"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 hardships.
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 shells
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 shell 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 shell 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 muffled talk on the other
side of the panels, and, with a shiver, 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-class, but hardly first-class 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
anticipations. 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 passed 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."