“I should prefer to say nothing unless the necessity arises.”
“I never thought of your going into details, but she must know something, surely? Flora will learn the state of affairs from Haycraft; Mrs North will pick it up from the Hardys and her ayah, and Miss North will probably expect—— But please yourself, of course.”
“I will go and talk to her for a little while. I have scarcely seen her all day.”
Mr Burgrave’s tone was constrained. It seemed to him almost impossible to meet Mabel at this crisis, and abstain from any allusion to the terrible duty which had just been laid upon him. He was not an imaginative man, and no forecast of the scene burned itself into his brain, as would have been the case with some people, but the oppression of anticipation was heavy upon him. For him the dull horror in his mind overshadowed everything, and it was with a shock that he found Mabel to be in one of her most vivacious and aggressive moods. She was walking up and down the verandah outside her room as if for a wager, turning at each end of the course with a swish of draperies which sounded like an angry breeze, and she hailed his arrival with something like enthusiasm, simply because he was some one to talk to.
“Flora is crying on Fred’s—I mean Mr Haycraft’s—shoulder somewhere,” she said; “and Mrs Hardy and Georgia are having a prayer-meeting with the native Christians. They wanted me to come too; but I don’t feel as if I could be quiet, and I shouldn’t understand, either. What is going to happen, really?”
“The Colonel proposes to make a sortie and capture the two guns which the enemy have brought up. There is, I trust, every prospect of his succeeding.”
Mabel stamped her foot. “Why can’t you tell me the truth, instead of trying to sugar things over?” she demanded. “It would be much more interesting.”
“You must allow me to decide what is suitable for you to hear,” said Mr Burgrave, his mind still so full of that final duty of his that he spoke with a serene indifference which Mabel found most galling.
“I don’t allow you to do anything of the sort. I wish you wouldn’t treat me as if I was a baby. It’s like telling me yesterday that all the fresh milk in the place was to be reserved for us women and the wounded, as if I wanted to be pilloried as a lazy, selfish creature, doing nothing and demanding luxuries!”
“My dear little girl, I am sure there isn’t a man in the garrison who would consent to your missing any comfort that the place can furnish.”