“You have incurred a fearful responsibility, Mr. Bergwyn,” he began. “Major Kireef has told me the facts. You have taken an unwarrantable course in attempting to thwart the army’s purpose, and have used means which are inexcusable.”
“They were the only means I could find to use.”
“You have compromised yourself and all with you; you have opposed the soldiers when carrying out the army’s orders, and have subjected them to gross ill-treatment, in order that you might obtain disguises for your purpose. And in doing this, you have committed acts for which you must have known you would have to answer. I can see neither excuse nor palliation for such conduct.”
I made no reply to that tirade. I judged that he had not taken the trouble to come at such a time merely to lecture me on the heinousness of my conduct; and as I cared nothing for what he said, and only for what he meant to do, I let him talk.
“You yourself see there is no answer,” he continued; and went on to condemn at considerable length with much detail the enormity of my offences, until I began to be perplexed as to his motive. He couldn’t have made the thing worse had he been going to order my instant execution.
I guessed at length, however, that his real object was to make me appreciate the extreme difficulty of the task I had set him to get me out of the mess. But the harangue had a very different effect upon Gatrina. The blacker he made my conduct appear and the more vividly he painted the danger in which I stood, the greater was her manifest agitation; and when he declared with very stern and significant deliberation that at such times men had lost their lives who had done less than I, I resolved to try and stop him.
“It will save time, Colonel Petrosch, if you are going to order me to be shot, to have it done at once,” I said. “I am not in the least ashamed of a single thing I have done, except that I blundered and failed.”
“Do I understand you to mean, Mr. Bergwyn,” he cried, very sternly, “that you would have me report to my colleagues that in the face of all I have said you take pride in having set their authority at defiance?”
A hot retort rose to my lips, but just before it passed, I caught his meaning and paused to consider my reply.
“No, I don’t mean that. I recognise their authority fully. In so far as my actions have involved an apparent defiance of that authority, I must, of course, regret them.”