Then he grew better all at once; the troop of horse artillery filed into the barrack-yard, and he hurried out to look at the men, horses, and guns, whose aspect chilled him, for they were in undress and covered with perspiration and dust. There was nothing attractive or glorious about them, and he went back to his quarters with his heart sinking once more.
Then it rose again with a jump, for his native servant met him at the door, showing his white teeth in a broad smile, to inform the sahib that the cases had come; and there they were, with each bearing his name branded thereon: “Lieutenant Richard Darrell, Bengal Horse Artillery.”
It was a loud expiration of the breath, and the lad felt better already. Those cases had come from the regimental tailor’s, a long journey across the plains, and looked very ordinary, and cumbered the room; but then there were the contents—medicine to the disconsolate lad at a time like that—a tonic which completely carried the depression away.
Chapter II. Fine Feathers make Fine Birds.
Richard Darrell was not a vain or conceited lad, but the time had arrived when he could not help feeling like a young peacock. He had gone on for a long time in his ordinary dowdy plumage, till one fine spring day the dull feathers began to drop out, and there was a flash here and a gleam there—a bit of blue, a bit of gold, a bit of purple and violet, and golden green and ruddy bronze—and he was strutting along in the sunshine in the full panoply of his gorgeous feathers, from the tuft on his head to the grand argus-eyed train which slants from the back, and is carried so gingerly that the tips may not be sullied by the dirt; all which makes him feel that he is a bird right glorious to behold.
And the day had come when, in the secrecy of his own room, Dick was about to moult from the simple uniform of the foot and preparatory days into the splendid full dress of the Bengal Horse Artillery, a commission in which was a distinction, a feather in any young soldier’s cap.
Call it vanity what you will; but it was a glorious sensation, that which came over Dick, and he would have been a strangely unnatural lad if he had not felt excited.
No wonder that he shut himself up for the first full enjoyment of the sensation alone, though perhaps there was a feeling of dread that he might be laughed at by any one who saw him for the first time, since he was painfully conscious of being very young and slight and smooth-faced, although there was a suggestion of something coming up on the narrow space just beneath his nose.