank God for sending you."

A minute later I heard her tap on her father's door. He was awake
and dressed, apparently--for it seemed at any rate but a moment later
that her voice was guiding his blind footsteps by whispers down the
stairs. Had I guessed more of the ordeal before her, my eyes had
closed less easily than they did. As it was, I tumbled into bed and
slept almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.

I had forgotten to blow out the candles, and they were but half
burnt, yet extinguished, when I awoke from a dream that Isabel was
kneeling beside me in their dim light to find her standing at the
bed's foot in a fresh print gown and the room filled again with
sunshine. Her eyes were red. Poor soul! she had but an hour before
said good-bye to Archibald; and Spain and its battlefields lay before
him, and between their latest kiss and their next--if another there
might be. Yet she smiled bravely, telling me that all was well, and
that her father would be ready for me in the summer-house.

Major Brooks, when I found him there, made no allusion to the events
of the night. His face was mild and grave as at our first meeting.
At the sound of my footsteps he picked up his Virgil and motioned me
to be seated.

"Let me see," he began: "_liquidi fontes_, was it not?"--and
forthwith began to dictate at his accustomed pace.

"But seek a green-moss'd pool, with well-spring nigh,
And through the grass a streamlet fleeting by.
The porch with palm or oleaster shade--
That when the regents from the hive parade
Its gilded youth, in Spring--their Spring!--to prank,
To woo their holiday heat a neighbouring bank
May lean with branches hospitably cool.
And midway, be your water stream or pool,
Cross willow-twigs, and massy boulders fling--
A line of stations for the halting wing
To dry in summer sunshine, has it shipped
A cupful aft, or deep in Neptune dipped.
Plant cassias green around, thyme redolent,
Full-flowering succory with heavy scent,
And violet-beds to drink the channel'd stream.
And let your hives (sewn concave, seam to seam,
Of cork; or of the supple osier twined)
Have narrow entrances; for frosts will bind
Honey as hard as dog-days run it thin:
--In bees' abhorrence each extreme's akin.
Not purposeless they vie with wax to paste
Their narrow cells, and choke the crannies fast
With pollen, or that gum specific which
Out-binds or birdlime or Idxan pitch--"

--And so on, and so on, until midday arrived, and Isabel with the
claret and biscuits. She lingered while he ate: and when he had done
he shut his Virgil, saying (in a tone which, though studiously kind,
told me that she was not wholly forgiven):

"Take the drum, Isabel, and give the lad his first lesson. It will
not disturb me."

She choked down a sob, passed the drum to me, and put the drumsticks
into my hands. And so by signs rather than by words, she began to
teach me; scarcely letting me tap the vellum, but instructing me
rather how to hold the sticks and move my wrists. So quiet were we
that the old man by and by dropped asleep: and then, as she taught,
her tears flowed.

This was the first of many lessons; for I spent a full fortnight at
Minden Cottage, free of its ample walled garden, but never showing my
face in the high road or at the windows looking upon it. I learned
from Isabel that Whitmore had not been found, and that Archibald and
his regiment had sailed for Lisbon. Sometimes Miss Belcher or
Mr. Rogers paid us a visit, and once the two together: and always
they held long talks with the Major in his summer-house. But they
never invited me to be present at these interviews.

So the days slipped away and I almost forgot my fears, nor speculated
how or when the end would come. My elders were planning this
for me, and meanwhile life, if a trifle dull, was pleasant enough.
What vexed me was the old man's obdurate politeness towards Isabel,
and her evident distress. It angered me the more that, when she was
not by he gave never a sign that he brooded on what had befallen, but
went on placidly polishing his petty and (to me) quite uninteresting
verses.

But there came an evening when we finished the Fourth Georgic
together.

"Of tillage, timber, herds, and hives, thus far
My trivial lay--while Caesar thunders war
To deep Euphrates, conquers, pacifies,
Twice wins the world and now attempts the skies.
Pardon thy Virgil that Parthenope
Sufficed a poor tame scholar, who on thee
Whilom his boyish pastoral pipe essayed,
--Thee, Tityrus, beneath the beechen shade."

He closed the book.

"Lord Wellington is not a Caesar," he said and paused, musing: then,
in a low voice, "Parthenope--Parthenope--and to-morrow 'Arms and the
man.' Boy," said he sharply, "we do not translate the Aeneid."

"No, sir?"

"Mr. Rogers calls for you to-night. A draft of the 52nd Regiment
sails from Plymouth to-morrow. You will find, when you join it in
Spain, that--that my son-in-law"--he hesitated and spoke the word
with a certain prim deliberateness--"has been gazetted to an
ensigncy in that gallant regiment. I may tell you that he owes this
to no intervention of mine, but solely to the generosity of Miss
Belcher. Before departing--I will do him so much justice--he spoke
to me very frankly of his past, and for my daughter's sake and his
father's I trust that, as under Providence you were an instrument in
averting its consequences, so you may sound him yet to some action
which, whether he lives or falls, may redeem it. Mr. Rogers will sup
with us to-night. If I mistake not, I hear his wheels on the road."
He drew himself up to his full height and bowed. "You have done a
service, boy, to the honour of two families. I thank you for it, and
shall not omit to remember you daily when I thank God. Shall we go
in?"

I had, as I said just now, almost forgotten my fears of the Law: but
that the Law had not relaxed its interest in me was evident from my
friends' precautions. Night had fallen before Mr. Rogers rose from
table and gave the word for departure, and after exchanging some
formal farewells with Major Brooks, and some very tender ones with
Isabel, I was packed in the tilbury and driven off into darkness in
which the world seemed uncomfortably large and vague and my prospects
disconcertingly ill lit.

"D'ye know what _that_ is?" asked Mr. Rogers at the end of five
minutes, pulling up his mare and jerking his whip towards a splash of
white beside the road.

"No, sir."

He pulled a rein, and brought the light of the offside lamp to bear
on a milestone with a bill pasted upon it.

"A full, particular, and none too flattering description of you, my
lad, with an offer of twenty pounds. And I'm a Justice of the Peace!
Cl'k, lass!"

On went the mare; and I, who had been feeling like a needle in a
bundle of hay, now shrank down within my wraps as though the night
had a thousand eyes.

We reached the village of Anthony: and here, instead of holding on
for Torpoint and the ferry, Mr. Rogers struck aside into a lane on
our right, so steep and narrow that he alighted and led the mare
down, holding one of the lamps to guide her as she picked her steps.

The lane ended beside a sheet of water, pitch-black under the shadow
of a wooded shore, and glimmering beyond it with the reflections of a
few stars. Mr. Rogers gave a whistle; and a soft whistle answered
him. I heard a boat's nose grate on the shingle and take ground.

"All right, Sergeant?"

"Right, sir. Got the boy?"

"Climb down, Harry," whispered Mr. Rogers. "Shake hands and good
luck to you!"

I was given a hand over the bows by a man whose face I could not see.
The boat was full of men, and one dark figure handed me to another
till I reached the stern-sheets.

"Give way, lads!" called a voice beside me, as the bow-man pushed us
off. We were travelling fast when at a bend of the creek a line of
lights shot into view--innumerable small sparks clustered low on the
water ahead and shining steadily across it. I knew them at once.
They were the lights of Plymouth Dock.

"Where are you taking me?" I cried.

"That's no question for a soldier," said a voice which I recognised
as the sergeant's. And one or two of the crew laughed.

CHAPTER XXI.

I GO CAMPAIGNING WITH LORD WELLINGTON.

The vessel to which they rowed me was the _Bute_ transport, bound for
Portugal with one hundred and fifty officers and men of the 52nd
Regiment, one hundred and twenty of the third battalion 95th Rifles,
and a young cornet and three farriers of the 7th Light Dragoons in
charge of fifty remounts for that regiment.

We weighed anchor at daybreak (the date, I may mention, was July
28th), and cleared the Sound. At ten o'clock or thereabouts the wind
fell, and for two days and nights we drifted aimlessly about the
Channel at the will of the tides, while the sergeant--a veteran named
Henderson, who had started twenty-five years before by blowing a
bugle in the 52nd, and therefore served me as index and example of
what by patience I might attain to--filled the most of my time
between sleep and meals with lessons upon that instrument. From a
hencoop abaft the mainmast (the _Bute_ was a brig, by the way) I blew
back inarticulate farewells to the shores receding from us
imperceptibly, if at all; and so illustrated a profound remark of the
war's great historian, that the English are a bellicose rather than a
martial race, and by consequence sometimes find themselves committed
to military enterprises without having counted the cost or made
complete preparation.

On the third day the wind freshened and blew dead foul, decimating
the horses with sea-sickness, prostrating three-fourths of the men,
and shaking the two regiments down into a sociability which outlasted
their sufferings. To be sure my comrades of the 52nd (as, with a
fearful joy, I named them to myself in secret), being veterans for
the most part, recovered or recovering from wounds taken in the land
to which they were returning with common memories of Sir John Moore,
of Benevente, Calcabellos and Corunna, treated the riflemen with that
affable condescension which was all that could be claimed by third
battalion youngsters with their soldiering before them. But the 52nd
knew the 95th of old. And, veterans and youths, were they not bound
to be enrolled together in that noble Light Division, the glory of
which was already lifting above the horizon, soon to blaze across
heaven?

Sergeant Henderson did not suffer from seasickness. For no reward--
unless it be the fierce delight of tackling a difficulty for its own
sake--he had sworn to make a bugler of me, given moderately bad
weather: and when the evening of September 2nd brought us off the
coast of Portugal, he allowed me to shake hands over his success.
Early next morning we began to disembark at a place called Figueira,
by the mouth of the Mondego river. I stepped ashore with a swelling
heart.

But I carried also a portentously swollen under-lip, with a crack in
it which showed signs of festering. Now there was a base hospital at
Figueira, to the surgeon in charge of which fell the duty of
inspecting the men as they landed and detaining those who were sick
or physically unfit. I need not say that his eye was arrested at
once by my unfortunate lip. He examined it.

"Blood-poisoning," he announced. "Nasty, if not attended to.
Detained for a week."

He saw my eyes fill with tears at this blow, the more cruel because
quite unexpected; and added not unkindly:

"Eh? What? In a hurry? Never mind, my lad--you'll go up with the
next draft I dare say. Jericho won't fall between this and then."

I was young, and never doubted that even so slight a promise must be
remembered.

Still, that my merit might leave him no excuse for forgetting, I
determined that it should not escape attention: and finding myself
confined to hospital with a trifling hurt which in no way interfered
with my activity, and being at once pounced upon by an over-worked
and red-eyed orderly and pressed into service as emergency-man,
nurse, and general bottle-washer for three over-crowded tents, I
flung into my new duties a zeal which ended by undoing me. Drummers
might be wanted at the front, but meanwhile the hospital-camp was
undoubtedly short-handed. And my hopes faded as, with the approach
of Christmas, wagon after wagon laden with sick soldiers crawled back
to us from the low-lying country over which Lord Wellington had
spread his forces between the Agueda and the upper Mondego--men
shuddering with ague or bent double with rheumatism, and all bringing
down the same tales of short food, sodden quarters, and arrears of
pay. For three days, they told me, the army had gone without bread,
and the commissariat crawled over unthreatened roads at the pace of
five to nine miles a day. They cursed the war, the Government at
home, above all the Portuguese and everything in Portugal; and yet
their hardships seemed heaven to me in comparison with the hospital
in which, though its duties were frequently disgusting, I had
plenty to eat and nothing to complain of but over-work.

It was not until Christmas that I won my release, and by a singular
accident.

It happened that after nightfall on the 23rd of December an ambulance
train arrived of six wagons, all full of sick demanding instant
attention; and, close upon these, four other wagons laden with
cavalrymen, wounded more or less severely in a foraging excursion
beyond the Agueda, which had brought them into conflict with a casual
party of Marmont's dragoons. The weather was bitterly cold; the men,
apart from this, were unfit for so long a journey and should have
been attended to promptly at their own headquarters. To make matters
worse, one of the wagons had been overturned six miles back on the
frozen road, and the assistant-surgeon who, owing to the seriousness
of the business, had been sent down in attendance, lost his balance
completely. Three of the poor fellows had succumbed as they lay, of
cold, wounds and exhaustion, and a dozen others were in desperate
case.

Our surgeons went to work at once, and until midnight I attended
on them, preparing the lint, washing the blood-stained instruments,
changing the water in the pails, and performing other necessary
but more gruesome tasks which I need not particularise. At midnight
the young cavalry surgeon, who had been freely dosed with brandy,
professed himself ready to take over the minor casualties. The two
hospital surgeons, by this time worn out, accepted the offer and
withdrew. No one thought of me.

I understand that about an hour later as I sat waiting for orders on
the edge of an unoccupied bed (from which a dead man had been carried
out a little before midnight) I must have dropped across it in a
sleep of utter exhaustion. It appears too that the young doctor,
finding me there a short while after, carried me out and laid me on
the ground with my head against the hut. He never admitted this: for
I had been attending upon him, off and on, since his arrival, and
that he failed to recognise me might have been awkwardly accounted
for. But I cannot believe (as certainly I do not remember) that of
my own motion I crawled outside the hut and stretched myself on the
frozen ground, or that, exhausted as I was, I could have walked ten
yards in my sleep.

At all events, the chill of the bitter dawn awoke me there; and with
a yawn I stretched out both arms. My right hand encountered--what?--
the body of a man stretched beside me! Still dazed and numb, I
rolled over to my elbow, raised myself a little and peered into his
face.

It was pinched and cold. Its eyes stared straight up at the dawn.
From it my gaze travelled slowly over the faces of three other men
laid out accurately alongside of him, feet to feet, head to head.

I sank back, not yet comprehending, gazed up at the grey sky for a
while, then slowly raised myself on my left elbow.

On that side lay a score of sleepers, all flat on their backs, and
all equally still. Then I understood and leapt up with a scream.
It was a line of corpses, and I had been laid out beside them for
burial at dawn.

A sleepy orderly--a friend of mine--poked his head out of the doorway
of the next hut. I pointed to the spot where I had been lying.

"They must ha' done it in the dark," he said, slowly regarding the
bodies.

I suppose that my story, spreading about the camp, at length
penetrated to headquarters: for on Christmas Day, a transport
arriving and landing some light guns and a detachment of artillery, I
was sent forward with them towards Villa del Ciervo on the left bank
of the Agueda, where, by all accounts, the 52nd were posted.

Our battery was but six light six-pounders; yet even with these we
moved over the frozen and slippery roads at a snail's pace, the men
tearing their boots to ribbons as they hung on to the drag-ropes--for
the artillery captain was a martinet and refused to lock the wheels,
declaring that it would damage the carriages. Of damage to his men
he never seemed to think: and I, being fool enough to volunteer--
though my weight on the rope could have counted for next to nothing--
found myself on the second day without heels to my shoes, and on the
third without shoes at all. Nor is it likely that I had ever reached
the Agueda in time for the fighting had we not been met at Coimbra by
an order to leave our guns in the magazine there and hurry forward to
Ciudad Rodrigo, where my comrades were required to work the
24-pounders which composed the bulk of Lord Wellington's siege-train.

Having been supplied with new boots from the stores in Coimbra,
we pushed on eastward through torrents of rain which converted
every valley bottom into a quag, so that our march was scarcely
less toilsome than before, and the men grumbled worse than
they had when dragging the guns over the frozen hill-roads.
They had been forced to leave their wagons behind at Coimbra, and
marched like infantry soldiers, each man carrying a haversack
with four days' provisions, as well as an extra pair of boots.
But what seemed to vex and deject them most was a rumour that
Quartermaster-General Murray had been sent down from the front on
leave of absence for England. They argued positively that, with
Murray absent, the Commander-in-Chief could not be intending any
action of importance: they doubted that he had twenty siege-guns at
his call even if he stripped Almeida and left that fortress
defenceless. Moreover, who would open a siege in such a country,
in the depth of such a winter as this?

Nevertheless we had no sooner passed the bridge of the Coa than
we discovered our mistake; the roads below Almeida being choked
with a continuous train of mule transports, tumbrils, light carts,
and wagons heaped with fascines, gabions, long balks of timber,
sheaves of spades and siege implements--all crawling southwards.
Our artillerymen were now halted to await and take charge of three
brass guns said to be on their way down from Pinhel under an escort
of Portuguese militia; and, taking leave of them, I was handed over
to a company of the 23rd Regiment--hurrying in from one of the
outlying hamlets near Celorico--with whom I reached on the 7th of
January the squalid village of Boden, in and around which the 52nd
lay in face of the doomed fortress across the river.

"Here then is war at last," thought I that night, as I curled
myself to sleep in a loft where Sergeant Henderson considerately
found a corner for me under some pathetically empty fowl-roosts.
Sergeant Henderson in his captain's absence had claimed me from a
distracted adjutant who wanted to know where the devil I had come
from, and why, and if I would kindly make myself scarce and leave him
in peace--a display of temper pardonable in a man who had just come
in wet to his middle from fording the river amid cannoning blocks of
ice.

Here was war at last, and I was not long in making acquaintance with
it. I awoke to find, by the light of the lantern swung from the
roost overhead, the dozen men in the loft awake and pulling on their
boots. They had lain in their sodden clothes all night: but of their
boots, I found, they were as careful as dandies, and to grease them
would hoard up a lump of fat even while their stomachs craved for it.
Sergeant Henderson motioned me to pull on mine. From my precious
bugle I had never parted, even to unsling it, since leaving Figueira.
And so I stood ready.

We bundled on our great-coats, climbed down the ladder, and filed out
into the street. It was dark yet, though I could not guess the hour;
and bitter cold, with an east wind which seemed to set the very stars
shivering. The men stamped their feet on the frozen road as we
hurried to the alarm-post, and there I walked into a crowd of dark
figures which closed around me at once. For a moment I supposed the
whole army to be massed there in the darkness, and wondered foolishly
if we were to assault Ciudad Rodrigo at once. A terrible murmur
filled the night--the more terrible because, while the few words
spoken near me were idle and jocular, it ran down the jostling crowd
into endless darkness, gathering menace as it went.

But the sergeant, gripping my shoulder, ordered me gruffly to keep
close beside him, and promised to find me my place. The jostling
grew regular, almost methodical, and by and by an officer came
down the road carrying a lantern, and spoke with Henderson for a
moment. At a word from him the men began to number off. Far up the
road, other lanterns were moving and voices calling. Then after a
long pause, on the reason of which the company speculated in
whispers, the troops ahead began to move and the order came down to
us--"Order arms--Fix bayonets--Shoulder arms!"--a pause--"By the
right, quick march!"

An hour later, still in darkness, we halted beside the Agueda while
company after company marched down into the water. A body of cavalry
had been drawn across the upper edge of the ford, four deep--the
horses' bodies forming a barrier against the swirling blocks of ice;
and under this shelter we crossed, the water rising to my small ribs
and touching my heart with a shiver that I recall as I write.
But the sergeant's hand was on my collar and steadied me over.

"How much farther?" I made bold to whisper to him as we groped our
way up the bank.

"Three miles, maybe: that's as the crow flies. But you mustn't
talk."

And not another word did I say. We plodded on--not straight for the
fortress, the distant lights of which seemed to be waiting for us,
but athwart and, for a mile and more, almost away from it. By and by
the road began to climb; and, a little later, we had left it and were
crossing the shoulder of a grassy hill behind which the lights of
Ciudad Rodrigo disappeared from view.

Here the dawn overtook us; and here at length, along the northern
slope of the hill and close under its summit, we were halted.

Sergeant Henderson gave a satisfied grunt. "Good for _The_
Division--the One and Only!" he remarked. "Now, for my part, I'm
ready for breakfast."

CHAPTER XXII.

ON THE GREATER TESSON.

I turned for a look behind us and below. At the foot of the slope,
where daylight had just begun to touch the dark shadows, stood a line
of mules--animals scarcely taller than the loads they carried, which
a crowd of Portuguese had already begun to unpack; and already, on
the plateau to the left of us half a dozen markers, with a
quartermaster, were mapping out a camp for the 52nd. They went to
work so deliberately, and took such careful measurements with their
long tapes, that even a tyro could no longer mistake this for an
ordinary halt.

I looked at Sergeant Henderson. Word had just been given to the
ranks to dismiss, and he returned my look with a humorous wink.

"That'll do, eh?" He nodded towards the markers.

"What does it mean?" I asked.

"It means that we've done with cold baths, my son, and may leave 'em
to the other divisions. What else it means you'll discover before
you sleep, maybe." He glanced up at the ridge, towards which at a
dozen different points our sentries were creeping--some of them
escorted by knots of officers--and ducking low as they neared the
sky-line.

"May I go down and watch?" I asked again, pointing at the plateau;
for I was young enough to find all operations of war amusing.

"Ay--if you won't get in the way and trip over the pegs. I'll be
down there myself by 'n by with a fatigue party."

I left him and strolled down the hill. The morning air was cold and
the turf, on this north side of the hill, frozen hard underfoot.
But I felt neither hunger nor weariness. Here was war, and I was in
it!

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