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The Four Feathers

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Title: The Four Feathers

Author: A. E. W. Mason


        
Release date: July 21, 2006 [eBook #18883]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18883

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E-text prepared by Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Mary Meehan, and the
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THE FOUR FEATHERS

by

A. E. W. MASON

Author of "Miranda of the Balcony," "The Courtship of Morrice Buckler,"
Etc.







New York
The MacMillan Company
London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd.
1903
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1901,
By A. E. W. Mason.
Copyright, 1902,
By The MacMillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1902.  Reprinted November,
December, 1902; January, 1903; February, March, 1903.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.




To
MISS ELSPETH ANGELA CAMPBELL
June 19, 1902.




CONTENTS


        I. A Crimean Night

       II. Captain Trench and a Telegram

      III. The Last Ride Together

       IV. The Ball at Lennon House

        V. The Pariah

       VI. Harry Feversham's Plan

      VII. The Last Reconnaissance

     VIII. Lieutenant Sutch is tempted to lie

       IX. At Glenalla

        X. The Wells of Obak

       XI. Durrance hears News of Feversham

      XII. Durrance sharpens his Wits

     XIII. Durrance begins to see

      XIV. Captain Willoughby reappears

       XV. The Story of the First Feather

      XVI. Captain Willoughby retires

     XVII. The Musoline Overture

    XVIII. The Answer to the Overture

      XIX. Mrs. Adair interferes

       XX. West and East

      XXI. Ethne makes Another Slip

     XXII. Durrance lets his Cigar go out

    XXIII. Mrs. Adair makes her Apology

     XXIV. On the Nile

      XXV. Lieutenant Sutch comes off the Half-pay List

     XXVI. General Feversham's Portraits are appeased

    XXVII. The House of Stone

   XXVIII. Plans of Escape

     XXIX. Colonel Trench assumes a Knowledge of Chemistry

      XXX. The Last of the Southern Cross

     XXXI. Feversham returns to Ramelton

    XXXII. In the Church at Glenalla

   XXXIII. Ethne again plays the Musoline Overture

    XXXIV. The End




THE FOUR FEATHERS[1]

[Footnote 1: The character of Harry Feversham is developed from a short
story by the author, originally printed in the _Illustrated London
News_, and since republished.]




CHAPTER I

A CRIMEAN NIGHT


Lieutenant Sutch was the first of General Feversham's guests to reach
Broad Place. He arrived about five o'clock on an afternoon of sunshine
in mid June, and the old red-brick house, lodged on a southern slope of
the Surrey hills, was glowing from a dark forest depth of pines with the
warmth of a rare jewel. Lieutenant Sutch limped across the hall, where
the portraits of the Fevershams rose one above the other to the ceiling,
and went out on to the stone-flagged terrace at the back. There he found
his host sitting erect like a boy, and gazing southward toward the
Sussex Downs.

"How's the leg?" asked General Feversham, as he rose briskly from his
chair. He was a small wiry man, and, in spite of his white hairs, alert.
But the alertness was of the body. A bony face, with a high narrow
forehead and steel-blue inexpressive eyes, suggested a barrenness of
mind.

"It gave me trouble during the winter," replied Sutch. "But that was to
be expected." General Feversham nodded, and for a little while both men
were silent. From the terrace the ground fell steeply to a wide level
plain of brown earth and emerald fields and dark clumps of trees. From
this plain voices rose through the sunshine, small but very clear. Far
away toward Horsham a coil of white smoke from a train snaked rapidly in
and out amongst the trees; and on the horizon rose the Downs, patched
with white chalk.

"I thought that I should find you here," said Sutch.

"It was my wife's favourite corner," answered Feversham in a quite
emotionless voice. "She would sit here by the hour. She had a queer
liking for wide and empty spaces."

"Yes," said Sutch. "She had imagination. Her thoughts could people
them."

General Feversham glanced at his companion as though he hardly
understood. But he asked no questions. What he did not understand he
habitually let slip from his mind as not worth comprehension. He spoke
at once upon a different topic.

"There will be a leaf out of our table to-night."

"Yes. Collins, Barberton, and Vaughan went this winter. Well, we are
all permanently shelved upon the world's half-pay list as it is. The
obituary column is just the last formality which gazettes us out of the
service altogether," and Sutch stretched out and eased his crippled leg,
which fourteen years ago that day had been crushed and twisted in the
fall of a scaling-ladder.

"I am glad that you came before the others," continued Feversham. "I
would like to take your opinion. This day is more to me than the
anniversary of our attack upon the Redan. At the very moment when we
were standing under arms in the dark--"

"To the west of the quarries; I remember," interrupted Sutch, with a
deep breath. "How should one forget?"

"At that very moment Harry was born in this house. I thought, therefore,
that if you did not object, he might join us to-night. He happens to be
at home. He will, of course, enter the service, and he might learn
something, perhaps, which afterward will be of use--one never knows."

"By all means," said Sutch, with alacrity. For since his visits to
General Feversham were limited to the occasion of these anniversary
dinners, he had never yet seen Harry Feversham.

Sutch had for many years been puzzled as to the qualities in General
Feversham which had attracted Muriel Graham, a woman as remarkable for
the refinement of her intellect as for the beauty of her person; and he
could never find an explanation. He had to be content with his knowledge
that for some mysterious reason she had married this man so much older
than herself and so unlike to her in character. Personal courage and an
indomitable self-confidence were the chief, indeed the only, qualities
which sprang to light in General Feversham. Lieutenant Sutch went back
in thought over twenty years, as he sat on his garden-chair, to a time
before he had taken part, as an officer of the Naval Brigade, in that
unsuccessful onslaught on the Redan. He remembered a season in London
to which he had come fresh from the China station; and he was curious to
see Harry Feversham. He did not admit that it was more than the natural
curiosity of a man who, disabled in comparative youth, had made a hobby
out of the study of human nature. He was interested to see whether the
lad took after his mother or his father--that was all.

So that night Harry Feversham took a place at the dinner-table and
listened to the stories which his elders told, while Lieutenant Sutch
watched him. The stories were all of that dark winter in the Crimea, and
a fresh story was always in the telling before its predecessor was
ended. They were stories of death, of hazardous exploits, of the pinch
of famine, and the chill of snow. But they were told in clipped words
and with a matter-of-fact tone, as though the men who related them were
only conscious of them as far-off things; and there was seldom a comment
more pronounced than a mere "That's curious," or an exclamation more
significant than a laugh.

But Harry Feversham sat listening as though the incidents thus
carelessly narrated were happening actually at that moment and within
the walls of that room. His dark eyes--the eyes of his mother--turned
with each story from speaker to speaker, and waited, wide open and
fixed, until the last word was spoken. He listened fascinated and
enthralled. And so vividly did the changes of expression shoot and
quiver across his face, that it seemed to Sutch the lad must actually
hear the drone of bullets in the air, actually resist the stunning shock
of a charge, actually ride down in the thick of a squadron to where guns
screeched out a tongue of flame from a fog. Once a major of artillery
spoke of the suspense of the hours between the parading of the troops
before a battle and the first command to advance; and Harry's shoulders
worked under the intolerable strain of those lagging minutes.

But he did more than work his shoulders. He threw a single furtive,
wavering glance backwards; and Lieutenant Sutch was startled, and indeed
more than startled,--he was pained. For this after all was Muriel
Graham's boy.

The look was too familiar a one to Sutch. He had seen it on the faces of
recruits during their first experience of a battle too often for him to
misunderstand it. And one picture in particular rose before his
mind,--an advancing square at Inkermann, and a tall big soldier rushing
forward from the line in the eagerness of his attack, and then stopping
suddenly as though he suddenly understood that he was alone, and had to
meet alone the charge of a mounted Cossack. Sutch remembered very
clearly the fatal wavering glance which the big soldier had thrown
backward toward his companions,--a glance accompanied by a queer sickly
smile. He remembered too, with equal vividness, its consequence. For
though the soldier carried a loaded musket and a bayonet locked to the
muzzle, he had without an effort of self-defence received the Cossack's
lance-thrust in his throat.

Sutch glanced hurriedly about the table, afraid that General Feversham,
or that some one of his guests, should have remarked the same look and
the same smile upon Harry's face. But no one had eyes for the lad; each
visitor was waiting too eagerly for an opportunity to tell a story of
his own. Sutch drew a breath of relief and turned to Harry. But the boy
was sitting with his elbows on the cloth and his head propped between
his hands, lost to the glare of the room and its glitter of silver,
constructing again out of the swift succession of anecdotes a world of
cries and wounds, and maddened riderless chargers and men writhing in a
fog of cannon-smoke. The curtest, least graphic description of the
biting days and nights in the trenches set the lad shivering. Even his
face grew pinched, as though the iron frost of that winter was actually
eating into his bones. Sutch touched him lightly on the elbow.

"You renew those days for me," said he. "Though the heat is dripping
down the windows, I feel the chill of the Crimea."

Harry roused himself from his absorption.

"The stories renew them," said he.

"No. It is you listening to the stories."

And before Harry could reply, General Feversham's voice broke sharply in
from the head of the table:--

"Harry, look at the clock!"

At once all eyes were turned upon the lad. The hands of the clock made
the acutest of angles. It was close upon midnight; and from eight,
without so much as a word or a question, he had sat at the dinner-table
listening. Yet even now he rose with reluctance.

"Must I go, father?" he asked, and the general's guests intervened in
a chorus. The conversation was clear gain to the lad, a first taste of
powder which might stand him in good stead afterwards.

"Besides, it's the boy's birthday," added the major of artillery. "He
wants to stay; that's plain. You wouldn't find a youngster of fourteen
sit all these hours without a kick of the foot against the table-leg
unless the conversation entertained him. Let him stay, Feversham!"

For once General Feversham relaxed the iron discipline under which the
boy lived.

"Very well," said he. "Harry shall have an hour's furlough from his bed.
A single hour won't make much difference."

Harry's eyes turned toward his father, and just for a moment rested
upon his face with a curious steady gaze. It seemed to Sutch that they
uttered a question, and, rightly or wrongly, he interpreted the question
into words:--

"Are you blind?"

But General Feversham was already talking to his neighbours, and Harry
quietly sat down, and again propping his chin upon his hands, listened
with all his soul. Yet he was not entertained; rather he was enthralled;
he sat quiet under the compulsion of a spell. His face became
unnaturally white, his eyes unnaturally large, while the flames of the
candles shone ever redder and more blurred through a blue haze of
tobacco smoke, and the level of the wine grew steadily lower in the
decanters.

Thus half of that one hour's furlough was passed; and then General
Feversham, himself jogged by the unlucky mention of a name, suddenly
blurted out in his jerky fashion:--

"Lord Wilmington. One of the best names in England, if you please. Did
you ever see his house in Warwickshire? Every inch of the ground you
would think would have a voice to bid him play the man, if only in
remembrance of his fathers.... It seemed incredible and mere camp
rumour, but the rumour grew. If it was whispered at the Alma, it was
spoken aloud at Inkermann, it was shouted at Balaclava. Before
Sebastopol the hideous thing was proved. Wilmington was acting as
galloper to his general. I believe upon my soul the general chose him
for the duty, so that the fellow might set himself right. There were
three hundred yards of bullet-swept flat ground, and a message to be
carried across them. Had Wilmington toppled off his horse on the way,
why, there were the whispers silenced for ever. Had he ridden through
alive he earned distinction besides. But he didn't dare; he refused!
Imagine it if you can! He sat shaking on his horse and declined. You
should have seen the general. His face turned the colour of that
Burgundy. 'No doubt you have a previous engagement,' he said, in the
politest voice you ever heard--just that, not a word of abuse. A
previous engagement on the battlefield! For the life of me, I could
hardly help laughing. But it was a tragic business for Wilmington. He
was broken, of course, and slunk back to London. Every house was closed
to him; he dropped out of his circle like a lead bullet you let slip out
of your hand into the sea. The very women in Piccadilly spat if he spoke
to them; and he blew his brains out in a back bedroom off the Haymarket.
Curious that, eh? He hadn't the pluck to face the bullets when his name
was at stake, yet he could blow his own brains out afterwards."

Lieutenant Sutch chanced to look at the clock as the story came to an
end. It was now a quarter to one. Harry Feversham had still a quarter of
an hour's furlough, and that quarter of an hour was occupied by a
retired surgeon-general with a great wagging beard, who sat nearly
opposite to the boy.

"I can tell you an incident still more curious," he said. "The man in
this case had never been under fire before, but he was of my own
profession. Life and death were part of his business. Nor was he really
in any particular danger. The affair happened during a hill campaign in
India. We were encamped in a valley, and a few Pathans used to lie out
on the hillside at night and take long shots into the camp. A bullet
ripped through the canvas of the hospital tent--that was all. The
surgeon crept out to his own quarters, and his orderly discovered him
half-an-hour afterward lying in his blood stone-dead."

"Hit?" exclaimed the major.

"Not a bit of it," said the surgeon. "He had quietly opened his
instrument-case in the dark, taken out a lancet, and severed his femoral
artery. Sheer panic, do you see, at the whistle of a bullet."

Even upon these men, case-hardened to horrors, the incident related in
its bald simplicity wrought its effect. From some there broke a
half-uttered exclamation of disbelief; others moved restlessly in their
chairs with a sort of physical discomfort, because a man had sunk so far
below humanity. Here an officer gulped his wine, there a second shook
his shoulders as though to shake the knowledge off as a dog shakes
water. There was only one in all that company who sat perfectly still in
the silence which followed upon the story. That one was the boy, Harry
Feversham.

He sat with his hands now clenched upon his knees and leaning forward a
little across the table toward the surgeon, his cheeks white as paper,
his eyes burning, and burning with ferocity. He had the look of a
dangerous animal in the trap. His body was gathered, his muscles taut.
Sutch had a fear that the lad meant to leap across the table and strike
with all his strength in the savagery of despair. He had indeed reached
out a restraining hand when General Feversham's matter-of-fact voice
intervened, and the boy's attitude suddenly relaxed.

"Queer incomprehensible things happen. Here are two of them. You can
only say they are the truth and pray God you may forget 'em. But you
can't explain, for you can't understand."

Sutch was moved to lay his hand upon Harry's shoulder.

"Can you?" he asked, and regretted the question almost before it was
spoken. But it was spoken, and Harry's eyes turned swiftly toward Sutch,
and rested upon his face, not, however, with any betrayal of guilt, but
quietly, inscrutably. Nor did he answer the question, although it was
answered in a fashion by General Feversham.

"Harry understand!" exclaimed the general, with a snort of indignation.
"How should he? He's a Feversham."

The question, which Harry's glance had mutely put before, Sutch in the
same mute way repeated. "Are you blind?" his eyes asked of General
Feversham. Never had he heard an untruth so demonstrably untrue. A mere
look at the father and the son proved it so. Harry Feversham wore his
father's name, but he had his mother's dark and haunted eyes, his
mother's breadth of forehead, his mother's delicacy of profile, his
mother's imagination. It needed perhaps a stranger to recognise the
truth. The father had been so long familiar with his son's aspect that
it had no significance to his mind.

"Look at the clock, Harry."

The hour's furlough had run out. Harry rose from his chair, and drew a
breath.

"Good night, sir," he said, and walked to the door.

The servants had long since gone to bed; and, as Harry opened the door,
the hall gaped black like the mouth of night. For a second or two the
boy hesitated upon the threshold, and seemed almost to shrink back into
the lighted room as though in that dark void peril awaited him. And
peril did--the peril of his thoughts.

He stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him. The decanter
was sent again upon its rounds; there was a popping of soda-water
bottles; the talk revolved again in its accustomed groove. Harry was in
an instant forgotten by all but Sutch. The lieutenant, although he
prided himself upon his impartial and disinterested study of human
nature, was the kindliest of men. He had more kindliness than
observation by a great deal. Moreover, there were special reasons which
caused him to take an interest in Harry Feversham. He sat for a little
while with the air of a man profoundly disturbed. Then, acting upon an
impulse, he went to the door, opened it noiselessly, as noiselessly
passed out, and, without so much as a click of the latch, closed the
door behind him.

And this is what he saw: Harry Feversham, holding in the centre of the
hall a lighted candle high above his head, and looking up toward the
portraits of the Fevershams as they mounted the walls and were lost in
the darkness of the roof. A muffled sound of voices came from the other
side of the door panels, but the hall itself was silent. Harry stood
remarkably still, and the only thing which moved at all was the yellow
flame of the candle as it flickered apparently in some faint draught.
The light wavered across the portraits, glowing here upon a red coat,
glittering there upon a corselet of steel. For there was not one man's
portrait upon the walls which did not glisten with the colours of a
uniform, and there were the portraits of many men. Father and son, the
Fevershams had been soldiers from the very birth of the family. Father
and son, in lace collars and bucket boots, in Ramillies wigs and steel
breastplates, in velvet coats, with powder on their hair, in shakos and
swallow-tails, in high stocks and frogged coats, they looked down upon
this last Feversham, summoning him to the like service. They were men of
one stamp; no distinction of uniform could obscure their
relationship--lean-faced men, hard as iron, rugged in feature,
thin-lipped, with firm chins and straight, level mouths, narrow
foreheads, and the steel-blue inexpressive eyes; men of courage and
resolution, no doubt, but without subtleties, or nerves, or that
burdensome gift of imagination; sturdy men, a little wanting in
delicacy, hardly conspicuous for intellect; to put it frankly, men
rather stupid--all of them, in a word, first-class fighting men, but
not one of them a first-class soldier.

But Harry Feversham plainly saw none of their defects. To him they
were one and all portentous and terrible. He stood before them in the
attitude of a criminal before his judges, reading his condemnation in
their cold unchanging eyes. Lieutenant Sutch understood more clearly why
the flame of the candle flickered. There was no draught in the hall, but
the boy's hand shook. And finally, as though he heard the mute voices of
his judges delivering sentence and admitted its justice, he actually
bowed to the portraits on the wall. As he raised his head, he saw
Lieutenant Sutch in the embrasure of the doorway.

He did not start, he uttered no word; he let his eyes quietly rest upon
Sutch and waited. Of the two it was the man who was embarrassed.

"Harry," he said, and in spite of his embarrassment he had the tact to
use the tone and the language of one addressing not a boy, but a comrade
equal in years, "we meet for the first time to-night. But I knew your
mother a long time ago. I like to think that I have the right to call
her by that much misused word 'friend.' Have you anything to tell me?"

"Nothing," said Harry.

"The mere telling sometimes lightens a trouble."

"It is kind of you. There is nothing."

Lieutenant Sutch was rather at a loss. The lad's loneliness made a
strong appeal to him. For lonely the boy could not but be, set apart as
he was, no less unmistakably in mind as in feature, from his father and
his father's fathers. Yet what more could he do? His tact again came to
his aid. He took his card-case from his pocket.

"You will find my address upon this card. Perhaps some day you will give
me a few days of your company. I can offer you on my side a day or two's
hunting."

A spasm of pain shook for a fleeting moment the boy's steady inscrutable
face. It passed, however, swiftly as it had come.

"Thank you, sir," Harry monotonously repeated. "You are very kind."

"And if ever you want to talk over a difficult question with an older
man, I am at your service."

He spoke purposely in a formal voice, lest Harry with a boy's
sensitiveness should think he laughed. Harry took the card and repeated
his thanks. Then he went upstairs to bed.

Lieutenant Sutch waited uncomfortably in the hall until the light of the
candle had diminished and disappeared. Something was amiss, he was very
sure. There were words which he should have spoken to the boy, but he
had not known how to set about the task. He returned to the dining room,
and with a feeling that he was almost repairing his omissions, he filled
his glass and called for silence.

"Gentlemen," he said, "this is June 15th," and there was great applause
and much rapping on the table. "It is the anniversary of our attack upon
the Redan. It is also Harry Feversham's birthday. For us, our work is
done. I ask you to drink the health of one of the youngsters who are
ousting us. His work lies before him. The traditions of the Feversham
family are very well known to us. May Harry Feversham carry them on!
May he add distinction to a distinguished name!"

At once all that company was on its feet.

"Harry Feversham!"

The name was shouted with so hearty a good-will that the glasses on the
table rang. "Harry Feversham, Harry Feversham," the cry was repeated and
repeated, while old General Feversham sat in his chair with a face
aflush with pride. And a boy a minute afterward in a room high up in the
house heard the muffled words of a chorus--

    For he's a jolly good fellow,
    For he's a jolly good fellow,
    For he's a jolly good fellow,
      And so say all of us,

and believed the guests upon this Crimean night were drinking his
father's health. He turned over in his bed and lay shivering. He saw in
his mind a broken officer slinking at night in the shadows of the London
streets. He pushed back the flap of a tent and stooped over a man lying
stone-dead in his blood, with an open lancet clinched in his right hand.
And he saw that the face of the broken officer and the face of the dead
surgeon were one--and that one face, the face of Harry Feversham.




CHAPTER II

CAPTAIN TRENCH AND A TELEGRAM


Thirteen years later, and in the same month of June, Harry Feversham's
health was drunk again, but after a quieter fashion and in a smaller
company. The company was gathered in a room high up in a shapeless block
of buildings which frowns like a fortress above Westminster. A stranger
crossing St. James's Park southwards, over the suspension bridge, at
night, who chanced to lift his eyes and see suddenly the tiers of
lighted windows towering above him to so precipitous a height, might be
brought to a stop with the fancy that here in the heart of London was a
mountain and the gnomes at work. Upon the tenth floor of this building
Harry had taken a flat during his year's furlough from his regiment in
India; and it was in the dining room of this flat that the simple
ceremony took place. The room was furnished in a dark and restful
fashion; and since the chill of the weather belied the calendar, a
comfortable fire blazed in the hearth. A bay window, over which the
blinds had not been lowered, commanded London.

There were four men smoking about the dinner-table. Harry Feversham was
unchanged, except for a fair moustache, which contrasted with his dark
hair, and the natural consequences of growth. He was now a man of
middle height, long-limbed, and well-knit like an athlete, but his
features had not altered since that night when they had been so closely
scrutinised by Lieutenant Sutch. Of his companions two were
brother-officers on leave in England, like himself, whom he had that
afternoon picked up at his club,--Captain Trench, a small man, growing
bald, with a small, sharp, resourceful face and black eyes of a
remarkable activity, and Lieutenant Willoughby, an officer of quite a
different stamp. A round forehead, a thick snub nose, and a pair of
vacant and protruding eyes gave to him an aspect of invincible
stupidity. He spoke but seldom, and never to the point, but rather to
some point long forgotten which he had since been laboriously revolving
in his mind; and he continually twisted a moustache, of which the ends
curled up toward his eyes with a ridiculous ferocity,--a man whom one
would dismiss from mind as of no consequence upon a first thought, and
take again into one's consideration upon a second. For he was born
stubborn as well as stupid; and the harm which his stupidity might do,
his stubbornness would hinder him from admitting. He was not a man to be
persuaded; having few ideas, he clung to them. It was no use to argue
with him, for he did not hear the argument, but behind his vacant eyes
all the while he turned over his crippled thoughts and was satisfied.
The fourth at the table was Durrance, a lieutenant of the East Surrey
Regiment, and Feversham's friend, who had come in answer to a telegram.

This was June of the year 1882, and the thoughts of civilians turned
toward Egypt with anxiety; those of soldiers, with an eager
anticipation. Arabi Pasha, in spite of threats, was steadily
strengthening the fortifications of Alexandria, and already a long
way to the south, the other, the great danger, was swelling like a
thunder-cloud. A year had passed since a young, slight, and tall
Dongolawi, Mohammed Ahmed, had marched through the villages of the White
Nile, preaching with the fire of a Wesley the coming of a Saviour. The
passionate victims of the Turkish tax-gatherer had listened, had heard
the promise repeated in the whispers of the wind in the withered grass,
had found the holy names imprinted even upon the eggs they gathered up.
In 1882 Mohammed had declared himself that Saviour, and had won his
first battles against the Turks.

"There will be trouble," said Trench, and the sentence was the text on
which three of the four men talked. In a rare interval, however, the
fourth, Harry Feversham, spoke upon a different subject.

"I am very glad you were all able to dine with me to-night. I
telegraphed to Castleton as well, an officer of ours," he explained to
Durrance, "but he was dining with a big man in the War Office, and
leaves for Scotland afterwards, so that he could not come. I have news
of a sort."

The three men leaned forward, their minds still full of the dominant
subject. But it was not about the prospect of war that Harry Feversham
had news to speak.

"I only reached London this morning from Dublin," he said with a shade
of embarrassment. "I have been some weeks in Dublin."

Durrance lifted his eyes from the tablecloth and looked quietly at his
friend.

"Yes?" he asked steadily.

"I have come back engaged to be married."

Durrance lifted his glass to his lips.

"Well, here's luck to you, Harry," he said, and that was all. The wish,
indeed, was almost curtly expressed, but there was nothing wanting in it
to Feversham's ears. The friendship between these two men was not one in
which affectionate phrases had any part. There was, in truth, no need of
such. Both men were securely conscious of it; they estimated it at its
true, strong value; it was a helpful instrument, which would not wear
out, put into their hands for a hard, lifelong use; but it was not, and
never had been, spoken of between them. Both men were grateful for it,
as for a rare and undeserved gift; yet both knew that it might entail an
obligation of sacrifice. But the sacrifices, were they needful, would be
made, and they would not be mentioned. It may be, indeed, that the very
knowledge of their friendship's strength constrained them to a
particular reticence in their words to one another.

"Thank you, Jack!" said Feversham. "I am glad of your good wishes. It
was you who introduced me to Ethne; I cannot forget it."

Durrance set his glass down without any haste. There followed a moment
of silence, during which he sat with his eyes upon the tablecloth, and
his hands resting on the table edge.

"Yes," he said in a level voice. "I did you a good turn then."

He seemed on the point of saying more, and doubtful how to say it. But
Captain Trench's sharp, quick, practical voice, a voice which fitted the
man who spoke, saved him his pains.

"Will this make any difference?" asked Trench.

Feversham replaced his cigar between his lips.

"You mean, shall I leave the service?" he asked slowly. "I don't know;"
and Durrance seized the opportunity to rise from the table and cross to
the window, where he stood with his back to his companions. Feversham
took the abrupt movement for a reproach, and spoke to Durrance's back,
not to Trench.

"I don't know," he repeated. "It will need thought. There is much to be
said. On the one side, of course, there's my father, my career, such as
it is. On the other hand, there is her father, Dermod Eustace."

"He wishes you to chuck your commission?" asked Willoughby.

"He has no doubt the Irishman's objection to constituted authority,"
said Trench, with a laugh. "But need you subscribe to it, Feversham?"

"It is not merely that." It was still to Durrance's back that he
addressed his excuses. "Dermod is old, his estates are going to ruin,
and there are other things. You know, Jack?" The direct appeal he had to
repeat, and even then Durrance answered it absently:--

"Yes, I know," and he added, like one quoting a catch-word. "If you want
any whiskey, rap twice on the floor with your foot. The servants
understand."

"Precisely," said Feversham. He continued, carefully weighing his words,
and still intently looking across the shoulders of his companions to his
friend:--

"Besides, there is Ethne herself. Dermod for once did an appropriate
thing when he gave her that name. For she is of her country, and more,
of her county. She has the love of it in her bones. I do not think that
she could be quite happy in India, or indeed in any place which was not
within reach of Donegal, the smell of its peat, its streams, and the
brown friendliness of its hills. One has to consider that."

He waited for an answer, and getting none went on again. Durrance,
however, had no thought of reproach in his mind. He knew that Feversham
was speaking,--he wished very much that he would continue to speak for a
little while,--but he paid no heed to what was said. He stood looking
steadfastly out of the windows. Over against him was the glare from Pall
Mall striking upward to the sky, and the chains of light banked one
above the other as the town rose northward, and a rumble as of a million
carriages was in his ears. At his feet, very far below, lay St. James's
Park, silent and black, a quiet pool of darkness in the midst of glitter
and noise. Durrance had a great desire to escape out of this room into
its secrecy. But that he could not do without remark. Therefore he kept
his back turned to his companion, and leaned his forehead against the
window, and hoped his friend would continue to talk. For he was face to
face with one of the sacrifices which must not be mentioned, and which
no sign must betray.

Feversham did continue, and if Durrance did not listen, on the other
hand Captain Trench gave to him his closest attention. But it was
evident that Harry Feversham was giving reasons seriously considered. He
was not making excuses, and in the end Captain Trench was satisfied.

"Well, I drink to you, Feversham," he said, "with all the proper
sentiments."

"I too, old man," said Willoughby, obediently following his senior's
lead.

Thus they drank their comrade's health, and as their empty glasses
rattled on the table, there came a knock upon the door.

The two officers looked up. Durrance turned about from the window.
Feversham said, "Come in;" and his servant brought in to him a telegram.

Feversham tore open the envelope carelessly, as carelessly read through
the telegram, and then sat very still, with his eyes upon the slip of
pink paper and his face grown at once extremely grave. Thus he sat for
an appreciable time, not so much stunned as thoughtful. And in the room
there was a complete silence. Feversham's three guests averted their
eyes. Durrance turned again to his window; Willoughby twisted his
moustache and gazed intently upward at the ceiling; Captain Trench
shifted his chair round and stared into the glowing fire, and each man's
attitude expressed a certain suspense. It seemed that sharp upon the
heels of Feversham's good news calamity had come knocking at the door.

"There is no answer," said Harry, and fell to silence again. Once he
raised his head and looked at Trench as though he had a mind to speak.
But he thought the better of it, and so dropped again to the
consideration of this message. And in a moment or two the silence was
sharply interrupted, but not by any one of the expectant motionless
three men seated within the room. The interruption came from without.

From the parade ground of Wellington Barracks the drums and fifes
sounding the tattoo shrilled through the open window with a startling
clearness like a sharp summons, and diminished as the band marched away
across the gravel and again grew loud. Feversham did not change his
attitude, but the look upon his face was now that of a man listening,
and listening thoughtfully, just as he had read thoughtfully. In the
years which followed, that moment was to recur again and again to the
recollection of each of Harry's three guests. The lighted room, with the
bright homely fire, the open window overlooking the myriad lamps of
London, Harry Feversham seated with the telegram spread before him, the
drums and fifes calling loudly, and then dwindling to music very small
and pretty--music which beckoned where a moment ago it had commanded:
all these details made up a picture of which the colours were not to
fade by any lapse of time, although its significance was not apprehended
now.

It was remembered that Feversham rose abruptly from his chair, just
before the tattoo ceased. He crumpled the telegram loosely in his hands,
tossed it into the fire, and then, leaning his back against the
chimney-piece and upon one side of the fireplace, said again:--

"I don't know;" as though he had thrust that message, whatever it might
be, from his mind, and was summing up in this indefinite way the
argument which had gone before. Thus that long silence was broken, and a
spell was lifted. But the fire took hold upon the telegram and shook it,
so that it moved like a thing alive and in pain. It twisted, and part of
it unrolled, and for a second lay open and smooth of creases, lit up by
the flame and as yet untouched; so that two or three words sprang, as it
were, out of a yellow glare of fire and were legible. Then the flame
seized upon that smooth part too, and in a moment shrivelled it into
black tatters. But Captain Trench was all this while staring into the
fire.

"You return to Dublin, I suppose?" said Durrance. He had moved back
again into the room. Like his companions, he was conscious of an
unexplained relief.

"To Dublin? No; I go to Donegal in three weeks' time. There is to be a
dance. It is hoped you will come."

"I am not sure that I can manage it. There is just a chance, I believe,
should trouble come in the East, that I may go out on the staff." The
talk thus came round again to the chances of peace and war, and held in
that quarter till the boom of the Westminster clock told that the hour
was eleven. Captain Trench rose from his seat on the last stroke;
Willoughby and Durrance followed his example.

"I shall see you to-morrow," said Durrance to Feversham.

"As usual," replied Harry; and his three guests descended from his
rooms and walked across the Park together. At the corner of Pall Mall,
however, they parted company, Durrance mounting St. James's Street,
while Trench and Willoughby crossed the road into St. James's Square.
There Trench slipped his arm through Willoughby's, to Willoughby's
surprise, for Trench was an undemonstrative man.

"You know Castleton's address?" he asked.

"Albemarle Street," Willoughby answered, and added the number.

"He leaves Euston at twelve o'clock. It is now ten minutes past eleven.
Are you curious, Willoughby? I confess to curiosity. I am an inquisitive
methodical person, and when a man gets a telegram bidding him tell
Trench something and he tells Trench nothing, I am curious as a
philosopher to know what that something is! Castleton is the only other
officer of our regiment in London. It is likely, therefore, that the
telegram came from Castleton. Castleton, too, was dining with a big man
from the War Office. I think that if we take a hansom to Albemarle
Street, we shall just catch Castleton upon his door-step."

Mr. Willoughby, who understood very little of Trench's meaning,
nevertheless cordially agreed to the proposal.

"I think it would be prudent," said he, and he hailed a passing cab.
A moment later the two men were driving to Albemarle Street.




CHAPTER III

THE LAST RIDE TOGETHER


Durrance, meanwhile, walked to his lodging alone, remembering a day, now
two years since, when by a curious whim of old Dermod Eustace he had
been fetched against his will to the house by the Lennon River in
Donegal, and there, to his surprise, had been made acquainted with
Dermod's daughter Ethne. For she surprised all who had first held speech
with the father. Durrance had stayed for a night in the house, and
through that evening she had played upon her violin, seated with her
back toward her audience, as was her custom when she played, lest a look
or a gesture should interrupt the concentration of her thoughts. The
melodies which she had played rang in his ears now. For the girl
possessed the gift of music, and the strings of her violin spoke to the
questions of her bow. There was in particular an overture--the Melusine
overture--which had the very sob of the waves. Durrance had listened
wondering, for the violin had spoken to him of many things of which the
girl who played it could know nothing. It had spoken of long perilous
journeys and the faces of strange countries; of the silver way across
moonlit seas; of the beckoning voices from the under edges of the
desert. It had taken a deeper, a more mysterious tone. It had told of
great joys, quite unattainable, and of great griefs too, eternal, and
with a sort of nobility by reason of their greatness; and of many
unformulated longings beyond the reach of words; but with never a single
note of mere complaint. So it had seemed to Durrance that night as he
had sat listening while Ethne's face was turned away. So it seemed to
him now when he knew that her face was still to be turned away for all
his days. He had drawn a thought from her playing which he was at some
pains to keep definite in his mind. The true music cannot complain.

Therefore it was that as he rode the next morning into the Row his blue
eyes looked out upon the world from his bronzed face with not a jot less
of his usual friendliness. He waited at half-past nine by the clump of
lilacs and laburnums at the end of the sand, but Harry Feversham did not
join him that morning, nor indeed for the next three weeks. Ever since
the two men had graduated from Oxford it had been their custom to meet
at this spot and hour, when both chanced to be in town, and Durrance was
puzzled. It seemed to him that he had lost his friend as well.

Meanwhile, however, the rumours of war grew to a certainty; and when at
last Feversham kept the tryst, Durrance had news.

"I told you luck might look my way. Well, she has. I go out to Egypt on
General Graham's staff. There's talk we may run down the Red Sea to
Suakin afterward."

The exhilaration of his voice brought an unmistakable envy into
Feversham's eyes. It seemed strange to Durrance, even at that moment of
his good luck, that Harry Feversham should envy him--strange and rather
pleasant. But he interpreted the envy in the light of his own ambitions.

"It is rough on you," he said sympathetically, "that your regiment has
to stay behind."

Feversham rode by his friend's side in silence. Then, as they came to
the chairs beneath the trees, he said:--

"That was expected. The day you dined with me I sent in my papers."

"That night?" said Durrance, turning in his saddle. "After we had gone?"

"Yes," said Feversham, accepting the correction. He wondered whether it
had been intended. But Durrance rode silently forward. Again Harry
Feversham was conscious of a reproach in his friend's silence, and again
he was wrong. For Durrance suddenly spoke heartily, and with a laugh.

"I remember. You gave us your reasons that night. But for the life of me
I can't help wishing that we had been going out together. When do you
leave for Ireland?"

"To-night."

"So soon?"

They turned their horses and rode westward again down the alley of
trees. The morning was still fresh. The limes and chestnuts had lost
nothing of their early green, and since the May was late that year, its
blossoms still hung delicately white like snow upon the branches and
shone red against the dark rhododendrons. The park shimmered in a haze
of sunlight, and the distant roar of the streets was as the tumbling of
river water.

"It is a long time since we bathed in Sandford Lasher," said Durrance.

"Or froze in the Easter vacations in the big snow-gully on Great End,"
returned Feversham. Both men had the feeling that on this morning a
volume in their book of life was ended; and since the volume had been a
pleasant one to read, and they did not know whether its successors would
sustain its promise, they were looking backward through the leaves
before they put it finally away.

"You must stay with us, Jack, when you come back," said Feversham.

Durrance had schooled himself not to wince, and he did not, even at that
anticipatory "us." If his left hand tightened upon the thongs of his
reins, the sign could not be detected by his friend.

"If I come back," said Durrance. "You know my creed. I could never pity
a man who died on active service. I would very much like to come by that
end myself."

It was a quite simple creed, consistent with the simplicity of the man
who uttered it. It amounted to no more than this: that to die decently
was worth a good many years of life. So that he uttered it without
melancholy or any sign of foreboding. Even so, however, he had a fear
that perhaps his friend might place another interpretation upon the
words, and he looked quickly into his face. He only saw again, however,
that puzzling look of envy in Feversham's eyes.

"You see there are worse things which can happen," he continued;
"disablement, for instance. Clever men could make a shift, perhaps, to
put up with it. But what in the world should I do if I had to sit in a
chair all my days? It makes me shiver to think of it," and he shook his
broad shoulders to unsaddle that fear. "Well, this is the last ride. Let
us gallop," and he let out his horse.

Feversham followed his example, and side by side they went racing down
the sand. At the bottom of the Row they stopped, shook hands, and with
the curtest of nods parted. Feversham rode out of the park, Durrance
turned back and walked his horse up toward the seats beneath the trees.

Even as a boy in his home at Southpool in Devonshire, upon a wooded
creek of the Salcombe estuary, he had always been conscious of a certain
restlessness, a desire to sail down that creek and out over the levels
of the sea, a dream of queer outlandish countries and peoples beyond the
dark familiar woods. And the restlessness had grown upon him, so that
"Guessens," even when he had inherited it with its farms and lands, had
remained always in his thoughts as a place to come home to rather than
an estate to occupy a life. He purposely exaggerated that restlessness
now, and purposely set against it words which Feversham had spoken and
which he knew to be true. Ethne Eustace would hardly be happy outside
her county of Donegal. Therefore, even had things fallen out
differently, as he phrased it, there might have been a clash. Perhaps it
was as well that Harry Feversham was to marry Ethne--and not another
than Feversham.

Thus, at all events, he argued as he rode, until the riders vanished
from before his eyes, and the ladies in their coloured frocks beneath
the cool of the trees. The trees themselves dwindled to ragged mimosas,
the brown sand at his feet spread out in a widening circumference and
took the bright colour of honey; and upon the empty sand black stones
began to heap themselves shapelessly like coal, and to flash in the sun
like mirrors. He was deep in his anticipations of the Soudan, when he
heard his name called out softly in a woman's voice, and, looking up,
found himself close by the rails.

"How do you do, Mrs. Adair?" said he, and he stopped his horse. Mrs.
Adair gave him her hand across the rails. She was Durrance's neighbour
at Southpool, and by a year or two his elder--a tall woman, remarkable
for the many shades of her thick brown hair and the peculiar pallor on
her face. But at this moment the face had brightened, there was a hint
of colour in the cheeks.

"I have news for you," said Durrance. "Two special items. One, Harry
Feversham is to be married."

"To whom?" asked the lady, eagerly.

"You should know. It was in your house in Hill Street that Harry first
met her; and I introduced him. He has been improving the acquaintance in
Dublin."

But Mrs. Adair already understood; and it was plain that the news was
welcome.

"Ethne Eustace!" she cried. "They will be married soon?"

"There is nothing to prevent it."

"I am glad," and the lady sighed as though with relief. "What is your
second item?"

"As good as the first. I go out on General Graham's staff."

Mrs. Adair was silent. There came a look of anxiety into her eyes, and
the colour died out of her face.

"You are very glad, I suppose," she said slowly.

Durrance's voice left her in no doubt.

"I should think I was. I go soon, too, and the sooner the better. I will
come and dine some night, if I may, before I go."

"My husband will be pleased to see you," said Mrs. Adair, rather coldly.
Durrance did not notice the coldness, however. He had his own reasons
for making the most of the opportunity which had come his way; and he
urged his enthusiasm, and laid it bare in words more for his own benefit
than with any thought of Mrs. Adair. Indeed, he had always rather a
vague impression of the lady. She was handsome in a queer, foreign way
not so uncommon along the coasts of Devonshire and Cornwall, and she had
good hair, and was always well dressed. Moreover, she was friendly. And
at that point Durrance's knowledge of her came to an end. Perhaps her
chief merit in his eyes was that she had made friends with Ethne
Eustace. But he was to become better acquainted with Mrs. Adair. He rode
away from the park with the old regret in his mind that the fortunes of
himself and his friend were this morning finally severed. As a fact he
had that morning set the strands of a new rope a-weaving which was to
bring them together again in a strange and terrible relationship. Mrs.
Adair followed him out of the park, and walked home very thoughtfully.

Durrance had just one week wherein to provide his equipment and
arrange his estate in Devonshire. It passed in a continuous hurry of
preparation, so that his newspaper lay each day unfolded in his rooms.
The general was to travel overland to Brindisi; and so on an evening of
wind and rain, toward the end of July, Durrance stepped from the Dover
pier into the mail-boat for Calais. In spite of the rain and the gloomy
night, a small crowd had gathered to give the general a send-off. As the
ropes were cast off, a feeble cheer was raised; and before the cheer had
ended, Durrance found himself beset by a strange illusion. He was
leaning upon the bulwarks, idly wondering whether this was his last view
of England, and with a wish that some one of his friends had come down
to see him go, when it seemed to him suddenly that his wish was
answered; for he caught a glimpse of a man standing beneath a gas-lamp,
and that man was of the stature and wore the likeness of Harry
Feversham. Durrance rubbed his eyes and looked again. But the wind made
the tongue of light flicker uncertainly within the glass; the rain, too,
blurred the quay. He could only be certain that a man was standing
there, he could only vaguely distinguish beneath the lamp the whiteness
of a face. It was an illusion, he said to himself. Harry Feversham was
at that moment most likely listening to Ethne playing the violin under a
clear sky in a high garden of Donegal. But even as he was turning from
the bulwarks, there came a lull of the wind, the lights burned bright
and steady on the pier, and the face leaped from the shadows distinct in
feature and expression. Durrance leaned out over the side of the boat.

"Harry!" he shouted, at the top of a wondering voice.

But the figure beneath the lamp never stirred. The wind blew the lights
again this way and that, the paddles churned the water, the mail-boat
passed beyond the pier. It was an illusion, he repeated; it was a
coincidence. It was the face of a stranger very like to Harry
Feversham's. It could not be Feversham's, because the face which
Durrance had seen so distinctly for a moment was a haggard, wistful
face--a face stamped with an extraordinary misery; the face of a man
cast out from among his fellows.

Durrance had been very busy all that week. He had clean forgotten the
arrival of that telegram and the suspense which the long perusal of it
had caused. Moreover, his newspaper had lain unfolded in his rooms. But
his friend Harry Feversham had come to see him off.




CHAPTER IV

THE BALL AT LENNON HOUSE


Yet Feversham had travelled to Dublin by the night mail after his ride
with Durrance in the Row. He had crossed Lough Swilly on the following
fore-noon by a little cargo steamer, which once a week steamed up the
Lennon River as far as Ramelton. On the quay-side Ethne was waiting for
him in her dog-cart; she gave him the hand and the smile of a comrade.

"You are surprised to see me," said she, noting the look upon his face.

"I always am," he replied. "For always you exceed my thoughts of you;"
and the smile changed upon her face--it became something more than the
smile of a comrade.

"I shall drive slowly," she said, as soon as his traps had been packed
into the cart; "I brought no groom on purpose. There will be guests
coming to-morrow. We have only to-day."

She drove along the wide causeway by the riverside, and turned up the
steep, narrow street. Feversham sat silently by her side. It was his
first visit to Ramelton, and he gazed about him, noting the dark thicket
of tall trees which climbed on the far side of the river, the old grey
bridge, the noise of the water above it as it sang over shallows, and
the drowsy quiet of the town, with a great curiosity and almost a pride
of ownership, since it was here that Ethne lived, and all these things
were part and parcel of her life.

She was at that time a girl of twenty-one, tall, strong, and supple of
limb, and with a squareness of shoulder proportionate to her height. She
had none of that exaggerated slope which our grandmothers esteemed, yet
she lacked no grace of womanhood on that account, and in her walk she
was light-footed as a deer. Her hair was dark brown, and she wore it
coiled upon the nape of her neck; a bright colour burned in her cheeks,
and her eyes, of a very clear grey, met the eyes of those to whom she
talked with a most engaging frankness. And in character she was the
counterpart of her looks. She was honest; she had a certain simplicity,
the straightforward simplicity of strength which comprises much
gentleness and excludes violence. Of her courage there is a story still
told in Ramelton, which Feversham could never remember without a thrill
of wonder. She had stopped at a door on that steep hill leading down to
the river, and the horse which she was driving took fright at the mere
clatter of a pail and bolted. The reins were lying loose at the moment;
they fell on the ground before Ethne could seize them. She was thus
seated helpless in the dog-cart, and the horse was tearing down to where
the road curves sharply over the bridge. The thing which she did, she
did quite coolly. She climbed over the front of the dog-cart as it
pitched and raced down the hill, and balancing herself along the shafts,
reached the reins at the horse's neck, and brought the horse to a stop
ten yards from the curve. But she had, too, the defects of her
qualities, although Feversham was not yet aware of them.

Ethne during the first part of this drive was almost as silent as her
companion; and when she spoke, it was with an absent air, as though she
had something of more importance in her thoughts. It was not until she
had left the town and was out upon the straight, undulating road to
Letterkenny that she turned quickly to Feversham and uttered it.

"I saw this morning that your regiment was ordered from India to Egypt.
You could have gone with it, had I not come in your way. There would
have been chances of distinction. I have hindered you, and I am very
sorry. Of course, you could not know that there was any possibility of
your regiment going, but I can understand it is very hard for you to be
left behind. I blame myself."

Feversham sat staring in front of him for a moment. Then he said, in a
voice suddenly grown hoarse:--

"You need not."

"How can I help it? I blame myself the more," she continued, "because I
do not see things quite like other women. For instance, supposing that
you had gone to Egypt, and that the worst had happened, I should have
felt very lonely, of course, all my days, but I should have known quite
surely that when those days were over, you and I would see much of one
another."

She spoke without any impressive lowering of the voice, but in the
steady, level tone of one stating the simplest imaginable fact.
Feversham caught his breath like a man in pain. But the girl's eyes
were upon his face, and he sat still, staring in front of him without so
much as a contraction of the forehead. But it seemed that he could not
trust himself to answer. He kept his lips closed, and Ethne continued:--

"You see I can put up with the absence of the people I care about, a
little better perhaps than most people. I do not feel that I have lost
them at all," and she cast about for a while as if her thought was
difficult to express. "You know how things happen," she resumed. "One
goes along in a dull sort of way, and then suddenly a face springs out
from the crowd of one's acquaintances, and you know it at once and
certainly for the face of a friend, or rather you recognise it, though
you have never seen it before. It is almost as though you had come upon
some one long looked for and now gladly recovered. Well, such
friends--they are few, no doubt, but after all only the few really
count--such friends one does not lose, whether they are absent, or
even--dead."

"Unless," said Feversham, slowly, "one has made a mistake. Suppose the
face in the crowd is a mask, what then? One may make mistakes."

Ethne shook her head decidedly.

"Of that kind, no. One may seem to have made mistakes, and perhaps for a
long while. But in the end one would be proved not to have made them."

And the girl's implicit faith took hold upon the man and tortured him,
so that he could no longer keep silence.

"Ethne," he cried, "you don't know--" But at that moment Ethne reined
in her horse, laughed, and pointed with her whip.

They had come to the top of a hill a couple of miles from Ramelton. The
road ran between stone walls enclosing open fields upon the left, and a
wood of oaks and beeches on the right. A scarlet letter-box was built
into the left-hand wall, and at that Ethne's whip was pointed.

"I wanted to show you that," she interrupted. "It was there I used to
post my letters to you during the anxious times." And so Feversham let
slip his opportunity of speech.

"The house is behind the trees to the right," she continued.

"The letter-box is very convenient," said Feversham.

"Yes," said Ethne, and she drove on and stopped again where the park
wall had crumbled.

"That's where I used to climb over to post the letters. There's a tree
on the other side of the wall as convenient as the letter-box. I used to
run down the half-mile of avenue at night."

"There might have been thieves," exclaimed Feversham.

"There were thorns," said Ethne, and turning through the gates she drove
up to the porch of the long, irregular grey house. "Well, we have still
a day before the dance."

"I suppose the whole country-side is coming," said Feversham.

"It daren't do anything else," said Ethne, with a laugh. "My father
would send the police to fetch them if they stayed away, just as he
fetched your friend Mr. Durrance here. By the way, Mr. Durrance has
sent me a present--a Guarnerius violin."

The door opened, and a thin, lank old man, with a fierce peaked face
like a bird of prey, came out upon the steps. His face softened,
however, into friendliness when he saw Feversham, and a smile played
upon his lips. A stranger might have thought that he winked. But his
left eyelid continually drooped over the eye.

"How do you do?" he said. "Glad to see you. Must make yourself at home.
If you want any whiskey, stamp twice on the floor with your foot. The
servants understand," and with that he went straightway back into the
house.

       *       *       *       *       *

The biographer of Dermod Eustace would need to bring a wary mind to his
work. For though the old master of Lennon House has not lain twenty
years in his grave, he is already swollen into a legendary character.
Anecdotes have grown upon his memory like barnacles, and any man in
those parts with a knack of invention has only to foist his stories upon
Dermod to ensure a ready credence. There are, however, definite facts.
He practised an ancient and tyrannous hospitality, keeping open house
upon the road to Letterkenny, and forcing bed and board even upon
strangers, as Durrance had once discovered. He was a man of another
century, who looked out with a glowering, angry eye upon a topsy-turvy
world, and would not be reconciled to it except after much alcohol. He
was a sort of intoxicated Coriolanus, believing that the people should
be shepherded with a stick, yet always mindful of his manners, even to
the lowliest of women. It was said of him with pride by the townsfolk
of Ramelton, that even at his worst, when he came galloping down the
steep cobbled streets, mounted on a big white mare of seventeen hands,
with his inseparable collie dog for his companion,--a gaunt, grey-faced,
grey-haired man, with a drooping eye, swaying with drink, yet by a
miracle keeping his saddle,--he had never ridden down any one except a
man. There are two points to be added. He was rather afraid of his
daughter, who wisely kept him doubtful whether she was displeased with
him or not, and he had conceived a great liking for Harry Feversham.

Harry saw little of him that day, however. Dermod retired into the room
which he was pleased to call his office, while Feversham and Ethne spent
the afternoon fishing for salmon in the Lennon River. It was an
afternoon restful as a Sabbath, and the very birds were still. From the
house the lawns fell steeply, shaded by trees and dappled by the
sunlight, to a valley, at the bottom of which flowed the river swift and
black under overarching boughs. There was a fall, where the water slid
over rocks with a smoothness so unbroken that it looked solid except
just at one point. There a spur stood sharply up, and the river broke
back upon itself in an amber wave through which the sun shone. Opposite
this spur they sat for a long while, talking at times, but for the most
part listening to the roar of the water and watching its perpetual flow.
And at last the sunset came, and the long shadows. They stood up, looked
at each other with a smile, and so walked slowly back to the house. It
was an afternoon which Feversham was long to remember; for the next
night was the night of the dance, and as the band struck up the opening
bars of the fourth waltz, Ethne left her position at the drawing-room
door, and taking Feversham's arm passed out into the hall.

The hall was empty, and the front door stood open to the cool of the
summer night. From the ballroom came the swaying lilt of the music and
the beat of the dancers' feet. Ethne drew a breath of relief at her
reprieve from her duties, and then dropping her partner's arm, crossed
to a side table.

"The post is in," she said. "There are letters, one, two, three, for
you, and a little box."

She held the box out to him as she spoke,--a little white jeweller's
cardboard box,--and was at once struck by its absence of weight.

"It must be empty," she said.

Yet it was most carefully sealed and tied. Feversham broke the seals and
unfastened the string. He looked at the address. The box had been
forwarded from his lodgings, and he was not familiar with the
handwriting.

"There is some mistake," he said as he shook the lid open, and then he
stopped abruptly. Three white feathers fluttered out of the box, swayed
and rocked for a moment in the air, and then, one after another, settled
gently down upon the floor. They lay like flakes of snow upon the dark
polished boards. But they were not whiter than Harry Feversham's cheeks.
He stood and stared at the feathers until he felt a light touch upon his
arm. He looked and saw Ethne's gloved hand upon his sleeve.

"What does it mean?" she asked. There was some perplexity in her voice,
but nothing more than perplexity. The smile upon her face and the loyal
confidence in her eyes showed she had never a doubt that his first word
would lift it from her. "What does it mean?"

"That there are things which cannot be hid, I suppose," said Feversham.

For a little while Ethne did not speak. The languorous music floated
into the hall, and the trees whispered from the garden through the open
door. Then she shook his arm gently, uttered a breathless little laugh,
and spoke as though she were pleading with a child.

"I don't think you understand, Harry. Here are three white feathers.
They were sent to you in jest? Oh, of course in jest. But it is a cruel
kind of jest--"

"They were sent in deadly earnest."

He spoke now, looking her straight in the eyes. Ethne dropped her hand
from his sleeve.

"Who sent them?" she asked.

Feversham had not given a thought to that matter. The message was all in
all, the men who had sent it so unimportant. But Ethne reached out her
hand and took the box from him. There were three visiting cards lying at
the bottom, and she took them out and read them aloud.

"Captain Trench, Mr. Castleton, Mr. Willoughby. Do you know these men?"

"All three are officers of my old regiment."

The girl was dazed. She knelt down upon the floor and gathered the
feathers into her hand with a vague thought that merely to touch them
would help her to comprehension. They lay upon the palm of her white
glove, and she blew gently upon them, and they swam up into the air and
hung fluttering and rocking. As they floated downward she caught them
again, and so she slowly felt her way to another question.

"Were they justly sent?" she asked.

"Yes," said Harry Feversham.

He had no thought of denial or evasion. He was only aware that the
dreadful thing for so many years dreadfully anticipated had at last
befallen him. He was known for a coward. The word which had long blazed
upon the wall of his thoughts in letters of fire was now written large
in the public places. He stood as he had once stood before the portraits
of his fathers, mutely accepting condemnation. It was the girl who
denied, as she still kneeled upon the floor.

"I do not believe that is true," she said. "You could not look me in the
face so steadily were it true. Your eyes would seek the floor, not
mine."

"Yet it is true."

"Three little white feathers," she said slowly; and then, with a sob in
her throat, "This afternoon we were under the elms down by the Lennon
River--do you remember, Harry?--just you and I. And then come three
little white feathers, and the world's at an end."

"Oh, don't!" cried Harry, and his voice broke upon the word. Up till now
he had spoken with a steadiness matching the steadiness of his eyes. But
these last words of hers, the picture which they evoked in his memories,
the pathetic simplicity of her utterance, caught him by the heart. But
Ethne seemed not to hear the appeal. She was listening with her face
turned toward the ballroom. The chatter and laughter of the voices there
grew louder and nearer. She understood that the music had ceased. She
rose quickly to her feet, clenching the feathers in her hand, and opened
a door. It was the door of her sitting room.

"Come," she said.

Harry followed her into the room, and she closed the door, shutting out
the noise.

"Now," she said, "will you tell me, if you please, why the feathers have
been sent?"

She stood quietly before him; her face was pale, but Feversham could not
gather from her expression any feeling which she might have beyond a
desire and a determination to get at the truth. She spoke, too, with the
same quietude. He answered, as he had answered before, directly and to
the point, without any attempt at mitigation.

"A telegram came. It was sent by Castleton. It reached me when Captain
Trench and Mr. Willoughby were dining with me. It told me that my
regiment would be ordered on active service in Egypt. Castleton was
dining with a man likely to know, and I did not question the accuracy of
his message. He told me to tell Trench. I did not. I thought the matter
over with the telegram in front of me. Castleton was leaving that night
for Scotland, and he would go straight from Scotland to rejoin the
regiment. He would not, therefore, see Trench for some weeks at the
earliest, and by that time the telegram would very likely be forgotten
or its date confused. I did not tell Trench. I threw the telegram into
the fire, and that night sent in my papers. But Trench found out
somehow. Durrance was at dinner, too,--good God, Durrance!" he suddenly
broke out. "Most likely he knows like the rest."

It came upon him as something shocking and strangely new that his friend
Durrance, who, as he knew very well, had been wont rather to look up to
him, in all likelihood counted him a thing of scorn. But he heard Ethne
speaking. After all, what did it matter whether Durrance knew, whether
every man knew, from the South Pole to the North, since she, Ethne,
knew?

"And is this all?" she asked.

"Surely it is enough," said he.

"I think not," she answered, and she lowered her voice a little as she
went on. "We agreed, didn't we, that no foolish misunderstandings should
ever come between us? We were to be frank, and to take frankness each
from the other without offence. So be frank with me! Please!" and she
pleaded. "I could, I think, claim it as a right. At all events I ask for
it as I shall never ask for anything else in all my life."

There was a sort of explanation of his act, Harry Feversham remembered;
but it was so futile when compared with the overwhelming consequence.
Ethne had unclenched her hands; the three feathers lay before his eyes
upon the table. They could not be explained away; he wore "coward" like
a blind man's label; besides, he could never make her understand.
However, she wished for the explanation and had a right to it; she had
been generous in asking for it, with a generosity not very common
amongst women. So Feversham gathered his wits and explained:--

"All my life I have been afraid that some day I should play the coward,
and from the very first I knew that I was destined for the army. I kept
my fear to myself. There was no one to whom I could tell it. My mother
was dead, and my father--" he stopped for a moment, with a deep intake
of the breath. He could see his father, that lonely iron man, sitting at
this very moment in his mother's favourite seat upon the terrace, and
looking over the moonlit fields toward the Sussex Downs; he could
imagine him dreaming of honours and distinctions worthy of the
Fevershams to be gained immediately by his son in the Egyptian campaign.
Surely that old man's stern heart would break beneath this blow. The
magnitude of the bad thing which he had done, the misery which it would
spread, were becoming very clear to Harry Feversham. He dropped his head
between his hands and groaned aloud.

"My father," he resumed, "would, nay, could, never have understood. I
know him. When danger came his way, it found him ready, but he did not
foresee. That was my trouble always,--I foresaw. Any peril to be
encountered, any risk to be run,--I foresaw them. I foresaw something
else besides. My father would talk in his matter-of-fact way of the
hours of waiting before the actual commencement of a battle, after the
troops had been paraded. The mere anticipation of the suspense and the
strain of those hours was a torture to me. I foresaw the possibility of
cowardice. Then one evening, when my father had his old friends about
him on one of his Crimean nights, two dreadful stories were told--one
of an officer, the other of a surgeon, who had both shirked. I was now
confronted with the fact of cowardice. I took those stories up to bed
with me. They never left my memory; they became a part of me. I saw
myself behaving now as one, now as the other, of those two men had
behaved, perhaps in the crisis of a battle bringing ruin upon my
country, certainly dishonouring my father and all the dead men whose
portraits hung ranged in the hall. I tried to get the best of my fears.
I hunted, but with a map of the country-side in my mind. I foresaw every
hedge, every pit, every treacherous bank."

"Yet you rode straight," interrupted Ethne. "Mr. Durrance told me so."

"Did I?" said Feversham, vaguely. "Well, perhaps I did, once the hounds
were off. Durrance never knew what the moments of waiting before the
coverts were drawn meant to me! So when this telegram came, I took the
chance it seemed to offer and resigned."

He ended his explanation. He had spoken warily, having something to
conceal. However earnestly she might ask for frankness, he must at all
costs, for her sake, hide something from her. But at once she suspected
it.

"Were you afraid, too, of disgracing me? Was I in any way the cause that
you resigned?"

Feversham looked her in the eyes and lied:--

"No."

"If you had not been engaged to me, you would still have sent in your
papers?"

"Yes."

Ethne slowly stripped a glove off her hand. Feversham turned away.

"I think that I am rather like your father," she said. "I don't
understand;" and in the silence which followed upon her words Feversham
heard something whirr and rattle upon the table. He looked and saw that
she had slipped her engagement ring off her finger. It lay upon the
table, the stones winking at him.

"And all this--all that you have told to me," she exclaimed suddenly,
with her face very stern, "you would have hidden from me? You would have
married me and hidden it, had not these three feathers come?"

The words had been on her lips from the beginning, but she had not
uttered them lest by a miracle he should after all have some unimagined
explanation which would reestablish him in her thoughts. She had given
him every chance. Now, however, she struck and laid bare the worst of
his disloyalty. Feversham flinched, and he did not answer but allowed
his silence to consent. Ethne, however, was just; she was in a way
curious too: she wished to know the very bottom of the matter before she
thrust it into the back of her mind.

"But yesterday," she said, "you were going to tell me something. I
stopped you to point out the letter-box," and she laughed in a queer
empty way. "Was it about the feathers?"

"Yes," answered Feversham, wearily. What did these persistent questions
matter, since the feathers had come, since her ring lay flickering and
winking on the table? "Yes, I think what you were saying rather
compelled me."

"I remember," said Ethne, interrupting him rather hastily, "about
seeing much of one another--afterwards. We will not speak of such things
again," and Feversham swayed upon his feet as though he would fall. "I
remember, too, you said one could make mistakes. You were right; I was
wrong. One can do more than seem to make them. Will you, if you please,
take back your ring?"

Feversham picked up the ring and held it in the palm of his hand,
standing very still. He had never cared for her so much, he had never
recognised her value so thoroughly, as at this moment when he lost her.
She gleamed in the quiet room, wonderful, most wonderful, from the
bright flowers in her hair to the white slipper on her foot. It was
incredible to him that he should ever have won her. Yet he had, and
disloyally had lost her. Then her voice broke in again upon his
reflections.

"These, too, are yours. Will you take them, please?"

She was pointing with her fan to the feathers upon the table. Feversham
obediently reached out his hand, and then drew it back in surprise.

"There are four," he said.

Ethne did not reply, and looking at her fan Feversham understood. It was
a fan of ivory and white feathers. She had broken off one of those
feathers and added it on her own account to the three.

The thing which she had done was cruel, no doubt. But she wished to make
an end--a complete, irrevocable end; though her voice was steady and her
face, despite its pallor, calm, she was really tortured with humiliation
and pain. All the details of Harry Feversham's courtship, the
interchange of looks, the letters she had written and received, the
words which had been spoken, tingled and smarted unbearably in her
recollections. Their lips had touched--she recalled it with horror. She
desired never to see Harry Feversham after this night. Therefore she
added her fourth feather to the three.

Harry Feversham took the feathers as she bade him, without a word of
remonstrance, and indeed with a sort of dignity which even at that
moment surprised her. All the time, too, he had kept his eyes steadily
upon hers, he had answered her questions simply, there had been nothing
abject in his manner; so that Ethne already began to regret this last
thing which she had done. However, it _was_ done. Feversham had taken
the four feathers.

He held them in his fingers as though he was about to tear them across.
But he checked the action. He looked suddenly towards her, and kept his
eyes upon her face for some little while. Then very carefully he put the
feathers into his breast pocket. Ethne at this time did not consider
why. She only thought that here was the irrevocable end.

"We should be going back, I think," she said. "We have been some time
away. Will you give me your arm?" In the hall she looked at the clock.
"Only eleven o'clock," she said wearily. "When we dance here, we dance
till daylight. We must show brave faces until daylight."

And with her hand resting upon his arm, they passed into the ballroom.




CHAPTER V

THE PARIAH


Habit assisted them; the irresponsible chatter of the ballroom sprang
automatically to their lips; the appearance of enjoyment never failed
from off their faces; so that no one at Lennon House that night
suspected that any swift cause of severance had come between them. Harry
Feversham watched Ethne laugh and talk as though she had never a care,
and was perpetually surprised, taking no thought that he wore the like
mask of gaiety himself. When she swung past him the light rhythm of her
feet almost persuaded him that her heart was in the dance. It seemed
that she could even command the colour upon her cheeks. Thus they both
wore brave faces as she had bidden. They even danced together. But all
the while Ethne was conscious that she was holding up a great load of
pain and humiliation which would presently crush her, and Feversham felt
those four feathers burning at his breast. It was wonderful to him that
the whole company did not know of them. He never approached a partner
without the notion that she would turn upon him with the contemptuous
name which was his upon her tongue. Yet he felt no fear on that account.
He would not indeed have cared had it happened, had the word been
spoken. He had lost Ethne. He watched her and looked in vain amongst
her guests, as indeed he surely knew he would, for a fit comparison.
There were women, pretty, graceful, even beautiful, but Ethne stood
apart by the particular character of her beauty. The broad forehead, the
perfect curve of the eyebrows, the great steady, clear, grey eyes, the
full red lips which could dimple into tenderness and shut level with
resolution, and the royal grace of her carriage, marked her out to
Feversham's thinking, and would do so in any company. He watched her in
a despairing amazement that he had ever had a chance of owning her.

Only once did her endurance fail, and then only for a second. She was
dancing with Feversham, and as she looked toward the windows she saw
that the daylight was beginning to show very pale and cold upon the
other side of the blinds.

"Look!" she said, and Feversham suddenly felt all her weight upon his
arms. Her face lost its colour and grew tired and very grey. Her eyes
shut tightly and then opened again. He thought that she would faint.
"The morning at last!" she exclaimed, and then in a voice as weary as
her face, "I wonder whether it is right that one should suffer so much
pain."

"Hush!" whispered Feversham. "Courage! A few minutes more--only a very
few!" He stopped and stood in front of her until her strength returned.

"Thank you!" she said gratefully, and the bright wheel of the dance
caught them in its spokes again.

It was strange that he should be exhorting her to courage, she thanking
him for help; but the irony of this queer momentary reversal of their
position occurred to neither of them. Ethne was too tried by the strain
of those last hours, and Feversham had learned from that one failure of
her endurance, from the drawn aspect of her face and the depths of pain
in her eyes, how deeply he had wounded her. He no longer said, "I have
lost her," he no longer thought of his loss at all. He heard her words,
"I wonder whether it is right that one should suffer so much pain." He
felt that they would go ringing down the world with him, persistent in
his ears, spoken upon the very accent of her voice. He was sure that he
would hear them at the end above the voices of any who should stand
about him when he died, and hear in them his condemnation. For it was
not right.

The ball finished shortly afterwards. The last carriage drove away, and
those who were staying in the house sought the smoking-room or went
upstairs to bed according to their sex. Feversham, however, lingered in
the hall with Ethne. She understood why.

"There is no need," she said, standing with her back to him as she
lighted a candle, "I have told my father. I told him everything."

Feversham bowed his head in acquiescence.

"Still, I must wait and see him," he said.

Ethne did not object, but she turned and looked at him quickly with her
brows drawn in a frown of perplexity. To wait for her father under such
circumstances seemed to argue a certain courage. Indeed, she herself
felt some apprehension as she heard the door of the study open and
Dermod's footsteps on the floor. Dermod walked straight up to Harry
Feversham, looking for once in a way what he was, a very old man, and
stood there staring into Feversham's face with a muddled and bewildered
expression. Twice he opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. In
the end he turned to the table and lit his candle and Harry Feversham's.
Then he turned back toward Feversham, and rather quickly, so that Ethne
took a step forward as if to get between them; but he did nothing more
than stare at Feversham again and for a long time. Finally, he took up
his candle.

"Well--" he said, and stopped. He snuffed the wick with the scissors and
began again. "Well--" he said, and stopped again. Apparently his candle
had not helped him to any suitable expressions. He stared into the flame
now instead of into Feversham's face, and for an equal length of time.
He could think of nothing whatever to say, and yet he was conscious that
something must be said. In the end he said lamely:--

"If you want any whiskey, stamp twice on the floor with your foot. The
servants understand."

Thereupon he walked heavily up the stairs. The old man's forbearance was
perhaps not the least part of Harry Feversham's punishment.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was broad daylight when Ethne was at last alone within her room. She
drew up the blinds and opened the windows wide. The cool fresh air of
the morning was as a draught of spring-water to her. She looked out upon
a world as yet unillumined by colours and found therein an image of her
days to come. The dark, tall trees looked black; the winding paths, a
singular dead white; the very lawns were dull and grey, though the dew
lay upon them like a network of frost. It was a noisy world, however,
for all its aspect of quiet. For the blackbirds were calling from the
branches and the grass, and down beneath the overhanging trees the
Lennon flowed in music between its banks. Ethne drew back from the
window. She had much to do that morning before she slept. For she
designed with her natural thoroughness to make an end at once of all her
associations with Harry Feversham. She wished that from the moment when
next she waked she might never come across a single thing which could
recall him to her memory. And with a sort of stubborn persistence she
went about the work.

But she changed her mind. In the very process of collecting together the
gifts which he had made to her she changed her mind. For each gift that
she looked upon had its history, and the days before this miserable
night had darkened on her happiness came one by one slowly back to her
as she looked. She determined to keep one thing which had belonged to
Harry Feversham,--a small thing, a thing of no value. At first she chose
a penknife, which he had once lent to her and she had forgotten to
return. But the next instant she dropped it and rather hurriedly. For
she was after all an Irish girl, and though she did not believe in
superstitions, where superstitions were concerned she preferred to be on
the safe side. She selected his photograph in the end and locked it away
in a drawer.

She gathered the rest of his presents together, packed them carefully in
a box, fastened the box, addressed it and carried it down to the hall,
that the servants might despatch it in the morning. Then coming back to
her room she took his letters, made a little pile of them on the hearth
and set them alight. They took some while to consume, but she waited,
sitting upright in her arm-chair while the flame crept from sheet to
sheet, discolouring the paper, blackening the writing like a stream of
ink, and leaving in the end only flakes of ashes like feathers, and
white flakes like white feathers. The last sparks were barely
extinguished when she heard a cautious step on the gravel beneath her
window.

It was broad daylight, but her candle was still burning on the table at
her side, and with a quick instinctive movement she reached out her arm
and put the light out. Then she sat very still and rigid, listening. For
a while she heard only the blackbirds calling from the trees in the
garden and the throbbing music of the river. Afterward she heard the
footsteps again, cautiously retreating; and in spite of her will, in
spite of her formal disposal of the letters and the presents, she was
mastered all at once, not by pain or humiliation, but by an overpowering
sense of loneliness. She seemed to be seated high on an empty world of
ruins. She rose quickly from her chair, and her eyes fell upon a violin
case. With a sigh of relief she opened it, and a little while after one
or two of the guests who were sleeping in the house chanced to wake up
and heard floating down the corridors the music of a violin played very
lovingly and low. Ethne was not aware that the violin which she held was
the Guarnerius violin which Durrance had sent to her. She only
understood that she had a companion to share her loneliness.




CHAPTER VI

HARRY FEVERSHAM'S PLAN


It was the night of August 30. A month had passed since the ball at
Lennon House, but the uneventful country-side of Donegal was still busy
with the stimulating topic of Harry Feversham's disappearance. The
townsmen in the climbing street and the gentry at their dinner-tables
gossiped to their hearts' contentment. It was asserted that Harry
Feversham had been seen on the very morning after the dance, and at five
minutes to six--though according to Mrs. Brien O'Brien it was ten
minutes past the hour--still in his dress clothes and with a white
suicide's face, hurrying along the causeway by the Lennon Bridge. It was
suggested that a drag-net would be the only way to solve the mystery.
Mr. Dennis Rafferty, who lived on the road to Rathmullen, indeed, went
so far as to refuse salmon on the plea that he was not a cannibal, and
the saying had a general vogue. Their conjectures as to the cause of the
disappearance were no nearer to the truth. For there were only two who
knew, and those two went steadily about the business of living as though
no catastrophe had befallen them. They held their heads a trifle more
proudly perhaps. Ethne might have become a little more gentle, Dermod a
little more irascible, but these were the only changes. So gossip had
the field to itself.

But Harry Feversham was in London, as Lieutenant Sutch discovered on the
night of the 30th. All that day the town had been perturbed by rumours
of a great battle fought at Kassassin in the desert east of Ismailia.
Messengers had raced ceaselessly through the streets, shouting tidings
of victory and tidings of disaster. There had been a charge by moonlight
of General Drury-Lowe's Cavalry Brigade, which had rolled up Arabi's
left flank and captured his guns. It was rumoured that an English
general had been killed, that the York and Lancaster Regiment had been
cut up. London was uneasy, and at eleven o'clock at night a great crowd
of people had gathered beneath the gas-lamps in Pall Mall, watching with
pale upturned faces the lighted blinds of the War Office. The crowd was
silent and impressively still. Only if a figure moved for an instant
across the blinds, a thrill of expectation passed from man to man, and
the crowd swayed in a continuous movement from edge to edge. Lieutenant
Sutch, careful of his wounded leg, was standing on the outskirts, with
his back to the parapet of the Junior Carlton Club, when he felt himself
touched upon the arm. He saw Harry Feversham at his side. Feversham's
face was working and extraordinarily white, his eyes were bright like
the eyes of a man in a fever; and Sutch at the first was not sure that
he knew or cared who it was to whom he talked.

"I might have been out there in Egypt to-night," said Harry, in a quick
troubled voice. "Think of it! I might have been out there, sitting by a
camp-fire in the desert, talking over the battle with Jack Durrance; or
dead perhaps. What would it have mattered? I might have been in Egypt
to-night!"

Feversham's unexpected appearance, no less than his wandering tongue,
told Sutch that somehow his fortunes had gone seriously wrong. He had
many questions in his mind, but he did not ask a single one of them. He
took Feversham's arm and led him straight out of the throng.

"I saw you in the crowd," continued Feversham. "I thought that I would
speak to you, because--do you remember, a long time ago you gave me your
card? I have always kept it, because I have always feared that I would
have reason to use it. You said that if one was in trouble, the telling
might help."

Sutch stopped his companion.

"We will go in here. We can find a quiet corner in the upper
smoking-room;" and Harry, looking up, saw that he was standing by the
steps of the Army and Navy Club.

"Good God, not there!" he cried in a sharp low voice, and moved quickly
into the roadway, where no light fell directly on his face. Sutch limped
after him. "Nor to-night. It is late. To-morrow if you will, in some
quiet place, and after nightfall. I do not go out in the daylight."

Again Lieutenant Sutch asked no questions.

"I know a quiet restaurant," he said. "If we dine there at nine, we
shall meet no one whom we know. I will meet you just before nine
to-morrow night at the corner of Swallow Street."

They dined together accordingly on the following evening, at a table in
the corner of the Criterion grill-room. Feversham looked quickly about
him as he entered the room.

"I dine here often when I am in town," said Sutch. "Listen!" The
throbbing of the engines working the electric light could be distinctly
heard, their vibrations could be felt.

"It reminds me of a ship," said Sutch, with a smile. "I can almost fancy
myself in the gun-room again. We will have dinner. Then you shall tell me
your story."

"You have heard nothing of it?" asked Feversham, suspiciously.

"Not a word;" and Feversham drew a breath of relief. It had seemed to
him that every one must know. He imagined contempt on every face which
passed him in the street.

Lieutenant Sutch was even more concerned this evening than he had been
the night before. He saw Harry Feversham clearly now in a full light.
Harry's face was thin and haggard with lack of sleep, there were black
hollows beneath his eyes; he drew his breath and made his movements in a
restless feverish fashion, his nerves seemed strung to breaking-point.
Once or twice between the courses he began his story, but Sutch would
not listen until the cloth was cleared.

"Now," said he, holding out his cigar-case. "Take your time, Harry."

Thereupon Feversham told him the whole truth, without exaggeration or
omission, forcing himself to a slow, careful, matter-of-fact speech, so
that in the end Sutch almost fell into the illusion that it was just the
story of a stranger which Feversham was recounting merely to pass the
time. He began with the Crimean night at Broad Place, and ended with the
ball at Lennon House.

"I came back across Lough Swilly early that morning," he said in
conclusion, "and travelled at once to London. Since then I have stayed
in my rooms all day, listening to the bugles calling in the barrack-yard
beneath my windows. At night I prowl about the streets or lie in bed
waiting for the Westminster clock to sound each new quarter of an hour.
On foggy nights, too, I can hear steam-sirens on the river. Do you know
when the ducks start quacking in St. James's Park?" he asked with a
laugh. "At two o'clock to the minute."

Sutch listened to the story without an interruption. But halfway through
the narrative he changed his attitude, and in a significant way. Up to
the moment when Harry told of his concealment of the telegram, Sutch had
sat with his arms upon the table in front of him, and his eyes upon his
companion. Thereafter he raised a hand to his forehead, and so remained
with his face screened while the rest was told. Feversham had no doubt
of the reason. Lieutenant Sutch wished to conceal the scorn he felt, and
could not trust the muscles of his face. Feversham, however, mitigated
nothing, but continued steadily and truthfully to the end. But even
after the end was reached, Sutch did not remove his hand, nor for some
little while did he speak. When he did speak, his words came upon
Feversham's ears with a shock of surprise. There was no contempt in
them, and though his voice shook, it shook with a great contrition.

"I am much to blame," he said. "I should have spoken that night at Broad
Place, and I held my tongue. I shall hardly forgive myself." The
knowledge that it was Muriel Graham's son who had thus brought ruin and
disgrace upon himself was uppermost in the lieutenant's mind. He felt
that he had failed in the discharge of an obligation, self-imposed, no
doubt, but a very real obligation none the less. "You see, I
understood," he continued remorsefully. "Your father, I am afraid, never
would."

"He never will," interrupted Harry.

"No," Sutch agreed. "Your mother, of course, had she lived, would have
seen clearly; but few women, I think, except your mother. Brute courage!
Women make a god of it. That girl, for instance,"--and again Harry
Feversham interrupted.

"You must not blame her. I was defrauding her into marriage."

Sutch took his hand suddenly from his forehead.

"Suppose that you had never met her, would you still have sent in your
papers?"

"I think not," said Harry, slowly. "I want to be fair. Disgracing my
name and those dead men in the hall I think I would have risked. I could
not risk disgracing her."

And Lieutenant Sutch thumped his fist despairingly upon the table. "If
only I had spoken at Broad Place. Harry, why didn't you let me speak? I
might have saved you many unnecessary years of torture. Good heavens!
what a childhood you must have spent with that fear all alone with you.
It makes me shiver to think of it. I might even have saved you from this
last catastrophe. For I understood. I understood."

Lieutenant Sutch saw more clearly into the dark places of Harry
Feversham's mind than Harry Feversham did himself; and because he saw so
clearly, he could feel no contempt. The long years of childhood, and
boyhood, and youth, lived apart in Broad Place in the presence of the
uncomprehending father and the relentless dead men on the walls, had
done the harm. There had been no one in whom the boy could confide. The
fear of cowardice had sapped incessantly at his heart. He had walked
about with it; he had taken it with him to his bed. It had haunted his
dreams. It had been his perpetual menacing companion. It had kept him
from intimacy with his friends lest an impulsive word should betray him.
Lieutenant Sutch did not wonder that in the end it had brought about
this irretrievable mistake; for Lieutenant Sutch understood.

"Did you ever read 'Hamlet'?" he asked.

"Of course," said Harry, in reply.

"Ah, but did you consider it? The same disability is clear in that
character. The thing which he foresaw, which he thought over, which he
imagined in the act and in the consequence--that he shrank from,
upbraiding himself even as you have done. Yet when the moment of action
comes, sharp and immediate, does he fail? No, he excels, and just by
reason of that foresight. I have seen men in the Crimea, tortured by
their imaginations before the fight--once the fight had begun you must
search amongst the Oriental fanatics for their match. 'Am I a coward?'
Do you remember the lines?

                    Am I a coward?
    Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across?
    Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?

There's the case in a nutshell. If only I had spoken on that night!"

One or two people passed the table on the way out. Sutch stopped and
looked round the room. It was nearly empty. He glanced at his watch and
saw that the hour was eleven. Some plan of action must be decided upon
that night. It was not enough to hear Harry Feversham's story. There
still remained the question, what was Harry Feversham, disgraced and
ruined, now to do? How was he to re-create his life? How was the secret
of his disgrace to be most easily concealed?

"You cannot stay in London, hiding by day, slinking about by night," he
said with a shiver. "That's too like--" and he checked himself.
Feversham, however, completed the sentence.

"That's too like Wilmington," said he, quietly, recalling the story
which his father had told so many years ago, and which he had never
forgotten, even for a single day. "But Wilmington's end will not be
mine. Of that I can assure you. I shall not stay in London."

He spoke with an air of decision. He had indeed mapped out already the
plan of action concerning which Lieutenant Sutch was so disturbed.
Sutch, however, was occupied with his own thoughts.

"Who knows of the feathers? How many people?" he asked. "Give me their
names."

"Trench, Castleton, Willoughby," began Feversham.

"All three are in Egypt. Besides, for the credit of their regiment they
are likely to hold their tongues when they return. Who else?"

"Dermod Eustace and--and--Ethne."

"They will not speak."

"You, Durrance perhaps, and my father."

Sutch leaned back in his chair and stared.

"Your father! You wrote to him?"

"No; I went into Surrey and told him."

Again remorse for that occasion, recognised and not used, seized upon
Lieutenant Sutch.

"Why didn't I speak that night?" he said impotently. "A coward, and you
go quietly down to Surrey and confront your father with that story to
tell to him! You do not even write! You stand up and tell it to him face
to face! Harry, I reckon myself as good as another when it comes to
bravery, but for the life of me I could not have done that."

"It was not--pleasant," said Feversham, simply; and this was the only
description of the interview between father and son which was vouchsafed
to any one. But Lieutenant Sutch knew the father and knew the son. He
could guess at all which that one adjective implied. Harry Feversham
told the results of his journey into Surrey.

"My father continues my allowance. I shall need it, every penny of
it--otherwise I should have taken nothing. But I am not to go home
again. I did not mean to go home for a long while in any case, if at
all."

He drew his pocket-book from his breast, and took from it the four white
feathers. These he laid before him on the table.

"You have kept them?" exclaimed Sutch.

"Indeed, I treasure them," said Harry, quietly. "That seems strange to
you. To you they are the symbols of my disgrace. To me they are much
more. They are my opportunities of retrieving it." He looked about the
room, separated three of the feathers, pushed them forward a little on
the tablecloth, and then leaned across toward Sutch.

"What if I could compel Trench, Castleton, and Willoughby to take back
from me, each in his turn, the feather he sent? I do not say that it is
likely. I do not say even that it is possible. But there is a chance
that it may be possible, and I must wait upon that chance. There will be
few men leading active lives as these three do who will not at some
moment stand in great peril and great need. To be in readiness for that
moment is from now my career. All three are in Egypt. I leave for Egypt
to-morrow."

Upon the face of Lieutenant Sutch there came a look of great and
unexpected happiness. Here was an issue of which he had never thought;
and it was the only issue, as he knew for certain, once he was aware of
it. This student of human nature disregarded without a scruple the
prudence and the calculation proper to the character which he assumed.
The obstacles in Harry Feversham's way, the possibility that at the last
moment he might shrink again, the improbability that three such
opportunities would occur--these matters he overlooked. His eyes already
shone with pride; the three feathers for him were already taken back.
The prudence was on Harry Feversham's side.

"There are endless difficulties," he said. "Just to cite one: I am a
civilian, these three are soldiers, surrounded by soldiers; so much the
less opportunity therefore for a civilian."

"But it is not necessary that the three men should be themselves in
peril," objected Sutch, "for you to convince them that the fault is
retrieved."

"Oh, no. There may be other ways," agreed Feversham. "The plan came
suddenly into my mind, indeed at the moment when Ethne bade me take up
the feathers, and added the fourth. I was on the point of tearing them
across when this way out of it sprang clearly up in my mind. But I have
thought it over since during these last weeks while I sat listening to
the bugles in the barrack-yard. And I am sure there is no other way. But
it is well worth trying. You see, if the three take back their
feathers,"--he drew a deep breath, and in a very low voice, with his
eyes upon the table so that his face was hidden from Sutch, he
added--"why, then she perhaps might take hers back too."

"Will she wait, do you think?" asked Sutch; and Harry raised his head
quickly.

"Oh, no," he exclaimed, "I had no thought of that. She has not even a
suspicion of what I intend to do. Nor do I wish her to have one until
the intention is fulfilled. My thought was different"--and he began to
speak with hesitation for the first time in the course of that evening.
"I find it difficult to tell you--Ethne said something to me the day
before the feathers came--something rather sacred. I think that I will
tell you, because what she said is just what sends me out upon this
errand. But for her words, I would very likely never have thought of it.
I find in them my motive and a great hope. They may seem strange to you,
Mr. Sutch; but I ask you to believe that they are very real to me. She
said--it was when she knew no more than that my regiment was ordered to
Egypt--she was blaming herself because I had resigned my commission, for
which there was no need, because--and these were her words--because had
I fallen, although she would have felt lonely all her life, she would
none the less have surely known that she and I would see much of one
another--afterwards."

Feversham had spoken his words with difficulty, not looking at his
companion, and he continued with his eyes still averted:--

"Do you understand? I have a hope that if--this fault can be
repaired,"--and he pointed to the feathers,--"we might still, perhaps,
see something of one another--afterwards."

It was a strange proposition, no doubt, to be debated across the soiled
tablecloth of a public restaurant, but neither of them felt it to be
strange or even fanciful. They were dealing with the simple serious
issues, and they had reached a point where they could not be affected by
any incongruity in their surroundings. Lieutenant Sutch did not speak
for some while after Harry Feversham had done, and in the end Harry
looked up at his companion, prepared for almost a word of ridicule; but
he saw Sutch's right hand outstretched towards him.

"When I come back," said Feversham, and he rose from his chair. He
gathered the feathers together and replaced them in his pocket-book.

"I have told you everything," he said. "You see, I wait upon chance
opportunities; the three may not come in Egypt. They may never come at
all, and in that case I shall not come back at all. Or they may come
only at the very end and after many years. Therefore I thought that I
would like just one person to know the truth thoroughly in case I do not
come back. If you hear definitely that I never can come back, I would
be glad if you would tell my father."

"I understand," said Sutch.

"But don't tell him everything--I mean, not the last part, not what I
have just said about Ethne and my chief motive, for I do not think that
he would understand. Otherwise you will keep silence altogether.
Promise!"

Lieutenant Sutch promised, but with an absent face, and Feversham
consequently insisted.

"You will breathe no word of this to man or woman, however hard you may
be pressed, except to my father under the circumstances which I have
explained," said Feversham.

Lieutenant Sutch promised a second time and without an instant's
hesitation. It was quite natural that Harry should lay some stress upon
the pledge, since any disclosure of his purpose might very well wear the
appearance of a foolish boast, and Sutch himself saw no reason why he
should refuse it. So he gave the promise and fettered his hands. His
thoughts, indeed, were occupied with the limit Harry had set upon the
knowledge which was to be imparted to General Feversham. Even if he died
with his mission unfulfilled, Sutch was to hide from the father that
which was best in the son, at the son's request. And the saddest part of
it, to Sutch's thinking, was that the son was right in so requesting.
For what he said was true--the father could not understand. Lieutenant
Sutch was brought back to the causes of the whole miserable business:
the premature death of the mother, who could have understood; the want
of comprehension in the father, who was left; and his own silence on
the Crimean night at Broad Place.

"If only I had spoken," he said sadly. He dropped the end of his cigar
into his coffee-cup, and standing up, reached for his hat. "Many things
are irrevocable, Harry," he said, "but one never knows whether they are
irrevocable or not until one has found out. It is always worth while
finding out."

The next evening Feversham crossed to Calais. It was a night as wild as
that on which Durrance had left England; and, like Durrance, Feversham
had a friend to see him off, for the last thing which his eyes beheld as
the packet swung away from the pier, was the face of Lieutenant Sutch
beneath a gas-lamp. The lieutenant maintained his position after the
boat had passed into the darkness and until the throb of its paddles
could no longer be heard. Then he limped through the rain to his hotel,
aware, and regretfully aware, that he was growing old. It was long since
he had felt regret on that account, and the feeling was very strange to
him. Ever since the Crimea he had been upon the world's half-pay list,
as he had once said to General Feversham, and what with that and the
recollection of a certain magical season before the Crimea, he had
looked forward to old age as an approaching friend. To-night, however,
he prayed that he might live just long enough to welcome back Muriel
Graham's son with his honour redeemed and his great fault atoned.




CHAPTER VII

THE LAST RECONNAISSANCE


"No one," said Durrance, and he strapped his field-glasses into the
leather case at his side.

"No one, sir," Captain Mather agreed.

"We will move forward."

The scouts went on ahead, the troops resumed their formation, the two
seven-pounder mountain-guns closed up behind, and Durrance's detachment
of the Camel Corps moved down from the gloomy ridge of Khor Gwob,
thirty-five miles southwest of Suakin, into the plateau of Sinkat. It
was the last reconnaissance in strength before the evacuation of the
eastern Soudan.

All through that morning the camels had jolted slowly up the gulley of
shale between red precipitous rocks, and when the rocks fell back,
between red mountain-heaps all crumbled into a desolation of stones.
Hardly a patch of grass or the ragged branches of a mimosa had broken
the monotony of ruin. And after that arid journey the green bushes of
Sinkat in the valley below comforted the eye with the pleasing aspect of
a park. The troopers sat their saddles with a greater alertness.

They moved in a diagonal line across the plateau toward the mountains of
Erkoweet, a silent company on a plain still more silent. It was eleven
o'clock. The sun rose toward the centre of a colourless, cloudless sky,
the shadows of the camels shortened upon the sand, and the sand itself
glistened white as a beach of the Scilly Islands. There was no draught
of air that morning to whisper amongst the rich foliage, and the shadows
of the branches lay so distinct and motionless upon the ground that they
might themselves have been branches strewn there on some past day by a
storm. The only sounds that were audible were the sharp clank of
weapons, the soft ceaseless padding of the camels' feet, and at times
the whirr of a flight of pigeons disturbed by the approaching cavalcade.
Yet there was life on the plateau, though of a noiseless kind. For as
the leaders rode along the curves of sand, trim and smooth between the
shrubs like carriage drives, they would see from time to time, far ahead
of them, a herd of gazelle start up from the ground and race silently, a
flash of dappled brown and white, to the enclosing hills. It seemed that
here was a country during this last hour created.

"Yet this way the caravans passed southwards to Erkoweet and the Khor
Baraka. Here the Suakis built their summer-houses," said Durrance,
answering the thought in his mind.

"And there Tewfik fought, and died with his four hundred men," said
Mather, pointing forward.

For three hours the troops marched across the plateau. It was the month
of May, and the sun blazed upon them with an intolerable heat. They had
long since lost their alertness. They rode rocking drowsily in their
saddles and prayed for the evening and the silver shine of stars. For
three hours the camels went mincing on with their queer smirking
motions of the head, and then quite suddenly a hundred yards ahead
Durrance saw a broken wall with window-spaces which let the sky through.

"The fort," said he.

Three years had passed since Osman Digna had captured and destroyed it,
but during these three years its roofless ruins had sustained another
siege, and one no less persistent. The quick-growing trees had so
closely girt and encroached upon it to the rear and to the right and to
the left, that the traveller came upon it unexpectedly, as Childe Roland
upon the Dark Tower in the plain. In the front, however, the sand still
stretched open to the wells, where three great Gemeiza trees of dark and
spreading foliage stood spaced like sentinels.

In the shadow to the right front of the fort, where the bushes fringed
the open sand with the level regularity of a river bank, the soldiers
unsaddled their camels and prepared their food. Durrance and Captain
Mather walked round the fort, and as they came to the southern corner,
Durrance stopped.

"Hallo!" said he.

"Some Arab has camped here," said Mather, stopping in his turn. The grey
ashes of a wood fire lay in a little heap upon a blackened stone.

"And lately," said Durrance.

Mather walked on, mounted a few rough steps to the crumbled archway of
the entrance, and passed into the unroofed corridors and rooms. Durrance
turned the ashes over with his boot. The stump of a charred and whitened
twig glowed red. Durrance set his foot upon it, and a tiny thread of
smoke spurted into the air.

"Very lately," he said to himself, and he followed Mather into the
fort. In the corners of the mud walls, in any fissure, in the very
floor, young trees were sprouting. Rearward a steep glacis and a deep
fosse defended the works. Durrance sat himself down upon the parapet of
the wall above the glacis, while the pigeons wheeled and circled
overhead, thinking of the long months during which Tewfik must daily
have strained his eyes from this very spot toward the pass over the
hills from Suakin, looking as that other general far to the south had
done, for the sunlight flashing on the weapons of the help which did not
come. Mather sat by his side and reflected in quite another spirit.

"Already the Guards are steaming out through the coral reefs toward
Suez. A week and our turn comes," he said. "What a God-forsaken
country!"

"I come back to it," said Durrance.

"Why?"

"I like it. I like the people."

Mather thought the taste unaccountable, but he knew nevertheless that,
however unaccountable in itself, it accounted for his companion's rapid
promotion and success. Sympathy had stood Durrance in the stead of much
ability. Sympathy had given him patience and the power to understand, so
that during these three years of campaign he had left far quicker and
far abler men behind him, in his knowledge of the sorely harassed tribes
of the eastern Soudan. He liked them; he could enter into their hatred
of the old Turkish rule, he could understand their fanaticism, and their
pretence of fanaticism under the compulsion of Osman Digna's hordes.

"Yes, I shall come back," he said, "and in three months' time. For one
thing, we know--every Englishman in Egypt, too, knows--that this can't
be the end. I want to be here when the work's taken in hand again. I
hate unfinished things."

The sun beat relentlessly upon the plateau; the men, stretched in the
shade, slept; the afternoon was as noiseless as the morning; Durrance
and Mather sat for some while compelled to silence by the silence
surrounding them. But Durrance's eyes turned at last from the
amphitheatre of hills; they lost their abstraction, they became intently
fixed upon the shrubbery beyond the glacis. He was no longer
recollecting Tewfik Bey and his heroic defence, or speculating upon the
work to be done in the years ahead. Without turning his head, he saw
that Mather was gazing in the same direction as himself.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked suddenly of Mather.

Mather laughed, and answered thoughtfully:--

"I was drawing up the menu of the first dinner I will have when I reach
London. I will eat it alone, I think, quite alone, and at Epitaux. It
will begin with a watermelon. And you?"

"I was wondering why, now that the pigeons have got used to our
presence, they should still be wheeling in and out of one particular
tree. Don't point to it, please! I mean the tree beyond the ditch, and
to the right of two small bushes."

All about them they could see the pigeons quietly perched upon the
branches, spotting the foliage like a purple fruit. Only above the one
tree they circled and timorously called.

"We will draw that covert," said Durrance. "Take a dozen men and
surround it quietly."

He himself remained on the glacis watching the tree and the thick
undergrowth. He saw six soldiers creep round the shrubbery from the
left, six more from the right. But before they could meet and ring the
tree in, he saw the branches violently shaken, and an Arab with a roll
of yellowish dammar wound about his waist, and armed with a flat-headed
spear and a shield of hide, dashed from the shelter and raced out
between the soldiers into the open plain. He ran for a few yards only.
For Mather gave a sharp order to his men, and the Arab, as though he
understood that order, came to a stop before a rifle could be lifted to
a shoulder. He walked quietly back to Mather. He was brought up on to
the glacis, where he stood before Durrance without insolence or
servility.

He explained in Arabic that he was a man of the Kabbabish tribe named
Abou Fatma, and friendly to the English. He was on his way to Suakin.

"Why did you hide?" asked Durrance.

"It was safer. I knew you for my friends. But, my gentleman, did you
know me for yours?"

Then Durrance said quickly, "You speak English," and Durrance spoke in
English.

The answer came without hesitation.

"I know a few words."

"Where did you learn them?"

"In Khartum."

Thereafter he was left alone with Durrance on the glacis, and the two
men talked together for the best part of an hour. At the end of that
time the Arab was seen to descend the glacis, cross the trench, and
proceed toward the hills. Durrance gave the order for the resumption of
the march.

The water-tanks were filled, the men replenished their zamshyehs,
knowing that of all thirsts in this world the afternoon thirst is the
very worst, saddled their camels, and mounted to the usual groaning and
snarling. The detachment moved northwestward from Sinkat, at an acute
angle to its morning's march. It skirted the hills opposite to the pass
from which it had descended in the morning. The bushes grew sparse. It
came into a black country of stones scantily relieved by yellow
tasselled mimosas.

Durrance called Mather to his side.

"That Arab had a strange story to tell me. He was Gordon's servant in
Khartum. At the beginning of 1884, eighteen months ago in fact, Gordon
gave him a letter which he was to take to Berber, whence the contents
were to be telegraphed to Cairo. But Berber had just fallen when the
messenger arrived there. He was seized upon and imprisoned the day after
his arrival. But during the one day which he had free he hid the letter
in the wall of a house, and so far as he knows it has not been
discovered."

"He would have been questioned if it had been," said Mather.

"Precisely, and he was not questioned. He escaped from Berber at night,
three weeks ago. The story is curious, eh?"

"And the letter still remains in the wall? It is curious. Perhaps the
man was telling lies."

"He had the chain mark on his ankles," said Durrance.

The cavalcade turned to the left into the hills on the northern side of
the plateau, and climbed again over shale.

"A letter from Gordon," said Durrance, in a musing voice, "scribbled
perhaps upon the roof-top of his palace, by the side of his great
telescope--a sentence written in haste, and his eye again to the lens,
searching over the palm trees for the smoke of the steamers--and it
comes down the Nile to be buried in a mud wall in Berber. Yes, it's
curious," and he turned his face to the west and the sinking sun. Even
as he looked, the sun dipped behind the hills. The sky above his head
darkened rapidly, to violet; in the west it flamed a glory of colours
rich and iridescent. The colours lost their violence and blended
delicately into one rose hue, the rose lingered for a little, and,
fading in its turn, left a sky of the purest emerald green transfused
with light from beneath rim of the world.

"If only they had let us go last year westward to the Nile," he said
with a sort of passion. "Before Khartum had fallen, before Berber had
surrendered. But they would not."

The magic of the sunset was not at all in Durrance's thoughts. The story
of the letter had struck upon a chord of reverence within him. He was
occupied with the history of that honest, great, impracticable soldier,
who, despised by officials and thwarted by intrigues, a man of few ties
and much loneliness, had gone unflaggingly about his work, knowing the
while that the moment his back was turned the work was in an instant all
undone.

Darkness came upon the troops, the camels quickened their pace, the
cicadas shrilled from every tuft of grass. The detachment moved down
toward the well of Disibil. Durrance lay long awake that night on his
camp bedstead spread out beneath the stars. He forgot the letter in the
mud wall. Southward the Southern Cross hung slanting in the sky, above
him glittered the curve of the Great Bear. In a week he would sail for
England; he lay awake, counting up the years since the packet had cast
off from Dover pier, and he found that the tale of them was good.
Kassassin, Tel-el-Kebir, the rush down the Red Sea, Tokar, Tamai,
Tamanieb--the crowded moments came vividly to his mind. He thrilled even
now at the recollection of the Hadendowas leaping and stabbing through
the breach of McNeil's zareba six miles from Suakin; he recalled the
obdurate defence of the Berkshires, the steadiness of the Marines, the
rallying of the broken troops. The years had been good years, years of
plenty, years which had advanced him to the brevet-rank of
lieutenant-colonel.

"A week more--only a week," murmured Mather, drowsily.

"I shall come back," said Durrance, with a laugh.

"Have you no friends?"

And there was a pause.

"Yes, I have friends. I shall have three months wherein to see them."

Durrance had written no word to Harry Feversham during these years. Not
to write letters was indeed a part of the man. Correspondence was a
difficulty to him. He was thinking now that he would surprise his
friends by a visit to Donegal, or he might find them perhaps in London.
He would ride once again in the Row. But in the end he would come back.
For his friend was married, and to Ethne Eustace, and as for himself his
life's work lay here in the Soudan. He would certainly come back. And
so, turning on his side, he slept dreamlessly while the hosts of the
stars trampled across the heavens above his head.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now, at this moment Abou Fatma of the Kabbabish tribe was sleeping under
a boulder on the Khor Gwob. He rose early and continued along the broad
plains to the white city of Suakin. There he repeated the story which he
had told to Durrance to one Captain Willoughby, who was acting for the
time as deputy-governor. After he had come from the Palace he told his
story again, but this time in the native bazaar. He told it in Arabic,
and it happened that a Greek seated outside a café close at hand
overheard something of what was said. The Greek took Abou Fatma aside,
and with a promise of much merissa, wherewith to intoxicate himself,
induced him to tell it a fourth time and very slowly.

"Could you find the house again?" asked the Greek.

Abou Fatma had no doubts upon that score. He proceeded to draw diagrams
in the dust, not knowing that during his imprisonment the town of Berber
had been steadily pulled down by the Mahdists and rebuilt to the north.

"It will be wise to speak of this to no one except me," said the Greek,
jingling some significant dollars, and for a long while the two men
talked secretly together. The Greek happened to be Harry Feversham whom
Durrance was proposing to visit in Donegal. Captain Willoughby was
Deputy-Governor of Suakin, and after three years of waiting one of Harry
Feversham's opportunities had come.




CHAPTER VIII

LIEUTENANT SUTCH IS TEMPTED TO LIE


Durrance reached London one morning in June, and on that afternoon took
the first walk of the exile, into Hyde Park, where he sat beneath the
trees marvelling at the grace of his countrywomen and the delicacy of
their apparel, a solitary figure, sunburnt and stamped already with that
indefinable expression of the eyes and face which marks the men set
apart in the distant corners of the world. Amongst the people who
strolled past him, one, however, smiled, and, as he rose from his chair,
Mrs. Adair came to his side. She looked him over from head to foot with
a quick and almost furtive glance which might have told even Durrance
something of the place which he held in her thoughts. She was comparing
him with the picture which she had of him now three years old. She was
looking for the small marks of change which those three years might have
brought about, and with eyes of apprehension. But Durrance only noticed
that she was dressed in black. She understood the question in his mind
and answered it.

"My husband died eighteen months ago," she explained in a quiet voice.
"He was thrown from his horse during a run with the Pytchley. He was
killed at once."

"I had not heard," Durrance answered awkwardly. "I am very sorry."

Mrs. Adair took a chair beside him and did not reply. She was a woman of
perplexing silences; and her pale and placid face, with its cold correct
outline, gave no clue to the thoughts with which she occupied them. She
sat without stirring. Durrance was embarrassed. He remembered Mr. Adair
as a good-humoured man, whose one chief quality was his evident
affection for his wife, but with what eyes the wife had looked upon him
he had never up till now considered. Mr. Adair indeed had been at the
best a shadowy figure in that small household, and Durrance found it
difficult even to draw upon his recollections for any full expression of
regret. He gave up the attempt and asked:--

"Are Harry Feversham and his wife in town?"

Mrs. Adair was slow to reply.

"Not yet," she said, after a pause, but immediately she corrected
herself, and said a little hurriedly, "I mean--the marriage never took
place."

Durrance was not a man easily startled, and even when he was, his
surprise was not expressed in exclamations.

"I don't think that I understand. Why did it never take place?" he
asked. Mrs. Adair looked sharply at him, as though inquiring for the
reason of his deliberate tones.

"I don't know why," she said. "Ethne can keep a secret if she wishes,"
and Durrance nodded his assent. "The marriage was broken off on the
night of a dance at Lennon House."

Durrance turned at once to her.

"Just before I left England three years ago?"

"Yes. Then you knew?"

"No. Only you have explained to me something which occurred on the very
night that I left Dover. What has become of Harry?"

Mrs. Adair shrugged her shoulders.

"I do not know. I have met no one who does know. I do not think that I
have met any one who has even seen him since that time. He must have
left England."

Durrance pondered on this mysterious disappearance. It was Harry
Feversham, then, whom he had seen upon the pier as the Channel boat cast
off. The man with the troubled and despairing face was, after all, his
friend.

"And Miss Eustace?" he asked after a pause, with a queer timidity. "She
has married since?"

Again Mrs. Adair took her time to reply.

"No," said she.

"Then she is still at Ramelton?"

Mrs. Adair shook her head.

"There was a fire at Lennon House a year ago. Did you ever hear of a
constable called Bastable?"

"Indeed, I did. He was the means of introducing me to Miss Eustace and
her father. I was travelling from Londonderry to Letterkenny. I received
a letter from Mr. Eustace, whom I did not know, but who knew from my
friends at Letterkenny that I was coming past his house. He asked me to
stay the night with him. Naturally enough I declined, with the result
that Bastable arrested me on a magistrate's warrant as soon as I landed
from the ferry."

"That is the man," said Mrs. Adair, and she told Durrance the history
of the fire. It appeared that Bastable's claim to Dermod's friendship
rested upon his skill in preparing a particular brew of toddy, which
needed a single oyster simmering in the saucepan to give it its
perfection of flavour. About two o'clock of a June morning the spirit
lamp on which the saucepan stewed had been overset; neither of the two
confederates in drink had their wits about them at the moment, and the
house was half burnt and the rest of it ruined by water before the fire
could be got under.

"There were consequences still more distressing than the destruction of
the house," she continued. "The fire was a beacon warning to Dermod's
creditors for one thing, and Dermod, already overpowered with debts,
fell in a day upon complete ruin. He was drenched by the water hoses
besides, and took a chill which nearly killed him, from the effects of
which he has never recovered. You will find him a broken man. The
estates are let, and Ethne is now living with her father in a little
mountain village in Donegal."

Mrs. Adair had not looked at Durrance while she spoke. She kept her eyes
fixed steadily in front of her, and indeed she spoke without feeling on
one side or the other, but rather like a person constraining herself to
speech because speech was a necessity. Nor did she turn to look at
Durrance when she had done.

"So she has lost everything?" said Durrance.

"She still has a home in Donegal," returned Mrs. Adair.

"And that means a great deal to her," said Durrance, slowly. "Yes, I
think you are right."

"It means," said Mrs. Adair, "that Ethne with all her ill-luck has
reason to be envied by many other women."

Durrance did not answer that suggestion directly. He watched the
carriages drive past, he listened to the chatter and the laughter of the
people about him, his eyes were refreshed by the women in their
light-coloured frocks; and all the time his slow mind was working toward
the lame expression of his philosophy. Mrs. Adair turned to him with a
slight impatience in the end.

"Of what are you thinking?" she asked.

"That women suffer much more than men when the world goes wrong with
them," he answered, and the answer was rather a question than a definite
assertion. "I know very little, of course. I can only guess. But I think
women gather up into themselves what they have been through much more
than we do. To them what is past becomes a real part of them, as much a
part of them as a limb; to us it's always something external, at the
best the rung of a ladder, at the worst a weight on the heel. Don't you
think so, too? I phrase the thought badly. But put it this way: Women
look backwards, we look ahead; so misfortune hits them harder, eh?"

Mrs. Adair answered in her own way. She did not expressly agree. But a
certain humility became audible in her voice.

"The mountain village at which Ethne is living," she said in a low
voice, "is called Glenalla. A track strikes up towards it from the road
halfway between Rathmullen and Ramelton." She rose as she finished the
sentence and held out her hand. "Shall I see you?"

"You are still in Hill Street?" said Durrance. "I shall be for a time
in London."

Mrs. Adair raised her eyebrows. She looked always by nature for the
intricate and concealed motive, so that conduct which sprang from a
reason, obvious and simple, was likely to baffle her. She was baffled
now by Durrance's resolve to remain in town. Why did he not travel at
once to Donegal, she asked herself, since thither his thoughts
undoubtedly preceded him. She heard of his continual presence at his
Service Club, and could not understand. She did not even have a
suspicion of his motive when he himself informed her that he had
travelled into Surrey and had spent a day with General Feversham.

It had been an ineffectual day for Durrance. The general kept him
steadily to the history of the campaign from which he had just returned.
Only once was he able to approach the topic of Harry Feversham's
disappearance, and at the mere mention of his son's name the old
general's face set like plaster. It became void of expression and
inattentive as a mask.

"We will talk of something else, if you please," said he; and Durrance
returned to London not an inch nearer to Donegal.

Thereafter he sat under the great tree in the inner courtyard of his
club, talking to this man and to that, and still unsatisfied with the
conversation. All through that June the afternoons and evenings found
him at his post. Never a friend of Feversham's passed by the tree but
Durrance had a word for him, and the word led always to a question. But
the question elicited no answer except a shrug of the shoulders, and a
"Hanged if I know!"

Harry Feversham's place knew him no more; he had dropped even out of the
speculations of his friends.

Toward the end of June, however, an old retired naval officer limped
into the courtyard, saw Durrance, hesitated, and began with a remarkable
alacrity to move away.

Durrance sprang up from his seat.

"Mr. Sutch," said he. "You have forgotten me?"

"Colonel Durrance, to be sure," said the embarrassed lieutenant. "It is
some while since we met, but I remember you very well now. I think we
met--let me see--where was it? An old man's memory, Colonel Durrance, is
like a leaky ship. It comes to harbour with its cargo of recollections
swamped."

Neither the lieutenant's present embarrassment nor his previous
hesitation escaped Durrance's notice.

"We met at Broad Place," said he. "I wish you to give me news of my
friend Feversham. Why was his engagement with Miss Eustace broken off?
Where is he now?"

The lieutenant's eyes gleamed for a moment with satisfaction. He had
always been doubtful whether Durrance was aware of Harry's fall into
disgrace. Durrance plainly did not know.

"There is only one person in the world, I believe," said Sutch, "who can
answer both your questions."

Durrance was in no way disconcerted.

"Yes. I have waited here a month for you," he replied.

Lieutenant Sutch pushed his fingers through his beard, and stared down
at his companion.

"Well, it is true," he admitted. "I can answer your questions, but I
will not."

"Harry Feversham is my friend."

"General Feversham is his father, yet he knows only half the truth. Miss
Eustace was betrothed to him, and she knows no more. I pledged my word
to Harry that I would keep silence."

"It is not curiosity which makes me ask."

"I am sure that, on the contrary, it is friendship," said the
lieutenant, cordially.

"Nor that entirely. There is another aspect of the matter. I will not
ask you to answer my questions, but I will put a third one to you. It is
one harder for me to ask than for you to answer. Would a friend of Harry
Feversham be at all disloyal to that friendship, if"--and Durrance
flushed beneath his sunburn--"if he tried his luck with Miss Eustace?"

The question startled Lieutenant Sutch.

"You?" he exclaimed, and he stood considering Durrance, remembering the
rapidity of his promotion, speculating upon his likelihood to take a
woman's fancy. Here was an aspect of the case, indeed, to which he had
not given a thought, and he was no less troubled than startled. For
there had grown up within him a jealousy on behalf of Harry Feversham as
strong as a mother's for a favourite second son. He had nursed with a
most pleasurable anticipation a hope that, in the end, Harry would come
back to all that he once had owned, like a rethroned king. He stared at
Durrance and saw the hope stricken. Durrance looked the man of courage
which his record proved him to be, and Lieutenant Sutch had his theory
of women. "Brute courage--they make a god of it."

"Well?" asked Durrance.

Lieutenant Sutch was aware that he must answer. He was sorely tempted to
lie. For he knew enough of the man who questioned him to be certain that
the lie would have its effect. Durrance would go back to the Soudan, and
leave his suit unpressed.

"Well?"

Sutch looked up at the sky and down upon the flags. Harry had foreseen
that this complication was likely to occur, he had not wished that Ethne
should wait. Sutch imagined him at this very moment, lost somewhere
under the burning sun, and compared that picture with the one before his
eyes--the successful soldier taking his ease at his club. He felt
inclined to break his promise, to tell the whole truth, to answer both
the questions which Durrance had first asked. And again the pitiless
monosyllable demanded his reply.

"Well?"

"No," said Sutch, regretfully. "There would be no disloyalty."

And on that evening Durrance took the train for Holyhead.




CHAPTER IX

AT GLENALLA


The farm-house stood a mile above the village, in a wild moorland
country. The heather encroached upon its garden, and the bridle-path
ended at its door. On three sides an amphitheatre of hills, which
changed so instantly to the season that it seemed one could distinguish
from day to day a new gradation in their colours, harboured it like a
ship. No trees grew upon those hills, the granite cropped out amidst the
moss and heather; but they had a friendly sheltering look, and Durrance
came almost to believe that they put on their different draperies of
emerald green, and purple, and russet brown consciously to delight the
eyes of the girl they sheltered. The house faced the long slope of
country to the inlet of the Lough. From the windows the eye reached down
over the sparse thickets, the few tilled fields, the whitewashed
cottages, to the tall woods upon the bank, and caught a glimpse of
bright water and the gulls poising and dipping above it. Durrance rode
up the track upon an afternoon and knew the house at once. For as he
approached, the music of a violin floated towards him from the windows
like a welcome. His hand was checked upon the reins, and a particular
strong hope, about which he had allowed his fancies to play, rose up
within him and suspended his breath.

He tied up his horse and entered in at the gate. A formless barrack
without, the house within was a place of comfort. The room into which he
was shown, with its brasses and its gleaming oak and its wide prospect,
was bright as the afternoon itself. Durrance imagined it, too, with the
blinds drawn upon a winter's night, and the fire red on the hearth, and
the wind skirling about the hills and rapping on the panes.

Ethne greeted him without the least mark of surprise.

"I thought that you would come," she said, and a smile shone upon her
face.

Durrance laughed suddenly as they shook hands, and Ethne wondered why.
She followed the direction of his eyes towards the violin which lay upon
a table at her side. It was pale in colour; there was a mark, too, close
to the bridge, where a morsel of worm-eaten wood had been replaced.

"It is yours," she said. "You were in Egypt. I could not well send it
back to you there."

"I have hoped lately, since I knew," returned Durrance, "that,
nevertheless, you would accept it."

"You see I have," said Ethne, and looking straight into his eyes she
added: "I accepted it some while ago. There was a time when I needed to
be assured that I had sure friends. And a thing tangible helped. I was
very glad to have it."

Durrance took the instrument from the table, handling it delicately,
like a sacred vessel.

"You have played upon it? The Musoline overture, perhaps," said he.

"Do you remember that?" she returned, with a laugh. "Yes, I have played
upon it, but only recently. For a long time I put my violin away. It
talked to me too intimately of many things which I wished to forget,"
and these words, like the rest, she spoke without hesitation or any
down-dropping of the eyes.

Durrance fetched up his luggage from Rathmullen the next day, and stayed
at the farm for a week. But up to the last hour of his visit no further
reference was made to Harry Feversham by either Ethne or Durrance,
although they were thrown much into each other's company. For Dermod was
even more broken than Mrs. Adair's description had led Durrance to
expect. His speech was all dwindled to monosyllables; his frame was
shrunken, and his clothes bagged upon his limbs; his very stature seemed
lessened; even the anger was clouded from his eye; he had become a
stay-at-home, dozing for the most part of the day by a fire, even in
that July weather; his longest walk was to the little grey church which
stood naked upon a mound some quarter of a mile away and within view of
the windows, and even that walk taxed his strength. He was an old man
fallen upon decrepitude, and almost out of recognition, so that his
gestures and the rare tones of his voice struck upon Durrance as
something painful, like the mimicry of a dead man. His collie dog seemed
to age in company, and, to see them side by side, one might have said,
in sympathy.

Durrance and Ethne were thus thrown much together. By day, in the wet
weather or the fine, they tramped the hills, while she, with the colour
glowing in her face, and her eyes most jealous and eager, showed him
her country and exacted his admiration. In the evenings she would take
her violin, and sitting as of old with an averted face, she would bid
the strings speak of the heights and depths. Durrance sat watching the
sweep of her arm, the absorption of her face, and counting up his
chances. He had not brought with him to Glenalla Lieutenant Sutch's
anticipations that he would succeed. The shadow of Harry Feversham might
well separate them. For another thing, he knew very well that poverty
would fall more lightly upon her than upon most women. He had indeed had
proofs of that. Though the Lennon House was altogether ruined, and its
lands gone from her, Ethne was still amongst her own people. They still
looked eagerly for her visits; she was still the princess of that
country-side. On the other hand, she took a frank pleasure in his
company, and she led him to speak of his three years' service in the
East. No detail was too insignificant for her inquiries, and while he
spoke her eyes continually sounded him, and the smile upon her lips
continually approved. Durrance did not understand what she was after.
Possibly no one could have understood unless he was aware of what had
passed between Harry Feversham and Ethne. Durrance wore the likeness of
a man, and she was anxious to make sure that the spirit of a man
informed it. He was a dark lantern to her. There might be a flame
burning within, or there might be mere vacancy and darkness. She was
pushing back the slide so that she might be sure.

She led him to speak of Egypt upon the last day of his visit. They were
seated upon the hillside, on the edge of a stream which leaped from
ledge to ledge down a miniature gorge of rock, and flowed over deep
pools between the ledges very swiftly, a torrent of clear black water.

"I travelled once for four days amongst the mirages," he
said,--"lagoons, still as a mirror and fringed with misty trees. You
could almost walk your camel up to the knees in them, before the lagoon
receded and the sand glared at you. And one cannot imagine that glare.
Every stone within view dances and shakes like a heliograph; you can
see--yes, actually see--the heat flow breast high across the desert
swift as this stream here, only pellucid. So till the sun sets ahead of
you level with your eyes! Imagine the nights which follow--nights of
infinite silence, with a cool friendly wind blowing from horizon to
horizon--and your bed spread for you under the great dome of stars. Oh,"
he cried, drawing a deep breath, "but that country grows on you. It's
like the Southern Cross--four overrated stars when first you see them,
but in a week you begin to look for them, and you miss them when you
travel north again." He raised himself upon his elbow and turned
suddenly towards her. "Do you know--I can only speak for myself--but I
never feel alone in those empty spaces. On the contrary, I always feel
very close to the things I care about, and to the few people I care
about too."

Her eyes shone very brightly upon him, her lips parted in a smile. He
moved nearer to her upon the grass, and sat with his feet gathered under
him upon one side, and leaning upon his arm.

"I used to imagine you out there," he said. "You would have loved
it--from the start before daybreak, in the dark, to the camp-fire at
night. You would have been at home. I used to think so as I lay awake
wondering how the world went with my friends."

"And you go back there?" she said.

Durrance did not immediately answer. The roar of the torrent throbbed
about them. When he did speak, all the enthusiasm had gone from his
voice. He spoke gazing into the stream.

"To Wadi Halfa. For two years. I suppose so."

Ethne kneeled upon the grass at his side.

"I shall miss you," she said.

She was kneeling just behind him as he sat on the ground, and again
there fell a silence between them.

"Of what are you thinking?"

"That you need not miss me," he said, and he was aware that she drew
back and sank down upon her heels. "My appointment at Halfa--I might
shorten its term. I might perhaps avoid it altogether. I have still half
my furlough."

She did not answer nor did she change her attitude. She remained very
still, and Durrance was alarmed, and all his hopes sank. For a stillness
of attitude he knew to be with her as definite an expression of distress
as a cry of pain with another woman. He turned about towards her. Her
head was bent, but she raised it as he turned, and though her lips
smiled, there was a look of great trouble in her eyes. Durrance was a
man like another. His first thought was whether there was not some
obstacle which would hinder her from compliance, even though she
herself were willing.

"There is your father," he said.

"Yes," she answered, "there is my father too. I could not leave him."

"Nor need you," said he, quickly. "That difficulty can be surmounted. To
tell the truth I was not thinking of your father at the moment."

"Nor was I," said she.

Durrance turned away and sat for a little while staring down the rocks
into a wrinkled pool of water just beneath. It was after all the shadow
of Feversham which stretched between himself and her.

"I know, of course," he said, "that you would never feel trouble, as so
many do, with half your heart. You would neither easily care nor lightly
forget."

"I remember enough," she returned in a low voice, "to make your words
rather a pain to me. Some day perhaps I may bring myself to tell
everything which happened at that ball three years ago, and then you
will be better able to understand why I am a little distressed. All that
I can tell you now is this: I have a great fear that I was to some
degree the cause of another man's ruin. I do not mean that I was to
blame for it. But if I had not been known to him, his career might
perhaps never have come to so abrupt an end. I am not sure, but I am
afraid. I asked whether it was so, and I was told 'no,' but I think very
likely that generosity dictated that answer. And the fear stays. I am
much distressed by it. I lie awake with it at night. And then you come
whom I greatly value, and you say quietly, 'Will you please spoil my
career too?'" And she struck one hand sharply into the other and cried,
"But that I will not do."

And again he answered:--

"There is no need that you should. Wadi Halfa is not the only place
where a soldier can find work to his hand."

His voice had taken a new hopefulness. For he had listened intently to
the words which she had spoken, and he had construed them by the
dictionary of his desires. She had not said that friendship bounded all
her thoughts of him. Therefore he need not believe it. Women were given
to a hinting modesty of speech, at all events the best of them. A man
might read a little more emphasis into their tones, and underline their
words and still be short of their meaning, as he argued. A subtle
delicacy graced them in nature. Durrance was near to Benedick's mood.
"One whom I value"; "I shall miss you"; there might be a double meaning
in the phrases. When she said that she needed to be assured that she had
sure friends, did she not mean that she needed their companionship? But
the argument, had he been acute enough to see it, proved how deep he was
sunk in error. For what this girl spoke, she habitually meant, and she
habitually meant no more. Moreover, upon this occasion she had
particularly weighed her words.

"No doubt," she said, "_a_ soldier can. But can this soldier find work
so suitable? Listen, please, till I have done. I was so very glad to
hear all that you have told me about your work and your journeys. I was
still more glad because of the satisfaction with which you told it. For
it seemed to me, as I listened and as I watched, that you had found the
one true straight channel along which your life could run swift and
smoothly and unharassed. And so few do that--so very few!" And she wrung
her hands and cried, "And now you spoil it all."

Durrance suddenly faced her. He ceased from argument; he cried in a
voice of passion:--

"I am for you, Ethne! There's the true straight channel, and upon my
word I believe you are for me. I thought--I admit it--at one time I
would spend my life out there in the East, and the thought contented me.
But I had schooled myself into contentment, for I believed you married."
Ethne ever so slightly flinched, and he himself recognised that he had
spoken in a voice overloud, so that it had something almost of
brutality.

"Do I hurt you?" he continued. "I am sorry. But let me speak the whole
truth out, I cannot afford reticence, I want you to know the first and
last of it. I say now that I love you. Yes, but I could have said it
with equal truth five years ago. It is five years since your father
arrested me at the ferry down there on Lough Swilly, because I wished to
press on to Letterkenny and not delay a night by stopping with a
stranger. Five years since I first saw you, first heard the language of
your violin. I remember how you sat with your back towards me. The light
shone on your hair; I could just see your eyelashes and the colour of
your cheeks. I remember the sweep of your arm.... My dear, you are for
me; I am for you."

But she drew back from his outstretched hands.

"No," she said very gently, but with a decision he could not mistake.
She saw more clearly into his mind than he did himself. The restlessness
of the born traveller, the craving for the large and lonely spaces in
the outlandish corners of the world, the incurable intermittent fever to
be moving, ever moving amongst strange peoples and under strange
skies--these were deep-rooted qualities of the man. Passion might
obscure them for a while, but they would make their appeal in the end,
and the appeal would torture. The home would become a prison. Desires
would so clash within him, there could be no happiness. That was the
man. For herself, she looked down the slope of the hill across the brown
country. Away on the right waved the woods about Ramelton, at her feet
flashed a strip of the Lough; and this was her country; she was its
child and the sister of its people.

"No," she repeated, as she rose to her feet. Durrance rose with her. He
was still not so much disheartened as conscious of a blunder. He had put
his case badly; he should never have given her the opportunity to think
that marriage would be an interruption of his career.

"We will say good-bye here," she said, "in the open. We shall be none
the less good friends because three thousand miles hinder us from
shaking hands."

They shook hands as she spoke.

"I shall be in England again in a year's time," said Durrance. "May I
come back?"

Ethne's eyes and her smile consented.

"I should be sorry to lose you altogether," she said, "although even if
I did not see you, I should know that I had not lost your friendship."
She added, "I should also be glad to hear news of you and what you are
doing, if ever you have the time to spare."

"I may write?" he exclaimed eagerly.

"Yes," she answered, and his eagerness made her linger a little
doubtfully upon the word. "That is, if you think it fair. I mean, it
might be best for you, perhaps, to get rid of me entirely from your
thoughts;" and Durrance laughed and without any bitterness, so that in a
moment Ethne found herself laughing too, though at what she laughed she
would have discovered it difficult to explain. "Very well, write to me
then." And she added drily, "But it will be about--other things."

And again Durrance read into her words the interpretation he desired;
and again she meant just what she said, and not a word more.

She stood where he left her, a tall, strong-limbed figure of womanhood,
until he was gone out of sight. Then she climbed down to the house, and
going into her room took one of her violins from its case. But it was
the violin which Durrance had given to her, and before she had touched
the strings with her bow she recognised it and put it suddenly away from
her in its case. She snapped the case to. For a few moments she sat
motionless in her chair, then she quickly crossed the room, and, taking
her keys, unlocked a drawer. At the bottom of the drawer there lay
hidden a photograph, and at this she looked for a long while and very
wistfully.

Durrance meanwhile walked down to the trap which was waiting for him at
the gates of the house, and saw that Dermod Eustace stood in the road
with his hat upon his head.

"I will walk a few yards with you, Colonel Durrance," said Dermod. "I
have a word for your ear."

Durrance suited his stride to the old man's faltering step, and they
walked behind the dog-cart, and in silence. It was not the mere personal
disappointment which weighed upon Durrance's spirit. But he could not
see with Ethne's eyes, and as his gaze took in that quiet corner of
Donegal, he was filled with a great sadness lest all her life should be
passed in this seclusion, her grave dug in the end under the wall of the
tiny church, and her memory linger only in a few white cottages
scattered over the moorland, and for a very little while. He was
recalled by the pressure of Dermod's hand upon his elbow. There was a
gleam of inquiry in the old man's faded eyes, but it seemed that speech
itself was a difficulty.

"You have news for me?" he asked, after some hesitation. "News of Harry
Feversham? I thought that I would ask you before you went away."

"None," said Durrance.

"I am sorry," replied Dermod, wistfully, "though I have no reason for
sorrow. He struck us a cruel blow, Colonel Durrance.--I should have
nothing but curses for him in my mouth and my heart. A black-throated
coward my reason calls him, and yet I would be very glad to hear how the
world goes with him. You were his friend. But you do not know?"

It was actually of Harry Feversham that Dermod Eustace was speaking, and
Durrance, as he remarked the old man's wistfulness of voice and face,
was seized with a certain remorse that he had allowed Ethne so to
thrust his friend out of his thoughts. He speculated upon the mystery of
Harry Feversham's disappearance at times as he sat in the evening upon
his verandah above the Nile at Wadi Halfa, piecing together the few
hints which he had gathered. "A black-throated coward," Dermod had
called Harry Feversham, and Ethne had said enough to assure him that
something graver than any dispute, something which had destroyed all her
faith in the man, had put an end to their betrothal. But he could not
conjecture at the particular cause, and the only consequence of his
perplexed imaginings was the growth of a very real anger within him
against the man who had been his friend. So the winter passed, and
summer came to the Soudan and the month of May.




CHAPTER X

THE WELLS OF OBAK


In that month of May Durrance lifted his eyes from Wadi Halfa and began
eagerly to look homeward. But in the contrary direction, five hundred
miles to the south of his frontier town, on the other side of the great
Nubian desert and the Belly of Stones, the events of real importance to
him were occurring without his knowledge. On the deserted track between
Berber and Suakin the wells of Obak are sunk deep amongst mounds of
shifting sand. Eastward a belt of trees divides the dunes from a hard
stony plain built upon with granite hills; westward the desert stretches
for fifty-eight waterless miles to Mahobey and Berber on the Nile, a
desert so flat that the merest tuft of grass knee-high seems at the
distance of a mile a tree promising shade for a noonday halt, and a pile
of stones no bigger than one might see by the side of any roadway in
repair achieves the stature of a considerable hill. In this particular
May there could be no spot more desolate than the wells of Obak. The sun
blazed upon it from six in the morning with an intolerable heat, and all
night the wind blew across it piercingly cold, and played with the sand
as it would, building pyramids house-high and levelling them, tunnelling
valleys, silting up long slopes, so that the face of the country was
continually changed. The vultures and the sand-grouse held it
undisturbed in a perpetual tenancy. And to make the spot yet more
desolate, there remained scattered here and there the bleached bones and
skeletons of camels to bear evidence that about these wells once the
caravans had crossed and halted; and the remnants of a house built of
branches bent in hoops showed that once Arabs had herded their goats and
made their habitation there. Now the sun rose and set, and the hot sky
pressed upon an empty round of honey-coloured earth. Silence brooded
there like night upon the waters; and the absolute stillness made it a
place of mystery and expectation.

Yet in this month of May one man sojourned by the wells and sojourned
secretly. Every morning at sunrise he drove two camels, swift
riding-mares of the pure Bisharin breed, from the belt of trees, watered
them, and sat by the well-mouth for the space of three hours. Then he
drove them back again into the shelter of the trees, and fed them
delicately with dhoura upon a cloth; and for the rest of the day he
appeared no more. For five mornings he thus came from his hiding-place
and sat looking toward the sand-dunes and Berber, and no one approached
him. But on the sixth, as he was on the point of returning to his
shelter, he saw the figures of a man and a donkey suddenly outlined
against the sky upon a crest of the sand. The Arab seated by the well
looked first at the donkey, and, remarking its grey colour, half rose to
his feet. But as he rose he looked at the man who drove it, and saw that
while his jellab was drawn forward over his face to protect it from the
sun, his bare legs showed of an ebony blackness against the sand. The
donkey-driver was a negro. The Arab sat down again and waited with an
air of the most complete indifference for the stranger to descend to
him. He did not even move or turn when he heard the negro's feet
treading the sand close behind him.

"Salam aleikum," said the negro, as he stopped. He carried a long spear
and a short one, and a shield of hide. These he laid upon the ground and
sat by the Arab's side.

The Arab bowed his head and returned the salutation.

"Aleikum es salam," said he, and he waited.

"It is Abou Fatma?" asked the negro.

The Arab nodded an assent.

"Two days ago," the other continued, "a man of the Bisharin, Moussa
Fedil, stopped me in the market-place of Berber, and seeing that I was
hungry, gave me food. And when I had eaten he charged me to drive this
donkey to Abou Fatma at the wells of Obak."

Abou Fatma looked carelessly at the donkey as though now for the first
time he had remarked it.

"Tayeeb," he said, no less carelessly. "The donkey is mine," and he sat
inattentive and motionless, as though the negro's business were done and
he might go.

The negro, however, held his ground.

"I am to meet Moussa Fedil again on the third morning from now, in the
market-place of Berber. Give me a token which I may carry back, so that
he may know I have fulfilled the charge and reward me."

Abou Fatma took his knife from the small of his back, and picking up a
stick from the ground, notched it thrice at each end.

"This shall be a sign to Moussa Fedil;" and he handed the stick to his
companion. The negro tied it securely into a corner of his wrap, loosed
his water-skin from the donkey's back, filled it at the well and slung
it about his shoulders. Then he picked up his spears and his shield.
Abou Fatma watched him labour up the slope of loose sand and disappear
again on the further incline of the crest. Then in his turn he rose, and
hastily. When Harry Feversham had set out from Obak six days before to
traverse the fifty-eight miles of barren desert to the Nile, this grey
donkey had carried his water-skins and food.

Abou Fatma drove the donkey down amongst the trees, and fastening it to
a stem examined its shoulders. In the left shoulder a tiny incision had
been made and the skin neatly stitched up again with fine thread. He cut
the stitches, and pressing open the two edges of the wound, forced out a
tiny package little bigger than a postage stamp. The package was a
goat's bladder, and enclosed within the bladder was a note written in
Arabic and folded very small. Abou Fatma had not been Gordon's
body-servant for nothing; he had been taught during his service to read.
He unfolded the note, and this is what was written:--

"The houses which were once Berber are destroyed, and a new town of wide
streets is building. There is no longer any sign by which I may know the
ruins of Yusef's house from the ruins of a hundred houses; nor does
Yusef any longer sell rock-salt in the bazaar. Yet wait for me another
week."

The Arab of the Bisharin who wrote the letter was Harry Feversham.
Wearing the patched jubbeh of the Dervishes over his stained skin, his
hair frizzed on the crown of his head and falling upon the nape of his
neck in locks matted and gummed into the semblance of seaweed, he went
about his search for Yusef through the wide streets of New Berber with
its gaping pits. To the south, and separated by a mile or so of desert,
lay the old town where Abou Fatma had slept one night and hidden the
letters, a warren of ruined houses facing upon narrow alleys and winding
streets. The front walls had been pulled down, the roofs carried away,
only the bare inner walls were left standing, so that Feversham when he
wandered amongst them vainly at night seemed to have come into long
lanes of five courts, crumbling into decay. And each court was only
distinguishable from its neighbour by a degree of ruin. Already the
foxes made their burrows beneath the walls.

He had calculated that one night would have been the term of his stay in
Berber. He was to have crept through the gate in the dusk of the
evening, and before the grey light had quenched the stars his face
should be set towards Obak. Now he must go steadily forward amongst the
crowds like a man that has business of moment, dreading conversation
lest his tongue should betray him, listening ever for the name of Yusef
to strike upon his ears. Despair kept him company at times, and fear
always. But from the sharp pangs of these emotions a sort of madness
was begotten in him, a frenzy of obstinacy, a belief fanatical as the
dark religion of those amongst whom he moved, that he could not now fail
and the world go on, that there could be no injustice in the whole
scheme of the universe great enough to lay this heavy burden upon the
one man least fitted to bear it and then callously to destroy him
because he tried.

Fear had him in its grip on that morning three days after he had left
Abou Fatma at the wells, when coming over a slope he first saw the sand
stretched like a lagoon up to the dark brown walls of the town, and the
overshadowing foliage of the big date palms rising on the Nile bank
beyond. Within those walls were the crowded Dervishes. It was surely the
merest madness for a man to imagine that he could escape detection
there, even for an hour. Was it right, he began to ask, that a man
should even try? The longer he stood, the more insistent did this
question grow. The low mud walls grew strangely sinister; the welcome
green of the waving palms, after so many arid days of sun and sand and
stones, became an ironical invitation to death. He began to wonder
whether he had not already done enough for honour in venturing so near.

The sun beat upon him; his strength ebbed from him as though his veins
were opened. If he were caught, he thought, as surely he would be--oh,
very surely! He saw the fanatical faces crowding fiercely about him ...
were not mutilations practised?... He looked about him, shivering even
in that strong heat, and the great loneliness of the place smote upon
him, so that his knees shook. He faced about and commenced to run,
leaping in a panic alone and unpursued across the naked desert under the
sun, while from his throat feeble cries broke inarticulately.

He ran, however, only for a few yards, and it was the very violence of
his flight which stopped him. These four years of anticipation were as
nothing, then? He had schooled himself in the tongue, he had lived in
the bazaars, to no end? He was still the craven who had sent in his
papers? The quiet confidence with which he had revealed his plan to
Lieutenant Sutch over the table in the Criterion grill-room was the mere
vainglory of a man who continually deceived himself? And Ethne?...

He dropped upon the ground and, drawing his coat over his head, lay, a
brown spot indistinguishable from the sand about him, an irregularity in
the great waste surface of earth. He shut the prospect from his eyes,
and over the thousands of miles of continent and sea he drew Ethne's
face towards him. A little while and he was back again in Donegal. The
summer night whispered through the open doorway in the hall; in a room
near by people danced to music. He saw the three feathers fluttering to
the floor; he read the growing trouble in Ethne's face. If he could do
this thing, and the still harder thing which now he knew to lie beyond,
he might perhaps some day see that face cleared of its trouble. There
were significant words too in his ears, "I should have no doubt that you
and I would see much of one another afterwards." Towards the setting of
the sun he rose from the ground, and walking down towards Berber, passed
between the gates.




CHAPTER XI

DURRANCE HEARS NEWS OF FEVERSHAM


A month later Durrance arrived in London and discovered a letter from
Ethne awaiting him at his club. It told him simply that she was staying
with Mrs. Adair, and would be glad if he would find the time to call;
but there was a black border to the paper and the envelope. Durrance
called at Hill Street the next afternoon and found Ethne alone.

"I did not write to Wadi Halfa," she explained at once, "for I thought
that you would be on your way home before my letter could arrive. My
father died last month, towards the end of May."

"I was afraid when I got your letter that you would have this to tell
me," he replied. "I am very sorry. You will miss him."

"More than I can say," said she, with a quiet depth of feeling. "He died
one morning early--I think I will tell you if you would care to hear,"
and she related to him the manner of Dermod's death, of which a chill
was the occasion rather than the cause; for he died of a gradual
dissolution rather than a definite disease.

It was a curious story which Ethne had to tell, for it seemed that just
before his death Dermod recaptured something of his old masterful
spirit. "We knew that he was dying," Ethne said. "He knew it too, and
at seven o'clock of the afternoon after--" she hesitated for a moment
and resumed, "after he had spoken for a little while to me, he called
his dog by name. The dog sprang at once on to the bed, though his voice
had not risen above a whisper, and crouching quite close, pushed its
muzzle with a whine under my father's hand. Then he told me to leave him
and the dog altogether alone. I was to shut the door upon him. The dog
would tell me when to open it again. I obeyed him and waited outside the
door until one o'clock. Then a loud sudden howl moaned through the
house." She stopped for a while. This pause was the only sign of
distress which she gave, and in a few moments she went on, speaking
quite simply, without any of the affectations of grief. "It was trying
to wait outside that door while the afternoon faded and the night came.
It was night, of course, long before the end. He would have no lamp left
in his room. One imagined him just the other side of that thin
door-panel, lying very still and silent in the great four-poster bed
with his face towards the hills, and the light falling. One imagined the
room slipping away into darkness, and the windows continually looming
into a greater importance, and the dog by his side and no one else,
right to the very end. He would have it that way, but it was rather hard
for me."

Durrance said nothing in reply, but gave her in full measure what she
most needed, the sympathy of his silence. He imagined those hours in the
passage, six hours of twilight and darkness; he could picture her
standing close by the door, with her ear perhaps to the panel, and her
hand upon her heart to check its loud beating. There was something
rather cruel, he thought, in Dermod's resolve to die alone. It was Ethne
who broke the silence.

"I said that my father spoke to me just before he told me to leave him.
Of whom do you think he spoke?"

She was looking directly at Durrance as she put the question. From
neither her eyes nor the level tone of her voice could he gather
anything of the answer, but a sudden throb of hope caught away his
breath.

"Tell me!" he said, in a sort of suspense, as he leaned forward in his
chair.

"Of Mr. Feversham," she answered, and he drew back again, and rather
suddenly. It was evident that this was not the name which he had
expected. He took his eyes from hers and stared downwards at the carpet,
so that she might not see his face.

"My father was always very fond of him," she continued gently, "and I
think that I would like to know if you have any knowledge of what he is
doing or where he is."

Durrance did not answer nor did he raise his face. He reflected upon the
strange strong hold which Harry Feversham kept upon the affections of
those who had once known him well; so that even the man whom he had
wronged, and upon whose daughter he had brought much suffering, must
remember him with kindliness upon his death-bed. The reflection was not
without its bitterness to Durrance at this moment, and this bitterness
he was afraid that his face and voice might both betray. But he was
compelled to speak, for Ethne insisted.

"You have never come across him, I suppose?" she asked.

Durrance rose from his seat and walked to the window before he answered.
He spoke looking out into the street, but though he thus concealed the
expression of his face, a thrill of deep anger sounded through his
words, in spite of his efforts to subdue his tones.

"No," he said, "I never have," and suddenly his anger had its way with
him; it chose as well as informed his words. "And I never wish to," he
cried. "He was my friend, I know. But I cannot remember that friendship
now. I can only think that if he had been the true man we took him for,
you would not have waited alone in that dark passage during those six
hours." He turned again to the centre of the room and asked abruptly:--

"You are going back to Glenalla?"

"Yes."

"You will live there alone?"

"Yes."

For a little while there was silence between them. Then Durrance walked
round to the back of her chair.

"You once said that you would perhaps tell me why your engagement was
broken off."

"But you know," she said. "What you said at the window showed that you
knew."

"No, I do not. One or two words your father let drop. He asked me for
news of Feversham the last time that I spoke with him. But I know
nothing definite. I should like you to tell me."

Ethne shook her head and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.
"Not now," she said, and silence again followed her words. Durrance
broke it again.

"I have only one more year at Halfa. It would be wise to leave Egypt
then, I think. I do not expect much will be done in the Soudan for some
little while. I do not think that I will stay there--in any case. I mean
even if you should decide to remain alone at Glenalla."

Ethne made no pretence to ignore the suggestion of his words. "We are
neither of us children," she said; "you have all your life to think of.
We should be prudent."

"Yes," said Durrance, with a sudden exasperation, "but the right kind of
prudence. The prudence which knows that it's worth while to dare a good
deal."

Ethne did not move. She was leaning forward with her back towards him,
so that he could see nothing of her face, and for a long while she
remained in this attitude, quite silent and very still. She asked a
question at the last, and in a very low and gentle voice.

"Do you want me so very much?" And before he could answer she turned
quickly towards him. "Try not to," she exclaimed earnestly. "For this
one year try not to. You have much to occupy your thoughts. Try to
forget me altogether;" and there was just sufficient regret in her tone,
the regret at the prospect of losing a valued friend, to take all the
sting from her words, to confirm Durrance in his delusion that but for
her fear that she would spoil his career, she would answer him in very
different words. Mrs. Adair came into the room before he could reply,
and thus he carried away with him his delusion.

He dined that evening at his club, and sat afterwards smoking his cigar
under the big tree where he had sat so persistently a year before in his
vain quest for news of Harry Feversham. It was much the same sort of
clear night as that on which he had seen Lieutenant Sutch limp into the
courtyard and hesitate at the sight of him. The strip of sky was
cloudless and starry overhead; the air had the pleasant languor of a
summer night in June; the lights flashing from the windows and doorways
gave to the leaves of the trees the fresh green look of spring; and
outside in the roadway the carriages rolled with a thunderous hum like
the sound of the sea. And on this night, too, there came a man into the
courtyard who knew Durrance. But he did not hesitate. He came straight
up to Durrance and sat down upon the seat at his side. Durrance dropped
the paper at which he was glancing and held out his hand.

"How do you do?" said he. This friend was Captain Mather.

"I was wondering whether I should meet you when I read the evening
paper. I knew that it was about the time one might expect to find you in
London. You have seen, I suppose?"

"What?" asked Durrance.

"Then you haven't," replied Mather. He picked up the newspaper which
Durrance had dropped and turned over the sheets, searching for the piece
of news which he required. "You remember that last reconnaissance we
made from Suakin?"

"Very well."

"We halted by the Sinkat fort at midday. There was an Arab hiding in
the trees at the back of the glacis."

"Yes."

"Have you forgotten the yarn he told you?"

"About Gordon's letters and the wall of a house in Berber? No, I have
not forgotten."

"Then here's something which will interest you," and Captain Mather,
having folded the paper to his satisfaction, handed it to Durrance and
pointed to a paragraph. It was a short paragraph; it gave no details; it
was the merest summary; and Durrance read it through between the puffs
of his cigar.

"The fellow must have gone back to Berber after all," said he. "A risky
business. Abou Fatma--that was the man's name."

The paragraph made no mention of Abou Fatma, or indeed of any man except
Captain Willoughby, the Deputy-Governor of Suakin. It merely announced
that certain letters which the Mahdi had sent to Gordon summoning him to
surrender Khartum, and inviting him to become a convert to the Mahdist
religion, together with copies of Gordon's curt replies, had been
recovered from a wall in Berber and brought safely to Captain Willoughby
at Suakin.

"They were hardly worth risking a life for," said Mather.

"Perhaps not," replied Durrance, a little doubtfully. "But after all,
one is glad they have been recovered. Perhaps the copies are in Gordon's
own hand. They are, at all events, of an historic interest."

"In a way, no doubt," said Mather. "But even so, their recovery throws
no light upon the history of the siege. It can make no real difference
to any one, not even to the historian."

"That is true," Durrance agreed, and there was nothing more untrue. In
the same spot where he had sought for news of Feversham news had now
come to him--only he did not know. He was in the dark; he could not
appreciate that here was news which, however little it might trouble the
historian, touched his life at the springs. He dismissed the paragraph
from his mind, and sat thinking over the conversation which had passed
that afternoon between Ethne and himself, and without discouragement.
Ethne had mentioned Harry Feversham, it was true,--had asked for news of
him. But she might have been--nay, she probably had been--moved to ask
because her father's last words had referred to him. She had spoken his
name in a perfectly steady voice, he remembered; and, indeed, the mere
fact that she had spoken it at all might be taken as a sign that it had
no longer any power with her. There was something hopeful to his mind in
her very request that he should try during this one year to omit her
from his thoughts. For it seemed almost to imply that if he could not,
she might at the end of it, perhaps, give to him the answer for which he
longed. He allowed a few days to pass, and then called again at Mrs.
Adair's house. But he found only Mrs. Adair. Ethne had left London and
returned to Donegal. She had left rather suddenly, Mrs. Adair told him,
and Mrs. Adair had no sure knowledge of the reason of her going.

Durrance, however, had no doubt as to the reason. Ethne was putting into
practice the policy which she had commended to his thoughts. He was to
try to forget her, and she would help him to success so far as she could
by her absence from his sight. And in attributing this reason to her,
Durrance was right. But one thing Ethne had forgotten. She had not asked
him to cease to write to her, and accordingly in the autumn of that year
the letters began again to come from the Soudan. She was frankly glad to
receive them, but at the same time she was troubled. For in spite of
their careful reticence, every now and then a phrase leaped out--it
might be merely the repetition of some trivial sentence which she had
spoken long ago and long ago forgotten--and she could not but see that
in spite of her prayer she lived perpetually in his thoughts. There was
a strain of hopefulness too, as though he moved in a world painted with
new colours and suddenly grown musical. Ethne had never freed herself
from the haunting fear that one man's life had been spoilt because of
her; she had never faltered from her determination that this should not
happen with a second. Only with Durrance's letters before her she could
not evade a new and perplexing question. By what means was that
possibility to be avoided? There were two ways. By choosing which of
them could she fulfil her determination? She was no longer so sure as
she had been the year before that his career was all in all. The
question recurred to her again and again. She took it out with her on
the hillside with the letters, and pondered and puzzled over it and got
never an inch nearer to a solution. Even her violin failed her in this
strait.




CHAPTER XII

DURRANCE SHARPENS HIS WITS


It was a night of May, and outside the mess-room at Wadi Halfa three
officers were smoking on a grass knoll above the Nile. The moon was at
its full, and the strong light had robbed even the planets of their
lustre. The smaller stars were not visible at all, and the sky washed of
its dark colour, curved overhead, pearly-hued and luminous. The three
officers sat in their lounge chairs and smoked silently, while the
bull-frogs croaked from an island in mid-river. At the bottom of the
small steep cliff on which they sat the Nile, so sluggish was its flow,
shone like a burnished mirror, and from the opposite bank the desert
stretched away to infinite distances, a vast plain with scattered
hummocks, a plain white as a hoar frost on the surface of which the
stones sparkled like jewels. Behind the three officers of the garrison
the roof of the mess-room verandah threw a shadow on the ground; it
seemed a solid piece of blackness.

One of the three officers struck a match and held it to the end of his
cigar. The flame lit up a troubled and anxious face.

"I hope that no harm has come to him," he said, as he threw the match
away. "I wish that I could say I believed it."

The speaker was a man of middle age and the colonel of a Soudanese
battalion. He was answered by a man whose hair had gone grey, it is
true. But grey hair is frequent in the Soudan, and his unlined face
still showed that he was young. He was Lieutenant Calder of the
Engineers. Youth, however, in this instance had no optimism wherewith to
challenge Colonel Dawson.

"He left Halfa eight weeks ago, eh?" he said gloomily.

"Eight weeks to-day," replied the colonel.

It was the third officer, a tall, spare, long-necked major of the Army
Service Corps, who alone hazarded a cheerful prophecy.

"It's early days to conclude Durrance has got scuppered," said he. "One
knows Durrance. Give him a camp-fire in the desert, and a couple of
sheiks to sit round it with him, and he'll buck to them for a month and
never feel bored at the end. While here there are letters, and there's
an office, and there's a desk in the office and everything he loathes
and can't do with. You'll see Durrance will turn up right enough, though
he won't hurry about it."

"He is three weeks overdue," objected the colonel, "and he's methodical
after a fashion. I am afraid."

Major Walters pointed out his arm to the white empty desert across the
river.

"If he had travelled that way, westward, I might agree," he said. "But
Durrance went east through the mountain country toward Berenice and the
Red Sea. The tribes he went to visit were quiet, even in the worst
times, when Osman Digna lay before Suakin."

The colonel, however, took no comfort from Walters's confidence. He
tugged at his moustache and repeated, "He is three weeks overdue."

Lieutenant Calder knocked the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. He
leaned forward in his chair as he pressed the tobacco down with his
thumb, and he said slowly:--

"I wonder. It is just possible that some sort of trap was laid for
Durrance. I am not sure. I never mentioned before what I knew, because
until lately I did not suspect that it could have anything to do with
his delay. But now I begin to wonder. You remember the night before he
started?"

"Yes," said Dawson, and he hitched his chair a little nearer. Calder was
the one man in Wadi Halfa who could claim something like intimacy with
Durrance. Despite their difference in rank there was no great disparity
in age between the two men, and from the first when Calder had come
inexperienced and fresh from England, but with a great ardour to acquire
a comprehensive experience, Durrance in his reticent way had been at
pains to show the newcomer considerable friendship. Calder, therefore,
might be likely to know.

"I too remember that night," said Walters. "Durrance dined at the mess
and went away early to prepare for his journey."

"His preparations were made already," said Calder. "He went away early,
as you say. But he did not go to his quarters. He walked along the
river-bank to Tewfikieh."

Wadi Halfa was the military station, Tewfikieh a little frontier town to
the north separated from Halfa by a mile of river-bank. A few Greeks
kept stores there, a few bare and dirty cafés faced the street between
native cook-shops and tobacconists'; a noisy little town where the negro
from the Dinka country jolted the fellah from the Delta, and the air was
torn with many dialects; a thronged little town, which yet lacked to
European ears one distinctive element of a throng. There was no ring of
footsteps. The crowd walked on sand and for the most part with naked
feet, so that if for a rare moment the sharp high cries and the
perpetual voices ceased, the figures of men and women flitted by
noiseless as ghosts. And even at night, when the streets were most
crowded and the uproar loudest, it seemed that underneath the noise, and
almost appreciable to the ear, there lay a deep and brooding silence,
the silence of deserts and the East.

"Durrance went down to Tewfikieh at ten o'clock that night," said
Calder. "I went to his quarters at eleven. He had not returned. He was
starting eastward at four in the morning, and there was some detail of
business on which I wished to speak to him before he went. So I waited
for his return. He came in about a quarter of an hour afterwards and
told me at once that I must be quick, since he was expecting a visitor.
He spoke quickly and rather restlessly. He seemed to be labouring under
some excitement. He barely listened to what I had to say, and he
answered me at random. It was quite evident that he was moved, and
rather deeply moved, by some unusual feeling, though at the nature of
the feeling I could not guess. For at one moment it seemed certainly to
be anger, and the next moment he relaxed into a laugh, as though in
spite of himself he was glad. However, he bundled me out, and as I went
I heard him telling his servant to go to bed, because, though he
expected a visitor, he would admit the visitor himself."

"Well!" said Dawson, "and who was the visitor?"

"I do not know," answered Calder. "The one thing I do know is that when
Durrance's servant went to call him at four o'clock for his journey, he
found Durrance still sitting on the verandah outside his quarters, as
though he still expected his visitor. The visitor had not come."

"And Durrance left no message?"

"No. I was up myself before he started. I thought that he was puzzled
and worried. I thought, too, that he meant to tell me what was the
matter. I still think that he had that in his mind, but that he could
not decide. For even after he had taken his seat upon his saddle and his
camel had risen from the ground, he turned and looked down towards me.
But he thought better of it, or worse, as the case may be. At all
events, he did not speak. He struck the camel on the flank with his
stick, and rode slowly past the post-office and out into the desert,
with his head sunk upon his breast. I wonder whether he rode into a
trap. Who could this visitor have been whom he meets in the street of
Tewfikieh, and who must come so secretly to Wadi Halfa? What can have
been his business with Durrance? Important business, troublesome
business--so much is evident. And he did not come to transact it. Was
the whole thing a lure to which we have not the clue? Like Colonel
Dawson, I am afraid."

There was a silence after he had finished, which Major Walters was the
first to break. He offered no argument--he simply expressed again his
unalterable cheerfulness.

"I don't think Durrance has got scuppered," said he, as he rose from his
chair.

"I know what I shall do," said the colonel. "I shall send out a strong
search party in the morning."

And the next morning, as they sat at breakfast on the verandah, he at
once proceeded to describe the force which he meant to despatch. Major
Walters, too, it seemed, in spite of his hopeful prophecies, had
pondered during the night over Calder's story, and he leaned across the
table to Calder.

"Did you never inquire whom Durrance talked with at Tewfikieh on that
night?" he asked.

"I did, and there's a point that puzzles me," said Calder. He was
sitting with his back to the Nile and his face towards the glass doors
of the mess-room, and he spoke to Walters, who was directly opposite. "I
could not find that he talked to more than one person, and that one
person could not by any likelihood have been the visitor he expected.
Durrance stopped in front of a café where some strolling musicians, who
had somehow wandered up to Tewfikieh, were playing and singing for their
night's lodging. One of them, a Greek I was told, came outside into the
street and took his hat round. Durrance threw a sovereign into the hat,
the man turned to thank him, and they talked for a little time
together;" and as he came to this point he raised his head. A look of
recognition came into his face. He laid his hands upon the table-edge,
and leaned forward with his feet drawn back beneath his chair as though
he was on the point of springing up. But he did not spring up. His look
of recognition became one of bewilderment. He glanced round the table
and saw that Colonel Dawson was helping himself to cocoa, while Major
Walters's eyes were on his plate. There were other officers of the
garrison present, but not one had remarked his movement and its sudden
arrest. Calder leaned back, and staring curiously in front of him and
over the major's shoulder, continued his story. "But I could never hear
that Durrance spoke to any one else. He seemed, except that one knows to
the contrary, merely to have strolled through the village and back again
to Wadi Halfa."

"That doesn't help us much," said the major.

"And it's all you know?" asked the colonel.

"No, not quite all," returned Calder, slowly; "I know, for instance,
that the man we are talking about is staring me straight in the face."

At once everybody at the table turned towards the mess-room.

"Durrance!" cried the colonel, springing up.

"When did you get back?" said the major.

Durrance, with the dust of his journey still powdered upon his clothes,
and a face burnt to the colour of red brick, was standing in the
doorway, and listening with a remarkable intentness to the voices of his
fellow-officers. It was perhaps noticeable that Calder, who was
Durrance's friend, neither rose from his chair nor offered any greeting.
He still sat watching Durrance; he still remained curious and perplexed;
but as Durrance descended the three steps into the verandah there came
a quick and troubled look of comprehension into his face.

"We expected you three weeks ago," said Dawson, as he pulled a chair
away from an empty place at the table.

"The delay could not be helped," replied Durrance. He took the chair and
drew it up.

"Does my story account for it?" asked Calder.

"Not a bit. It was the Greek musician I expected that night," he
explained with a laugh. "I was curious to know what stroke of ill-luck
had cast him out to play the zither for a night's lodging in a café at
Tewfikieh. That was all," and he added slowly, in a softer voice, "Yes,
that was all."

"Meanwhile you are forgetting your breakfast," said Dawson, as he rose.
"What will you have?"

Calder leaned ever so slightly forward with his eyes quietly resting on
Durrance. Durrance looked round the table, and then called the
mess-waiter. "Moussa, get me something cold," said he, and the waiter
went back into the mess-room. Calder nodded his head with a faint smile,
as though he understood that here was a difficulty rather cleverly
surmounted.

"There's tea, cocoa, and coffee," he said. "Help yourself, Durrance."

"Thanks," said Durrance. "I see, but I will get Moussa to bring me a
brandy-and-soda, I think," and again Calder nodded his head.

Durrance ate his breakfast and drank his brandy-and-soda, and talked the
while of his journey. He had travelled farther eastward than he had
intended. He had found the Ababdeh Arabs quiet amongst their mountains.
If they were not disposed to acknowledge allegiance to Egypt, on the
other hand they paid no tribute to Mahommed Achmet. The weather had been
good, ibex and antelope plentiful. Durrance, on the whole, had reason to
be content with his journey. And Calder sat and watched him, and
disbelieved every word that he said. The other officers went about their
duties; Calder remained behind, and waited until Durrance should finish.
But it seemed that Durrance never would finish. He loitered over his
breakfast, and when that was done he pushed his plate away and sat
talking. There was no end to his questions as to what had passed at Wadi
Halfa during the last eight weeks, no limit to his enthusiasm over the
journey from which he had just returned. Finally, however, he stopped
with a remarkable abruptness, and said, with some suspicion, to his
companion:--

"You are taking life easily this morning."

"I have not eight weeks' arrears of letters to clear off, as you have,
Colonel," Calder returned with a laugh; and he saw Durrance's face cloud
and his forehead contract.

"True," he said, after a pause. "I had forgotten my letters." And he
rose from his seat at the table, mounted the steps, and passed into the
mess-room.

Calder immediately sprang up, and with his eyes followed Durrance's
movements. Durrance went to a nail which was fixed in the wall close to
the glass doors and on a level with his head. From that nail he took
down the key of his office, crossed the room, and went out through the
farther door. That door he left open, and Calder could see him walk down
the path between the bushes through the tiny garden in front of the
mess, unlatch the gate, and cross the open space of sand towards his
office. As soon as Durrance had disappeared Calder sat down again, and,
resting his elbows on the table, propped his face between his hands.
Calder was troubled. He was a friend of Durrance; he was the one man in
Wadi Halfa who possessed something of Durrance's confidence; he knew
that there were certain letters in a woman's handwriting waiting for him
in his office. He was very deeply troubled. Durrance had aged during
these eight weeks. There were furrows about his mouth where only faint
lines had been visible when he had started out from Halfa; and it was
not merely desert dust which had discoloured his hair. His hilarity,
too, had an artificial air. He had sat at the table constraining himself
to the semblance of high spirits. Calder lit his pipe, and sat for a
long while by the empty table.

Then he took his helmet and crossed the sand to Durrance's office. He
lifted the latch noiselessly; as noiselessly he opened the door, and he
looked in. Durrance was sitting at his desk with his head bowed upon his
arms and all his letters unopened at his side. Calder stepped into the
room and closed the door loudly behind him. At once Durrance turned his
face to the door.

"Well?" said he.

"I have a paper, Colonel, which requires your signature," said Calder.
"It's the authority for the alterations in C barracks. You remember?"

"Very well. I will look through it and return it to you, signed, at
lunch-time. Will you give it to me, please?"

He held out his hand towards Calder. Calder took his pipe from his
mouth, and, standing thus in full view of Durrance, slowly and
deliberately placed it into Durrance's outstretched palm. It was not
until the hot bowl burnt his hand that Durrance snatched his arm away.
The pipe fell and broke upon the floor. Neither of the two men spoke for
a few moments, and then Calder put his arm round Durrance's shoulder,
and asked in a voice gentle as a woman's:--

"How did it happen?"

Durrance buried his face in his hands. The great control which he had
exercised till now he was no longer able to sustain. He did not answer,
nor did he utter any sound, but he sat shivering from head to foot.

"How did it happen?" Calder asked again, and in a whisper.

Durrance put another question:--

"How did you find out?"

"You stood in the mess-room doorway listening to discover whose voice
spoke from where. When I raised my head and saw you, though your eyes
rested on my face there was no recognition in them. I suspected then.
When you came down the steps into the verandah I became almost certain.
When you would not help yourself to food, when you reached out your arm
over your shoulder so that Moussa had to put the brandy-and-soda safely
into your palm, I was sure."

"I was a fool to try and hide it," said Durrance. "Of course I knew all
the time that I couldn't for more than a few hours. But even those few
hours somehow seemed a gain."

"How did it happen?"

"There was a high wind," Durrance explained. "It took my helmet off. It
was eight o'clock in the morning. I did not mean to move my camp that
day, and I was standing outside my tent in my shirt-sleeves. So you see
that I had not even the collar of a coat to protect the nape of my neck.
I was fool enough to run after my helmet; and--you must have seen the
same thing happen a hundred times--each time that I stooped to pick it
up it skipped away; each time that I ran after it, it stopped and waited
for me to catch it up. And before one was aware what one was doing, one
had run a quarter of a mile. I went down, I was told, like a log just
when I had the helmet in my hand. How long ago it happened I don't quite
know, for I was ill for a time, and afterwards it was difficult to keep
count, since one couldn't tell the difference between day and night."

Durrance, in a word, had gone blind. He told the rest of his story. He
had bidden his followers carry him back to Berber, and then, influenced
by the natural wish to hide his calamity as long as he could, he had
enjoined upon them silence. Calder heard the story through to the end,
and then rose at once to his feet.

"There's a doctor. He is clever, and, for a Syrian, knows a good deal. I
will fetch him here privately, and we will hear what he says. Your
blindness may be merely temporary."

The Syrian doctor, however, pursed up his lips and shook his head. He
advised an immediate departure to Cairo. It was a case for a specialist.
He himself would hesitate to pronounce an opinion; though, to be sure,
there was always hope of a cure.

"Have you ever suffered an injury in the head?" he asked. "Were you
ever thrown from your horse? Were you wounded?"

"No," said Durrance.

The Syrian did not disguise his conviction that the case was grave; and
after he had departed both men were silent for some time. Calder had a
feeling that any attempt at consolation would be futile in itself, and
might, moreover, in betraying his own fear that the hurt was
irreparable, only discourage his companion. He turned to the pile of
letters and looked them through.

"There are two letters here, Durrance," he said gently, "which you might
perhaps care to hear. They are written in a woman's hand, and there is
an Irish postmark. Shall I open them?"

"No," exclaimed Durrance, suddenly, and his hand dropped quickly upon
Calder's arm. "By no means."

Calder, however, did not put down the letters. He was anxious, for
private reasons of his own, to learn something more of Ethne Eustace
than the outside of her letters could reveal. A few rare references made
in unusual moments of confidence by Durrance had only informed Calder of
her name, and assured him that his friend would be very glad to change
it if he could. He looked at Durrance--a man so trained to vigour and
activity that his very sunburn seemed an essential quality rather than
an accident of the country in which he lived; a man, too, who came to
the wild, uncitied places of the world with the joy of one who comes
into an inheritance; a man to whom these desolate tracts were home, and

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