Two hours later Trevelyan received his orders.
"Very well, sir," "I understand, sir," "Yes, sir," he had replied, and after he had left, the Colonel nodded and smiled grimly at the young engineer's self-control in the face of an order that might mean death.
Trevelyan walked blindly back to his quarters. There was a queer singing in his head and beating at his temples. He stumbled across the threshold and he sat down on the edge of his bunk and pressed his hands hard against his temples to still that mad, incessant beating. His eyes remained wide and fixed at one spot on the floor.
It had come at last; the test and the opportunity for which he had blindly, passionately prayed as a child; for which he had striven and worked as a boy; it had come and it had found him unprepared to meet it!
He thought of the ride—alone, except for a trooper—and on the spot of the floor, he pictured the blackness and the danger, as a man brings forth a likeness on a dark plate. The picture came and went, and went and came again on the spot on the floor and he sprang up with a choked cry. To go out into that stillness and darkness; to face the blackness of death—
They might get back his body—what good would his body do anyone—and they might get it home, but they probably wouldn't. The utter silence in that blackness of death—so great that her voice could never reach him!
He put his foot over the possessed spot on the floor, and his leg shook as he did so. He saw his leg tremble, and he knew it and he did not care! He had turned coward, and—he did not care! What was courage when her voice could not reach him in the blackness of death? He might live through it, and she might care more for him, for it, but the chances were two-thirds for death.
The man they had brought in that morning! What a ghastly sight he had been! The eyes had refused to remain closed and they had stared at him in all the horror of dead sightlessness. And the lips had been drawn back from the teeth and had stiffened so, in the agony of the death struggle. God! And they would bring him back like that—like that—like that!
What vision did those staring eyes see but unutterable, unpenetrable blackness? What speech could that grinning mouth ever form again? What sound could pierce the seal laid on the hearing?
They had told him that the trooper had a sweetheart waiting for him somewhere off in Ireland. Well, even love could not break the bonds of death, and make him speak and hear and caress her as of old.