CHAPTER XXIX.
THE COURT-MARTIAL.
It has been the privilege of one or two famous Gardes du Corps to be a law unto themselves. The Guard of Maäsau shares that privilege. The inquiry or rather trial was to be held within closed doors, and by the express order of the colonel-in-chief all the officers, including those junior to the prisoner, were to be present. And every officer present on such occasions had the right to vote. The procedure was simple. When the witnesses had been examined the accused was invited to speak in his own defence, then the senior officer summed up and lastly the officers recorded their votes.
Rallywood's offence had outraged the fundamental principle of the Guard, the blind self-sacrificing obedience which in trivial as in vital matters demanded the merging of the private individual with hopes and conscience of his own into the body corporate of the Guard. With the single exception of Unziar, no man present was acquainted with the details of Rallywood's crime. They knew only that he had grossly disobeyed orders, and not only that, but had disobeyed them for the furtherance of private ambition. So the charge against him intimated. It was understood that the accusation had been lodged by Count Sagan in consequence of information received by him, and the court-martial at once assembled to deal with the matter.
The original prejudice against Rallywood as a foreigner and an interloper was revived, with all the more bitterness because the men had in the interval come to respect if not to like him. They resented the deception they believed to have been practised upon them with the rancour of those who find they have not only been played upon but made tools of. Rallywood had gained his position among them by false pretences to serve his own ends—gained it to betray them.
But more than this, he had dishonoured the Guard, brought the first blot of treachery upon its long and unblemished traditions. Hereditary instincts inbred and powerful were arrayed against him in the hearts of six of his judges; in the seventh, Count Sagan, he had to encounter the ill-blood of a profoundly vindictive nature whose purposes he had crossed and baffled, and who harboured towards him a savage personal hatred.
It must be understood that so far no hint of the arrangement with England had been allowed to transpire. The engagement to be given by Maäsau in return for the promised British loan and moral support was in train for completion, but the final signature was not to take place till that afternoon. Meantime the Chancellor kept a still tongue in his head and waited upon events, knowing that when all transpired the responsibility could be shifted on to the shoulders of the Duke. It was a risky game, but M. Selpdorf had played many another—and won them all. At the same time he had no intention of putting out his hand to save Rallywood, whose disappearance from the scheme of earthly affairs would remove an awkward cause of disagreement from the range of his own family circle. Yet it must be admitted that M. Selpdorf really regretted that the necessities of the case required the sacrifice of the Englishman, for whom his former abstract liking remained entirely unaltered.
The doors of the great mess-room were closed, for within them the court-martial was in progress. At the central table seven men with the marks of power upon them were gathered. Above them the torn banners of the regiment hung in the red gloom of the dome, but about the men themselves the gray-white light of a winter day fell from the riverward windows. It seemed to dull even the red glow of the hangings, that cold light, which lent to the faces of those assembled a strange effect of pallor.
It is a common experience that silence in a place associated in the mind with voices and the movement and sounds of life has a weird and impressive effect. Enter an empty church and you are chilled; hear a will read in the room which you connect with laughter and the genial routine of everyday events, and the uncanny quiet, falling away from the single voice, benumbs you. Thus in the mess-room, where music and laughter and the hubbub of men's talking usually resounded, the unwonted stillness, broken only by the piercing wail of the tsa, struck coldly and heavily upon the senses.