CHAPTER XXVIII

RED RUIN

“You sent for me, and I am here.”

The brusque, curt speech sounded a knell to the faint hope which Sara had been tending whilst she waited for Garth’s coming.  His voice, the dogged expression of his face, the chill, brief manner, each held its grievous message for the woman who had learned to recognize the signs of mental stress in the man she loved.

“Yes, I sent for you,” she said.  “I—­I—­Garth, I have seen Elisabeth.”

“Yes?” Just the one brief monosyllable in response, uttered with a slightly questioning inflection.  Nothing more.

Sara twisted her hands together.  There was something unapproachable about Garth as he stood there—­quiet, inflexible, waiting to hear what she had to say to him.

With an effort she began again.

“She has told me of something—­something that happened to you, in the past.”

“Yes?  Quite a great deal happened—­in my past.  What was it, in particular, that she told you?”

The mocking quality in his tones stung her into open accusation.

“She told me that you had been court-martialled and cashiered from the Army—­for cowardice.”  The words came slowly, succinctly.

“Ah—­h!” He drew his breath sharply, and a grey shadow seemed to spread itself over his face.

Sara waited—­waited with an intensity of longing that was well-nigh unendurable—­for either the indignant denial or the easy, mirthful scorn wherewith an innocent man might be expected to answer such a charge.

But there came neither of these.  Only silence—­an endless, agonizing silence, while Garth stood utterly motionless, looking at her, his face slowly greying.

It was impossible to interpret the expression of his eyes.  There was neither anger, nor horror, nor pleading in their cool indomitable stare, but only a hard, bright impenetrability, shuttering the soul behind it from the aching gaze of the woman who waited.

In that silence, Sara’s flickering hope that the accusation might prove false went out in blinding darkness.  She knew, now—­knew it as certainly as though Garth had answered her—­that he was unable to deny it.  Still, she would brace herself to hear it—­to endure the ultimate anguish of words.

“Is it true?” she questioned him.  “Is it true that you were—­cashiered for cowardice?”

At last he spoke.

“Yes,” he said.  “It is true.”  His voice was altogether passionless, but something had come into his face, into his whole attitude, which denied the calm passivity of his reply.  The soul of the man—­a soul in ineffable extremity of suffering—­was struggling for expression, striving against the rigid bonds of the motionless body in which his iron will constrained it.

Sara could sense it—­a tormented flame shut in a casing of steel—­and she was swept by a torrent of uttermost pity and compassion.