I found the chief at his own dinner-table with an untouched glass of wine before him.
“This is a bad business,” he said, looking at me with haggard eyes. I had never quite realized before what an old man he was. His trim beard and moustache had been white for years, but he had always been a hale man up to his work—a fine soldier but not a great leader. There was a vein of indolence in Brigadier-General Thurkow's nature which had the same effect on his career as that caused by barnacles round a ship's keel. This inherent indolence was a steady drag on the man's life. Only one interest thoroughly aroused him—only one train of thought received the full gift of his mind. This one absorbing interest was his son Charlie, and it says much for Charlie Thurkow that we did not hate him.
The brigadier had lost his wife years before. All that belonged to ancient history—to the old Company days before our time. To say that he was absorbed in his son is to state the case in the mildest imaginable form. The love in this old man's heart for his reckless, happy-souled offspring was of that higher order which stops at nothing. There is a love that worketh wonders, and the same love can make a villain of an honest man.
I looked at old Thurkow, sitting white-lipped behind the decanter, and I knew that there was villainy in his upright, honest heart. He scarcely met my eyes. He moved uneasily in his chair. All through a long life this man had carried nobly the noblest name that can be given to any—the name of gentleman. No great soldier, but a man of dauntless courage. No strategist, but a leader who could be trusted with his country's honour. Upright, honourable, honest, brave—and it had come to this. It had come to his sitting shamefaced before a poor unknown sawbones—not daring to look him in the face.
His duty was plain enough. Charlie Thurkow's turn had come. Charlie Thurkow must be sent to Capoo—by his father's orders. But the old man—the soldier who had never turned his back on danger—could not do it.
We were old friends, this man and I. I owed him much. He had made my career, and I am afraid I had been his accomplice more than once. But we had never wronged any other man. Fitz had aided and abetted more than once. It had been an understood thing between Fitz and myself that the winds of our service were to be tempered to Charlie Thurkow, and I imagine we had succeeded in withholding the fact from his knowledge. Like most spoilt sons, Charlie was a little selfish, with that convenient blindness which does not perceive how much dirty work is done by others.
But we had never deceived the brigadier. He was not easily deceived in those matters which concerned his son. I knew the old man very well, and for years I had been content to sit by the hour together and talk with him of Charlie. To tell the honest truth, Master Charlie was a very ordinary young man. I take it that a solution of all that was best in five Charles Thurkows would make up one Fitz Marner.
There was something horribly pathetic in the blindness of this usually keen old man on this one point. He would sit there stiffly behind the decanter fingering his wine-glass, and make statements about Charlie which would have made me blush had that accomplishment not belonged to my past. A certain cheery impertinence which characterized Charlie was fondly set down as savoir-faire and dash. A cheap wit was held to be brilliancy and conversational finish. And somehow we had all fallen into the way of humouring the brigadier. I never told him, for instance, that his son was a very second-rate doctor and a nervous operator. I never hinted that many of the cures which had been placed to his credit were the work of Fitz—that the men had no confidence in Charlie, and that they were somewhat justified in their opinion.
“This is a bad business,” repeated the brigadier, looking hard at the despatch that lay on the table before him.
“Yes,” I answered.