Bag and Baggage/Tony's Drum
TONY'S DRUM
I
SOMEWHERE on the heights of Malplaquet a bugle sang out in the dead exhausted evening. Sergeant Garrow, kneeling in the brushwood below, cursed the whine of it with picturesque vehemence:
"Why don't ye come and give us a haul, ye braying jackass," he panted, "instead of standing up there and boasting of your wind?"
The wail, in its passing, seemed to release the babel of mournful sounds it had for the moment subdued—sobbing of wounded horses, crying of wounded men, all flowing over the lip of the plateau above, and mingling confusedly with the wind in the leaves and the rush of a little river, vocal in the thickets deep below.
It was the evening following that day of dreadful battle which had cost us twenty thousand lives for the gain of a position not worth negotiating. Our troops could boast that they had won his camp from the enemy for the sake of a night's lodging; and there they lay in it, their fires spotting the heath, their anguish testifying to their gain. The woods of Lanière and Taisniere under the hill were spilled full of dead men, and sentries almost as torpid watched the captured entrenchments.
Sergeant Garrow, staggering up the ravine-side with a little smitten drummer-boy in his arms, had fought to within hail of the plateau of Malplaquet, when he found that his endurance had reached its limit. He put his burden gently down against a tree, and, half falling beside it, squatted haggardly, his chest labouring.
"Lad," he whispered presently, "I'm spent. I can carry thee no farther, lad!"
The boy was beyond answering. He lay huddled among the roots, his drum still slung at his side, his wounded chest exposed. It had been smashed by a round-shot, and his friend's rough surgery had been able to make nothing of the injury. But the doctors were all at work above.
The sergeant panted as if he would never get his heart again. He could only squat and gasp, praying for help. Presently there came up through the wood an officer, taking the steeps in his torn galligaskins as vigorously as if he had never fought all day. It was Captain Hugomort of the 4th King's Own, a soldier who had the reputation for possessing the toughest rind and the softest heart in all Her Majesty's army. His strength was as prodigious as his humanity, and his cheery ugliness as prepossessing as either. He stopped, leaning one hand against a tree, and breathed himself. The sergeant rubbed his fingers in the grass before saluting.
"Only a woundy drummer-boy, sir," he said apologetically, in answer to the unspoken query. "A bit of a thing; but beyont me."
The other nodded comprehendingly.
"What is he doing on this bloody hill-side of Flanders? He should have been in bed by rights, miles away in old England."
He stooped, and peered into the lad's white face; then, as gently as a mother, lifted the little broken body in his arms, and carried it up to the plateau. It was cold September weather, and the camp-fires, after the false heat of the day, were welcome. Hugomort, motioning for room, laid the child down in the heather by one, and bent over him. The sergeant, wearily following, came and stood beside.
"Dying!" he said. "No need for a doctor, sir."
"Who is it?"
"Truelove, sir. A main spirited lad."
Again, far away over the heath, a bugle sounded—ineffably mournful—the Last Post. The drummer-boy's eyes opened; his lips moved. Hugomort put out his hand, commanding silence.
"What is it, my child?"
"The drum—give it to daddy."
He could hardly hear the bodiless whisper. There was not a moment to lose. He stooped low, and spoke his faithful promise:
"Before God I will, manny—and with my own hands, if God wills."
A smile, like a faintest ripple, crossed the boy's face; his shattered chest rose once, and fell; his eyes rolled back, and Hugomort got to his feet.
"Unbuckle it, sergeant," he said, in a subdued voice. "He's gone."
II
The Hugomorts were a race of strong men, but this Captain Roger was an Anak among the Anakim. He was so huge and gristly, it was said, that bullets rebounded from him like peas, and bayonets pricked him no more than thorns. He fought through the Marlborough wars, receiving many wounds of a kind, and, after the capture of Douay, accompanied his chief back to England, where, standing enrolled of the heroes, he had to suffer a siege on his own account, the missiles being feminine and multifarious. In the end, to the scandal of his name and of society, he made a ruinous mésalliance; but that offence, so far as it affects posterity, has long mellowed into the distinction conferred by dead and gone romance. Disgraces, once poignant, become in their remoteness the pride of race, and Mrs. Roger's portrait owns at this day a distinguished position to itself on the walls of the great gallery at Hugomort. It is in an oval frame, and exhibits, at half-length, the figure of a very fresh and blooming young woman, having the brown curls and humid artless eyes of the Kneller convention. She wears loosely on her head a little stone-blue hood surmounted by a straw paysanne, a trifle 'raked,' which sports a primrose-coloured ribbon; and her right hand presses a bunch of lavender to her bosom, as to the white and fragrant shrine of innocence. Her darker blue bodice is laced and square-cut, showing a frill of smock, and there is a suggestion of pretty wistfulness about the whole picture which is curiously winning.
Well, that is the portrait of Betty Truelove, the lavender-girl, who was married to the Captain, when—being only a younger son of the younger branch of Hugomort—he had little more than his commission to justify his folly. But of that he never repented, claiming, even, a sort of supernatural sanction for the happiness that came to him with the love of his beautiful wife. And this is how the thing happened.
After his return, the Captain, as may be supposed, was too much occupied for a long time to think of discharging his commission to the dead drummer-boy's father. But he had by no means forgotten his promise; and so it chanced that he started at length to vindicate it within a few days of the anniversary of the battle of Malplaquet. He had already ascertained, from the regimental rolls, the address of the home he sought; and he now rode forth from London, with the drum in a bag at his saddle-bow, bound for the little village of Mitcham in Surrey where the Trueloves lived. He had dressed himself soberly, as befitted the sad occasion; but indeed it wanted more than the dark blue riding-coat, with its deep cuffs and skirts turned back with buff, than the little plain hat and heavy military jackboots which he wore, more, even, than his strong companionable face, to mislead the world as to his natural distinction. He looked the fine gentleman, and was not to be mistaken for a lesser because he was riding with a drum at his knee to fulfil a big man's vow to a trumpery little soldier-thing.
His way took him by fields, and long rolls of common haunted by Egyptians, and again by fields, to the pleasant village of Tooting, five miles south-west of the City; and thence a branch road to Reigate brought him at the end of a couple more miles to the place he sought.
It was a mellow and a glowing day, and Hugomort's soul felt one with the quiet sunshine. How, in the Low Countries, had not these characteristic English sights and sounds haunted him!—the deep pastures, the sweet-breathed cattle, the maidens with skins like apple-blossom and soft merry voices. He drank in the scene as if it were fresh warm milk; he expanded his huge chest, and took enjoying draughts of the air, which was as fragrant as if the very pillowy clouds had been stored in lavender. Lavender! The whole place smelt of it. He remembered now that Mitcham was the lavender-garden of England. Destiny could not have allured him to a sweeter spot.
At a reputable inn, The Old House at Home, standing about midway in the single long street, he dismounted, and, dismissing his horse to the ostler, entered, carrying his bag with the drum in it, to bespeak a meal and make an enquiry or so. He found the landlord properly communicative, and, over a good rib of beef, asked his simple question as to the habitat of the Truelove family. The answer sounded the first note of a complication. He looked up explanatory:
"I speak of the drummer-boy's father."
The landlord nodded his head. Every particular of village sayings and doings was docketed and pigeon-holed in that enormous knowledge-box. Even the way he held his hands clasped under his apron suggested his possession of secret evidences.
"Of Tony the drummer-boy's father," he repeated. "It was Tony, the naughty lad, that broke his daddy's heart a'running away to the wars."
Hugomort's eyes opened.
"Dead? "
"Strook dead," said the landlord. "He never rightly got over it."
The Captain paused in his eating, and sat back.
"Let us be clear on that point," he said. "The father Truelove is dead?"
"Six months gone," said the landlord.
"Tony the drummer-boy's father?"
"Tony the drummer-boy's father."
"He died of grief?"
"Of grief, sir. A wild boy was Tony, but dear to his daddy's heart. He run away and joined the redcoats. But, a month before they Marlborough wars begun, back he comes, with his fine laced frock and his drum, to say good-bye to his daddy and his sister Betty."
"Well?"
"His daddy was away, sir, over to the great sheep-fair at Dorking, and he never saw him. But that Tony filled out his furlough as befitted him. How he kep' us alive, to be sure—a young spark! I call to mind," said the landlord, looking out of the window, with a glassy contemplative eye, "his thrashing young Jakes, twice his size, to within an inch of his reason, for breaking in his drumhead with an ash stick. Lord, what a boy!"
The Captain had resumed his eating.
"He was killed at Malplaquet," he said. "And his father died of the news?"
"It finished him," said the landlord. "He'd been ailing sore, ever since he'd learnt how the boy had come and gone without his seeing him."
Hugomort cut another slice of beef.
"Well," he said; "is there anyone to represent the family at this day? "
The landlord gave a snort, sudden and alarming.
"Charles Truelove, the eldest," he said shortly.
The guest glanced up, surprised.
"Why do you speak of him in that tone?"
"A devil," said the landlord briefly.
Hugomort asked for information. He learned, to his interest, the following facts: that the father Truelove, early left a widower, had been a prosperous woolstapler in the village, and that, of his three children, Charles, Betty and Tony, the eldest had turned out reprobate, a gambler and falsifier of books, while the youngest, a born adventurer, had slipped from the parental control to follow a recruiting sergeant. Now, it appeared that, the moment the woolstapler was dead, his banished first-born had turned up from nowhere, dropping from the sky like a vulture, to claim his share of the spoil (which was considerable), and that, to the astonishment of everybody, a will had been found, dated before Tony's birth, which, barring a trifling provision for the daughter, left everything, all the profits of which the testator might die possessed, to the black sheep. It was a stunning fact, but indisputable, and Charles, whom all had supposed disinherited by a later Will, was in possession of the property. Nor was that the worst.
"The daughter?" said Captain Hugomort.
"Was offered a provision by her brother," said the landlord indignantly, "on terms that would have disgraced a poplolly; but she preferred her independence with poverty, and none to blame her. She bides with a cook-maid, once her father's servant, in a cottage nigh to the common, and they eke out a hard living with selling of lavender brooms and sweet water to the travelling folk."
The Captain, a satisfied man, put down his knife and fork.
"I fancy she is the one for my money," he said.
"Anan?" quoth the landlord.
"Never mind," said Hugomort. "Bring me a pipe, and a glass of right Nantes."
He pondered over the story, lazily, while he smoked. It appeared to him that his commission, defeated in the male direction, could not be better discharged than in the feminine. Betty should have the drum.
He was in a curiously impressionable mood, full of fancies sweet and warm. Perhaps the good beef and brandy had something to do with it; but in addition, it seemed, the spirit of the lavender had got into his senses, and was throbbing there towards some emotional expression or demonstration. His brain was steeped, his heart muffled in lavender; some fragrant personification of the flower appeared to hover on the threshold of his soul, like a little butterfly Psyche with trembling wings. And then suddenly he looked up, and there outside the window stood the very substance of his vision.
There was a great waggon halted there—one of those tilted huge-tyred farm-carts, drawn by six horses, with bell-hung yokes to the hames of their collars, which catered for the humbler class of travellers—and, pleading softly hither and thither among the alighted passengers, was a young girl, with a basket on her arm and a little phial of sweet water in her hand. She was dressed even as in the picture, and her face was a garden of pinks and roses, a parterre which seemed to astonish into sudden violence a big semi-military ruffian, in enormous boots, and with a sword hanging from a greasy shoulder-strap, who had alighted with the rest.
"Curse me pretty," cried this fellow, "if I ever saw a kiss more sweetly invited!"
Hugomort did not hear the words; but he understood their import through the little panic scuffle that followed, and hurried out just as the bully had got his arm about the child's waist. He caught the fellow by the neck, as a dog catches a rat, and flung him to the ground.
The swaggerer, half-stunned for the moment, rose the next, with a howl of fury, and felt for his sword-hilt. But the Captain, forestalling him, wrenched away the blade, and, snapping it across his knee, took the ruffian fairly by his scruff and breeches, and lifting him high, rolled him into the waggon, and bade him, on pain of being broke, dare again to lift his hand to an officer and gentleman. Then, leaving the man quite cowed and whimpering, he strode back through the obsequious admiring throng, and, lifting his hat, with the grand air, to the subject of his protection, says he:
"You are upset, my child, and no wonder. Pray accept of Captain Hugomort's escort to your home."
And she looked up into his strong ugly face, with her wet eyes blinking, and hung her pretty head and went with him.
III
And that was how Captain Hugomort found his wife; but not all at once. At the sweet beginning of things he imposed himself as a lodger on the two women, Betty and cook-maid Hunston, with the professed view of showing them a new way to self-help. They lived in a little old cottage on the skirt of the common where the turn of the road took it, and spent all their working-time in expressing oil from lavandula vera, and distilling it, and treating it with spirits of wine until it sparkled into crystal perfume. Also they made brooms in season of the blossoming heads, and, a little later, sachets of the dried ones; and out of these, when all was done, they squeezed a margin of profit, sufficient, with Betty's small provision, to keep them going.
This was, in fact, an idyll of lavender, having, for its central figure, it seemed, the very Chloris of sweet flowers. So she appeared to Hugomort, all fragrant, all soft, all endearing. He lived in an atmosphere of lavender and loving witchery. But she meant no arts, and was in truth at his mercy. It was a perilous time for her. This god who had come to her in her need!—she might have resisted his noble condescension; it was his Herculean strength that took her, and at once, by storm. She never thought for a moment of questioning his assumption of a right to protect her. Fortunately for her romance's happy consummation, nobility, drugged and drowned as it was in sweet sensuousness, kept its instinct for cleanness. Maybe, also, superstition helped to support it through a temptation or so.
Well, the Captain, as I say, took a lodging with the two women, and from that moment some curious things began to happen. He did not on the first day mention anything as to the object of his visit; but he hung the drum in its bag from a nail on the wall of the tiny room allotted him, and slept that night in lavender-scented sheets, and dreamed of lavender eyes, and of lavender-shadowed arms coming about him. And in the morning he woke up, and saw the drum on a chair at his bed-foot.
He was surprised, of course. He was as sure as sure could be that the thing had been ensconced in its bag when he went to bed. Someone must have entered his room unheard during the night, and removed it. But, why? It seemed a senseless act. He dismissed, however, for the moment the subject from his mind, and got up and dressed. His tiny quarters delighted him, seen in the fresh morning. They looked over a little garden, lush with dewy flowers; and thence flowed the common in grassy billows. And even sweeter and more lovely than remembered dreams appeared his nymph, velvety from slumber. His soul began to throb to her with a sensation it had never yet experienced.
That day he entered himself into the confidence of both these girls—there was something in him that invited women's trust—and presently he went out and returned with the drum.
"What is there about this to invite curiosity?" he said, holding it forth with a smile.
They shook their heads guilelessly.
"Has either of you seen it before?"
They looked one at the other enquiringly, and answered, "No," with obvious bewilderment. He was convinced, but puzzled. And then his eyes softened, and his voice, as he approached Betty Truelove.
"Nay, little mistress," he said; "but your heart must rally itself to the pain it is my hard fate to inflict. You have seen it, indeed, for it was your brother's."
She did not move; but her face flushed, and her throat swelled. Perhaps she had already half anticipated the truth. " Little Tony," she whispered, and that was all.
In gentle vein, then, he told them of the battle, of its fortunes and its heroisms, among which he counted very kindly the little drummer-boy's uncomplaining death. "He thought only of his daddy," he said, "and of his sorrowful pride in receiving this last token of his boy's patriotism and affection. Alas! it was not destined that I should vindicate my promise to the letter; but to thee, my child, as to love's trustee, do I make over its reversion. Take the drum, and cherish it."
She received the soldierly toy from his hands, like one half blind; and, as she so held it, he left her.
Later in the day, confident in his own true sympathy, he ventured to touch upon the subject again, and she opened her heart to him, like a flower to the sun.
"He was ever his father's love," she said. "He could dare with him as might none else. It was a bitter thing they might not meet when he came to say good-bye—bitterest for the elder. The child, like children, was thoughtless, and gloried, as well he might, in his importance. He was always a righting nature, and resourceful as he was bold. Well I remember how, the day before he left, he had his drum broke in some quarrel; but he found means to restore it, the wild clever child. He was a little thing to be killed."
Hugomort dared to enclose the young scented hand in his. She shook slightly, but submitted.
"I marvel," he said, like one pondering. "I marvel."
"At what?" she whispered.
"How one," he said, "so infatuated as your father, could so have sinned against the darling of his heart?"
She understood him, and hung her head.
"O! not sinned," she pleaded. "He must have meant the best. Who could have foreseen the cruel stroke that bereft us in an hour?"
"Himself," he answered sternly, and looked at her. "Tell me; did you never hear talk of a later Will?"
She shook her head; and he passed to other subjects.
That night he went to bed in love. His passion was like a fever, and kept him awake and tossing. He knew that he had discharged his task, and that no reason remained to him to stop. Yet the very thought of going was a torture. She slept, he knew, in the little room against his. O, that the frail wall would mist away and reveal her to his arms! Yet he cherished her sweet innocence too well to wish it his at any price but the lawful. And what had he to offer her there? Just his own ugly self and his commission, supplemented by a sorry small allowance. But he must have her somehow—he must, or die.
He hardly slept all night; not a thing stirred in the little quiet house; and when the morning stole into his hot eyes, there was the drum standing on the chair at his bed-foot.
He uttered an ejaculation; he leapt to the floor and stood staring. Then he went and touched the thing gingerly. Tony's drum—not a doubt about it.
Presently, while he was dressing as in a dream, he heard voices in the garden, mingled of angry and pleading. He looked from the window, and saw his soft goddess bending before the wrath of a lowering, dissipated-looking young man, who reviled and threatened her. His heart flamed; but, guessing the truth, he forbore for the moment to interfere. But by and by, making an opportunity, he questioned cook-maid Hunston as to the brother. He learned enough to fire his soul with indignation—too much and too offending to be set down here in detail. But, briefly, it seemed, the provision originally offered by young Truelove to his sister had been made conditional on her becoming the price of silence to a brother-blackleg, who knew enough of Master Charles's past to make his tenure of the present particularly insecure. So it was rumoured, and so believed; and now, it appeared, the persecution was acquiring a fresh virulence through the entry of the Captain himself upon the scene, and the girl had been taunted and insulted on the score of her supposed protector. Indeed, Mrs. Hunston, with weeping eyes, begged him to spare her mistress by going.
"I shall do nothing of the sort," he said. "I am going to marry your mistress myself."
"Dear heart alive!" cried the girl, and sat down plump upon a chair.
He saw Betty, who had been avoiding him hitherto, in the garden, and ran out to her. She was making a show of unconcern; but her lids were swollen with weeping. Yet his first thought was a diversion.
"What of the drum?" he said.
She glanced up at him, astonished, and so away.
"Was it you brought it to my room last night?" he demanded.
She stared at him again, going as pale as a lily, then suddenly began to run. He followed and caught her.
"It was there this morning," he said.
"I never put it."
"Didn't you?"
"O! how could you believe it of me?"
"It must have been your friend, then?"
"She slept with me. She never moved. I know."
"What! were you awake too?"
"Let me go. I cannot keep from crying."
He lifted her in his arms, making nothing and everything of her in a breath, and carried her into the cottage parlour. And there he sat down with her, holding her close.
"Child, isn't this sudden—this love of yours and mine?"
She wept, and whispered without coquetry: "You give me no chance."
"You shall be taken away from here, Betty, from the struggle and the shame."
"Alack!" she said; "the shame will go with me."
"You think it shame, then, to be my wife?"
She stopped her breath, listening, all at once.
"That was settled," he said, "the moment I saw you in the street. You threw lavender in my eyes, child. It is all a pastoral of lavender, and I have gone into the sweetest garden in all the world for my flower-wife."
••••••
"We have forgotten the drum," he said presently. "It is a strange thing."
She looked up at him, trembling.
"You are sure you did not come and fetch it yourself?"
"Betty, Mistress!"
"In your sleep, I mean?"
"Even in my sleep if I had come I could not have gone. Make it sure to-night, at least."
"If I could be sure it was not you."
"I have said what I have said. Put it in its bag and sleep safe."
IV
Into the warm ecstasy of Hugomort's dreams crept a strange sound, the far-distant roll of a drum. It seemed to come from a vast remoteness, to swell gradually into a low thunder, and so to fade out and cease. Now, sleeping as he was, it came to him suddenly that this very night was the anniversary of that on which, a year before, he had climbed the hill of Malplaquet to find a little dying drummer-boy stretched among the trees. And the scene rose so vividly before him that in a moment he was there again, toiling up and up, making for the plateau. And even as he reached it, he saw that its heath, far and near, was all sown with blossoms of fire, thick and melancholy as corpse-candles. But not a solitary form of all the wounded and dying remained on the plateau. The place was one vast sepulchral emptiness; the souls of the fallen were fled; only the sound of the flames, flapping and reverberating, broke the desolate silences. But, little by little as he gazed, another sound crept into his brain, at first hardly to be distinguished from the fluttering of the fires—a throb, a mere pulse beating in the deep heart of stillness. It waxed and grew; its hurried tremor was resolved into a definite crepitation; it swelled out of the black distances nearer and louder—the roll of a drum. For the second time! Whence and with what purpose was it making towards him? The fires had died down. Standing in that blind oblivion, a fear, such as he had never yet felt, stole into his heart. The drum came on. Its voice by now was overmastering, hollow and resonant as if sounded in an empty room.
A room! With a shock he leapt to instant realisation of the truth. It was a room. He was lying in the cottage all the time, and the sound was in the house—in the adjoining chamber—outside his door, furious, triumphant, deafening! God in heaven! How could they be sleeping through that appalling racket? It seemed to shake the building; it increased in volume; yet he lay as if spellbound, unable to move limb or lid. It came on—it was upon him—with a final thundering crash it passed into his room—and at once ceased in a flurry of soaring vibrations.
In that instant light seemed to flash into the sleeper's eyes, and, with a cry, he broke the spell that held him, and leapt into consciousness. Bright dawn was stealing through the window, and there on the chair stood the drum.
Wild-eyed, his skin still wet with the terror of his dream, Hugomort leapt from his bed, and approached the thing. Its batter-head appeared as if still palpitating from the blows rained upon it—it seemed to heave and writhe with pain. Merciful Christ! was something imprisoned within? In an access of horror, touched with fury, the waker seized his sword, and, severing the straps and cords, wrenched off at a blow the upper hoop, and let it drop to the floor. The drum was empty; but on the under side of the head revealed ran lines of legal script, footed by a signature. Hugomort dropped on his knees to read. A Will!
A Will, drawn, signed and attested in London, revoking all former Wills and codicils, and leaving everything of which the testator might die possessed, conjointly, and with sole reversion to the survivor should either child die unwedded, to Elizabeth and Anthony Truelove, the testator's beloved only daughter and his youngest son.
••••••
And so Tony the marplot made restitution. Fishing among his father's papers, he had found and appropriated the opportune parchment, to replace that burst by Master Jakes. He knew quite well what he had done; hence his dying concern to have the document returned.
The sequel is to be found in the Hugomort Memoirs. Mrs. Roger, it is related, made a handsomer provision for her scoundrel brother than he had ever designed for her; but luckily he did not live long to enjoy it. As to the drum, I have told the story as the Captain authenticated it; but the supernatural business was, of course, discredited by his relations, who attributed the discovery of the Will simply and solely to their kinsman's native shrewdness. In the marriage which followed, he was considered, as inevitably, to have disgraced himself; but he outlived all that, and quadrupled the small fortune his wife brought him, and made otherwise a big name for himself. But, from first to last, he never, to his renown, addressed his wife on paper but as his sweetest fondest lavender-girl. He had her painted by Sir Godfrey in the dress she had worn outside The Old House at Home, and to this day a bunch of lavender figures in the family crest.