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Updated: June 29, 2025
As Sergeant-Major the latter is shown, later on, upon one desperate occasion cutting his way single-handed through a mass of men, recovering the colours of his regiment, and rescuing his wounded Captain from the very jaws of death "in a jungle of horses' hoofs and sabres" for which deed of gallantry and all but desperation, he is forthwith raised from the ranks, appearing no longer as a non-commissioned officer, but as Ensign Doubledick.
In his worst moments, he would rather turn back, and go any distance out of his way, than encounter those two handsome, dark, bright eyes. One day, when Private Richard Doubledick came out of the Black hole, where he had been passing the last eight-and-forty hours, and in which retreat he spent a good deal of his time, he was ordered to betake himself to Captain Taunton's quarters.
He moved, and disappeared, and Captain Richard Doubledick heard his steps coming quickly down own into the hall. He entered through an archway. There was a bright, sudden look upon his face, much such a look as it had worn in that fatal moment. Monsieur le Capitaine Richard Doubledick? Enchanted to receive him! A thousand apologies! The servants were all out in the air.
"If your praises," returned the Captain, "were sounded from mouth to mouth through the whole regiment, through the whole army, through the whole country, you would wish she had lived to say, with pride and joy, 'He is my son!" "Spare me, sir," said Doubledick. "She would never have heard any good of me. She would never have had any pride and joy in owning herself my mother.
"Stranger!" he repeated. The voice awoke old memories, before the days of Private Richard Doubledick. "A stranger now, but not a stranger once," it said in tones that thrilled him. "Richard, dear Richard, lost through so many years, my name " He cried out her name, "Mary," and she held him in her arms, and his head lay on her bosom. "I am not breaking a rash vow, Richard.
Doubledick, prostrated and inconsolable in his bereavement, has but two cares seemingly for the rest of his existence one to preserve a packet of hair to be given to the mother of the friend lost to him; the other, to encounter that French officer who had rallied the men under whose fire that friend had fallen.
Out of the Reader's own eyes would look the eyes of that Captain, as the Author himself describes them: "They were bright, handsome, dark eyes, what are called laughing eyes generally, and, when serious, rather steady than severe." But, he immediately went on to say, they were the only eyes then left in his narrowed world that could not be met without a sense of shame by Private Doubledick.
Trudging down to Chatham, footsore and without a farthing in his pocket, it is in this humble guise first of all that he comes before us, this Poor Traveller. Christian name, Eichard, better known as Dick, his own surname dropped upon the road, he assumes that of Doubledick being thenceforth spoken of all through the tale, even to the very end of it, by his new name, as Eichard Doubledick.
Taunton, growing old after three years though not so old as that her bright, dark eyes were dimmed and remembering that her strength had been benefited by the change resolved to go back for a year to those parts. So she went with a faithful servant, who had often carried her son in his arms; and she was to be rejoined and escorted home, at the year's end, by Captain Richard Doubledick.
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