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So many circumstances connected with Boyce's visit were of a nature that precluded confidential discussion with Marigold, that precluded, indeed, confidential discussion with anyone else. The suddenness of his departure I learned that afternoon from Mrs. Boyce, who sent me by hand a miserable letter characteristically rambling. From it I gathered certain facts.
But she felt her loss, and more than once, as she knelt at her prayers, she wiped a hidden tear from her eyes. Crosbie also was thinking of his departure more than he should have done during Mr Boyce's sermon. "It's easy listening to him," Mrs Hearn used to say of her husband's successor. "It don't give one much trouble following him into his arguments."
She gathered from her husband's grumbling that the provision of a suitable trousseau for Marcella would tax his resources to their utmost. How long would it be before they were dipping in Marcella's purse? Mrs. Boyce's self-tormenting soul was possessed by one of those nightmares her pride had brought upon her in grim succession during these fifteen years.
It even reached my battery which was a hundred miles away; for Johnny Dacre, one of my subs, had a brother in Boyce's old regiment. For my own part I scouted the story as soon as I heard it, and I withered up young Dacre for daring to bring such abominable slander within my Rhadamanthine sphere. I dismissed the calumny from my mind.
Very much the same thought only treated as a nameless horror not to be recognised or admitted was in Marcella's mind also, joined however with another, unsuspected even by Mrs. Boyce's acuteness. "Very likely when I tell him he will not want to marry me at all and of course I shall tell him." But not yet certainly not yet.
We had to walk him down the passage, one at each elbow, to Boyce's private room, and while Boyce talked to him there, and humoured him about this ship idea, I went along the corridor and asked old Wade to come and look at him. The voice of our Dean sobered him a little, but not very much. He asked where his hands were, and why he had to walk about up to his waist in the ground.
"I repudiate any charge whatsoever; and tell my story my own way. Some hot words passed between Captain McBean and the Frenchman, each blaming the other for Colonel Boyce's escape. Then Captain McBean says 'The fellows that were drinking in the tap, I suppose you've let them dodge you too? No? Well, that's a wonder.
There was a satiric detachment in her tone which contrasted sharply with Marcella's amused but sympathetic interest. Detachment was perhaps the characteristic note of Mrs. Boyce's manner, a curious separateness, as it were, from all the things and human beings immediately about her. Marcella pondered. "I shall ask Mr. Harden about the stories," she said presently.
But I gather that some years ago when I was still a lad something in Mr. Boyce's life some financial matters, I believe during the time that he was member of Parliament, made a scandal, and especially among his family and old friends. It was the effect upon his old father, I think, who, as you know, died soon afterwards " Marcella started. "I didn't know," she said quickly.
If he had not lost his balance, why should he have launched into an almost passionate defence of the physical coward? My memory went back to the narrative of the poor devil in the Cape Town hospital. Boyce's description of the general phenomenon was a deadly corroboration of Somers's account of the individual case. They had used the same word "paralysed."
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