A Spectre of Power by Mary Noailles Murfree

POOR Callum Bane! Sober in good truth and sad as well! As soon as his guard had quitted his side, he flung himself down on the earth floor of the Indian winter-house, to which he had been conducted, with his cheek pressed to the clay. He wished that the day had come when it might cover him. Then he recoiled with the thought that this might not be far distant. Striking an officer was a most serious military offense. Even apart from its military aspect it was an insult for which only blood could atone. He knew that Lieutenant Everard could never face his world, the officers of his regiment, his mess, if they were aware that as man to man he had tamely submitted to receive a blow in the face. And since he could not challenge one of so low a station as a common soldier, he had let the matter revert to its normal aspect of insubordination, and the military law would take its course.

Yet Callum could have shed the tears that stood hot and smarting in his eyes for this sad finale to their gay young friendship. He had felt that it augured a certain magnanimity in Everard to ignore what he was in station in the knowledge of what he was by descent. Callum would never have admitted, not even in his most secret thoughts, that he found aught lacking in Jock Lesly, whose instincts rendered him a man of intrinsic worth; but this association on equal terms with Everard, a man of refined manners and gentlemanly phrasings and careful nurture, was to Callum like a return to the companionship of his earlier life, and a relief after the ruder comradeship of the boisterous common soldier and the dull routine of mechanical duty. He had taken a certain pleasure, too, in the realization that his society was the young officer's only solace in the long and dreary march with its peculiar personal isolation. But it was a pleasure fraught with much pain, -- the contemplation of this man in a position which but for an untoward fling of fate might have been his own also. The thought often lent a sharp edge to the close and intimate observation of Everard's opportunities and their development, but Callum was not of a jealous temperament, and did not visit upon the individual, even in secret meditation, the disasters which national circumstances and conditions had wrought. Despite the difference in station and habits, wealth and education, the two had grown fraternally fond of each other, and now there was that between them which could be washed out only with blood, and the officer in the direct discharge of his duty had chosen that it should be with the blood of the soldier.