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No Hero

By E.W. Hornung


1903



CONTENTS

Chapter

I. A Plenipotentiary

II. The Theatre of War

III. First Blood

IV. A Little Knowledge

V. A Marked Woman

VI. Out of Action

VII. Second Fiddle

VIII. Prayers and Parables

IX. Sub Judice

X. The Last Word

XI. The Lion's Mouth

XII. A Stern Chase

XIII. Number Three




No Hero


CHAPTER I

A PLENIPOTENTIARY


Has no writer ever dealt with the dramatic aspect of the unopened
envelope? I cannot recall such a passage in any of my authors, and yet
to my mind there is much matter for philosophy in what is always the
expressionless shell of a boundless possibility. Your friend may run
after you in the street, and you know at a glance whether his news is to
be good, bad, or indifferent; but in his handwriting on the
breakfast-table there is never a hint as to the nature of his
communication. Whether he has sustained a loss or an addition to his
family, whether he wants you to dine with him at the club or to lend him
ten pounds, his handwriting at least will be the same, unless, indeed,
he be offended, when he will generally indite your name with a studious
precision and a distant grace quite foreign to his ordinary caligraphy.

These reflections, trite enough as I know, are nevertheless inevitable
if one is to begin one's unheroic story in the modern manner, at the
latest possible point. That is clearly the point at which a waiter
brought me the fatal letter from Catherine Evers. Apart even from its
immediate consequences, the letter had a _prima facie_ interest, of no
ordinary kind, as the first for years from a once constant
correspondent. And so I sat studying the envelope with a curiosity too
piquant not to be enjoyed. What in the world could so obsolete a friend
find to say to one now? Six months earlier there had been a certain
opportunity for an advance, which at that time could not possibly have
been misconstrued; when they landed me, a few later, there was another
and perhaps a better one. But this was the last summer of the late
century, and already I was beginning to get about like a lamplighter on
my two sticks. Now, young men about town, on two walking-sticks, in the
year of grace 1900, meant only one thing. Quite a stimulating thing in
the beginning, but even as I write, in this the next winter but one, a
national irritation of which the name alone might prevent you from
reading another word.

Catherine's handwriting, on the contrary, was still stimulating, if
indeed I ever found it more so in the foolish past. It had not altered
in the least. There was the same sweet pedantry of the Attic _e_, the
same superiority to the most venial abbreviation, the same inconsistent
forest of exclamatory notes, thick as poplars across the channel. The
present plantation started after my own Christian name, to wit "Dear
Duncan!!" Yet there was nothing Germanic in Catherine's ancestry; it was
only her apologetic little way of addressing me as though nothing had
ever happened, of asking whether she might. Her own old tact and charm
were in that tentative burial of the past. In the first line she had all
but won my entire forgiveness; but the very next interfered with the
effect.

"You promised to do anything for me!"

I should be sorry to deny it, I am sure, for not to this day do I know
what I did say on the occasion to which she evidently referred. But was
it kind to break the silence of years with such a reference? Was it even
quite decent in Catherine to ignore my existence until I could be of use
to her, and then to ask the favour in her first breath? It was true, as
she went on to remind me, that we were more or less connected after all,
and at least conceivable that no one else could help her as I could, if
I would. In any case, it was a certain satisfaction to hear that
Catherine herself was of the last opinion. I read on. She was in a
difficulty; but she did not say what the difficulty was. For one
unworthy moment the thought of money entered my mind, to be ejected the
next, as the Catherine of old came more and more into the mental focus.
Pride was the last thing in which I had found her wanting, and her
letter indicated no change in that respect.

"You may wonder," she wrote just at the end, "why I have never sent you
a single word of inquiry, or sympathy, or congratulation!!
Well--suppose it was 'bad blood'!! between us when you went away! Mind,
_I_ never meant it to be so, but suppose it was: could I treat the dear
old you like that, and the Great New You like somebody else? You have
your own fame to thank for my unkindness! _I_ am only thankful they
haven't given you the V.C.!! _Then_ I should _never_ have dared--not
even now!!!"

I smoked a cigarette when I had read it all twice over, and as I crushed
the fire out of the stump I felt I could as soon think of lighting it
again as I should have expected Catherine Evers to set a fresh match to
me. That, I was resolved, she should never do; nor was I quite coxcomb
enough to suspect her of the desire for a moment. But a man who has once
made a fool of himself, especially about a woman somewhat older than
himself, does not soon get over the soreness; and mine returned with the
very fascination which made itself felt even in the shortest little
letter.

Catherine wrote from the old address in Elm Park Gardens, and she wanted
me to call as early as I could, or to make any appointment I liked. I
therefore telegraphed that I was coming at three o'clock that afternoon,
and thus made for myself one of the longest mornings that I can remember
spending in town. I was staying at the time at the Kensington Palace
Hotel, to be out of the central racket of things, and yet more or less
under the eye of the surgeon who still hoped to extract the last bullet
in time. I can remember spending half the morning gazing aimlessly over
the grand old trees, already prematurely bronzed, and the other half in
limping in their shadow to the Round Pond, where a few little townridden
boys were sailing their humble craft. It was near the middle of August,
and for the first time I was thankful that an earlier migration had not
been feasible in my case.

In spite of my telegram Mrs. Evers was not at home when I arrived, but
she had left a message which more than explained matters. She was
lunching out, but only in Brechin Place, and I was to wait in the study
if I did not mind. I did not, and yet I did, for the room in which
Catherine certainly read her books and wrote her letters was also the
scene of that which I was beginning to find it rather hard work to
forget as it was. Nor had it changed any more than her handwriting, or
than the woman herself as I confidently expected to find her now. I have
often thought that at about forty both sexes stand still to the eye, and
I did not expect Catherine Evers, who could barely have reached that
rubicon, to show much symptom of the later marches. To me, here in her
den, the other year was just the other day. My time in India was little
better than a dream to me, while as for angry shots at either end of
Africa, it was never I who had been there to hear them. I must have come
by my sticks in some less romantic fashion. Nothing could convince me
that I had ever been many days or miles away from a room that I knew by
heart, and found full as I left it of familiar trifles and poignant
associations.

That was the shelf devoted to her poets; there was no addition that I
could see. Over it hung the fine photograph of Watts's "Hope," an ironic
emblem, and elsewhere one of that intolerably sad picture, his "Paolo
and Francesca": how I remembered the wet Sunday when Catherine took me
to see the original in Melbury Road! The old piano which was never
touched, the one which had been in St. Helena with Napoleon's doctor,
there it stood to an inch where it had stood of old, a sort of
grand-stand for the photographs of Catherine's friends. I descried my
own young effigy among the rest, in a frame which I recollected giving
her at the time. Well, I looked all the idiot I must have been; and
there was the very Persian rug that I had knelt on in my idiocy! I could
afford to smile at myself to-day; yet now it all seemed yesterday, not
even the day before, until of a sudden I caught sight of that other
photograph in the place of honour on the mantelpiece. It was one by
Hills and Sanders, of a tall youth in flannels, armed with a
long-handled racket, and the sweet open countenance which Robin Evers
had worn from his cradle upward. I should have known him anywhere and at
any age. It was the same dear, honest face; but to think that this giant
was little Bob! He had not gone to Eton when I saw him last; now I knew
from the sporting papers that he was up at Cambridge; but it was left to
his photograph to bring home the flight of time.

Certainly his mother would never have done so when all at once the door
opened and she stood before me, looking about thirty in the ample shadow
of a cavalier's hat. Simply but admirably gowned, as I knew she would
be, her slender figure looked more youthful still; yet in all this there
was no intent; the dry cool smile was that of an older woman, and I was
prepared for greater cordiality than I could honestly detect in the
greeting of the small firm hand. But it was kind, as indeed her whole
reception of me was; only it had always been the way of Catherine the
correspondent to make one expect a little more than mere kindness, and
of Catherine the companion to disappoint that expectation. Her
conversation needed few exclamatory points.

"Still halt and lame," she murmured over my sticks. "You poor thing, you
are to sit down this instant."

And I obeyed her as one always had, merely remarking that I was getting
along famously now.

"You must have had an awful time," continued Catherine, seating herself
near me, her calm wise eyes on mine.

"Blood-poisoning," said I. "It nearly knocked me out, but I'm glad to
say it didn't quite."

Indeed, I had never felt quite so glad before.

"Ah! that was too hard and cruel; but I was thinking of the day itself,"
explained Catherine, and paused in some sweet transparent awe of one who
had been through it.

"It was a beastly day," said I, forgetting her objection to the epithet
until it was out. But Catherine did not wince. Her fixed eyes were full
of thought.

"It was all that here," she said. "One depressing morning I had a
telegram from Bob, 'Spion Kop taken'--"

"So Bob," I nodded, "had it as badly as everybody else!"

"Worse," declared Catherine, her eye hardening; "it was all I could do
to keep him at Cambridge, though he had only just gone up. He would have
given up everything and flown to the Front if I had let him."

And she wore the inexorable face with which I could picture her standing
in his way; and in Catherine I could admire that dogged look and all it
spelt, because a great passion is always admirable. The passion of
Catherine's life was her boy, the only son of his mother, and she a
widow. It had been so when he was quite small, as I remembered it with a
pinch of jealousy startling as a twinge from an old wound. More than
ever must it be so now; that was as natural as the maternal embargo in
which Catherine seemed almost to glory. And yet, I reflected, if all the
widows had thought only of their only sons--and of themselves!

"The next depressing morning," continued Catherine, happily oblivious of
what was passing through one's mind, "the first thing I saw, the first
time I put my nose outside, was a great pink placard with 'Spion Kop
Abandoned!' Duncan, it was too awful."

"I wish we'd sat tight," I said, "I must confess."

"Tight!" cried Catherine in dry horror. "I should have abandoned it long
before. I should have run away--hard! To think that you didn't--that's
quite enough for me."

And again I sustained the full flattery of that speechless awe which was
yet unembarrassing by reason of its freedom from undue solemnity.

"There were some of us who hadn't a leg to run on," I had to say; "I was
one, Mrs. Evers."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Catherine, then." But it put me to the blush.

"Thank you. If you really wish me to call you 'Captain Clephane' you
have only to say so; but in that case I can't ask the favour I had made
up my mind to ask--of so old a friend."

Her most winning voice was as good a servant as ever; the touch of scorn
in it was enough to stimulate, but not to sting; and it was the same
with the sudden light in the steady intellectual eyes.

"Catherine," I said, "you can't indeed ask any favour of me! There you
are quite right. It is not a word to use between us."

Mrs. Evers gave me one of her deliberate looks before replying.

"And I am not so sure that it is a favour," she said softly enough at
last. "It is really your advice I want to ask, in the first place at all
events. Duncan, it's about old Bob!"

The corners of her mouth twitched, her eyes filled with a quaint
humorous concern, and as a preamble I was handed the photograph which I
had already studied on my own account.

"Isn't he a dear?" asked Bob's mother. "Would you have known him,
Duncan?"

"I did know him," said I. "Spotted him at a glance. He's the same old
Bob all over."

I was fortunate enough to meet the swift glance I got for that, for in
sheer sweetness and affection it outdid all remembered glances of the
past. In a moment it was as though I had more than regained the lost
ground of lost years. And in another moment, on the heels of the
discovery, came the still more startling one that I was glad to have
regained my ground, was thankful to be reinstated, and strangely,
acutely, yet uneasily happy, as I had never been since the old days in
this very room.

Half in a dream I heard Catherine telling of her boy, of his Eton
triumphs, how he had been one of the rackets pair two years, and in the
eleven his last, but "in Pop" before he was seventeen, and yet as simple
and unaffected and unspoilt with it all as the small boy whom I
remembered. And I did remember him, and knew his mother well enough to
believe it all; for she did not chant his praises to organ music, but
rather hummed them to the banjo; and one felt that her own demure
humour, so signal and so permanent a charm in Catherine, would have been
the saving of half-a-dozen Bobs.

"And yet," she wound up at her starting-point, "it's about poor old Bob
I want to speak to you!"

"Not in a fix, I hope?"

"I hope not, Duncan."

Catherine was serious now.

"Or mischief?"

"That depends on what you mean by mischief."

Catherine was more serious still.

"Well, there are several brands, but only one or two that really
poison--unless, of course, a man is very poor."

And my mind harked back to its first suspicion, of some financial
embarrassment, now conceivable enough; but Catherine told me her boy was
not poor, with the air of one who would have drunk ditchwater rather
than let the other want for champagne.

"It is just the opposite," she added: "in little more than a year, when
he comes of age, he will have quite as much as is good for him. You know
what he is, or rather you don't. I do. And if I were not his mother I
should fall in love with him myself!"

Catherine looked down on me as she returned from replacing Bob's
photograph on the mantelpiece. The humour had gone out of her eye; in
its place was an almost animal glitter, a far harder light than had
accompanied the significant reference to the patriotic impulse which she
had nipped in the bud. It was probably only the old, old look of the
lioness whose whelp is threatened, but it was something new to me in
Catherine Evers, something half-repellent and yet almost wholly fine.

"You don't mean to say it's that?" I asked aghast.

"No, I don't," Catherine answered, with a hard little laugh. "He's not
quite twenty, remember; but I am afraid that he is making a fool of
himself, and I want it stopped."

I waited for more, merely venturing to nod my sympathetic concern.

"Poor old Bob, as you may suppose, is not a genius. He is far too nice,"
declared Catherine's old self, "to be anything so nasty. But I always
thought he had his head screwed on, and his heart screwed in, or I never
would have let him loose in a Swiss hotel. As it was, I was only too
glad for him to go with George Kennerley, who was as good at work at
Eton as Bob was at games."

In Catherine's tone, for all the books on her shelves, the pictures on
her walls, there was no doubt at all as to which of the two an Eton boy
should be good at, and I agreed sincerely with another nod.

"They were to read together for an hour or so every day. I thought it
would be a nice little change for Bob, and it was quite a chance; he
must do a certain amount of work, you see. Well, they only went at the
beginning of the month, and already they have had enough of each other's
society."

"You don't mean that they've had a row?"

Catherine inclined a mortified head.

"Bob never had such a thing in his life before, nor did I ever know
anybody who succeeded in having one with Bob. It does take two, you
know. And when one of the two has an angelic temper, and tact enough for
twenty--"

"You naturally blame the other," I put in, as she paused in visible
perplexity.

"But I don't, Duncan, and that's just the point. George is devoted to
Bob, and is as nice as he can be himself, in his own sober, honest,
plodding way. He may not have the temper, he certainly has not the tact,
but he worships Bob and has come back quite miserable."

"Then he has come back, and you have seen him?"

"He was here last night. You must know that Bob writes to me every day,
even from Cambridge, if it's only a line; and in yesterday's letter he
mentioned quite casually that George had had enough of it and was off
home. It was a little too casual to be quite natural in old Bob, and
there are other things he has been mentioning in the same way. If any
instinct is to be relied upon it is a mother's, and mine amounted almost
to second sight. I sent Master George a telegram, and he came in last
night."

"Well?"'

"Not a word! There was bad blood between them, but that was all I could
get out of him. Vulgar disagreeables between Bob, of all people, and his
greatest friend! If you could have seen the poor fellow sitting where
you are sitting now, like a prisoner in the dock! I put him in the
witness-box instead, and examined him on scraps of Bob's letters to me.
It was as unscrupulous as you please, but I felt unscrupulous; and the
poor dear was too loyal to admit, yet too honest to deny, a single
thing."

"And?" said I, as Bob's mother paused again.

"And," cried she, with conscious melodrama in the fiery twinkle of her
eye--"and, I know all! There is an odious creature at the hotel--a
widow, if you please! A 'ripping widow' Bob called her in his first
letter; then it was 'Mrs. Lascelles'; but now it is only 'some people'
whom he escorts here, there, and everywhere. _Some_ people, indeed!"

Catherine smiled unmercifully. I relied upon my nod.

"I needn't tell you," she went on, "that the creature is at least twenty
years older than my baby, and not at all nice at that. George didn't
tell me, mind, but he couldn't deny a single thing. It was about her
that they fell out. Poor George remonstrated, not too diplomatically, I
daresay, but I can quite see that my Bob behaved as he was never known
to behave on land or sea. The poor child has been bewitched, neither
more nor less."

"He'll get over it," I murmured, with the somewhat shaky confidence born
of my own experience.

Catherine looked at me in mild surprise.

"But it's going on now, Duncan--it's going on still!"

"Well," I added, with all the comfort that my voice would carry, and
which an exaggerated concern seemed to demand: "well, Catherine, it
can't go very far at his age!" Nor to this hour can I yet conceive a
sounder saying, in all the circumstances of the case, and with one's
knowledge of the type of lad; but my fate was the common one of
comforters, and I was made speedily and painfully aware that I had now
indeed said the most unfortunate thing.

Catherine did not stamp her foot, but she did everything else required
by tradition of the exasperated lady. Not go far? As if it had not gone
too far already to be tolerated another instant longer than was
necessary!

"He is making a fool of himself--my boy--my Bob--before a whole
hotelful of sharp eyes and sharper tongues! Is that not far enough for
it to have gone? Duncan, it must be stopped, and stopped at once; but I
am not the one to do it. I would rather it went on," cried Catherine
tragically, as though the pit yawned before us all, "than that his
mother should fly to his rescue before all the world! But a friend might
do it, Duncan--if--"

Her voice had dropped. I bent my ear.

"If only," she sighed, "I had a friend who would!"

Catherine was still looking down when I looked up; but the droop of the
slender body, the humble angle of the cavalier hat, the faint flush
underneath, all formed together a challenge and an appeal which were the
more irresistible for their sweet shamefacedness. Acute consciousness of
the past (I thought), and (I even fancied) some penitence for a wrong by
no means past undoing, were in every sensitive inch of her, as she sat a
suppliant to the old player of that part. And there are emotions of
which the body may be yet more eloquent than the face; there was the
figure of Watts's "Hope" drooping over as she drooped, not more lissom
and speaking than her own; just then it caught my eye, and on the spot
it was as though the lute's last string of that sweet masterpiece had
vibrated aloud in Catherine's room.

My hand shook as I reached for my trusty sticks, but I cannot say that
my voice betrayed me when I inquired the name of the Swiss hotel.

"The Riffel Alp," said Catherine--"above Zermatt, you know."

"I start to-morrow morning," I rejoined, "if that will do."

Then Catherine looked up. I cannot describe her look. Transfiguration
were the idle word, but the inadequate, and yet more than one would
scatter the effect of so sudden a burst of human sunlight.

"Would you really go?" she cried. "Do you mean it, Duncan?"

"I only wish," I replied, "that it were to Australia."

"But then you would be weeks too late."

"Ah, that's another story! I may be too late as it is."

Her brightness clouded on the instant; only a gleam of annoyance pierced
the cloud.

"Too late for what, may I ask?"

"Everything except stopping the banns."

"Please don't talk nonsense, Duncan. Banns at nineteen!"

"It is nonsense, I agree; at the same time the minor consequences will
be the hardest to deal with. If they are being talked about, well, they
are being talked about. You know Bob best: suppose he is making a fool
of himself, is he the sort of fellow to stop because one tells him so? I
should say not, from what I know of him, and of you."

"I don't know," argued Catherine, looking pleased with her compliment.
"You used to have quite an influence over him, if you remember."

"That's quite possible; but then he was a small boy, now he is a grown
man."

"But you are a much older one."

"Too old to trust to that."

"And you have been wounded in the war."

"The hotel may be full of wounded officers; if not I might get a little
unworthy purchase there. In any case I'll go. I should have to go
somewhere before many days. It may as well be to that place as to
another. I have heard that the air is glorious; and I'll keep an eye on
Robin, if I can't do anything else."

"That's enough for me," cried Catherine, warmly. "I have sufficient
faith in you to leave all the rest to your own discretion and good sense
and better heart. And I never shall forget it, Duncan, never, never! You
are the one person he wouldn't instantly suspect as an emissary, besides
being the only one I ever--ever trusted well enough to--to take at your
word as I have done."

I thought myself that the sentence might have pursued a bolder course
without untruth or necessary complications. Perhaps my conceit was on a
scale with my acknowledged infirmity where Catherine was concerned. But
I did think that there was more than trust in the eyes that now melted
into mine; there was liking at least, and gratitude enough to inspire
one to win infinitely more. I went so far as to take in mine the hand to
which I had dared to aspire in the temerity of my youth; nor shall I
pretend for a moment that the old aspirations had not already mounted to
their old seat in my brain. On the contrary, I was only wondering
whether the honesty of voicing my hopes would nowise counterbalance the
caddishness of the sort of stipulation they might imply.

"All I ask," I was saying to myself, "is that you will give me another
chance, and take me seriously this time, if I prove myself worthy in the
way you want."

But I am glad to think I had not said it when tea came up, and saved a
dangerous situation by breaking an insidious spell.

I stayed another hour at least, and there are few in my memory which
passed more deliciously at the time. In writing of it now I feel that I
have made too little of Catherine Evers, in my anxiety not to make too
much, yet am about to leave her to stand or to fall in the reader's
opinion by such impression as I have already succeeded in creating in
his or her mind. Let me add one word, or two, while yet I may. A
baron's daughter (though you might have known Catherine some time
without knowing that), she had nevertheless married for mere love as a
very young girl, and had been left a widow before the birth of her boy.
I never knew her husband, though we were distant kin, nor yet herself
during the long years through which she mourned him. Catherine Evers was
beginning to recover her interest in the world when first we met; but
she never returned to that identical fold of society in which she had
been born and bred. It was, of course, despite her own performances, a
fold to which the worldly wolf was no stranger; and her trouble had
turned a light-hearted little lady into an eager, intellectual,
speculative being, with a sort of shame for her former estate, and an
undoubted reactionary dislike of dominion and of petty pomp. Of her own
high folk one neither saw nor heard a thing; her friends were the
powerful preachers of most denominations, and one or two only painted or
wrote; for she had been greatly exercised about religion, and somewhat
solaced by the arts.

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