Cecil winced as though he had been struck.
“You know the Ten Commandments, Cecil,” said his grandmother in her slow fashion. “You have heard them often enough in church, I’m sure, and you were taught them as a little boy. ‘Have mercy upon us, O Lord, and incline our hearts to keep this law.’ I’m sure you’ve said those words many a time, with all the rest of us. And if there’s one Commandment more plainly worded than another, surely it is: ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ I could understand it, if you’d never been taught right from wrong. But you have.”
She stressed her inconclusive conclusion with mournful perplexity.
“Well, well, I suppose we none of us think much about church unless we’re inside one,” said Sir Thomas simply. “We don’t want to bring religion into the thing, you can talk about that with your grandmother or your mother later on. But there are certain things that a decent feller doesn’t do, you know—things that put him beyond the pale. Cheating at cards, and that sort of thing, for instance. There have been fellers who’ve blown their brains out for less than what you’ve done, I can tell you.”
The doctor made an irrepressible movement.
“A coward’s form of reparation,” said he. His detestation of generalities was as intense as is that of most precisians in thought, but he was intent only upon Cecil Aviolet, and his possible reactions to the peculiar form of penalization that he was being made to undergo.
“I hope,” said Cecil in a low voice, “that someone else will blow my brains out for me, when I’m sent to fight.”
A sound, just short of open scoffing, came from Ford.
“Heroics are terribly easy, my dear boy. You’ve not gone yet, and, in any case, it’s a pretty nearly certain thing that the fighting will be all over long before you’ve been taught how to hold yourself on parade. You lads are all the same—prating of Death and Glory before you’ve learnt how to hold a rifle.”
Cecil turned his head and glanced at Ford. There was neither resentment nor surprise in his look, but cowed, bewildered misery, like that of a tortured animal.