Page:The-forlorn-hope-hall.djvu/21

 "Who knows?" said James Hardy, "if she had a milder climate, or proper care."

"Ah! the poor sergeant-major! He's always leading some forlorn hope!"

The sergeant-major was one of who are pensioned by a grateful country; an honourable boon—honourable alike to "those who give, and those who take." A wound in the head had rendered him, at an early period of life, unfit for future service, and he had taken up his quarters in his native village, only to watch by the dying bed of a beloved wife, who, after a few years of gradual decline, left him the fatal legacy of a child as delicate as herself.

Of all the evils that wait on poor humanity, the most sad and the most hopeless, in its progress and its result, is that disease which may be described as peculiar to our climate; acting as a dreadful counterpoise to numerous blessed privileges; the one terrible "set-off." against the plague, the pestilence, the famine, the storm, the earthquake, the wars, which so continually devastate other countries, but from which a merciful Providence has, in a great degree, exempted ours. The raging fever of the blood or the brain, brings the suspense of but a week or two, and busies the mournful watcher; all the ills that "flesh is heir to" have inseparably linked with them some sources of consolation, some motives for hope; they may be borne by the sufferer, and by those who often suffer more intensely than the patient, because of the knowledge that skill and care are mighty to save. But —lingering, wasting, "slow but sure"—when the victim has been marked out, the work is, as it were, done! The hectic cheek is as a registered death-doom from which there is no appeal!

Should I not, rather, say that,, it has been so considered:—the Despair engendered by a belief that "all hope" was to be "abandoned," having—no one can doubt it—largely aided in preventing cure.

The poor sergeant-major! strong and brave as a lion though he was,a single word had made him feeble as a child. He had defied death, when death assumed appalling shapes; but the memory of his wife's sufferings was ever a sudden chill upon his heart; he shrank, as at an adders's touch, from the thought that his child might be the inheritor of the mother's fatal dowry. Thus, the sound of a hollow cough would shake his rugged nature like an ague fit; his very life was bound up in that of his dear daughter;