'You colour painfully, Cecil, old fellow,' said he, patting him kindly on the shoulder; 'but, if this gazette refers to you——'
'It does—it must—but why am I named Montgomerie?' exclaimed Cecil, impetuously. 'I have the name of Falconer.'
'You have been in some scrape perhaps—who among us has lived a life without pain, or who among us has been without reproach?'
'I have lived a life—latterly at least—that has had much of pain in it; and if there was any reproach, it was unmerited—all!'
'I can well believe it, and congratulate you heartily,' exclaimed Stanley, clasping his passive hand, while Cecil, still as one in a dream, muttered about the name of 'Montgomerie?'
'By Jove,' said Stanley, as a sudden light broke upon him; 'I remember your affair now, and the noise it made at mess-tables. Well, well—court-martials are not infallible—neither are the Horse Guards authorities, for the matter of that. I remember when we were lying in the Wellington Barracks, how a fellow in the Coldstreams—but have another glass of wine!'
'Oh, Stanley,' said Cecil, in a broken voice, 'you do not know—and never, never may you know—what it is, and has been, to live on day after day, under the cloud that cast a gloom on my life! To bear, with a dull aching of the heart—to exist under a cloud and unexplainable shadow, trying by some brilliant act, hoping by well-done service, to redeem my name in this——'
'Well—in this devil of a country, to which Pelham and I came, for a new sensation, in search of a spree, in fact. I know the world, Cecil—it is a cruel world, even to the strong; and the best of us get into scrapes with it.'
'But I got into none—at least, none that I can understand or explain,' replied Cecil, a little incoherently.
'Yet you were—were——'