This was the day of Captain Con’s crossing the Rubicon between the secret of his happiness and a Parliamentary career.

CHAPTER XVIII

CAPTAIN CON’S LETTER

Women may be able to tell you why the nursing of a military invalid awakens tenderer anxieties in their bosoms than those called forth by the drab civilian.  If we are under sentence of death we are all of us pathetic of course; but stretched upon the debateable couch of sickness we are not so touching as the coloured coat:  it has the distinction belonging to colour.  It smites a deeper nerve, or more than one; and this, too, where there is no imaginary subjection to the charms of military glory, in minds to which the game of war is lurid as the plumes of the arch-slayer.

Jane Mattock assisting Mrs. Adister O’Donnell to restore Captain Philip was very singularly affected, like a person shut off on a sudden from her former theories and feelings.  Theoretically she despised the soldier’s work as much as she shrank abhorrently from bloodshed.  She regarded him and his trappings as an ensign of our old barbarism, and could peruse platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm.  The soldier personally, she was accustomed to consider an inferior intelligence:  a sort of schoolboy when young, and schoolmaster when mature a visibly limited creature, not a member of our broader world.  Without dismissing any of these views she found them put aside for the reception of others of an opposite character; and in her soul she would have ascribed it to her cares of nursing that she had become thoughtful, doubtful, hopeful, even prayerful, surcharged with zeal, to help to save a good sword for the country.  If in a world still barbarous we must have soldiers, here was one whom it would be grievous to lose.  He had fallen for the country; and there was a moving story of how he had fallen.  She inclined to think more highly of him for having courted exposure on a miserable frontier war where but a poor sheaf of glory could be gathered.  And he seemed to estimate his professional duties apart from an aim at the laurels.  A conception of the possibility of a man’s being both a soldier and morally a hero edged its way into her understanding.  It stood edgeways within, desirous of avoiding a challenge to show every feature.

The cares of nursing were Jane’s almost undividedly, except for the aid she had from her friend Grace Barrow and from Miss Colesworth.  Mrs. Adister O’Donnell was a nurse in name only.  ’She’ll be seen by Philip like as if she were a nightmare apparition of his undertaker’s wraith,’ Captain Con said to Jane, when recommending his cousin to her charitable nature, after he had taken lodgings at a farmhouse near Mrs. Lackstraw’s model farm Woodside on the hills.  ‘Barring the dress,’ as he added, some such impression of her frigid mournfulness might have struck a recumbent invalid.  Jane