The Fortunes Of Glencore. Lever Charles James

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СКАЧАТЬ have made of the boy!” said Harcourt, bluntly. “By Jove! it was time I should come here!”

      When the boy came back he was followed by the old butler, carefully carrying in a small wicker contrivance, Hibernicè called a cooper, three cobwebbed and well-crusted bottles.

      “Now, Charley,” said Jarcourt, gayly, “if you want to see a man thoroughly happy, just step up to my room and fetch me a small leather sack you ‘ll find there of tobacco, and on the dressing-table you ‘ll see my meerschaum pipe; be cautious with it, for it belonged to no less a man than Poniatowski, the poor fellow who died at Leipsic.”

      The lad stood again irresolute and confused, when a signal from his father motioned him away to acquit the errand.

      “Thank you,” said Harcourt, as he re-entered; “you see I am not vain of my meerschaum without reason. The carving of that bull is a work of real art; and if you were a connoisseur in such matters, you ‘d say the color was perfect. Have you given up smoking, Glencore? – you used to be fond of a weed.”

      “I care but little for it,” said Glencore, sighing.

      “Take to it again, my dear fellow, if only that it is a bond ‘tween yourself and every one who whiffs his cloud. There are wonderfully few habits – I was going to say enjoyments, and I might say so, but I ‘ll call them habits – that consort so well with every condition and every circumstance of life, that become the prince and the peasant, suit the garden of the palace and the red watch-fire of the bivouac, relieve the weary hours of a calm at sea, or refresh the tired hunter in the prairies.”

      “You must tell Charley some of your adventures in the West. – The Colonel has passed two years in the Rocky Mountains,” said Glencore to his son.

      “Ay, Charley, I have knocked about the world as much as most men, and seen, too, my share of its wonders. If accidents by sea and land can interest you, if you care for stories of Indian life and the wild habits of a prairie hunter, I ‘m your man. Your father can tell you more of salons and the great world, of what may be termed the high game of life – ”

      “I have forgotten it, as much as if I had never seen it,” said Glencore, interrupting, and with a severity of voice that showed the theme displeased him. And now a pause ensued, painful perhaps to the others, but scarcely felt by Harcourt, as he smoked away peacefully, and seemed lost in the windings of his own fancies.

      “Have you shooting here, Glencore?” asked he at length.

      “There might be, if I were to preserve the game.”

      “And you do not. Do you fish?”

      “No; never.”

      “You give yourself up to farming, then?”

      “Not even that; the truth is, Harcourt, I literally do nothing. A few newspapers, a stray review or so, reach me in these solitudes, and keep me in a measure informed as to the course of events; but Charley and I con over our classics together, and scrawl sheets of paper with algebraic signs, and puzzle our heads over strange formulas, wonderfully indifferent to what the world is doing at the other side of this little estuary.”

      “You of all men living to lead such a life as this! a fellow that never could cram occupation enough into his short twenty-four hours,” broke in Harcourt.

      Glencore’s pale cheek flushed slightly, and an impatient movement of his fingers on the table showed how ill he relished any allusion to his own former life.

      “Charley will show you to-morrow all the wonders of our erudition. Harcourt,” said he, changing the subject; “we have got to think ourselves very learned, and I hope you ‘ll be polite enough not to undeceive us.”

      “You ‘ll have a merciful critic, Charley,” said the Colonel, laughing, “for more reasons than one. Had the question been how to track a wolf or wind an antelope, to outmanoeuvre a scout party or harpoon a calf-whale, I’d not yield to many; but if you throw me amongst Greek roots or double equations, I ‘m only Samson with his hair en crop!”

      The solemn clock over the mantelpiece struck ten, and the boy arose as it ceased.

      “That’s Charley’s bedtime,” said Glencore, “and we are determined to make no stranger of you, George. He ‘ll say good-night.”

      And with a manner of mingled shyness and pride the boy held out his hand, which the soldier shook cordially, saying, —

      “To-morrow, then, Charley, I count upon you for my day, and so that it be not to be passed in the library I ‘ll acquit myself creditably.”

      “I like your boy, Glencore,” said he, as soon as they were alone. “Of course I have seen very little of him; and if I had seen more I should be but a sorry judge of what people would call his abilities. But he is a good stamp: ‘Gentleman’ is written on him in a hand that any can read; and, by Jove! let them talk as they will, but that’s half the battle of life!”

      “He is a strange fellow; you’ll not understand him in a moment,” said Glencore, smiling half sadly to himself.

      “Not understand him, Glencore? I read him like print, man. You think that his shy, bashful manner imposes upon me; not a bit of it; I see the fellow is as proud as Lucifer. All your solitude and estrangement from the world have n’t driven out of his head that he’s to be a Viscount one of these days; and somehow, wherever he has picked it up, he has got a very pretty notion of the importance and rank that same title confers.”

      “Let us not speak of this now, Harcourt; I’m far too weak to enter upon what it would lead to. It is, however, the great reason for which I entreated you to come here. And to-morrow – at all events in a day or two – we can speak of it fully. And now I must leave you. You ‘ll have to rough it here, George; but as there is no man can do so with a better grace, I can spare my apologies; only, I beg, don’t let the place be worse than it need be. Give your orders; get what you can; and see if your tact and knowledge of life cannot remedy many a difficulty which our ignorance or apathy have served to perpetuate.”

      “I ‘ll take the command of the garrison with pleasure,” said Harcourt, filling up his glass, and replenishing the fire. “And now a good night’s rest to you, for I half suspect I have already jeopardied some of it.”

      The old campaigner sat till long past midnight. The generous wine, his pipe, the cheerful wood-fire, were all companionable enough, and well suited thoughts which took no high or heroic range, but were chiefly reveries of the past, – some sad, some pleasant, but all tinged with the one philosophy, which made him regard the world as a campaign, wherein he who grumbles or repines is but a sorry soldier, and unworthy of his cloth.

      It was not till the last glass was drained that he arose to seek his bed, and presently humming some old air to himself, he slowly mounted the stairs to his chamber.

      CHAPTER V. COLONEL HARCOUUT’S LETTER

      As we desire throughout this tale to make the actors themselves, wherever it be possible, the narrators, using their words in preference to our own, we shall now place before the reader a letter written by Colonel Harcourt about a week after his arrival at Glencore, which will at least serve to rescue him and ourselves from the task of repetition.

      It was addressed to Sir Horace Upton, Her Majesty’s Envoy at Stuttgard, one who had formerly served in the same regiment with Glencore and himself, but who left the army early to follow the career of diplomacy, wherein, still a young man, he had risen СКАЧАТЬ