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.  He suffered acutely many times; suffered till he was heart-sick of his life; but he never sought to escape the slightest penalty or hardship, and not even Rake ever heard from him a single syllable of irritation or of self-pity.

Moreover, the war-fire woke in him.

In one shape or another active service was almost always his lot, and hot, severe campaigning was his first introduction to military life in Algeria.  The latent instinct in him—­the instinct that had flashed out during his lazy, fashionable calm in all moments of danger, in all days of keen sport; the instinct that had made him fling himself into the duello with the French boar, and made him mutter to Forest King, “Kill me if you like, but don’t fail me!”—­was the instinct of the born soldier.  In peril, in battle, in reckless bravery, in the rush of the charge and the excitement of the surprise, in the near presence of death, and in the chase of a foe through a hot African night when both were armed to the teeth, and one or both must fall when the grapple came—­in all these that old instinct, aroused and unloosed, made him content; made him think that the life which brought them was worth the living.

There had always been in him a reckless dare-devilry, which had slept under the serene, effeminate insouciance of his careless temper and his pampered habits.  It had full rein now, and made him, as the army affirmed, one of the most intrepid, victorious, and chivalrous lascars of its fiery ranks.  Fate had flung him off his couch of down into the tempest of war; into the sternness of life spent ever on the border of the grave; ruled over by an iron code, requiring at every step self-negation, fortitude, submission, courage, patience; the self-control which should take the uttermost provocation from those in command without even a look of reprisal, and the courageous recklessness which should meet death and deal death; which should be as the eagle to swoop, as the lion to rend.  And he was not found wanting in it.

He was too thoroughbred to attempt to claim a superiority that fortune no longer conferred on him; to seek to obtain a deference that he had no longer the position to demand.  He was too quiet, too courteous, too calmly listless; he had too easy a grace, too soft a voice, and too many gentleman habits, for them.  But when they found that he could fight like a Zouave, ride like an Arab, and bear shot-wounds or desert-thirst as though he were of bronze, it grew a delight to them to see of what granite and steel this dainty patrician was made; and they loved him with a rough, ardent, dog-like love, when they found that his last crust, in a long march, would always be divided:  that the most desperate service of danger was always volunteered for by him; that no severity of personal chastisement ever made him clear himself of a false charge at a comrade’s expense; and that all his pay went in giving a veteran a stoup of wine, or a sick conscript a tempting meal, or a prisoner of Beylick some food through the grating, scaled too at risk of life and limb.