He took her hand and he said no word, but suddenly all the misery of the last year slipped back, as it were, into a dream. She could not define her thoughts then, and they left no memory to recall afterwards. She seemed to forget that this man had been dead and was living, she only knew that her hand was within his. Jem looked round to the others present, his attitude a judgment in itself, his face, in its fierce repose, a verdict.
Mark Ruthine had gently pushed Seymour Michael into the room and was closing the door behind them. Mrs. Agar did not see the General, who was half-concealed by his junior officer. She could not take her eyes from Jem's face.
“This is fortunate,” he said; and the sound of his voice was music in Dora's ears. “This is fortunate, every one seems to be here.”
He paused for a moment, as if at a loss, and drew his brown hand down over his moustache. Perhaps he felt remotely that his position was strong and almost dramatic; but that, being a simple, honest Englishman, he was unable to turn it to account.
He turned towards Seymour Michael, who stood behind, uncomfortably conscious of Mark Ruthine at his heels. It was not in Jem to make an effective scene. Englishmen are so. We do not make our lives superficially picturesque by apostrophising the shade of a dead mother. Jem gave way to the natural instinct of a soldier by nature and training. A clear statement of the facts, and a short, sharp judgment.
“This man,” he said, laying his hand on the General's shoulder, and bringing him forward, “has been brought here by us to explain something.”
White-lipped, breathless, in a ghastly silence Anna Agar and Seymour Michael stared at each other over the dainty tea-table, across a gulf of misused years, through the tangle of two unfaithful lives.
Then Jem Agar began his story, addressing himself to Dora, then, and until the end.
“I was not with Stevenor,” he said, “when his force was surprised and annihilated. I had been sent on through an enemy's country into a position which no man had the right to ask another to hold with the force allowed me. This man sent me. All his life has he been seeking glory at the risk of other men's lives. After the disaster he came to me and relieved my little force; but he proposed to me a scheme of exploration, which I have carried through. But even now I shall not get the credit; he will have that. It was a low, scurrilous thing to do; for he was my commanding officer, and I could not say No.”
“I gave you the option,” blurted out Michael sullenly.