"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 nutshell. If only I had spoken on that night!"
One or two people passed 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 shiver. "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 assure 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."