Saxham's square face was ashen, but the Chief's eyes were elsewhere.
"And you told him——?"
"I told him, that whilst physical disease and deformity are transmissible from the unhealthy parents to their unlucky offspring, no sensible Christian regarded the theory of inherited vice or crime, as anything but the most pernicious lie that the devil ever invented to spread as a net for the catching of bodies and souls. That seemed to buck him up!"
"I do not doubt it!" said Saxham. He breathed more freely, and his face had regained its natural hue.
"I reminded him," went on the Chief, "that our Army and our Fleet are indebted for thousands of the finest men, morally and physically speaking, to Reformatories and Industrial Schools and Homes. 'Think of the character borne by Barnardo's boys,' I told him, 'and grind the scorpion lie to pulp under your boot-heel, whenever and wherever you find it cocking up its damnable tail!'"
"So he went back," said Saxham, "cheered and strengthened by your sympathy, as—other men have been before now!"
"So he went back to the College, fortified by my bit of nervous English, and worked at his troop for all he was worth. Raked in seventy in the first month, and kept on raking. He is dandy at drill and organisation, is Sherbrand. When he left the College they mustered three hundred strong." The speaker struck his stick upon the turf and said emphatically: "How it grows!—how the Movement spreads and gathers and ramifies! Do you know Saxham, that there are moments in my life when I am tempted to be proud. When rank upon rank of young, fresh, fearless faces with bright eyes are turned to me. When thousands of active, lithe, healthy young bodies run out into the open and rally about the Chief Scout."
There was a mist in the bright eyes that his manliness was not ashamed of.
"Years ago, when the officer in command of a certain beleaguered garrison was doing his best to defend it, a great Fear came upon him in the watches of a particularly anxious night. Perhaps you will guess what I mean, Saxham? The man had not slept for more weeks than I like to remember, and the hours of rest in the day-time were hot-eyed staring horrors of insomnia. He was—up against it! The shrunken lids would not shut down over his bursting eyeballs, and his jaws were clamped so that he could not yawn. Then, on this night, his Fear rose up and mopped and mowed at him, and it had the kind of face that madhouse doctors and keepers know. He wasn't ordinarily a 'fearful man,' like Kipling's immortal Bengali, but now he was horribly, sickeningly afraid!"
"I guessed it," said Saxham. "I realised what you were suffering, but I did not dare to hint my knowledge to you. There was no danger of madness. But you were certainly on the verge of mental and physical breakdown."