Part 7 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+ver 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 nutsh.e.l.l. If only I had spoken on that night!”

One or two people pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ver. ”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 a.s.sure 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.