Part 10 (1/2)

THE COWARD.

I.

”Geoffrey,” said General Faversham, ”look at the clock!”

The hands of the clock made the acutest of angles. It was close upon midnight, and ever since nine the boy had sat at the dinner-table listening. He had not spoken a word, indeed had barely once stirred in the three hours, but had sat turning a white and fascinated face upon speaker after speaker. At his father's warning he waked with a shock from his absorption, and reluctantly stood up.

”Must I go, father?” he asked.

The General's three guests intervened in a chorus. The conversation was clear gain for the lad, they declared,--a first taste of powder which might stand him in good stead at a future time. So Geoffrey was allowed furlough from his bed for another half-hour, and with his face supported between his hands he continued to listen at the table.

The flames of the candles were more and more blurred with a haze of tobacco smoke, the room became intolerably hot, the level of the wine grew steadily lower in the decanters, and the boy's face took a strained, quivering look, his pallour increased, his dark, wide-opened eyes seemed preternaturally large.

The stories were all of that terrible winter in the Crimea, now ten years past, and a fresh story was always in the telling before its predecessor was ended. For each of the four men had borne his share of that winter's wounds and privations. It was still a reality rather than a memory to them; they could feel, even in this hot summer evening and round this dinner-table, the chill of its snows, and the pinch of famine. Yet their recollections were not all of hards.h.i.+ps.

The Major told how the subalterns, of whom he had then been one, had cheerily played cards in the trenches three hundred yards from the Malakoff. One of the party was always told off to watch for sh.e.l.ls from the fort's guns. If a black speck was seen in the midst of the cannon smoke, then the sentinel shouted, and a rush was made for safety, for the sh.e.l.l was coming their way. At night the burning fuse could be seen like a rocket in the air; so long as it span and flew, the card-players were safe, but the moment it became stationary above their heads it was time to run, for the sh.e.l.l was falling upon them.

The guns of the Malakoff were not the rifled guns of a later decade.

When the Major had finished, the General again looked at the clock, and Geoffrey said good-night.

He stood outside the door listening to the m.u.f.fled talk on the other side of the panels, and, with a s.h.i.+ver, lighted his candle, and held it aloft in the dark and silent hall. There was not one man's portrait upon the walls which did not glow with the colours of a uniform,--and there were the portraits of many men. Father and son the Faversham's had been soldiers from the very birth of the family. Father and son,--no steinkirks and plumed hats, no shakos and swallow tails, no frogged coats and no high stocks. They looked down upon the boy as though summoning him to the like service. No distinction in uniform could obscure their resemblance to each other: that stood out with a remarkable clearness. The Favershams were men of one stamp,--lean-faced, hard as iron--they lacked the elasticity of steel--, rugged in feature; confident in expression, men with firm, level mouths but rather narrow at the forehead, men of resolution and courage, no doubt; but hardly conspicuous for intellect, men without nerves or subtlety, fighting-men of the first-cla.s.s, but hardly first-cla.s.s soldiers. Some of their faces, indeed, revealed an actual stupidity. The boy, however, saw none of their defects. To him they were one and all portentous and terrible; and he had an air of one standing before his judges and pleading mutely for forgiveness. The candle shook in his hand.

These Crimean knights, as his father termed them, were the worst of torturers to Geoffrey Faversham. He sat horribly thralled, so long as he was allowed; he crept afterwards to bed and lay there shuddering.

For his mother, a lady who some twenty years before had shone at the Court of Saxe-Coburg, as much by the refinement of her intellect as by the beauty of her person, had bequeathed to him a very burdensome gift of imagination. It was visible in his face, marking him off unmistakably from his father, and from the study portraits in the hall. He had the capacity to foresee possibilities, and he could not but exercise that capacity. A hint was enough for the boy. Straightway he had a vivid picture before his mind, and as he listened to the men at the dinner-table, their rough clipped words set him down in the midst of their battlefields, he heard the drone of bullets, he quivered expecting the shock of a charge. But of all the Crimean nights this had been fraught with the most torments.

His father had told a story with a lowered voice, and in his usual jerky way. But the gap was easy to fill up.

”A Captain! Yes, and he bore one of the best names in all England.

It seemed incredible, and mere camp rumour. But the rumour grew with every fight he was engaged in. At the battle of Alma the thing was proved. He was acting as galloper to his General. I believe, upon my soul, that the General chose him for this duty so that the man might set himself right. He was bidden to ride with a message a quarter of a mile, and that quarter of a mile was bullet-swept. There were enough men looking on to have given him a reputation, had he dared and come through. But he did not dare, he refused, and was sent under arrest to his tent. He was court-martialled and broken. He dropped out of his circle like a plummet of lead; the very women in Piccadilly spat if he spoke to them. He blew his brains out three years later in a back bedroom off the Haymarket. Explain that if you can. Turns tail, and says 'I daren't!' But you, can you explain it? You can only say it's the truth, and shrug your shoulders. Queer, incomprehensible things happen. There's one of them.”

Geoffrey, however, understood only too well. He was familiar with many phases of warfare of which General Faversham took little account, such as, for instance, the strain and suspense of the hours between the parading of the troops and the first crack of a rifle. He took that story with him up the great staircase, past the portraits to his bed.

He fell asleep only in the grey of the morning, and then only to dream of a crisis in some hard-fought battle, when, through his cowardice, a necessary movement was delayed, his country worsted, and those dead men in the hall brought to irretrievable shame. Geoffrey's power to foresee in one flash all the perils to be encountered, the hazards to be run, had taught him the hideous possibility of cowardice. He was now confronted with the hideous fact. He could not afterwards clear his mind of the memory of that evening.

He grew up with it; he looked upon himself as a born coward, and all the time he knew that he was destined for the army. He could not have avoided his destiny without an explanation, and he could not explain.

But what he could do, he did. He hunted deliberately, hoping that familiarity with danger would overcome the vividness of his antic.i.p.ations. But those imagined hours before the beginnings of battles had their exact counterpart in the moments of waiting while the covers were drawn. At such times he had a map of the country-side before his eyes, with every ditch and fence and pit underlined and marked dangerous; and though he rode straight when the hounds were off, he rode straight with a fluttering heart. Thus he spent his youth. He pa.s.sed into Woolwich and out of it with high honours; he went to India with battery, and returned home on a two years'

furlough. He had not been home more than a week when his father broke one morning into his bedroom in a great excitement--

”Geoff,” he cried, ”guess the news to-day!”

Geoffrey sat up in his bed:--”Your manner, Sir, tells me the news. War is declared.”

”Between France and Germany.”

Geoffrey said slowly:--

”My mother, Sir, was of Germany.”

”So we can wish that country all success.”