There was
nothing in his gait or bearing to reveal that the one thing left to him
had that evening been taken away.
CHAPTER XX
WEST AND EAST
Durrance found his body-servant waiting up for him when he had come
across the fields to his own house of "Guessens."
"You can turn the lights out and go to bed," said Durrance, and he
walked through the hall into his study. The name hardly described the
room, for it had always been more of a gun-room than a study.
He sat for some while in his chair and then began to walk gently about
the room in the dark. There were many cups and goblets scattered about
the room, which Durrance had won in his past days. He knew them each one
by their shape and position, and he drew a kind of comfort from the feel
of them. He took them up one by one and touched them and fondled them,
wondering whether, now that he was blind, they were kept as clean and
bright as they used to be. This one, a thin-stemmed goblet, he had won
in a regimental steeple-chase at Colchester; he could remember the day
with its clouds and grey sky and the dull look of the ploughed fields
between the hedges. That pewter, which stood upon his writing table and
which had formed a convenient holder for his pens, when pens had been of
use, he had acquired very long ago in his college "fours," when he was a
freshman at Oxford.
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