Chapter XXXI: Deseret

New men--and women--new manners and customs, to say nothing of costumes.

The accession of the young Queen cut a deep cleft between the old times and the new. But human nature at the root is very much the same in all ages, no matter what its outward appearance and behaviour.

The wild excesses of the Regency days had given place to the ordered decorum of a Maiden Court. The young Queen's happy choice of a consort confirmed it in its new and healthy courses. But, placid to the point of dullness though the surface of the stream appeared, down below there were still the old rocks and shoals, and now and again resultant eddies and bubbles reminded the older folk of the doings of other days.

Now--as at all times, but undoubtedly more so than during the two preceding reigns--to those who believed in study and hard work as a means of personal advancement, the way was open. And now still, as at all times, but especially in those latter times, to those who craved the pleasures of the table, whether covered with a white cloth or a green, or simply bare mahogany, the way was no less open to those who knew.

Jack, down at Chatham, was much too busy with his books, and such practical application of them as could be had there, to give a thought to the more frivolous side of things.

Jim, cast into what was to him the whirl of London--though his grandfather would have viewed it scornfully over a depreciatory pinch of snuff, with something of the feelings of an old lion turned out to amuse himself in a kitchen garden--Jim found this new free life of the metropolis very delightful and somewhat intoxicating.

Harrow had been a vast enlargement on Carne. London was a mightier enfranchisement than Harrow.

But first of all he was a soldier, very proud of his particular branch of the service, and bent on fitting himself for it to the best of his limited powers.

In the first flush of his boyish enthusiasm he worked hard. His horsemanship was above the average; his swordsmanship, by dint of application and constant practice, excellent; and he slogged away at his drill and a knowledge of the handling of men as he had never slogged at anything before.

He bade fair to become a very efficient cavalryman, and meanwhile found life good and enjoyed himself exceedingly.

His wide-eyed appreciation of this expansive new life appealed to his fellows as does the unbounded delight of a pretty country cousin to a dweller in the metropolis. They found fresh flavour in things through his enjoyment of them, and laid themselves out to open his eyes still wider.

His enthusiasm for their common profession was in itself a novelty. They decided that all work and no play would, in his case, result in but a dull boy, as it would have done in their own if they had given it the chance; and so, whenever opportunity offered--and they made it their business to see that it was not lacking--they carried him off among the eddies and whirlpools of society and insisted on his enjoying himself.

But, indeed, no great insistence was necessary. Jim found life supremely delightful, and savoured it with all the headlong vehemence of his nature.

He had never dreamed there were so many good fellows in the world, such multitudes of pretty girls, such endless excitements of so many different kinds. Life was good; and Jack, deep in his studies at Chatham, And Charles Eager, busy among his simple folk up north, alike wagged their heads doubtfully over the hasty scrawls which reached them from time to time with exuberant but sketchy accounts of his doings, always winding up with promises of fuller details which never arrived.

Gracie enjoyed his enjoyment of life to the full, and wept with amusement over his attempts at description of the people he met, and never suffered any slightest feeling of loss in him, for he wound up every letter to her with the statement that, on his honour, he had not yet met a girl who could hold a candle to her, and that he did not believe there was one in the whole world, and that if there was he had no wish to meet her, and so he remained--hers most devotedly, hers most gratefully, hers only, hers till death, and so on, and so on--Jim.

As to Sir Denzil, who received a dutiful letter now and again and got all Eager's news in addition, he only smiled over all these carryings-on, and said the lad must have his fling, and it sounded all very tame and flat compared with the doings of his young days. And If the boy came a cropper in money matters he would be inclined to look upon it as the clearest indication they had yet had as to his birth, for there never had been a genuine Carron who had not made the money fly when he got the chance. None of which subversive doctrine did Eager transmit to the exuberant one in London, lest it should but serve to grease the wheels and quicken the pace towards catastrophe; and he earnestly begged, and solemnly warned, Sir Denzil to keep his deplorable sentiments to himself, lest worse should come of it.

And to Charles Eager, deeply as he detested the thought of war, it seemed that, from the purely personal point of view, as regarded Jim and his fellows in like case, a taste of the strenuous life of camp and field would be more wholesome than this frivolous whirl of London.

Jim, in his joyous flights, met many a strange adventure.

He had gone one night with some of his fellows--Charlie Denham, second lieutenant in his own regiment, and some others--to a house in St. James's Street, where Chance still flourished vigorously in spite of