The look was too familiar a one to Sutch. He had seen it on the faces of recruits during their first experience of a battle too often for him to misunderstand it. And one picture in particular rose before his mind,—an advancing square at Inkermann, and a tall big soldier rushing forward from the line in the eagerness of his attack, and then stopping suddenly as though he suddenly understood that he was alone, and had to meet alone the charge of a mounted Cossack. Sutch remembered very clearly the fatal wavering glance which the big soldier had thrown backward toward his companions,—a glance accompanied by a queer sickly smile. He remembered too, with equal vividness, its consequence. For though the soldier carried a loaded musket and a bayonet locked to the muzzle, he had without an effort of self-defence received the Cossack's lance-thrust in his throat.
Sutch glanced hurriedly about the table, afraid that General Feversham, or that some one of his guests, should have remarked the same look and the same smile upon Harry's face. But no one had eyes for the lad; each visitor was waiting too eagerly for an opportunity to tell a story of his own. Sutch drew a breath of relief and turned to Harry. But the boy was sitting with his elbows on the cloth and his head propped between his hands, lost to the glare of the room and its glitter of silver, constructing again out of the swift succession of anecdotes a world of cries and wounds, and maddened riderless chargers and men writhing in a fog of cannon-smoke. The curtest, least graphic description of the biting days and nights in the trenches set the lad shivering. Even his face grew pinched, as though the iron frost of that winter was actually eating into his bones. Sutch touched him lightly on the elbow.
"You renew those days for me," said he. "Though the heat is dripping down the windows, I feel the chill of the Crimea."
Harry roused himself from his absorption.
"The stories renew them," said he.
"No. It is you listening to the stories."
And before Harry could reply, General Feversham's voice broke sharply in from the head of the table:—
"Harry, look at the clock!"
At once all eyes were turned upon the lad. The hands of the clock made the acutest of angles. It was close upon midnight; and from eight, without so much as a word or a question, he had sat at the dinner-table listening. Yet even now he rose with reluctance.
"Must I go, father?" he asked, and the general's guests intervened in a chorus. The conversation was clear gain to the lad, a first taste of powder which might stand him in good stead afterwards.