As for Fred, no sooner was he alone than he began to regret the pledge his precipitancy had carried him into. What were the nature of the advances he was to make--how to open the negociation, in a quarter the habits and prejudices of which he was utterly ignorant of, he had not the most vague conception; and, as he sought his chamber, he had half persuaded himself to the conviction, that the safest, and the most honest course, after all, would be to avow in the morning that he had overstated his diplomatic abilities, and fairly abandon a task, to which he saw himself inadequate. These were his last sleeping thoughts; for his waking resolves, we must enter upon another chapter.
If Frederick Travers went to sleep at night with very considerable doubts, as to the practicability of his plans regarding the O'Donoghues, his waking thoughts were very far from re-assuring him, and he heartily wished he had never engaged in the enterprize. Now, however, his honour was in a manner pledged; he had spoken so confidently of success, there was nothing for it but to go forward, and endeavour, as as well he might, to redeem his promise.
At the time we speak of, military men never for a moment divested themselves of the emblems of their career; the uniform and the sword, the plumed hat and the high boot, formed a costume not to be worn at certain periods and laid aside at others, but was their daily dress, varying merely in the degree of full or half dress, as the occasion warranted. There was no affectation of the happy freedom of “Mufti”--no pretended enjoyment of the incognito of a black coat and round hat; on the contrary, the king's livery was borne with a pride which, erring on the opposite side, suggested a degree of assumption and conscious importance in the wearer, which more or less separated the soldier from the civilian in bearing, and gradually originated a feeling of soreness on the part of the more humbly clad citizen towards the more favoured order.
A certain haughty, overbearing tone of manner, was then popular in the army, and particularly in those regiments which boasted of an unalloyed nobility among the officers. If they assumed an air of superiority to the rest of the service, so much the more did they look down upon the mere civilian, whom they considered as belonging to a very subordinate class and order of mankind. To mark the sense of this difference of condition in a hundred little ways, and by a hundred petty observances, was part of a military education, and became a more unerring test of the soldier in society, than even the cockade and the cross-belt. To suppose that such a line of conduct should not have inspired those against whom it was directed with a feeling of counter hatred, would be to disbelieve in human nature. The civilian, indeed, reciprocated with dislike the soldier's insolence, and, in their estrangement from each other, the breach grew gradually wider--the dominant tyranny of the one, and the base-born vulgarity of the other, being themes each loved to dilate upon without ceasing.