Under Wellington's Command: A Tale of the Peninsular War by G. A. Henty (best pdf ebook reader txt) 📗

the captain begged him to have a pad of leather put on to the bottom of his leg, to save the decks. O'Grady is a philosopher, and I shall try to follow his example."

"Why should one bother oneself, Miss O'Connor, when bothering won't help? When the war is over, I shall buy Tim Doolan, my soldier servant, out. He is a vile, drunken villain; but I understand him, and he understands me, and he blubbered so, when he carried me off the field, that I had to promise him that, if a French bullet did not carry him off, I would send for him when the war was over.

"'You know you can't do without me, yer honour,' the scoundrel said.

"'I can do better without you than with you, Tim,' says I. 'Ye are always getting me into trouble, with your drunken ways. Ye would have been flogged a dozen times, if I hadn't screened you. Take up your musket and join your regiment. You rascal, you are smelling of drink now, and divil a drop, except water, is there in me flask.'

"'I did it for your own good,' says he. 'Ye know that spirits always heats your blood, and water would be the best for you, when the fighting began; so I just sacrificed meself.

"'For,' says I to meself, 'if ye get fighting a little wild, Tim, it don't matter a bit; but the captain will have to keep cool, so it is best that you should drink up the spirits, and fill the flask up with water to quench his thirst.'"

"'Be off, ye black villain,' I said, 'or I will strike you.'

"'You will never be able to do without me, Captain,' says he, picking up his musket; and with that he trudged away and, for aught I know, he never came out of the battle alive."

The others laughed.

"They were always quarrelling, Mary," Terence said. "But I agree with Tim that his master will find it very hard to do without him, especially about one o'clock in the morning."

"I am ashamed of you, Terence," O'Grady said, earnestly; "taking away me character, when I have come down here as your guest."

"It is too bad, O'Grady," Major O'Connor said, "but you know Terence was always conspicuous for his want of respect towards his elders."

"He was that same, O'Connor. I did me best for the boy, but there are some on whom education and example are clean thrown away."

"You are looking pale, cousin Terence," Mary said.

"Am I? My leg is hurting me a bit. Ireland is a great country, but its by-roads are not the best in the world, and this jolting shakes me up a bit."

"How stupid I was not to think of it!" she said and, rising in her seat, told Cassidy to drive at a walk.

They were now only half a mile from the house.

"You will hardly know the old place again, Terence," his father said.

"And a very good thing too, father, for a more tumble-down old shanty I never was in."

"It was the abode of our race, Terence."

"Well, then, it says mighty little for our race, father."

"Ah! But it did not fall into the state you saw it in till my father died, a year after I got my commission."

"I won't blame them, then; but, at any rate, I am glad I am coming home to a house and not to a ruin.

"Ah, that is more like a home!" he said, as a turn of the road brought them in sight of the building. "You have done wonders, Mary. That is a house fit for any Irish gentleman to live in."

"It has been altered so that it can be added to, Terence; but, at any rate, it is comfortable. As it was before, it made one feel rheumatic to look at it."

On arriving at the house, Terence refused all assistance.

"I am going to be independent, as far as I can," he said and, slipping down from the seat into the bottom of the chaise, he was able to put his foot on to the ground and, by the aid of his crutches, to get out and enter the house unaided.

"That is the old parlour, I think," he said, glancing into one of the rooms.

"Yes. It is your father's snuggery, now. There is scarcely any alteration there, and he can mess about as he likes with his guns and fishing tackle and swords.

"This is the dining room, now."

And she led the way along a wide passage to the new part of the house, where a bright fire was blazing in a handsome and well-furnished room. An invalid's chair had been placed by the fire, and opposite it was a large, cosy armchair.

"That is for your use, Major O'Grady," she said. "Now, Terence, you are to lay yourself up in that chair. I will bring a small table to your side, and put your dinner there."

"I will lie down until the dinner is ready, Mary. But I am perfectly capable of sitting at the table. I did so the last week before leaving the ship."

"You shall do that tomorrow. You may say what you like, but I can see that you are very tired and, for today, you will take it easy. I am going to be your nurse, and I can assure you that you will have to obey orders. You have been in independent command quite long enough."

"It is of no use, Terence; you must do as you are told," his father said. "The only way to get on with this young woman is to let her have her own way. I have given up opposing her, long ago; and you will have to do the same."

Terence did not find it unpleasant to be nursed and looked after, and even to obey peremptory orders.

A month later, Mary came into the room quietly, one afternoon, when he was sitting and looking into the fire; as his father and O'Grady had driven over to Killnally. Absorbed in his own thoughts, he did not hear her enter.

Thinking that he was asleep, she paused at the door. A moment later she heard a deep sigh. She came forward at once.

"What are you sighing about, Terence? Your leg is not hurting you, is it?"

"No, dear, it has pretty well given up hurting me."

"What were you sighing about, then?"

He was silent for a minute, and then said:

"Well you see, one cannot help sighing a little at the thought that one is laid up, a useless man, when one is scarce twenty-one."

"You have done your work, Terence. You have made a name for yourself, when others are just leaving college and thinking of choosing a profession. You have done more, in five years, than most men achieve in all their lifetime.

"This is the first time I have heard you grumble. I know it is hard, but what has specially upset you, today?"

"I suppose I am a little out of sorts," he said. "I was thinking, perhaps, how different it might have been, if it hadn't been for that unlucky shell."

"You mean that you might have gone on to Burgos, and fallen in the assault there; or shared in that dreadful retreat to the frontier again."

"No. I was not thinking of Spain, nor even of the army. I was thinking of here."

"But you said, over and over again, Terence, that you will be able to ride, and drive, and get about like other people, in time."

"Yes, dear. In many respects it will be the same, but not in one respect."

Then he broke off.

"I am an ungrateful brute. I have everything to make me happy--a comfortable home, a good father, and a dear little sister to nurse me."

"What did I tell you, sir," she said, after a pause, "when I said goodbye to you at Coimbra? That I would rather be your cousin. You were quite hurt, and I said that you were a silly boy, and would understand better, some day."

"I have understood, since," he said, "and was glad that you were not my sister; but now, you see, things have altogether changed, and I must be content with sistership."

The girl looked in the fire, and then said, in a low voice:

"Why, Terence?"

"You know why," he said. "I have had no one to think of but you, for the last four years. Your letters were the great pleasures of my life. I thought over and over again of those last words of yours, and I had some hope that, when I came back, I might say to you:

"'Dear Mary, I am grateful, indeed, that you are my cousin, and not my sister. A sister is a very dear relation, but there is one dearer still.'

"Don't be afraid, dear; I am not going to say so now. Of course, that is over, and I hope that I shall come, in time, to be content to think of you as a sister."

"You are very foolish, Terence," she said, almost with a laugh, "as foolish as you were at Coimbra. Do you think that I should have said what I did, then, if I had not meant it? Did you not save me, at the risk of your life, from what would have been worse than death? Have you not been my hero, ever since? Have you not been the centre of our thoughts here, the great topic of our conversation? Have not your father and I been as proud as peacocks, when we read of your rapid promotion, and the notices of your gallant conduct? And do you think that it would make any difference to me, if you had come back with both your legs and arms shot off?

"No, dear. I am just as dissatisfied with the relationship you propose as I was three years ago, and it must be either cousin or--" and she stopped.

She was standing up beside him, now.

"Or wife," he said, taking up her hand. "Is it possible you mean wife?"

Her face was a sufficient answer, and he drew her down to him.

"You silly boy!" she said, five minutes afterwards. "Of course, I thought of it all along. I never made any secret of it to your father. I told him that our escape was like a fairy tale, and that it must have the same ending: 'and they married, and lived happy ever after.' He would never have let me have my way with the house, had I not confided in him. He said that I could spend my money as I pleased, on myself, but that not one penny should be laid out on his house; and I was obliged to tell him.

"I am afraid I blushed furiously, as I did so, but I had to say:

"'Don't you see, Uncle?'--of course, I always called him uncle, from the first, though he is only a cousin--'I have quite made up my mind that it will be my house, some day; and the money may just as well be laid out on it now, to make it comfortable; instead of waiting till that time comes.'"

"What did my father say?"

"Oh, he said all sorts of nonsense, just the sort of thing that you Irishmen always do say! That he had hoped, perhaps, it might be so, from the moment he got your letter; and that the moment he saw me he felt sure that it would be so, for it must be, if you had any eyes in your head."

When Major O'Connor came home he was greatly pleased, but he took the news as a matter of course.

"Faith," he said, "I would have disinherited the boy, if he had been such a fool as not to appreciate you, Mary."

O'Grady was loud in his congratulations.

"It is just like your luck, Terence," he said. "Luck is everything. Here am I, a battered hero, who has lost an arm and a foot in the service of me country, and divil a girl has thrown herself upon me neck. Here are you, a mere gossoon, fifteen years my junior in the service, mentioned a score of times in despatches, promoted over my head; and now you have won one of the prettiest creatures in Ireland and, what is a good deal more to the point, though you may not think of it at present, with a handsome fortune of her own. In faith, there is no understanding the ways of Providence."

A week afterwards the whole party went up to Dublin, as Terence and O'Grady had to go before a medical board. A fortnight later a notice appeared, in the Gazette, that Lieutenant Colonel Terence O'Connor had retired from the service, on half pay, with the rank of colonel.

The marriage did not take place for another six months, by which time Terence had thrown away his crutches and had taken to an artificial leg--so well constructed that, were it not