The Four Feathers | Page 4

He was broken, of course, and
slunk back to London. Every house was closed to him; he dropped out
of his circle like a lead bullet you let slip out of your hand into the sea.
The very women in Piccadilly spat if he spoke to them; and he blew his
brains out in a back bedroom off the Haymarket. Curious that, eh? He
hadn't the pluck to face the bullets when his name was at stake, yet he
could blow his own brains out afterwards."
Lieutenant Sutch chanced to look at the clock as the story came to an
end. It was now a quarter to one. Harry Feversham had still a quarter of
an hour's furlough, and that quarter of an hour was occupied by a
retired surgeon-general with a great wagging beard, who sat nearly
opposite to the boy.
"I can tell you an incident still more curious," he said. "The man in this
case had never been under fire before, but he was of my own profession.
Life and death were part of his business. Nor was he really in any
particular danger. The affair happened during a hill campaign in India.
We were encamped in a valley, and a few Pathans used to lie out on the
hillside at night and take long shots into the camp. A bullet ripped
through the canvas of the hospital tent--that was all. The surgeon crept
out to his own quarters, and his orderly discovered him half-an-hour
afterward lying in his blood stone-dead."
"Hit?" exclaimed the major.
"Not a bit of it," said the surgeon. "He had quietly opened his
instrument-case in the dark, taken out a lancet, and severed his femoral

artery. Sheer panic, do you see, at the whistle of a bullet."
Even upon these men, case-hardened to horrors, the incident related in
its bald simplicity wrought its effect. From some there broke a
half-uttered exclamation of disbelief; others moved restlessly in their
chairs with a sort of physical discomfort, because a man had sunk so far
below humanity. Here an officer gulped his wine, there a second shook
his shoulders as though to shake the knowledge off as a dog shakes
water. There was only one in all that company who sat perfectly still in
the silence which followed upon the story. That one was the boy, Harry
Feversham.
He sat with his hands now clenched upon his knees and leaning
forward a little across the table toward the surgeon, his cheeks white as
paper, his eyes burning, and burning with ferocity. He had the look of a
dangerous animal in the trap. His body was gathered, his muscles taut.
Sutch had a fear that the lad meant to leap across the table and strike
with all his strength in the savagery of despair. He had indeed reached
out a restraining hand when General Feversham's matter-of-fact voice
intervened, and the boy's attitude suddenly relaxed.
"Queer incomprehensible things happen. Here are two of them. You
can only say they are the truth and pray God you may forget 'em. But
you can't explain, for you can't understand."
Sutch was moved to lay his hand upon Harry's shoulder.
"Can you?" he asked, and regretted the question almost before it was
spoken. But it was spoken, and Harry's eyes turned swiftly toward
Sutch, and rested upon his face, not, however, with any betrayal of guilt,
but quietly, inscrutably. Nor did he answer the question, although it
was answered in a fashion by General Feversham.
"Harry understand!" exclaimed the general, with a snort of indignation.
"How should he? He's a Feversham."
The question, which Harry's glance had mutely put before, Sutch in the
same mute way repeated. "Are you blind?" his eyes asked of General

Feversham. Never had he heard an untruth so demonstrably untrue. A
mere look at the father and the son proved it so. Harry Feversham wore
his father's name, but he had his mother's dark and haunted eyes, his
mother's breadth of forehead, his mother's delicacy of profile, his
mother's imagination. It needed perhaps a stranger to recognise the
truth. The father had been so long familiar with his son's aspect that it
had no significance to his mind.
"Look at the clock, Harry."
The hour's furlough had run out. Harry rose from his chair, and drew a
breath.
"Good night, sir," he said, and walked to the door.
The servants had long since gone to bed; and, as Harry opened the door,
the hall gaped black like the mouth of night. For a second or two the
boy hesitated upon the threshold, and seemed almost to shrink back
into the lighted room as though in that dark void peril awaited him.
And peril did--the peril of his thoughts.
He stepped out of the room and closed the