Thomas Ochiltree Read Online Free Page A

wheels and sway of the car as it bore him into the night, and far from his troubles, but he knew that it was a choice he would not make. To flee in such a manner would be to admit guilt, to ratify the monstrous accusation, to live for the rest of his life with the knowledge that through cowardice he had allowed his name to be fouled by a lie, for if he fled he would doubtless be tried and convicted
in absentia.
That would be the real dishonor: the dishonor of knowing himself a coward. Endrödy had spoken of this, and von Falkenburg now understood what he had meant.
    So it was suicide or standing trial. Standing trial and being convicted. Von Falkenburg thought again of the documents that he had been shown. No court-martial on earth could fail to convict on the basis of such evidence. And if he were alive after eight o’clock tomorrow morning he would be under close arrest. That would mean that obtaining proof that he had been framed – which von Falkenburg regarded as hopeless anyway – would be in the hands of an indifferent, pettifogging lawyer.
    But if he stood trial, at least he would have made his stand. He would have proclaimed his innocence to the world, and even though the world did not believe it, when the cell door shut behind him,
he
would know that he was there rather than in a Paris hotel because he had chosen the hopeless defense of his family’s name over the cowardly safety of flight. Publicly broken to the ranks, standing before a firing squad or cast among common criminals of the lowest sort and exposed to their contempt, he would know that his real, inner honor was safe.
    Or would he? The colonel had spoken not merely with brutal frankness, but with accuracy, of what his conviction would mean for the two people in the world closest to him: his mother and his sister.
    The Barons von Falkenburg were an ancient family, one which had served the Habsburgs since the latter first acquired Austria centuries before. But it was a service that had profited the von Falkenburgs little, and it was hard to tell who had ruined the family more: those of its members who had dissipated the fortune in extravagant living, or those who had dedicated themselves so thoroughly to the Emperor’s service as to have no time to supervise what was left.
    Everything was now mortgaged, and although it was still possible to pay the interest while providing a dowry for von Falkenburg’s sister, reasonable comfort for her and her mother in one wing of the ancestral house, and a supplement to his army pay which von Falkenburg’s mother insist on his drawing “to maintain the family’s honor,” even a small shock would bring down the whole delicately-poised structure of debt. A trial would mean the utter ruin of the family. His mother and sister would be reduced to penury, as well as being subject to the contempt that always attaches to the family of a traitor. And that to buy him a life of imprisonment, or a death far more shameful than the one which the colonel had offered him.
    Von Falkenburg knew the goodness and generosity of his mother and sister, knew their love for him, knew that they would willingly sacrifice everything for him. And he found himself shuddering at the thought that he might even consider accepting such generosity.
    His courage was the only thing shielding them, his courage to do what was, after all, the only possible thing: to trade his death for a suppression of the charges against him.
    And there was yet another argument in favor of that course, and one that he was surprised to find the most imperious of all: his responsibility towards all the von Falkenburgs who had gone before to preserve the honor of the family.
    He had always regarded himself as something of a rationalist and skeptic as far as the whole aristocratic-military cult of honor was concerned. Suddenly, he was surprised to find that perhaps because that cult was irrational, it was beyond the attack of reason. His father, who had lost his life in