He managed to put through the day, still wondering why men looked at him so strangely. Was there anything the matter with his appearance? In the afternoon, the youngest of his Lieutenants approached him kindly.
"Hadn't you better take a run down to the hospital, sir?" he asked. "You look all in."
Harry stared at him stupidly for a moment.
"Oh, I'm all right—just—er—a little stomach upset——"
The youngster saluted and disappeared and Harry went back to his quarters. There was no wonder that he looked "all in." He hadn't dared to go to the mess table since morning and he hadn't had a drink since yesterday. Tobacco had ceased to have the desired effect upon his nerves. He felt like jumping out of his skin. The thing couldn't go on. He was "all in." A short leave of absence which might give him time to pull himself together meant being gone over by a doctor—it meant showing his scarless shoulder—impossible! There was only one thing to do—to quit while there was time—before the truth came out. The more he thought of his situation, the more clearly this course seemed indicated. To disappear silently—in the night. It could be managed—and when he didn't come back, perhaps they would think that the wound in his head was troubling him again, and that he was not responsible for what he did. Or that he had met with foul play. They could think anything they chose so long as they didn't guess the truth. And they could never learn the truth, unless they examined his body for the wounds.
But they would never find him to do that if he ever got safely back of the lines. He had managed it before. He could do it again now; because he wouldn't have to trust to blind luck as he had done back of Boissière Wood. The more he thought of his plan, the more he became obsessed with it. At any rate it was an obsession which would banish the other obsession of the watching eyes. It was the dark he craved, the security and blessed immunity of darkness—darkness and solitude. He wouldn't wait for the ordeal of the morrow ... to-night!
And so, driven by all the enemies of his tortured mind, and planning with all the craft of a guilty conscience, he arranged all things to suit his purpose, passing beyond the village with the avowed purpose of visiting a friend in another unit and then losing himself in the thicket.
He traveled afoot all night, using his map and making for the railroad at St. Couvreur, and in the early morning breakfasted at a farmhouse, telling a story of having lost his way and craving a bed for a few hours' sleep. He was well provided with money and his host was hospitable. He slept a while, awoke and no one being about, searched the house for what he sought. He found it in a wardrobe upstairs—a suit of clothing which would serve—and leaving some money on a table, made off without ceremony into the thicket, covering a mile or so in a hurry, across country, when he found a disused building in which he tore off his uniform and donned the borrowed clothing, leaving his own, including its Croix de Guerre, under a truss of straw.
It grew dark again. But he did not care. In a village he managed by paying well to find a bottle of cognac. His cares slipped from him. Nothing mattered—not even the rain. His soul was set free. He paid for a good lodging and slept, warm inside and out; purchased the next day a better suit of clothing and then boldly boarded a train for Paris.
It was extraordinary how easily his liberty had been accomplished. They would look for him, of course. The M.P. would bustle about but he had given them the slip all right and they would never find him in Paris. Paris for awhile and then a new land where no questions would be asked. Curiously enough the only human being he seemed to think about, to regret, in what he had done, was Moira. His thoughts continually reverted to the expression on her face the night that Jim had surprised them in the studio. Its agony, its apprehension, so nearly depicted the very terrors that had been in his own soul. He remembered hazily too, that she had been kind to him when Quinlevin had left him there to watch her and he had finished the bottle of Irish whisky. Then, too, again in the morning she had awakened him and started him upon his way back to his post, while the expression of her face had shown that she was trying to do her duty to him even when her own heart was breaking. She had had a thought that even at this last moment he still had an opportunity to "make good." He felt that Moira, his wife in name only, would know the pain of his failure. Quinlevin would sneer, Jim would shrug, but Moira would weep and pray—in vain.