Our Kate, Joe Braggs, and I all had a hand in the
beginning, and as great results grew in the end out
of the small events of that December morning, I will
set them down in order.
It began by my refusing point-blank to take Kate to
the vicar’s to watch the soldiers march by.
I loved the vicar, the grave, sweet, childless old
man who had been a second father to me since the sad
day which made my mother a widow, and but for the
soldiers nothing would have been more agreeable than
to spend the afternoon with the old man and his books.
But my heart would surely have broken had I gone.
A caged linnet is a sorry enough sight in a withdrawing-room,
but hang the cage on a tree in a sunlit garden, with
free birds twittering and flitting about it, and you
turn dull pain into shattering agony. The vicar’s
little study, with the rows of books he had made me
know and love with some small measure of his own learning
and passion, was the perch and seed-bowl of my cage,
the things in it, after my sweet mother and saucy
Kate, that made life possible, but still part of the
cage, and it would have maddened me to hop and twitter
there in sight of free men with arms in their hands
and careers in front of them. Jack Dobson would
march by, the sweetness of life for Kate—little
dreamed she that I knew it—but for me the
bitterness of death. Jack Dobson! I liked
Jack, but not clinquant in crimson and gold, with
spurs and sword clanking on the hard, frost-bitten
road. I laughed at the idea; Jack Dobson, whom
I had fought time and time again at school until I
could lick him as easily as I could look at him; Jack
Dobson, a jolly enough lad, who fought cheerily even
when he knew a sound thrashing was in store for him,
but all his brains were good for was to stumble through
Arma virumque cano, and then whisper, “Noll,
you can fire a gun and shoot a man, but how can you
sing ’em?” And because his thin, shadowy,
grasping father was a man of much outward substance
and burgess for the ancient borough, Jack was cornet
in my Lord Brocton’s newly raised regiment of
dragoons, this day marching with other of the Duke
of Cumberland’s troops from Lichfield to Stafford.
And for me, the pride of old Bloggs for Latin and
of all the lads for fighting, the most stirring deed
of arms available was shooting rabbits. So, consuming
inwardly with thoughts of my hard fate, I refused to
go to the vicar’s. Mother should go.
For her it would be a real treat, and Kate would be
the better under her quiet, seeing eyes.
“Well then,” said Kate, “grump at
home over your beastly Virgil.” Mother,
who understood as only mothers can, said nothing, and
prepared my favourite dishes for dinner.
The meal over, and the house-place ‘tidied,’
which seldom meant more than the harassing of a few
stray specks of dust, Kate in her best fripperies
and mother in her churchgoing gown started for the
vicar’s. I stood in the porch and watched
them across the cobbled yard and along the road till
they dropped out of sight beyond the bridge.
