The story moved his own London world when it was told in the columns of the great daily papers. Poor Harry! He had lived like a fool, but he had ended his life like a hero.
For ended it surely was; he might rally, he might even live through a few months, a few years, but he had been shot and slashed like a desert animal slaughtered and maimed by a hundred hands; he would never breathe without pain, never move without help, never stand upright again. So the surgeon who was with him telegraphed to his father; and the Governor at Capetown to the Government at home.
And for ten minutes, in guardroom, in clubroom, in drawing-room, his old friends were sorry and spoke of him in a hushed voice. Only the Colonial Office was annoyed, because it had been pledged to protect the Loomalis and had broken its word, and failed them in their need; and the fact that one English gentleman had stood by these poor Africans to the last disagreeably emphasized by contrast the bad faith and pusillanimity of England as an empire.
The Duchess of Otterbourne, like the Colonial Office, was much shocked and displeased. It was odious to have all London talking of Harry; it would, she knew, make people remember his relations with herself.
When a woman has ordered a man out of her life she prefers him to efface himself from other people’s lives. Harry had effaced himself and gone docily into oblivion, which was quite right, but that now from that nether world he should have sent a clarion blast echoing over the seas, as if he were one of Wagner’s heroes, was distinctly irritating. Do what she would, too, she could often not sleep for thinking of him with his body hacked to pieces and his blood staining the yellow grass. To be sure she could take chloral, but she was very prudent as regarded health, and she knew that chloral has two faces, one beneficent and the other malevolent, and is not a deity to be too frequently invoked.
Meantime he was coming home; every day the vessel drew nearer and nearer, whether it brought him living or brought him dead. It was too dreadfully irritating when she had been relieved from the incubus of William Massarene to have this revival of an old scandal.
If his mother had said a word to her eldest son about their old friend, he would have laid his head on her lap and sobbed his heart out, and asked her why she had sent him to Africa. But she said not a word. He saw her always going out here, there, and everywhere, beautifully dressed and gay and bright; and Jack hated her for her heartlessness and avoided her, which was easy to do, for she seldom asked for him. Boo she had frequently with her, and his little brothers were sometimes taken in her carriage; but for Jack she scarcely ever inquired. He was left to the care of Mr. Lane. Once she told him to go as a page to a cousin’s wedding, the daughter of Mrs. Cecil Courcy, and Jack bluntly refused.
“I won’t be dressed up like a boy in a pantomime,” he said to Boo, who brought him the order; and he was steadfast in his refusal, for how could he know that Harry might not be already dead?
“You’d get a diamond pin,” said Boo.
“What do I want with pins?” replied Jack with scorn. “I won’t be made a guy of; I’d sooner be a real page and help to clean the plate.”