VC - A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea Part 15

'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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.serts 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 s.e.x. 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 n.o.body 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 d.a.m.ned 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 d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 troops.h.i.+ps 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 bra.s.s 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--vanis.h.!.+ 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.