“We must wait a little, sir,” Jeremy answered confidently, but with a trace of impatience in his voice. He wanted desperately to gain time. Under his mask he felt like a man who is about to be detected in an imposture, whom the turning of the next page will bring to utter ruin. He gazed here and there over the field, wondering how long he could control his expression. Perhaps the next minute his muscles would betray him and he would burst into tears. But suddenly the seizure was relaxed and he rose with a jerk to his feet.
“Time to bring the guns in,” he exclaimed with an air of authority which surprised himself. As he cantered down the slope one voice was whispering in his ear: “Throw your hand down! Confess that you’re stuck,” and another was answering, “You can’t do that. One doesn’t do that sort of thing!”
In the gun-pit he was greeted this time with enthusiasm, and Jabez accepted delightedly the order to drop a couple of shells on Dorney and see what would happen. The first shell did not explode. The second burst clean in the middle of the village, and, though they could not see that it had discovered a concentration, it seemed to have acted as a cue for the climax of the battle. The rifle fire on the river-bank doubled in volume, and a line of black dots appeared out of Boveney, rushed forward, and was succeeded by another wave. But by the time the guns were trained in that direction the movement had ceased, and two or three shells thrown into the houses whence it had come produced no visible effect. Jeremy ordered the guns to cease firing.
On the right the noise of the combat had suddenly grown irregular and spasmodic. Jeremy was puzzled and worried, and racked his sluggish brain to guess what this might portend. Was it the moment to order Thomas Wells to advance the right wing and begin the encircling movement? He had had no messenger nor any news from the Canadian since the battle had begun. His plan now seemed to him at once wooden and fantastic, drawn up by an amateur on the map, dependent on an accommodating enemy. Should he wait a little longer until the Welsh army had shown its hand more plainly? In his agony of indecision he gripped the gun-wheel at his side, as though he had been in need of physical support. If he had been left to himself he would have collapsed on the trodden earth of the pit and let the battle and the fortunes of the world roll over him as they would. He felt himself a poor waif beaten down by circumstance, a child called on to carry an unsupportable load. Only some kind of irrational obstinacy, a sort of momentum of the spirit, kept him upright. But things, both mental and physical, began to be blurred and to lose their outlines, and anxiety shed on him a sort of intoxication.
When he moved away towards his horse he was swaying in his walk and preserving his balance with the solemn care of drunkenness.
“Fire—fire on any advance you see!” he said unsteadily to Jabez, and he thought the old gunner looked at him queerly as he touched his hat in acknowledgment of the order.
“I’ve lost control of myself,” Jeremy muttered under his breath, very seriously and carefully, as he rode back to rejoin the Speaker. “I’ve lost control of myself ... I must be calm ... I’ve lost control of myself ... I must....” Nothing more seemed to matter but this: the battle came second to the struggle between his will and his nerves. He thought hazily that by one prodigious effort he might clear his brain again and see an answer to questions which now looked insoluble. He mechanically urged his horse up the rise; but the beast, fat, lazy, and sulky, did not respond, and Jeremy forgot it. When he dismounted he saw the old man still motionless in his chair gazing across the field, while behind him were the attendants, motionless, too, as though what was going on did not at all concern them. Jeremy half glanced at these men, and thought that they whispered to one another as he passed. He went on and stood silently beside the Speaker’s chair. His lips were still moving as he muttered to himself, and some moments passed before he became aware that the old man had turned and was looking up at him dubiously.
“I’m all right,” he began; and then suddenly a bullet whistled past their heads. It was as though the shrill sound had cleared away a thickening fog.
“Come out of this, sir,” Jeremy cried violently. “They’re too close. Some of them must have got into Chalk Hill. It’s not safe for you up here.” As he cried out, clutching at the Speaker with a convulsive hand, his self-possession and his resolution returned, and in that fraction of an instant he began to survey the field again with a new eye. The reserves were behind him in the village of Slough. He would bring them up, on the right, and make his push forward while the guns fired over the heads of the attacking wing. All these thoughts passed, sharp and distinct, through his mind, while he was frantically endeavoring to drag the Speaker into safety. But the old man resisted, foolishly obstinate it seemed to Jeremy, without giving any reason for doing so. He was staring open-mouthed towards the right flank of the army towards Stoke Park, and his face was contorted, crumbling, ravaged by the effects of astonishment and horror. It was a grotesque face, not that of an old man but of a man incredibly ancient: it might have been a thousand years old.
Jeremy ceased the effort to pull him away and followed with his eyes the direction of the extended, helplessly shaking finger. There, on the right, all firing had stopped, and the last clouds of smoke were drifting heavily to the north, leaving the fields quite clear. It took Jeremy a moment to realize what it was that he saw. Then he understood that, between the railway and the woods, the opposing forces had left their shelter in ditches and behind hedges and were mixing together, running, it seemed, in groups across the intervening meadows to unite. And among the moving crowds little rags of white danced and fluttered up and down.