At last he put it on, adjusted the scaled chin-strap, gave his head a shake to see if it fitted on tightly, and then turned to the glass and wished, “Oh, if they could only see me now!”
But _they_ were far away in the little Devon town, where Dr Darrell went quietly on with his daily tasks as a general practitioner, and Mrs Darrell sighed as she performed her domestic duties and counted the days that must elapse before the next mail came in, wondering whether it would bring a letter from her boy in far-away Bengal, and feeling many a motherly shiver of dread about fevers and cholera and wounds, and accidents with horses, or cannons which might go off when her boy was in front.
And the boy made all this fuss about a suit of clothes and the accoutrements just brought to his quarters from the military tailor’s.
Does any lad who reads this mentally exclaim, with an accompanying look of contempt, “What a vain, weak, conceited ass Dick Darrell must have been! Why, if under such circumstances I had received the uniform I should have behaved very differently, and treated it all as a mere matter of course.”
At seventeen? Hum! ha! perhaps so. It would be rude for me, the writer, to say, “I don’t believe you, my lad,” but one cannot help thinking something of the kind, for we all have a touch of vanity in our composition; and as for the uniform of the Bengal Horse Artillery, there was not a man who did not wear it with a feeling of pride.
Dick fell proud enough as he gazed in the glass to see a good-looking, sun-browned face surmounted by that magnificent helmet; but the lad’s head was screwed on the right way, and he was not one of those who were turned out when fools were being made. For, as he gazed at himself and admired his noble helmet and plume, his proud delight was dashed with disappointment.
“I’ve got such a little face,” he said to himself, “and it’s so smooth and boyish. I seem so young and thin. I wish I hadn’t tried so hard to get appointed to the horse brigade. I shall look ridiculous beside all those great, finely-built men. I wonder whether they’ll laugh. Well, it’s too late now. I wish I could go back home for two years to do nothing but grow.”
Dick had gone through everything, even to the gloves, and was having a fight with the desire to try everything on at once, when there was a sharp rap at his door, the handle was turned, and a manly voice shouted: