"Yes," Piers said. "I know."
He spoke heavily; all the youth seemed to have gone out of him. After a moment, as Crowther waited he turned with a gesture of hopelessness and faced him. "I'm like a dog on a chain," he said. "I drag this way and that, and eat my heart out for freedom. But it's all no use. I've got to live and die on it." He clenched his hands in sudden passionate rebellion. "But I'm damned if I'm going to tell anybody! It's hell enough without that!"
Crowther's hand closed slowly and very steadily on his shoulder. "It's just hell that I want to save you from, sonny," he said. "It may seem the hardest part to you now, but if you shirk it you'll go further in still. I know very well what I'm saying. And it's just because you're man enough to feel this thing and not a brute beast to forget it, that it's hurt you so infernally all these years. But it'll hurt you worse, lad, it'll wring your very soul, if you keep it a secret between you and the woman you love. It's a big temptation, but—if I know you—you're going to stand up to it. She'll think the better of you for it in the end. But it'll be a shadow over both your lives if you don't. And there are some things that even a woman might find it hard to forgive."
He stopped. Piers' eyes were hard and fixed. He scarcely looked as if he heard. From below them there arose the murmur of the moonlit sea. Close at hand the trees in a garden stirred mysteriously as though they moved in their sleep. But Piers made neither sound nor movement. He stood like an image of stone.
Again the silence began to lengthen intolerably, to stretch out into a desert of emptiness, to become fateful with a bitterness too poignant to be uttered. Crowther said no more. He had had his say. He waited with unswerving patience for the result.
Piers spoke at last, and there was a queer note of humour in his
voice,—humour that was tragic. "So I've got to go back again, have I?
Back to my valley of dry bones! There's no climbing the heights for me,
Crowther, never will be. Somehow or other, I am always tumbled back."
"You're wrong," Crowther said, with quiet decision. "It's the only way out. Take it like a man, and you'll win through! Shirk it and—well, sonny, no shirker ever yet got anything worth having out of life. You know that as well as I do."
Piers straightened himself with a brief laugh. "Yes, I know that much.
But—I sometimes ask myself if I'm any better than a shirker. Life is
such a beastly farce so far as I am concerned. I never do anything.
There's never anything to do."
"Oh, rats!" said Crowther, and smiled. "There are not many fellows who do half as much. If to-day is a fair sample of your life, I'm damned if it's an easy one."
"I'm used to it," said Piers quickly. "You know, I'm awfully fond of my grandfather—always have been. We suit each other marvellously well—in some ways." He paused a moment, then, with an effort, "I never told him either, Crowther. I never told a soul."