Misery, when all the blood glowed in him under some petty tyrant's jibe,
and he had to stand immovable, holding his peace. Misery, when hunger
and thirst of long marches tortured him, and his soul sickened at the
half-raw offal, and the water thick with dust, and stained with blood,
which the men round him seized so ravenously. Misery, when the dreary
dawn broke, only to usher in a day of mechanical maneuvers, of petty
tyrannies, of barren, burdensome hours in the exercise-ground, of convoy
duty in the burning sun-glare, and under the heat of harness; and the
weary night fell with the din and uproar, and the villainous blasphemy
and befouled merriment of the riotous barracks, that denied even the
peace and oblivion of sleep. They were years of infinite wretchedness
oftentimes, only relieved by the loyalty and devotion of the man who had
followed him into his exile. But, however wretched, they never wrung
a single regret or lament from Cecil. He had come out to this life;
he took it as it was. As, having lost the title to command, the high
breeding in him made him render implicitly the mute obedience which
was the first duty of his present position, so it made him accept, from
first to last, without a sign of complaint or of impatience, the altered
fortunes of his career. The hardest-trained, lowest-born, longest-inured
soldier in the Zephyr ranks did not bear himself with more apparent
content and more absolute fortitude than did the man who had used to
think it a cruelty to ride with his troop from Windsor to Wormwood
Scrubs, and had never taken the trouble to load his own gun any shooting
season, or to draw off his own coat any evening.
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