The trumpet-blast, winding cheerily from afar off, recalled him
to the truth; summoned him sharply back from vain regrets to the facts
of daily life. It waked him as it wakes a sleeping charger; it roused
him as it rouses a wounded trooper.
He stood hearkening to the familiar music till it had died
away--spirited, yet still lingering; full of fire, yet fading softly
down the wind. He listened till the last echo ceased; then he tore the
paper that he held in strips, and let it float away, drifting down the
yellow current of the reedy river channel; and he half drew from its
scabbard the saber whose blade had been notched and dented and stained
in many midnight skirmishes and many headlong charges under the desert
suns, and looked at it as though a friend's eye gazed at him in
the gleam of the trusty steel. And his soldier-like philosophy, his
campaigner's carelessness, his habitual, easy negligence that had
sometimes been weak as water and sometimes heroic as martyrdom, came
back to him with a deeper shadow on it, that was grave with a calm,
resolute, silent courage.
"So best after all, perhaps," he said half aloud, in the solitude of the
ruined and abandoned mosque. "He cannot well come to shipwreck with such
a fair wind and such a smooth sea. And I--I am just as well here. To
ride with the Chasseurs is more exciting than to ride with the Pytchley;
and the rules of the Chambree are scarce more tedious than the rules of
a Court.
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