The Forlorn Hope: A Novel (Vol. 1 of 2) — John Shaqi
The Forlorn Hope: A Novel (Vol. 1 of 2)Yates, Edmund
General
The Forlorn Hope: A Novel (Vol. 1 of 2)
Yates, Edmund
Fiction
The individual thus objurgated by the Colonel is highly thought of by
Sir Bernard Burke, and known to Debrett as John Ulick Delatribe,
Marquis of Towcester, eldest son of the Duke of Plymouth, who has just
been gazetted to the Blues, after some years at Eton and eighteen
months' wandering on the Continent. Though he is barely twenty, a more
depraved young person is rarely to be found; his tutor, the Rev.
Merton Sandford, who devoted the last few years of his life to him,
and who has retired to his well-earned preferment of the largest
living in the duke's gift, lifts up his eyes and shakes his head when,
over a quiet bottle of claret with an old college friend, he speaks of
Lord Towcester. The boy's reputation had preceded him to London; a
story from the Viennese Embassy, of which he was the hero, came across
in a private note to Blatherwick of the F.O., enclosed in the official
white sheep-skin despatch-bag, and before night was discussed in half
the smoking-rooms in Pall-Mall. The youngsters laughed at the anecdote
and envied its hero; but older men looked grave; and Charley
Jefferson, standing in the middle of a knot of men on the steps of the
Rag, said he was deuced glad that the lad wasn't coming into his
regiment; for if that story were true, the service would be none the
better for such an accession to it, as, if it were his business, he
should take an early opportunity of pointing out; and the listeners,
who knew that Colonel Jefferson was the best soldier and the strictest
martinet throughout the household cavalry, and who marked the
expression of his face as he pulled his moustache and strode away
after delivering his dictum, thought that perhaps it was better for
Towcester that his lot was cast in a different corps. You would not
have thought there was much harm in the boy, though, from his
appearance. Look at him now, as he bends over Lady Fairfax, until his
face almost touches her soft glossy hair. It is a round, boyish,
ingenuous face, though the eyes are rather deeply set, and there is
something cruel about the mouth which the thin downy moustache utterly
fails to hide. As Lady Fairfax turns her large dark eyes on her
interlocutor, and looks up at him, her brilliant white teeth flashing
in an irrepressible smile, the Colonel's growls become more frequent,
and he tugs at his moustache more savagely than ever. Why? If you know
any thing about these people, you will remember that ten years ago,
when Emily Fairfax was Emily Ponsonby, and lived with her old aunt,
Lady Mary, in the dull rambling old house at Kew, Charley Jefferson, a
penniless cornet in what were then the 13th Light Dragoons, was
quartered at Hounslow; danced, rode, and flirted with her; carried off
a lock of her hair when the regiment was ordered to India; and far
away up country, in utter ignorance of all that was happening in
England, used to gaze at it and kiss it, long after Miss Ponsonby had
married old Lord Fairfax, and had become the reigning belle of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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