For the joy of our small kingdom a delightful Fenian dropped into our midst. It was breathed among us in fatal undertones that he had actually shot a man. He was a figure of romance, if ever there was one. He went about with long boots, and an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. He had lovely dark-blue eyes, which Pauline described as Byronic, and lisped most captivatingly. He was a kind of adopted relative, and, as a special correspondent, has passed into history. He became our elder brother, and in the years to come solaced himself in camp by regarding Agnes as a lost early love. We lay about him on the grass as he told us the tales of the Wonderful Nights. Better still, he invented adventures of his own almost as alarming and enthralling. He told us that he had been to Persia, which was not true--but no matter. We believed in the Persian princess who had swung herself, at the risk of life, from the harem window to become a Christian and marry him; and the king, her royal father, who followed the lovers on horseback and was stabbed in the breast by Edmond's trusty sword. The incoherence of his reminiscences constituted their conspicuous charm. To-day we left him at Samarcand, and on the morrow found him with a fresh and more perilous love-adventure at Constantinople.
And then he would offer us a taste of adventure for ourselves: in the absence of our parents he would crowd us into the waggonette, and drive my stepfather's pet horses at a diabolical rate up by the exquisite coast-road of Sorrento, into Bray and through the Wicklow mountains, each curve and hollow and hilly bank menacing to lay us in pieces upon the landscape, and we shouting and hurrahing, in a fond notion that we were offering to the universe the spectacle of the instability of the United Kingdom. Edmond's formidable method of conspiring against the Government at that time consisted in delighting and amusing a troop of little girls!
Foolish, reckless creature, alcohol absorbed and tarnished his brilliant gifts, and his bones lie scattered at far-off Khartoum. He made of a life that might have been a heroic poem a mere trivial legend, and, with his lust for adventure and peril, he met the death he wished for, brief and glorious.