careful, matter-of-fact speech, so that in the end Sutch almost fell into the illusion that it was just the story of a stranger which Feversham was recounting merely to pass the time. He began with the Crimean night at Broad Place, and ended with the ball at Lennon House.
'I came back across Lough Swilly early that morning,' he said in conclusion, 'and travelled at once to London. Since then I have stayed in my rooms all day, listening to the bugles calling in the barrack-yard beneath my windows. At night I prowl about the streets or lie in bed waiting for the Westminster clock to sound each new quarter of an hour. On foggy nights, too, I can hear steam-sirens on the river. Do you know when the ducks start quacking in St. James's Park?' he asked with a laugh. 'At two o'clock to the minute.'
Sutch listened to the story without an interruption. But halfway through the narrative he changed his attitude, and in a significant way. Up to the moment when Harry told of his concealment of the telegram, Sutch had sat with his arms upon the table in front of him, and his eyes upon his companion. Thereafter he raised a hand to his forehead, and so remained with his face screened while the rest was told. Feversham had no doubt of the reason. Lieutenant Sutch wished to conceal the scorn he felt, and could not trust the muscles of his face. Feversham, however, mitigated nothing, but continued steadily and truthfully to the end. But even after the end was reached, Sutch did not remove his hand, nor for some little while did he speak. When he did speak, his words came upon Feversham's ears with a shock of surprise. There was no contempt in them, and though his voice shook, it shook with a great contrition.
'I am much to blame,' he said. 'I should have spoken that night at Broad Place, and I held my tongue. I shall hardly forgive myself.' The knowledge that it was Muriel Graham's son who had thus brought ruin and disgrace upon himself was uppermost in the lieutenant's mind. He felt that he had failed in the discharge of an obligation, self-imposed, no doubt, but a very real obligation none the less. 'You see, I understood,' he continued remorsefully. 'Your father, I am afraid, never would.'
'He never will,' interrupted Harry.
'No,' Sutch agreed. 'Your mother, of course, had she lived, would have seen clearly; but few women, I think, except your mother. Brute courage! Women make a god of it. That girl, for instance,'-and again Harry Feversham interrupted.
'You must not blame her. I was defrauding her into marriage.'
Sutch took his hand suddenly from his forehead.
'Suppose that you had never met her, would you still have sent in your papers?'
'I think not,' said Harry, slowly. 'I want to be fair. Disgracing my name and those dead men in the hall I think I would have risked. I could not risk disgracing her.'
And Lieutenant Sutch thumped his fist despairingly upon the table. 'If only I had spoken at Broad Place. Harry, why didn't you let me speak? I might have saved you many unnecessary years of torture. Good heavens! what a childhood you must have spent with that fear all alone with you. It makes me shiver to think of it. I might even have saved you from this last catastrophe. For I understood. I understood.'
Lieutenant Sutch saw more clearly into the dark places of Harry Feversham's mind than Harry Feversham did himself; and because he saw so clearly, he could feel no contempt. The long years of childhood, and boyhood, and youth, lived apart in Broad Place in the presence of the uncomprehending father and the relentless dead men on the walls, had done the harm. There had been no one in whom the boy could confide. The fear of cowardice had sapped incessantly at his heart. He had walked about with it; he had taken it with him to his bed. It had haunted his dreams. It had been his perpetual menacing companion. It had kept him from intimacy with his friends lest an impulsive word should betray him. Lieutenant Sutch did not wonder that in the end it had brought about this irretrievable mistake; for Lieutenant Sutch understood.
'Did you ever read 'Hamlet'?' he asked.
'Of course,' said Harry, in reply.
'Ah, but did you consider it? The same disability is clear in that character. The thing which he foresaw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and in the consequence-that he shrank from, upbraiding himself even as you have done. Yet when the moment of action comes, sharp and immediate, does he fail? No, he excels, and just by reason of that foresight. I have seen men in the Crimea, tortured by their imaginations before the fight-once the fight had begun you must search amongst the Oriental fanatics for their match. 'Am I a coward?' Do you remember the lines?
Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
There's the case in a nutshell. If only I had spoken on that night!'
One or two people passed the table on the way out. Sutch stopped and looked round the room. It was nearly empty. He glanced at his watch and saw that the hour was eleven. Some plan of action must be decided upon that night. It was not enough to hear Harry Feversham's story. There still remained the question, what was Harry Feversham, disgraced and ruined, now to do? How was he to re-create his life? How was the secret of his disgrace to be most easily concealed?
'You cannot stay in London, hiding by day, slinking about by night,' he said with a shiver. 'That's too like-' and he checked himself. Feversham, however, completed the sentence.
'That's too like Wilmington,' said he, quietly, recalling the story which his father had told so many years ago, and which he had never forgotten, even for a single day. 'But Wilmington's end will not be mine. Of that I can assure you. I shall not stay in London.'
He spoke with an air of decision. He had indeed mapped out already the plan of action concerning which Lieutenant Sutch was so disturbed. Sutch, however, was occupied with his own thoughts.
'Who knows of the feathers? How many people?' he asked. 'Give me their names.'
'Trench, Castleton, Willoughby,' began Feversham.
'All three are in Egypt. Besides, for the credit of their regiment they are likely to hold their tongues when they return. Who else?'
'Dermod Eustace and-and-Ethne.'
'They will not speak.'
'You, Durrance perhaps, and my father.'
Sutch leaned back in his chair and stared.
'Your father! You wrote to him?'
'No; I went into Surrey and told him.'
Again remorse for that occasion, recognised and not used, seized upon Lieutenant Sutch.
'Why didn't I speak that night?' he said impotently. 'A coward, and you go quietly down to Surrey and confront your father with that story to tell to him! You do not even write! You stand up and tell it to him face to face! Harry, I reckon myself as good as another when it comes to bravery, but for the life of me I could not have done that.'
'It was not-pleasant,' said Feversham, simply; and this was the only description of the interview between father and son which was vouchsafed to any one. But Lieutenant Sutch knew the father and knew the son. He could guess at all which that one adjective implied. Harry Feversham told the results of his journey into Surrey.
'My father continues my allowance. I shall need it, every penny of it-otherwise I should have taken nothing. But I am not to go home again. I did not mean to go home for a long while in any case, if at all.'
He drew his pocket-book from his breast, and took from it the four white feathers. These he laid before him on the table.
'You have kept them?' exclaimed Sutch.
'Indeed, I treasure them,' said Harry, quietly. 'That seems strange to you. To you they are the symbols of my disgrace. To me they are much more. They are my opportunities of retrieving it.' He looked about the room, separated three of the feathers, pushed them forward a little on the tablecloth, and then leaned across toward Sutch.
'What if I could compel Trench, Castleton, and Willoughby to take back from me, each in his turn, the feather he sent? I do not say that it is likely. I do not say even that it is possible. But there is a chance that it may be possible, and I must wait upon that chance. There will be few men leading active lives as these three do who will not at some moment stand in great peril and great need. To be in readiness for that moment is from now my career. All three are in Egypt. I leave for Egypt to-morrow.'
