Philip Caradoc, perceiving that I was somewhat dull and disposed to indulge in reverie, soon retired also, and we separated, intending to mature our plans after morning parade next day, as I knew that secretly Caradoc was very much attached to Winifred Lloyd, though that young lady by no means reciprocated his affection. But I, seized by an irresistible impulse, could not wait for our appointed time; so, the moment he was gone, I opened my desk, wrote my application for leave, and desiring Evans to take it to the orderly-room among his first duties on the morrow, threw open a second window to admit the soft breeze of the summer night, lit another cigar, and sat down to indulge in the train of thought Sir Madoc's unexpected letter had awakened within my breast.
Yet I was not much given to reflection--far from it, perhaps; and it is lucky for soldiers that they rarely indulge much in thought, or that the system of their life is apt to preclude time or opportunity for it. I had come home on a year's sick-leave from the West Indies, where the baleful night-dews, and a fever caught in the rainy season, had nearly finished my career while stationed at Up Park Camp; and now, through the friendly interest of Sir Madoc, I had been gazetted to the Welsh Fusileers, as I preferred the chances of the coming war and military service in any part of Europe to broiling uselessly in the land of the Maroons. Our army was in the East, I have said, encamped in the vale of Aladdyn, between Varna and the sea. There camp-fever and the terrible cholera were filling fast with graves the grassy plain and all the Valley of the Plague, as the Bulgarians so aptly named it; and though I was not sorry to escape the perils encountered where no honour could be won, I was pretty weary of the daily round at Winchester, of barrack life, of in-lying pickets, guards, parades, and drill. I had been seven years in the service, and deemed myself somewhat of a veteran, though only five-and-twenty. I was weary too of belonging to a provisional battalion, wherein, beyond the narrow circle of one's own depôt, no two men have the slightest interest in each other, or seem to care if they ever meet again, the whole organisation being temporary, and where the duties of such a battalion--it being, in effect, a strict military school for training recruits--are harassing to the newly-fledged, and a dreadful bore to the fully-initiated, soldier. So, till the time came when the order would be, "Eastward, ho!" Sir Madoc had opportunely offered me a little relaxation and escape from all this; and though he knew it not, his letter might be perhaps the means of doing much more--of opening up a path to happiness and fortune, or leaving one closed for ever behind me in sorrow, mortification, and bitterness of heart.
Good old Sir Madoc (or, as he loved to call himself, Madoc ap Meredyth Lloyd) had in his youth been an unsuccessful lover of my mother, then the pretty Mary Vassal, a belle in her second season; and now, though she had long since passed away, he had a strong regard for me. For her sake he had a deep and kindly interest in my welfare; and as he had no son (no heir to his baronetcy, with all its old traditional honours,) he quite regarded me in the light of one; and having two daughters, desired nothing more than that I should cut the service and become one in reality. So many an act of friendship and many a piece of stamped paper he had done for me, when in the first years of my career, I got into scrapes with rogues upon the turf, at billiards, and with those curses of all barracks, the children of Judea. Had I seen where my own good fortune really lay, I should have fallen readily into the snare so temptingly baited for me, a half-pennyless sub.; for Winifred Lloyd was a girl among a thousand, so far as brilliant attractions go, and, moreover, was not indisposed to view me favourably (at least, so my vanity taught me). But this world is full of cross purposes; people are too often blind to their profit and advantage, and, as Jaques has it, "thereby hangs a tale."
All the attractions of bright-eyed Winny Lloyd, personal and pecuniary, were at that time as nothing to me. I had casually, when idling in London, been introduced to, and had met at several places, this identical Lady Cressingham, whom my friend had mentioned so incidentally and in such an offhand way in his letter; and that sentence it was which brought the blood to my temples and quickened all the pulses of my heart.
She was very beautiful--as the reader will find when we meet her by-and-by--and I had soon learned to love her, but without quite venturing to say so; to love her as much as it was possible for one without hope of ultimate success, and so circumstanced as I was--a poor gentleman, with little more in the world save my sword and epaulettes. Doubtless she had seen and read the emotion with which she had inspired me, for women have keen perceptions in such matters; and though it seems as if it was on her very smile that the mainspring of my existence turned, the whole affair might be but a source of quiet amusement, of curiosity, or gratified vanity to her. Yet, by every opportunity that the chances and artificial system of society in town afforded, I had evinced this passion, the boldness of which my secret heart confessed. Her portrait, a stately full-length, was in the Academy, and how often had I gazed at it, till in fancy the limner's work seemed to become instinct with life! Traced on the canvas by no unskilful hand, it seemed to express a somewhat haughty consciousness of her own brilliant beauty, and somehow I fancied a deuced deal more of her own exalted position, as the only daughter of a deceased but wealthy peer, and as if she rather disdained alike the criticism and the admiration of the crowd of middle-class folks who thronged the Academy halls.
Visions of her--as I had seen her in the Countess's curtained box at the opera, her rare and high-class beauty enhanced by all the accessories of fashion and costume, by brilliance of light and the subtle flash of many a gem amid her hair; when galloping along the Row on her beautiful satin-skinned bay; or while driving after in the Park, with all those appliances and surroundings that wealth and rank confer--came floating before me, with the memory of words half-uttered, and glances responded to when eye met eye, and told so much more than the tongue might venture to utter. Was it mere vanity, or reality, that made me think her smile had brightened when she met me, or that when I rode by her side she preferred me to the many others who daily pressed forward to greet her amid that wonderful place, the Row? Her rank, and the fact that she was an heiress, had no real weight with me; nor did these fortuitous circumstances enhance her merit in my eyes, though they certainly added to the difficulty of winning her. Was it possible that the days of disinterested and romantic love, like those of chivalry, were indeed past--gone with the days when
"It was a clerk's son, of low degree,
Loved the king's daughter of Hongarie?"
With the love that struggled against humble fortune in my heart, I had that keenly sensitive pride which is based on proper self-respect. Hope I seemed to have none. What hope could I, Harry Hardinge, a mere subaltern, with little more than seven-and-sixpence per diem, have of obtaining such a wife as Lady Estelle Cressingham, and, more than all, of winning the good wishes of her over-awing mamma? Though "love will venture in when it daurna weel be seen," I could neither be hanged nor reduced to the ranks for my presumption, like the luckless Captain Ogilvie; who, according to the Scottish ballad, loved the Duke of Gordon's bonnie daughter Jean. Yet defeat and rejection might cover me with certain ridicule, leaving the stings of wounded self-esteem to rankle all the deeper, by thrusting the partial disparity of our relative positions in society more unpleasantly and humiliatingly before me and the world; for there is a snobbery in rank that is only equalled by the snobbery of wealth, and here I might have both to encounter. And so, as I brooded over these things, some very levelling and rather democratic, if not entirely Communal, ideas began to occur to me. And yet, for the Countess and those who set store upon such empty facts, I could have proved my descent from Nicholas Hardinge, knight, of King's Newton, in Derbyshire; who in the time of Henry VII. held his lands by the homely and most sanitary tenure of furnishing clean straw for his Majesty's bed when he and his queen, Elizabeth of York, passed that way, together with fresh rushes from the margin of the Trent wherewith to strew the floor of the royal apartment. But this would seem as yesterday to the fair Estelle, who boasted of an ancestor, one Sir Hugh Cressingham, who, as history tells us, was defeated and flayed by the Scots after the battle of Stirling; while old Sir Madoc Lloyd, who doubtless traced himself up to Noah ap Lamech, would have laughed both pedigrees to scorn.
Leaving London, I had striven to stifle as simply absurd the passion that had grown within me, and had joined at Winchester in the honest and earnest hope that ere long the coming campaign would teach me to forget the fair face and witching eyes, and, more than all, the winning manner that haunted me; and now I was to be cast within their magic influence once more, and doubtless to be hopelessly lost. To have acted wisely, I should have declined the invitation and pleaded military duty; yet to see her once, to be with her once again, without that cordon of guardsmen and cavaliers who daily formed her mounted escort in Rotten-row, and with all the chances our quiet mutual residence in a sequestered country mansion, when backed by all the influence and friendship of Sir Madoc, must afford me, proved a temptation too strong for resistance or for my philosophy; so, like the poor moth, infatuated and self-doomed, I resolved once more to rush at the light which dazzled me.
"She seems to know you, and would like to see more of you," ran the letter of Sir Madoc. I read that line over and over again, studying it minutely in every way. Were those dozen words simply the embodiment of his own ideas, or were they her personally expressed wish put literally into writing? Were they but the reflex of some casual remark? Even that conviction would bring me happiness. And so, after my friends left me, I sat pondering thus, blowing long rings of concentric smoke in the moonlight; and on those words of Sir Madoc raising not only a vast and aerial castle, but a "bower of bliss," as the pantomimes have it at Christmas time.
But how about this Mr. Hawkesby Guilfoyle? was my next thought. Could his attentions be tolerated by such a stately and watchful dowager as the Countess of Naseby? Could Sir Madoc actually hint that such as he might have a chance of success, when I had none? The idea was too ridiculous; for I had heard whispers of this man before, in London and about the clubs, where he was generally deemed to be a species of adventurer, the exact source of whose revenue no one knew. One fact was pretty certain: he was unpleasantly successful at billiards and on the turf. If he--to use his own phraseology--was daring enough to enter stakes for such a prize as Lord Cressingham's daughter, why should not I?
Thus, in reverie of a somewhat chequered kind, I lingered on, while the shadows of the cathedral, its lofty tower and choir, the spire of St. Lawrence, and many other bold features of the view began to deepen or become more uncertain on the city roofs below, and from amid which their masses stood upward in a flood of silver sheen. Ere long the full-orbed moon--that seemed to float in beauty beneath its snow-white clouds, looking calmly down on Winchester, even as she had done ages ago, ere London was a capital, and when the white city was the seat of England's Saxon, Danish, and Norman dynasties, of Alfred's triumphs and Canute's glories--began at last to pale and wane; and the solemn silence of the morning--for dewy morning it was now--was broken only by the chime of the city bells and clocks, and by the tread of feet in the gravelled barrack-yard, as the reliefs went round, and the sentinels were changed.
The first red streak of dawn was beginning to steal across the east; the bugles were pealing reveilles, waking all the hitherto silent echoes of the square; and just about the time when worthy and unambitious Charley Gwynne would be parading his first squad for "aiming drill" at sundry bull's-eyes painted on the barrack-walls, I retired to dream over a possible future, and to hope that if the stars were propitious, at the altar of that somewhat dingy fane, St. George's, Hanover-square, I might yet become the son-in-law of the late Earl of Naseby, Baron Cressingham of Cotteswold, in the county of Northampton, and of Walcot Park in Hants, Lord-lieutenant, custos rotulorum, and so forth, as I had frequently and secretly read in the mess-room copy of Sir Bernard Burke's thick royal octavo; "the Englishman's Bible" according to Thackeray, and, as I greatly feared, the somewhat exclusive libro d'oro of Mamma Cressingham, who was apt to reverence it pretty much as the Venetian nobles did the remarkable volume of that name.
