Bernard Capes

“ Yet he cherished her sweet innocence too well to wish it his at any price but the lawful. And what had he to offer her there? Just his own ugly self and his commission, supplemented by a sorry small allowance. But he must have her somehow—he must, or die.
He hardly slept all night; not a thing stirred in the little quiet house; and when the morning stole into his hot eyes, there was the drum standing on the chair at his bed-foot.
He uttered an ejaculation; he leapt to the floor and stood staring. Then he went and touched the thing gingerly. Tony's drum—not a doubt about it. ”

“ It was a bitter thing they might not meet when he came to say good-bye—bitterest for the elder. The child, like children, was thoughtless, and gloried, as well he might, in his importance. He was always a righting nature, and resourceful as he was bold. Well I remember how, the day before he left, he had his drum broke in some quarrel; but he found means to restore it, the wild clever child. He was a little thing to be killed."
Hugomort dared to enclose the young scented hand in his. ”

“ The drum was empty; but on the under side of the head revealed ran lines of legal script, footed by a signature. Hugomort dropped on his knees to read. A Will!
A Will, drawn, signed and attested in London, revoking all former Wills and codicils, and leaving everything of which the testator might die possessed, conjointly, and with sole reversion to the survivor should either child die unwedded, to Elizabeth and Anthony Truelove, the testator's beloved only daughter and his youngest son. ”

“ He pondered over the story, lazily, while he smoked. It appeared to him that his commission, defeated in the male direction, could not be better discharged than in the feminine. Betty should have the drum.
He was in a curiously impressionable mood, full of fancies sweet and warm. Perhaps the good beef and brandy had something to do with it; but in addition, it seemed, the spirit of the lavender had got into his senses, and was throbbing there towards some emotional expression or demonstration. His brain was steeped, his heart muffled in lavender ”

“ Nor was that the worst.
"The daughter?" said Captain Hugomort.
"Was offered a provision by her brother," said the landlord indignantly, "on terms that would have disgraced a poplolly; but she preferred her independence with poverty, and none to blame her. She bides with a cook-maid, once her father's servant, in a cottage nigh to the common, and they eke out a hard living with selling of lavender brooms and sweet water to the travelling folk." ”

“ Well, that is the portrait of Betty Truelove, the lavender-girl, who was married to the Captain, when—being only a younger son of the younger branch of Hugomort—he had little more than his commission to justify his folly. But of that he never repented, claiming, even, a sort of supernatural sanction for the happiness that came to him with the love of his beautiful wife. ”

“ Put it in its bag and sleep safe."
IV Into the warm ecstasy of Hugomort's dreams crept a strange sound, the far-distant roll of a drum. It seemed to come from a vast remoteness, to swell gradually into a low thunder, and so to fade out and cease. Now, sleeping as he was, it came to him suddenly that this very night was the anniversary of that on which, a year before, he had climbed the hill of Malplaquet to find a little dying drummer-boy stretched among the trees. And the scene rose so vividly before him that in a moment he was there again, toiling up and up, making for the plateau. ”

“ Hugomort asked for information. He learned, to his interest, the following facts: that the father Truelove, early left a widower, had been a prosperous woolstapler in the village, and that, of his three children, Charles, Betty and Tony, the eldest had turned out reprobate, a gambler and falsifier of books, while the youngest, a born adventurer, had slipped from the parental control to follow a recruiting sergeant. ”

“ He fought through the Marlborough wars, receiving many wounds of a kind, and, after the capture of Douay, accompanied his chief back to England, where, standing enrolled of the heroes, he had to suffer a siege on his own account, the missiles being feminine and multifarious. In the end, to the scandal of his name and of society, he made a ruinous mésalliance; but that offence, so far as it affects posterity, has long mellowed into the distinction conferred by dead and gone romance. Disgraces, once poignant, become in their remoteness the pride of race, and Mrs. ”