he would not earn
more than enough to pay his mess-bills and feed his horses. Not in
England certainly.... Was he to ask Lucille to leave her luxurious
home in a splendid mansion and live in a subaltern's four-roomed hut
in the plains in India? (Even if he could scrape into the Indian army
so as to live on his pay--more or less.) Grumper, her guardian, and
executor of the late Bishop's will, might have very different views
for her. Why, she might even be his heiress--he was very fond of her,
the daughter of his lifelong friend and kinsman. Fancy a pauper making
up to a very rich girl--if it came to her being that, which he
devoutly hoped it would not. It would remove her so hopelessly beyond
his reach. By the time he could make a position, and an income visible
to the naked eye, he would be grey-haired. Money was not made in the
army. Rather was it becoming no place for a poor gentleman but the
paradise of rich bounders, brainy little squits of swotters, and
commission-without-training nondescripts--thanks to the growing
insecurity of things among the army class and gentry generally. If she
were really penniless he might--as a Captain--ask her to share his
poverty--but was it likely shed be a spinster ten years hence--even if
he were a Captain so soon? Promotion is not violently rapid in the
Cavalry.... And yet he simply hated the bare thought of life without
Lucille. Better to be a gardener at Monksmead, and see her every day,
than be the Colonel of a Cavalry Corps and know her to be married to
somebody else.... Yes--he would come home one of these times from
Sandburst or his Regiment and find her engaged to some other fellow.
And what then? Well--nothing--only life would be of no further
interest. It was bound to happen. Everybody turned to look at her.
Even women gave generous praise of her beauty, grace, and sweetness.
Men raved about her, and every male creature who came near her was
obviously dpris in five minutes. The curate, plump "Holy Bill," was
well known to be fading away, slowly and beautifully, but quite
surely, on her account. Grumper's old pal, General Harringport, had
confided to Dam himself in the smoking-room, one very late night, that
since he was fifty years too old for hope of success in that direction
he'd go solitary to his lonely grave (here a very wee hiccup), damn
his eyes, so he would, unwed, unloved, uneverything. Very trag(h)ic,
but such was life, the General had declared, the one alleviati