“I can’t say, sir. Alcohol itself fathers that lapse very often. And the thing itself is rather too common to lay it overconfidently at any one father’s door.”
“Yes,” Agnew agreed sadly. “Did he say anything?”
“Tony? To me, about what had happened at his home, sir? Not one word—on the way back to Harrow, or after. But—I saw him suffer—then and after. Once a lot of fellows were talking—were talking about the thousand and one things that boys at school do—and got on to what ought to be forgiven, and what, if anything, ought not—no matter how repented and all that. Crespin did not join in and, of course, I didn’t. I was fagging, making their toast and so on. But after they’d gone, he said to me that there was one thing he’d kill for. And when I said, ‘What?’ he said he’d kill any one, no matter who it was, that ever said or thought a rough word of his mother. And there was murder in his eyes, sir. I thought he meant it as a warning to me. I think it was. He needn’t have done it. I took an oath to myself that Monday morning on the train, going back to school, that no word of it’d ever pass me, and that I’d do my best to forget it. No word ever has before, and I’ve told it now for him.”
“Ever see her again?” Agnew asked, as he again marched off stiffly to the open window.
“Twice,” Traherne told him. “She came to Harrow twice after that before Tony went to Sandhurst. If Tony had treated her like a queen on her other visits, I can’t describe how he treated her those two times. I couldn’t help feeling that he was trying to apologize to her—to make up to her for it. Colonel Agnew, Antony Crespin loved his mother with a love very few women ever get—a love that ought to make up to a woman for almost anything.”
Colonel Agnew, with his back to Traherne, drew out his handkerchief, and—sneezed.
CHAPTER XI
Dr. Traherne waited for Agnew to speak.
“I almost wish,” the older man said slowly, after a time, “that his wife knew—what you’ve just told me.”
Traherne nodded. “But we can’t tell her, sir. And Major Crespin never will. And probably no one in India knows but you and me and him—perhaps no one else living now, knows or remembers. But his Colonel knows now, sir,” he added rising and going to the man at the window.