"And when I looked up again they had taken away p-p-poor Donald,"
Priscilla went on spasmodically between her tears, "and I think they killed him because he belonged to you, and--they said he had no business there! Oh, they were such horrid cruel boys, and much bigger than us. And I can"t bear that Don should have his throat cut. I was promised that he should never be sold for mutton, but only clipped for wool. And he had such a pretty throat to hang daisy-chains on, and was such a dear, dear thing."
"I don"t think they would dare to kill him," said Mr. Smith gravely; "besides, they could not lift him over the gate. I will send at once and see. In fact I will go myself!"
There was only anger against the enemy now, and no thought of chastis.e.m.e.nt of his own in the heart of Mr. Picton Smith. He was rising to reach out his hand to his riding-whip, when General Napoleon Smith, who, like most great makers of history, had taken little part in the telling of it, created a diversion which put all thought of immediate action out of his father"s head. He had been standing up, shoulders squared, arms dressed to his side, head erect, as he had seen Sergeant Steel do when he spoke to his Colonel. Once or twice he had swayed slightly, but the heart of the Buonapartes, which beat bravely in his bosom, brought him up again all standing. Nevertheless he grew even whiter and whiter, till, all in a moment, he gave a little lurch forward, checked himself, and again looked straight before him. Then he sobbed out once suddenly and helplessly, said "I couldn"t help getting beaten, father--there were too many of them!"
and fell over all of a piece on the hearthrug.
At which his father"s face grew very still and angry as he gathered the great General gently in his arms and carried him upstairs to his own little white cot.
CHAPTER VII.
THE POOR WOUNDED HUSSAR.
It is small wonder that Mr. Picton Smith was full of anger. His castle had been invaded and desecrated, his authority as proprietor defied, his children insulted and abused. As a magistrate he felt bound to take notice both of the outrage and of the theft of his property. As a father he could not easily forget the plight in which his three children had appeared before him.
But in his schemes of vengeance he reckoned without that distinguished military officer, General-Field-Marshal Napoleon Smith. For this soldier had been promoted on his bed of sickness. He had read somewhere that in his profession (as in most others) success quite often bred envy and neglect, but that to the unsuccessful, promotion and honour were sometimes awarded as a sort of consolation sweepstakes. So, having been entirely routed and plundered by the enemy, it came to Hugh John in the watches of the night--when, as he put it, "his head was hurting like fun" that it was time for him to take the final step in his own advancement.
So on the next morning he announced the change in his name and style to his army as it filed in to visit him. The army was on the whole quite agreeable.
"But I"m afraid I shall never remember all that, Mr.
General-Field-Marshal Napoleon Smith!" said Priscilla.
"Well, you"d better!" returned the wounded hero, as truculently as he could for the bandages and the sticking-plaster, in which he was swathed after the fashion of an Egyptian mummy partially unwrapped.
"What a funny smell!" piped Toady Lion. "Do field-marshals _all_ smell like that?"
"Get out, silly!" retorted the wounded officer. "Don"t you know that"s the stuff they rub on the wounded when they have fought bravely?
That"s arnicay!"
"And what do they yub on them when they don"t fight bravely?"
persisted Toady Lion, who had had enough of fighting, and who in his heart was resolved that the next time he would "yun away" as hard as he could, a state of mind not unusual after the _zip-zip_ of bullets is heard for the first time.
"First of all they catch them and kick them for being cowards. Then they shoot at them till they are dead; and may the Lord have mercy on their souls! Amen!" said General Smith, mixing things for the information and encouragement of Sir Toady Lion.
Presently the children were called out to go and play, and the wounded hero was left alone. His head ached so that he could not read. Indeed, in any case he could not, for the room was darkened with the intention of shielding his damaged eyes from the light. General Napoleon could only watch the flies buzzing round and round, and wish in vain that he had a fly-flapper at the end of a pole in order to "plop" them, as he used to do all over the house in the happy days before Janet Sheepshanks discovered what made the walls and windows so horrid with dead and dying insects.
"Yes; the squashy ones _were_ rather streaky!" had been the words in which Hugh John admitted his guilt, after the pole and leathern flapper were taken from him and burned in the washhouse fire.
Thus in the semi-darkness Hugh John lay watching the flies with the stealthy intentness of a Red Indian scalper on the trail. It was sad to lie idly in bed, so bewrapped and swathed that (as he mournfully remarked), "if one of the brutes were to settle on your nose, you could only wait for him to crawl up, and then s.n.a.t.c.h at him with your left eyelid."
Suddenly the disabled hero bethought himself of something. First, after listening intently so as to be quite sure that "the children"
were outside the bounds of the house, the wounded general raised himself on his elbow. But the effort hurt him so much that involuntarily he said "Outch!" and sank back again on the pillow.
"Crikey, but don"t I smell just!" he muttered, when, after one breath of purer air, he sank back into the pool of arnica vapour. "I suppose I"ll have to howl out for Janet. What a swot!"
"Janet!--Ja-a-a-a-net!" he shouted, and sighed a sigh of relief to find that at least there was one part of him neither bandaged nor drowned in arnica.
"Deil tak" the laddie!" cried Janet, who went about her work all day with one ear c.o.c.ked toward the chamber of her brave sick soldier; "what service is there in taking the rigging aff the hoose wi" your noise? Did ye think I was doon at Edam Cross? What do ye want, callant, that ye deafen my auld lugs like that? I never heard sic a laddie!"
But General Smith did not answer any of these questions. He well knew Janet"s tone of simulated anger when she was "putting it on."
"Go and fetch _it_!" he said darkly.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FAMILIAR SPIRIT.
Now there was a skeleton in the cupboard of General Napoleon Smith. No distinguished family can be respectable without at least one such. But that of the new field-marshal was particularly dark and disgraceful.
Very obediently Janet Sheepshanks vanished from the sick-room, and presently returned with an oblong parcel, which she handed to the hero of battles.
"Thank you," he said; "are you sure that the children are out?"
"They are sailing paper boats on the mill-dam," said Janet, going to the window to look.
Hugh John sighed a sigh. He wished he could sail boats on the mill-dam.
"I hope every boat will go down the mill lade, and get mashed in the wheel," he said pleasantly.
"For shame, Master Hugh!" replied Janet Sheepshanks, shaking her head at him, but conscious that he was exactly expressing her own mind, if she had been lying sick a-bed and had been compelled to listen to some other housekeeper jingling keys that once were hers, ransacking her sacredest repositories, and keeping in order the menials of the house.
Hugh John proceeded cautiously to unwrap his family skeleton.
Presently from the folds of tissue paper a very aged and battered "Sambo" emerged. Now a "Sambo" is a black woolly-haired negro doll of the fashion of many years ago. This specimen was dressed in simple and airy fashion in a single red sh.e.l.l jacket. As to the rest, he was bare and black from head to foot. Janet called him "that horrid object"; but, nevertheless, he was precious in the eyes of Hugh John, and therefore in hers.
Though twelve years of age, he still liked to carry on dark and covert intercourse with his ancient "Sambo." In public, indeed, he preached, in season and out of season, against the folly and wickedness of dolls. No one but a la.s.sie or a "la.s.sie-boy" would do such a thing. He laughed at Priscilla for cleaning up her doll"s kitchen once a week, and for organising afternoon tea-parties for her quiet harem. But secretly he would have liked very well to see Sambo sit at that bounteous board.
Nevertheless, he instructed Toady Lion every day with doctrine and reproof that it was "only for girls" to have dolls. And knowing well that none of his common repositories were so remote and sacred as long to escape Priscilla"s unsleeping eye, or the more stormy though fitful curiosity of Sir Toady Lion, Hugh John had been compelled to take his ancient nurse and ever faithful friend Janet into his confidence. So Sambo dwelt in the housekeeper"s pantry and had two distinct odours. One side of him smelt of paraffin, and the other of soft soap, which, to a skilled detective, might have revealed the secret of his dark abode.
But let us not do our hero an injustice.
It was not exactly as a doll that General Smith considered Sambo. By no means so, indeed. Sometimes he was a distinguished general who came to take orders from his chief, sometimes an awkward private who needed to be drilled, and then knocked spinning across the floor for inattention to orders. For, be it remembered, it was the custom in the army of Field-Marshal-General Smith for the Commander-in-Chief to drill the recruits with his own voice, and in the by no means improbable event of their proving stupid, to knock them endwise with his own august hand.
But it was as Familiar Spirit, and in the pursuit of occult divination, that General Napoleon most frequently resorted to Sambo.
He had read all he could find in legend and history concerning that gruesomely attractive goblin, clothed all in red, which the wicked Lord Soulis kept in an oaken chest in a castle not so far from his own father"s house of Windy Standard.
And Hugh John saw no reason why Sambo should not be the very one.
Spirits do not die. It is a known fact that they are fond of their former haunts. What, then, could be clearer? Sambo was evidently Lord Soulis" Red Imp risen from the dead. Was Sambo not black? The devil was black. Did Sambo not wear a red coat? Was not the demon of the oaken chest attired in flaming scarlet, when all cautiously he lifted the lid at midnight and looked wickedly out upon his master?
Yet the General was conscious that Sambo Soulis was a distinct disappointment in the part of familiar spirit. He would sit silent, with his head hanging idiotically on one side, when he was asked to reveal the deepest secrets of the future, instead of toeing the line and doing it. Nor was it recorded in the chronicles of Soulis that the original demon of the chest had had his nose "bashed flat" by his master, as Hugh John vigorously expressed the damaged appearance of his own familiar.