hats, no shakos and swallow tails, no frogged coats and no high stocks.  They looked down upon the boy as though summoning him to the like service.  No distinction in uniform could obscure their resemblance to each other:  that stood out with a remarkable clearness.  The Favershams were men of one stamp,—­lean-faced, hard as iron—­they lacked the elasticity of steel—­, rugged in feature; confident in expression, men with firm, level mouths but rather narrow at the forehead, men of resolution and courage, no doubt; but hardly conspicuous for intellect, men without nerves or subtlety, fighting-men of the first-class, but hardly first-class soldiers.  Some of their faces, indeed, revealed an actual stupidity.  The boy, however, saw none of their defects.  To him they were one and all portentous and terrible; and he had an air of one standing before his judges and pleading mutely for forgiveness.  The candle shook in his hand.

These Crimean knights, as his father termed them, were the worst of torturers to Geoffrey Faversham.  He sat horribly thralled, so long as he was allowed; he crept afterwards to bed and lay there shuddering.  For his mother, a lady who some twenty years before had shone at the Court of Saxe-Coburg, as much by the refinement of her intellect as by the beauty of her person, had bequeathed to him a very burdensome gift of imagination.  It was visible in his face, marking him off unmistakably from his father, and from the study portraits in the hall.  He had the capacity to foresee possibilities, and he could not but exercise that capacity.  A hint was enough for the boy.  Straightway he had a vivid picture before his mind, and as he listened to the men at the dinner-table, their rough clipped words set him down in the midst of their battlefields, he heard the drone of bullets, he quivered expecting the shock of a charge.  But of all the Crimean nights this had been fraught with the most torments.

His father had told a story with a lowered voice, and in his usual jerky way.  But the gap was easy to fill up.

“A Captain!  Yes, and he bore one of the best names in all England.  It seemed incredible, and mere camp rumour.  But the rumour grew with every fight he was engaged in.  At the battle of Alma the thing was proved.  He was acting as galloper to his General.  I believe, upon my soul, that the General chose him for this duty so that the man might set himself right.  He was bidden to ride with a message a quarter of a mile, and that quarter of a mile was bullet-swept.  There were enough men looking on to have given him a reputation, had he dared and come through.  But he did not dare, he refused, and was sent under arrest to his tent.  He was court-martialled and broken.  He dropped out of his circle like a plummet of lead; the very women in Piccadilly spat if he spoke to them.  He blew his brains out three years later in a back bedroom off the Haymarket.  Explain that if you can.  Turns tail, and says ‘I daren’t!’ But you, can you explain it?  You can only say it’s the truth, and shrug your shoulders.  Queer, incomprehensible things happen.  There’s one of them.”