No Hero | Page 7

reader's
opinion by such impression as I have already succeeded in creating in
his or her mind. Let me add one word, or two, while yet I may. A
baron's daughter (though you might have known Catherine some time
without knowing that), she had nevertheless married for mere love as a
very young girl, and had been left a widow before the birth of her boy. I
never knew her husband, though we were distant kin, nor yet herself
during the long years through which she mourned him. Catherine Evers
was beginning to recover her interest in the world when first we met;
but she never returned to that identical fold of society in which she had
been born and bred. It was, of course, despite her own performances, a
fold to which the worldly wolf was no stranger; and her trouble had
turned a light-hearted little lady into an eager, intellectual, speculative
being, with a sort of shame for her former estate, and an undoubted
reactionary dislike of dominion and of petty pomp. Of her own high
folk one neither saw nor heard a thing; her friends were the powerful
preachers of most denominations, and one or two only painted or wrote;
for she had been greatly exercised about religion, and somewhat
solaced by the arts.
Of her charm for me, a lad with a sneaking regard for the pen, even
when I buckled on the sword, I need not be too analytical. No doubt
about her kindly interest, in the first instance, in so morbid a curiosity
as a subaltern who cared for books and was prepared to extend his
gracious patronage to pictures. This subaltern had only too much
money, and if the truth be known, only too little honest interest in the
career into which he had allowed himself to drift. An early stage of that
career brought him up to London, where family pressure drove him on
a day to Elm Park Gardens. The rest is easily conceived. Here was a
woman, still young, though some years older than oneself; attractive,
intellectual, amusing, the soul of sympathy, at once a spiritual influence
and the best companion in the world; and for a time, at least, she had
taken a perhaps imprudent interest in a lad whom she so greatly
interested herself, on so many and various accounts. Must you marvel

that the young fool mistook the interest, on both sides, for a more
intense feeling, of which he for one had no experience at the time, and
that he fell by his mistake at a ridiculously early stage of his career?
It is, I grant, more surprising to find the same young man playing Harry
Esmond (at due distance) to the same Lady Castlewood after years in
India and a taste of two wars. But Catherine's room was Catherine's
room, a very haunt of the higher sirens, charged with noble promptings
and forgotten influences and impossible vows. And you will please
bear in mind that as yet I am but setting forth, from this rarefied
atmosphere, upon my invidious mission.
CHAPTER II
THE THEATRE OF WAR
It is a far cry to Zermatt at the best of times, and that is not the middle
of August. The annual rush was at its height, the trains crowded, the
heat of them overpowering. I chose to sit up all night in my corner of
an ordinary compartment, as a lesser evil than the wagon-lit in which
you cannot sit up at all. In the morning one was in Switzerland, with a
black collar, a rusty chin, and a countenance in keeping with its
appointments. It was not as though the night had been beguiled for me
by such considerations as are only proper to the devout pilgrim in his
lady's service.
On the contrary, and to tell the honest truth, I found it quite impossible
to sustain such a serious view of the very special service to which I was
foresworn: the more I thought of it, in one sense, the less in another,
until my only chance was to go forward with grim humour in the spirit
of impersonal curiosity which that attitude induces. In a word, and the
cant one which yet happens to express my state of mind to a nicety, I
had already "weakened" on the whole business which I had been in
such a foolish hurry to undertake, though not for one reactionary
moment upon her for whom I had undertaken it. I was still entirely
eager to "do her behest in pleasure or in pain"; but this particular
enterprise I was beginning to view apart from its inspiration, on its

intrinsic demerits, and the more clearly I saw it in its own light, the less
pleasure did the prospect afford me.
A young