"For God's sake, Weldon, how long is this going to last?"Weldon raised his eyes from the seven-weeks-old Times in his hand, and looked at Carew in surprise.
"What last?" he questioned blankly.
Carew sprang to his feet and began to pace up and down with impatient, nervous steps.
"This.Everything," he said.
Weldon's smile, though it went no deeper than his lips, was half sarcastic, wholly sad.
"Specify," he advised languidly."My mind can't grasp your generalities."Carew took a few more turns.Then he came back to Weldon's side.
"It's this way, Harvey," he said slowly, for the moment lapsing into the name by which he had called his friend in their childhood;"since you came back from Johannesburg, you've not been the same man.What has done it?"Weldon's lips shut with a tightness which curled the corners downward.Then, as he looked into the questioning eyes and anxious face of his companion, his own eyes softened, and he changed his mind in regard to keeping silence.
"It was a hard journey," he said evasively, yet with a kindly accent to the words."Such days take it out of a man, Carew.I shall brace up in time."Carew shook his head.
"That is just what you must not do.You have braced too long, as it is.Your wounds were nothing but scratches.They healed up easily enough, and you say, yourself, that they don't trouble you; but you look--""Well?" "As if things had ended for you," Carew blurted out desperately.
Slowly, wearily, Weldon lifted his eyes to his friend's face.
"Well, they have," he said, with an intonation of dreary finality.
"Rot!" Carew observed profanely."Look here, Weldon, you've no business to funk in this fashion.It's not like you, either."The word stung Weldon.He scrambled to his feet and stood to attention.
"Carew, no other man could say that to me," he said slowly.
Carew maintained his ground.
"No other man cares for you as I do, Harvey.We've been like brothers, and I have been too proud of your record to be willing to sit by, quiet, and see you spoil the last round of the game.There is too much at stake." Weldon raised his brows.
"What is at stake?" he asked coldly.
"Your whole army record.Your manhood.Your--" Carew hesitated; then he nerved himself to speak out plainly; "your love for Miss Dent."Weldon shut his teeth and drew in his breath between them, while the dark red blood rushed across his face, and then died away, to leave in its place a grayish pallor.He put out his hand, as if to ward off something.
"For God's sake, don't!" he said huskily.
Carew watched him for an instant.Then he stepped forward and linked his arm through that of Weldon.
"There's nothing doing now," he said quietly."Let's go for a walk.
We can talk better, while we're moving, you know.""But what is the use of talking?" Weldon objected listlessly.
Carew looked into the heavy eyes, the overcast face of his friend.
Not once during the past three weeks since Weldon's return from Johannesburg had the cloud lifted.
"You must talk, Weldon," he said firmly."If you don't talk, you'll go mad.I've watched you, day after day, hoping you would speak of your own free will.I have hated to urge you.It seemed rather beastly to drive you into telling me things that are none of my business.But they are my business, in a sense.There's nobody in all South Africa who can go back farther with you into the past.
That alone ought to count for something."Handsome still, in spite of his dark sunburn and his time-stained khaki, Carew's face was wonderfully attractive, as it looked into that of his friend.Weldon felt the attraction, even while he was wondering why it was so powerless to move him.He liked Carew; since the death of the Captain, no other man was linked more closely with his life.Nevertheless, Carew's words left him cold.All things did leave him cold of late.It was as if, in the fierce conflagration of that one hour in the Johannesburg hospital, the fires of his nature had burned themselves out beyond the possibility of being rekindled.
His intellect told him that Carew was in the right of it, that his alternatives were speech or madness; but he faced the alternatives with an absolute indifference.His intellect also told him that, for the past three weeks, Carew's kindness had been unremitting; that his care had served as a buffer between himself and the clumsy tactlessness of their mates; that his sympathy now was leading him to try to storm the barrier of his own reserve; but he met Carew's advances with an icy front which could be thawed neither from outside nor from within.It was not his will to be ungrateful; it was beyond his present power to show the gratitude which he really felt.And Carew, with the supreme insight which marks the friendship of men at times, interpreted Weldon's mood aright and forebode to take offence.
