“Officers don’t fight with fists.”
“Oh!” cried Frank wildly; “then that’s what he meant when he said that my mother must not know.”
Chapter Fourteen.
Frank’s Dreadful Dawn.
Frank Gowan lay awake for hours that night with his brain in a wild state of excitement. The scene at the dinner, the angry face of his father as he stood defying the baron’s friends after striking the German down, the colonel’s stern interference, and his orders for Sir Robert to go to his quarters—all troubled him in turn; then there was the idea of his father being under arrest, and the possibility of his receiving some punishment, all repeating themselves in a way which drove back every prospect of sleep, weary as the lad was; while worst of all, there was Andrew Forbes’s remark about an encounter to come, and the possible results.
It was too horrible. Suppose Sir Robert should be killed by the fierce-looking baron! Frank turned cold, and the perspiration came in drops upon his temples as he thought of his mother. He sat up in bed, feeling that he ought to go to his father and beg of him to escape anywhere so as to avoid such a terrible fate. But the next minute his thoughts came in a less confusing way, and he knew that he could not at that late hour get to his father’s side, and that even if he could his ideas were childish. His father would smile at him, and tell him that they were impossible—that no man of honour could fly so as to avoid facing his difficulties, for it would be a contemptible, cowardly act, impossible for him to commit.
“I know—I know,” groaned the boy, as he flung himself down once more. “I couldn’t have run away to escape from a fight at school. It would have been impossible. Why didn’t I learn German instead of idling about as I have! If I had I should have known what the baron said. What could it have been?”
The hours crept sluggishly by, and sleep still avoided him. Not that he wished to sleep, for he wanted to think; and he thought too much, lying gazing at his window till there was a very faint suggestion of the coming day; when, leaving his bed, he drew the curtain a little on one side, to see that the stars were growing paler, and low down in the east a soft, pearly greyness in the sky just over the black-looking trees of the Park.