Three weeks later, Michael was sitting in his rooms in Half Moon Street, where he had arrived last night, expecting Sylvia. Since that attack at dawn in the trenches, he had been in hospital in France while his arm was mending. The bone had not been broken, but the muscles had been so badly torn that it was doubtful whether he would ever recover more than a very feeble power in it again.
In any case, it would take many months before he recovered even the most elementary use of it.
Those weeks had been a long-drawn continuous nightmare, not from the effect of the injury he had undergone, nor from any nervous breakdown, but from the sense of that which inevitably hung over him. For he knew, by an inward compulsion of his mind that admitted of no argument, that he had to tell Sylvia all that had happened in those ten minutes while the grey morning grew rosy.
This sense of compulsion was deaf to all reasoning, however plausible. He knew perfectly well that unless he told Sylvia who it was whom he had shot at point-blank range, as he leaped the last wire entanglement, no one else ever could. Hermann was buried now in the same grave as others who had fallen that morning: his name would be given out as missing from the Bavarian corps to which he belonged, and in time, after the war was over, she would grow to believe that she would never see him again.
But the sheer impossibility of letting this happen, though it entailed nothing on him except the mere abstention from speech, took away the slightest temptation that silence offered. He knew that again and again Sylvia would refer to Hermann, wondering where he was, praying for his safety, hoping perhaps even that, like Michael, he would be wounded and thus escape from the inferno at the front, and it was so absolutely out of the question that he should listen to this, try to offer little encouragements, wonder with her whether he was not safe, that even in his most depressed and shrinking hours he never for a moment contemplated silence.
Certainly he had to tell her that Hermann was dead, and to account for the fact that he knew him to be dead. And in the long watches of the wakeful night, when his mind moved in the twilight of drowsiness and fever and pain, it was here that a certain temptation entered. For it was easy to say (and no one could ever contradict him) that some man near him, that one perhaps who had fallen back with a grunt, had killed Hermann on the edge of the trench. Humanly speaking, there was no chance at all of that innocent falsehood being disproved. In the scurry and wild confusion of the attack none but he would remember exactly what had happened, and as he thought of that tossing and turning, it seemed to one part of his mind that the innocence of that falsehood would even be laudable, be heroic. It would save Sylvia the horrible shock of knowing that her lover had killed her brother; it would save her all that piercing of the iron into her soul that must inevitably be suffered by her if she knew the truth. And who could tell what effect the knowledge of the truth would have on her?
Michael felt that it was at the least possible that she could never bear to see him again, still less sleep in the arms of the one who had killed her brother. That knowledge, even if she could put it out of mind in pity and sorrow for Michael, would surely return and return again, and tear her from him sobbing and trembling. There was all to risk in telling her the truth; sorrow and bitterness for her and for him separation and a lifelong regret were piled up in the balance against the unknown weight of her love. Indeed, there was love on both sides of that balance. Who could tell how the gold weighed against the gold?
