Colville of the Guards, Volume 2 (of 3)

THE QUEEN'S SHILLING.

Robert Wodrow, we have stated, had disappeared from his home.

Ellinor had apparently passed out of his life, and he felt as if he had nothing more to hope for in it; but the influence of her memory hung over him still.

Even the love he bore his poor old mother failed to restrain his wild impulse, his craving, to begone, he cared not where; thus her influence also failed in getting him to resume those medical studies which he once pursued with enthusiasm, but now relinquished with indifference or disgust; and, under the disappointment and mental worry produced by Ellinor's falsehood to himself, he failed to graduate at the expected time.

'My poor boy!' his mother said again and again, while stroking his dark brown hair caressingly with her now shrivelled hand; 'that cold-blooded girl has come between you and your wits.'

'Don't call her so, mother. Perhaps I did not deserve her,' said he, humbly.

'I used to sit and watch you both when children many a time and oft, and think what a winsome couple you would be in the days to come. Ah me, Robert, your one ewe lamb, and that stranger took it from you, to be but a plaything for his idle hours too probably!'

'Mother, you torture me by all this kind of thing!' exclaimed Robert.

'It is perhaps but a sudden girlish fancy hers for that man Sleath. It may pass away and all yet be well.'

'Never for me, mother. And you think so meanly of me as to take that view of the matter? I would not and could not with my knowledge of the present seek to have the past over again, and never more can I look upon Ellinor Wellwood or think of her save as I would of the dead. The charm is broken, the flower has lost its fragrance, and the peach its bloom.'

'Why should the weakness or falsehood of one person—one person only—wreck the whole life of another?' asked his father, with some asperity. 'It should not be so.'

'The old and the young view these matters differently, father,' said Robert, gently.

'True. I have read that "in youth grief is a tempest which makes you ill; in old age it is only like a cold wind which adds a wrinkle to your face and one more white lock to the others. Yet there are people who can feed themselves on their grief till they grow fat on it."'

But arguments proved unavailing. The vicinity of Birkwoodbrae had become intolerable to Robert now, and he resolved that he would go far away from them and the pleasant birks of Invermay; and he openly announced his intention of becoming a soldier, adding that nothing would make him swerve from his purpose, as by that means he would be taken to other scenes and be under other influences.

'Most evil ones, I fear!' exclaimed the doctor, striking his hands together.

'Oh, my poor infatuated boy!' added his mother, while her tears fell hotly and fast, and his father started from the table on which the untasted dinner was spread, tore open his waistcoat as if he was suffocating, and paced about the room with impatient strides, his whole form agitated with a kind of convulsive agony that cut Robert to the soul, but did not make him swerve from his bitter purpose.

'Consider the society and profligacy you have to encounter—yea, such as even our ancestor, in the third volume of his
Analecta
, details when describing the schools of profanity in 1726.'

Then, after a time, finding that all his opposition was vain, he said, in a very broken voice,

'God bless and protect you, Robert, and may He forgive you for all the sorrow you are causing us, as by such a course you will be lost to us and to yourself, after all our care and affection, after all your painful anxieties at college, and after all your good training and religious education.'

'In three years I shall be an officer,' exclaimed Robert, confidently, 'and won't you and the dear old mother be proud of me then?'

But the minister shook his silver head.

'Your future——' he began, and paused. 'Who can see the future?'

'One above, Robert. And may He give you the grace to think overall this terrible purpose again.'

Robert did think again, as he had thought before, deeply and decidedly, and, to avoid more painful scenes and partings, he quitted his bed next morning while the sky was dark, and no ray of light gilded as yet the Ochil peaks. He dressed himself in haste, took a few necessaries in a handbag, and after kneeling softly and saying a prayer at the door of the room in which his parents were asleep, he tore himself as it were out of the house and set forth on his new path in life, the path by which there might be no returning.

In that time of supreme bitterness little could the poor fellow see all that was before him.

The morning was still dark, but the sky was clear and starry; the great hills and tall silver birches in the foreground stood blackly up against it, and he could hear that sound so familiar to his ears—the rush of the May over its rocky bed.

He gave a lingering farewell glance at the roof of the old house which had been his home since first he saw the light there—the abode, with all its old-fashioned but substantial furniture, to which his mother had come a smiling and blushing bride in the past time—the abode, till now, of so much peace, frugality, and happiness—and with a bitter sigh he turned his eyes resolutely away.

Then, if aught was required to nerve him, it was the next feature in the still and sombre landscape; the smokeless chimneys and darkened windows of Birkwoodbrae—the now empty shrine where so long his idol had been.

'Oh, all I have ever loved!' he exclaimed, and, wringing his hands, set out with all speed upon his way, haunted, however, by the coming grief of those he was leaving behind when his place was found empty; when his mother's eyes would have a vacant chair to contemplate and his father's reverend head was bent with sorrow, as it would be in the separation that was to come; and what is separation to the loving but a living death?

The next day found him among the wide and stately streets of the Modern Athens, willing to enlist in the first regiment any member of which came in his way, for he was drawing a chance in the lottery of life now, and to him all regiments were alike; so, as Fortune had it, he met a hussar, to whom he expressed his wishes, and from whom he soon receiyed, with all due formality, that magic coin
the Queen's Shilling
, and became what is termed 'a Headquarter Recruit,' enlisting for 'short service'—i.e., six years with the colours.

Six years! In these days of steam the progress of events is so rapid, what might not happen in that brief space?

He had answered all the usual questions by those entitled to make them as to his age, name, parish, and calling, with others that were less pleasant, as to whether he had ever served before, or been marked D. or B.C.; this formality over, and oath of attestation taken before a bailie of the city—the oath to 'be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty, her heirs and successors; obey all orders of Her Majesty, her heirs and successors; and of all the generals and officers, &c.,' set over him—being concluded, a night intervening between enlistment and attestation, nothing remained, as his new friend, Sam Surcingle, said, 'but to have a drink over it.'

This opinion was concurred in by several smart but long-legged fellows in braided trousers, and tight jackets, with caps like scarlet muffins, jangling jack-spurs, and riding switches, who seemed all opportunely at hand, and suffering from chronic thirst, all the more so as the new recruit seemed to have some loose cash; and a suitable tavern (the 'Scots Grey') being at hand, Robert Wodrow soon found himself acting as host to a military circle which made up in heedless jollity and noise what it might lack in rank and distinction.

Yet among the half-dozen or so of his new friends were, at least, two of those ill-starred fellows so frequently to be found in our cavalry regiments at all times, but more especially just now, those who by extravagance and dissipation or failing to achieve the insane 'cramming' of the present day, had lost their chance of commissions, and taken 'the shilling' from sheer love of the service, and the desperate hope of rising in it.

One of these was a mere youth, who, as Sam Surcingle said, 'had a long pedigree behind and a long minority before him;' the other, Toby Chase, the heir to an ancient baronetcy, was older, and drank fast to drown care, shouting, with a laugh,

'To-day—to-day is for me; to-morrow is the paradise of the fool! Your health and promotion, Wodrow, old fellow!'

Glass succeeded glass; toasts and anecdotes—some of the latter not very classical—followed each other fast, till the sharp trumpets blew 'the last post' in the adjoining barrack square of Piershill, and the hussars had to hurry to quarters, and we are sorry to admit that for perhaps the first time in his life—even during his college career—Robert Wodrow had contrived to get disreputably tipsy.

He had no care for the present and no anticipation of the headache and shame of the morrow, with the disgusts of the rough riding and 'barrack fatigue,' such as carrying coals or refilling mattresses with fresh straw; neither was he troubled with the natural reflection of what would be the emotions of his highly-principled and purely-minded old father and mother could they have seen him then, when he had spent the last of his cash on his new comrades, and was voted the king of good fellows, and with one of the before-mentioned scarlet muffins on his head, but cocked very much over the right ear, he flourished a riding-whip, while joining, but with a somewhat 'feathery' voice, in the song,

'How happy's the soldier that lives on his pay,
And spends half-a-crown out of sixpence a day!
Little cares he for the bailiff or bum,
When he pays all his debts with a roll on the drum.'

And so, for a time, Robert Wodrow passes out of our story; but a time only.