“But even so, sir,” he answered, “you can do your duty.”
“My duty?” Brereton repeated, raising his voice again. “And do you think it is my duty to precipitate a useless struggle? To begin a civil war? To throw away the lives of my own men and cut down innocent folk? To fill the streets with blood and slaughter? And the end the same?”
“Ay, sir, I do,” Vaughan answered sternly. “If by so doing a worse calamity may be averted! And, for your men’s lives, are they not soldiers? For your own life, are you not a soldier? And will you shun a soldier’s duty?”
Brereton clapped his hand to his brow, and, holding it there, paced the room in his shirt and breeches.
“My God! My God!” he cried, as he went. “I do not know what to do! But if—if it be as bad as you say——”
“It is as bad, and worse!”
“I might try once more,” looking at Vaughan with a troubled, undecided eye, “what showing my men might do? What do you think?”
Vaughan thought that if he were once on the spot, if he saw with his own eyes the lawlessness of the mob, he might act. And he assented. “Shall I pass on the order, sir,” he added, “while you dress?”
“Yes, I think you may. Yes, certainly. Tell the officer commanding to march his men to the Square and I’ll meet him there.”
Vaughan waited for no more. He suspected that the burden of responsibility had proved too heavy for Brereton’s mind. He suspected that the Colonel had brooded upon his position between a Whig Government and a Whig mob until the notion that he was sent there to be a scapegoat had become a fixed idea; and with it the determination that he would not be forced into strong measures, had become also a fixed idea.