V. C by David Christie Murray

General Boswell's coachman was a Scot; a grim, taciturn, brickdust-coloured fellow, who had been in his present service for a quarter of a century. He had been bred amongst horses from his boyhood, for his father had been a horsebreaker, and when he had run away from home and enlisted, he had satisfied ambition by becoming a driver of artillery. Then he had been wounded, and had turned batman for awhile. He had gone to the General as valet, but his stable love had broken out again, and he had gravitated by force of nature to the place of coachman. Polson's mind did not go back to a time when he did not remember Duncan, and to Irene he was like a fixed part of the scheme of nature. He had one defect which at this instant made him invaluable. He resented any imputation of the fact angrily, but he had been deaf as an adder for years.

There was no great privacy in a barrack square, to be sure, but it was as safe to talk within arm's length of Duncan as if he had been a stone Sphinx. Duncan was a man of rare discretion, and, though it must have been like an upheaval of the world to him to see the most constant of visitors at the General's modest little mansion, walking in shabby raiment in a barrack square with a recruit's ribbons fluttering from his cap, he saluted imperturbably as the young man came up, and then sat motionless.