The Four Feathers | Page 6

think he laughed. Harry took the card and repeated
his thanks. Then he went upstairs to bed.
Lieutenant Sutch waited uncomfortably in the hall until the light of the
candle had diminished and disappeared. Something was amiss, he was
very sure. There were words which he should have spoken to the boy,
but he had not known how to set about the task. He returned to the
dining room, and with a feeling that he was almost repairing his
omissions, he filled his glass and called for silence.

"Gentlemen," he said, "this is June 15th," and there was great applause
and much rapping on the table. "It is the anniversary of our attack upon
the Redan. It is also Harry Feversham's birthday. For us, our work is
done. I ask you to drink the health of one of the youngsters who are
ousting us. His work lies before him. The traditions of the Feversham
family are very well known to us. May Harry Feversham carry them on!
May he add distinction to a distinguished name!"
At once all that company was on its feet.
"Harry Feversham!"
The name was shouted with so hearty a good-will that the glasses on
the table rang. "Harry Feversham, Harry Feversham," the cry was
repeated and repeated, while old General Feversham sat in his chair
with a face aflush with pride. And a boy a minute afterward in a room
high up in the house heard the muffled words of a chorus--
For he's a jolly good fellow, For he's a jolly good fellow, For he's a
jolly good fellow, And so say all of us,
and believed the guests upon this Crimean night were drinking his
father's health. He turned over in his bed and lay shivering. He saw in
his mind a broken officer slinking at night in the shadows of the
London streets. He pushed back the flap of a tent and stooped over a
man lying stone-dead in his blood, with an open lancet clinched in his
right hand. And he saw that the face of the broken officer and the face
of the dead surgeon were one--and that one face, the face of Harry
Feversham.

CHAPTER II
CAPTAIN TRENCH AND A TELEGRAM
Thirteen years later, and in the same month of June, Harry Feversham's
health was drunk again, but after a quieter fashion and in a smaller

company. The company was gathered in a room high up in a shapeless
block of buildings which frowns like a fortress above Westminster. A
stranger crossing St. James's Park southwards, over the suspension
bridge, at night, who chanced to lift his eyes and see suddenly the tiers
of lighted windows towering above him to so precipitous a height,
might be brought to a stop with the fancy that here in the heart of
London was a mountain and the gnomes at work. Upon the tenth floor
of this building Harry had taken a flat during his year's furlough from
his regiment in India; and it was in the dining room of this flat that the
simple ceremony took place. The room was furnished in a dark and
restful fashion; and since the chill of the weather belied the calendar, a
comfortable fire blazed in the hearth. A bay window, over which the
blinds had not been lowered, commanded London.
There were four men smoking about the dinner-table. Harry Feversham
was unchanged, except for a fair moustache, which contrasted with his
dark hair, and the natural consequences of growth. He was now a man
of middle height, long-limbed, and well-knit like an athlete, but his
features had not altered since that night when they had been so closely
scrutinised by Lieutenant Sutch. Of his companions two were
brother-officers on leave in England, like himself, whom he had that
afternoon picked up at his club,--Captain Trench, a small man, growing
bald, with a small, sharp, resourceful face and black eyes of a
remarkable activity, and Lieutenant Willoughby, an officer of quite a
different stamp. A round forehead, a thick snub nose, and a pair of
vacant and protruding eyes gave to him an aspect of invincible
stupidity. He spoke but seldom, and never to the point, but rather to
some point long forgotten which he had since been laboriously
revolving in his mind; and he continually twisted a moustache, of
which the ends curled up toward his eyes with a ridiculous ferocity,--a
man whom one would dismiss from mind as of no consequence upon a
first thought, and take again into one's consideration upon a second. For
he was born stubborn as well as stupid; and the harm which his
stupidity might do, his stubbornness would hinder him from admitting.
He was not a man to be persuaded; having few ideas, he clung to them.
It