"You mean—that it was stained——?"
How long a time elapsed between the beginning of that query and its last words Colonel Harris could not say. The uttering of the words was a terrible effort. They seemed to choke him ere they reached his lips. A buzzing and singing filled his ears so that he did not hear Sir Thomas's reply, but through a strange veil which half obscured his vision he saw his brother-in-law's slow nod of affirmation. For the first time in his life, the man who had fought against naked savages in the swamps or sands of Africa, who had heard, unflinching, the news of the death of his only son, felt himself totally unnerved. He heard as in a dream the hum of the busy city in the street below, hansoms and omnibuses rattling along the road, the cries of news vendors or hawkers, the bustle of humdrum, every-day life: and through it the ticking of his own watch in his waistcoat pocket.
He remembered afterward how strangely this had impressed him: that he could hear the ticking of his own watch. He had never been conscious before of such an acute sense of hearing. And yet the buzzing and singing in his ears went on. And he was horribly, painfully conscious of silly, trivial things—the ticking of his watch which obsessed him, the irregularity in the design of the wall paper, the broken top of the inkstand on Sir Thomas's desk.
The great, all-important fact had escaped momentarily from his consciousness. He forgot that Philip de Mountford had been murdered, and that Luke's stick, bloodstained and damning, had been found inside the railings of the park.
A cycle of time went by—an eternity, or else a few seconds. Sir Thomas Ryder pulled open the long drawer of his monumental desk.
Colonel Harris watched him doing it, and long before Sir Thomas took a certain Something from out the drawer, the colonel knew what that something would be.
A familiar thing enough. The colonel had seen it over and over again in Luke de Mountford's hand. A slender stick of rich looking, dark wood, only very little thicker at the top than at the base and with a silver band about six inches from the top. On the band the initials L. de M. daintily engraved.
"Put it away, Tom, for God's sake!" Colonel Harris hardly recognized his own voice; he had spoken more from a sudden instinct of shrinking from loathsome objects, than from any real will of his own. One glance at the stick had been enough. It was thickly coated with mud, and about six inches from the top there where the silver band showed a deep dark cleft between it and the length of the stick, there were other stains—obvious stains of blood.
Yet Colonel Harris had seen worse sights than this in Zululand and at Omdurman. But on this stained stick, that discoloured silver band, he felt it impossible to look.
"I have broken it to you, Will, as gently as I could," said Sir Thomas, not quite as placidly as before. He too was not unmoved by the distress of his old friend. "You see that I had no option, but to tell you all. You must keep out of all this, old man, and above all you must keep Louisa out of it. Take her abroad, Will, as soon as you can."