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Jackanapes
by
[Footnote 1: “‘The political men declare war, and generally for commercial interests; but when the nation is thus embroiled with its neighbors the soldier … draws the sword, at the command of his country…. One word as to thy comparison of military and commercial persons. What manner of men be they who have supplied the Caffres with the firearms and ammunition to maintain their savage and deplorable wars? Assuredly they are not military…. Cease then, if thou would’st be counted among the just, to vilify soldiers.”–W. Napier, Lieut. General, November, 1851.]
II
To let the Black Captain have little Miss Jessamine, however, was another matter. Her Aunt would not hear of it; and then, to crown all, it appeared that the Captain’s father did not think the young lady good enough for his son. Never was any affair more clearly brought to a conclusion. But those were “trying times;” and one moon-light night, when the Grey Goose was sound asleep upon one leg, the Green was rudely shaken under her by the thud of a horse’s feet. “Ga, ga!” said she, putting down the other leg, and running away.
By the time she returned to her place not a thing was to be seen or heard. The horse had passed like a shot. But next day, there was hurrying and skurrying and cackling at a very early hour, all about the white house with the black beams, where Miss Jessamine lived. And when the sun was so low, and the shadows so long on the grass that the Grey Goose felt ready to run away at the sight of her own neck, little Miss Jane Johnson, and her “particular friend” Clarinda, sat under the big oak-tree on the Green, and Jane pinched Clarinda’s little finger till she found that she could keep a secret, and then she told her in confidence that she had heard from Nurse and Jemima that Miss Jessamine’s niece had been a very naughty girl, and that that horrid wicked officer had come for her on his black horse, and carried her right away.
“Will she never come back?” asked Clarinda.
“Oh, no!” said Jane decidedly. “Bony never brings people back.”
“Not never no more?” sobbed Clarinda, for she was weak-minded, and could not bear to think that Bony never, never let naughty people go home again.
Next day Jane had heard more.
“He has taken her to a Green?”
“A Goose Green?” asked Clarinda.
“No. A Gretna Green. Don’t ask so many questions, child,” said Jane; who, having no more to tell, gave herself airs.
Jane was wrong on one point. Miss Jessamine’s niece did come back, and she and her husband were forgiven. The Grey Goose remembered it well, it was Michaelmastide, the Michaelmas before the Michaelmas before the Michaelmas–but ga, ga! What does the date matter? It was autumn, harvest-time, and everybody was so busy prophesying and praying about the crops, that the young couple wandered through the lanes, and got blackberries for Miss Jessamine’s celebrated crab and blackberry jam, and made guys of themselves with bryony-wreaths, and not a soul troubled his head about them, except the children, and the Postman. The children dogged the Black Captain’s footsteps (his bubble reputation as an Ogre having burst), clamoring for a ride on the black mare. And the Postman would go somewhat out of his postal way to catch the Captain’s dark eye, and show that he had not forgotten how to salute an officer.
But they were “trying times.” One afternoon the black mare was stepping gently up and down the grass, with her head at her master’s shoulder, and as many children crowded on to her silky back as if she had been an elephant in a menagerie; and the next afternoon she carried him away, sword and sabre-tache clattering war-music at her side, and the old Postman waiting for them, rigid with salutation, at the four cross roads.
War and bad times! It was a hard winter, and the big Miss Jessamine and the little Miss Jessamine (but she was Mrs. Black-Captain now), lived very economically that they might help their poorer neighbors. They neither entertained nor went into company, but the young lady always went up the village as far as the George and Dragon, for air and exercise, when the London Mail[2] came in.