Suddenly, Trevelyan flung up his arms.
"God! Why couldn't I have gone! I wouldn't have been a loss to anyone—God!" he choked, and fell back, his face buried in the pillow.
The assistant left the room and the surgeon went to the window. Once or twice he glanced at the great, motionless figure on the bed.
"Jove! that's genuine enough! Guess I must have been mistaken about the shot!"
VII.
After awhile the surgeon turned from the window, came back to Trevelyan and stooping over him, listened to his breathing, and felt his pulse. Then he went away.
Trevelyan lifted his head slowly and looked about him. The room was deserted and he sat up in bed again, grasping its sides. It was as if everything was slipping away from him, and the agony in his brain had crept down to his feet, engulfing and making as nothing the throbbing in his shoulder, or the heat of the growing fever.
He stared at the shadows cast by the flickering lamp on the wall opposite. The vision of the trooper's ghastly face had faded for the time, but intenser visions appeared and shifted and reappeared again. First there came the shadow face of his mother, who had been dead for years, and then that of his father—his father who had led that charge at Inkerman. The face seemed turned away. Then there came the face of the aunt who had mothered him so long, and then the shadowy forms haltered as the fever grew and the wall became a glowing blank. Later a face appeared, Stewart's, against the fiery glow. It looked like a dead face—like the dead, ghastly face of the trooper; and then there came Cary's face. It haunted him in a hundred different guises. It came to him as the child-face, as he had known it years ago down at the sea coast fort; and it faded and came again as the face touched with time's maturity, as he had seen it when she first came to England; it shifted again and reappeared as it had been that day of the storm, when he and she had been housed in the old Scottish home together, and the tenderness and the fear were on it; it came again to him as he had seen it last before the receding transport and the oncoming mist had stolen it away from him. And it came once more as he had never seen it—horror-stricken, wide-eyed, and pale—as he would see it, when she looked at him again, knowing the truth.
"Allegiance—which is absolute." So she had written, and so she would say to him. And he had betrayed his allegiance, and he had lied, and he had turned coward, and had sent Stewart off to die!
His fingers gripped at the edges of the bed and he stared fascinated at that face of Cary on the wall—Cary as he had never seen her. It remained fixed. It would not fade.