"That's rough luck, isn't it?" said Durrance, when Calder had read the letter through. "For here's the one thing I have always wished for, and it comes when I can no longer take it."
"I think you will find it very difficult to refuse to take it," said Calder. "I do not know Miss Eustace, but I can hazard a guess from the letters of hers which I have read to you. I do not think that she is a woman who will say 'yes' one day, and then because bad times come to you say 'no' the next, or allow you to say 'no' for her, either. I have a sort of notion that since she cares for you and you for her, you are doing little less than insulting her if you imagine that she cannot marry you and still be happy."
Durrance thought over that aspect of the question, and began to wonder. Calder might be right. Marriage with a blind man! It might, perhaps, be possible if upon both sides there was love, and the letter from Ethne proved—did it not?—that on both sides therewaslove. Besides, there were some trivial compensations which might help to make her sacrifice less burdensome. She could still live in her own country and move in her own home. For the Lennon house could be rebuilt and the estates cleared of their debt.
"Besides," said Calder, "there is always a possibility of a cure."
"There is no such possibility," said Durrance, with a decision which quite startled his companion. "You know that as well as I do;" and he added with a laugh, "You needn't start so guiltily. I haven't overheard a word of any of your conversations about me."
"Then what in the world makes you think that there's no chance?"
"The voice of every doctor who has encouraged me to hope. Their words—yes—their words tell me to visit specialists in Europe, and not lose heart, but their voices give the lie to their words. If one cannot see, one can at all events hear."
Calder looked thoughtfully at his friend. This was not the only occasion on which of late Durrance had surprised his friends by an unusual acuteness. Calder glanced uncomfortably at the letter which he was still holding in his hand.
"When was that letter written?" said Durrance, suddenly; and immediately upon the question he asked another, "What makes you jump?"
Calder laughed and explained hastily. "Why, I was looking at the letter at the moment when you asked, and your question came so pat that I could hardly believe you did not see what I was doing. It was written on the fifteenth of May."
"Ah," said Durrance, "the day I returned to Wadi Halfa blind."
Calder sat in his chair without a movement. He gazed anxiously at his companion, it seemed almost as though he were afraid; his attitude was one of suspense.
"That's a queer coincidence," said Durrance, with a careless laugh; and Calder had an intuition that he was listening with the utmost intentness for some movement on his own part, perhaps a relaxation of his attitude, perhaps a breath of relief. Calder did not move, however; and he drew no breath of relief.
Ethne stood at the drawing-room window of the house in Hill Street. Mrs. Adair sat in front of her tea-table. Both women were waiting, and they were both listening for some particular sound to rise up from the street and penetrate into the room. The window stood open that they might hear it the more quickly. It was half-past five in the afternoon. June had come round again with the exhilaration of its sunlight, and London had sparkled into a city of pleasure and green trees. In the houses opposite, the windows were gay with flowers; and in the street below, the carriages rolled easily towards the Park. A jingle of bells rose upwards suddenly and grew loud. Mrs. Adair raised her head quickly.
"That's a cab," she said.
"Yes."
Ethne leaned forward and looked down. "But it's not stopping here;" and the jingle grew fainter and died away.
Mrs. Adair looked at the clock.
"Colonel Durrance is late," she said, and she turned curiously towards Ethne. It seemed to her that Ethne had spoken her "yes" with much more of suspense than eagerness; her attitude as she leaned forward at the window had been almost one of apprehension; and though Mrs. Adair was not quite sure, she fancied that she detected relief when the cab passed by the house and did not stop. "I wonder why you didn't go to the station and meet Colonel Durrance?" she asked slowly.
The answer came promptly enough.
"He might have thought that I had come because I looked upon him as rather helpless, and I don't wish him to think that. He has his servant with him." Ethne looked again out of the window, and once or twice she made a movement as if she was about to speak and then thought silence the better part. Finally, however, she made up her mind.
"You remember the telegram I showed to you?"
"From Lieutenant Calder, saying that Colonel Durrance had gone blind?"
"Yes. I want you to promise never to mention it. I don't want him to know that I ever received it."
Mrs. Adair was puzzled, and she hated to be puzzled. She had been shown the telegram, but she had not been told that Ethne had written to Durrance, pledging herself to him immediately upon its receipt. Ethne, when she showed the telegram, had merely said, "I am engaged to him." Mrs. Adair at once believed that the engagement had been of some standing, and she had been allowed to continue in that belief.
"You will promise?" Ethne insisted.
"Certainly, my dear, if you like," returned Mrs. Adair, with an ungracious shrug of the shoulders. "But there is a reason, I suppose. I don't understand why you exact the promise."
"Two lives must not be spoilt because of me."
There was some ground for Mrs. Adair's suspicion that Ethne expected the blind man to whom she was betrothed, with apprehension. It is true that she was a little afraid. Just twelve months had passed since, in this very room, on just such a sunlit afternoon, Ethne had bidden Durrance try to forget her, and each letter which she had since received had shown that, whether he tried or not, he had not forgotten. Even that last one received three weeks ago, the note scrawled in the handwriting of a child, from Wadi Halfa, with the large unsteady words straggling unevenly across the page, and the letters running into one another wherein he had told his calamity and renounced his suit—even that proved, and perhaps more surely than its hopeful forerunners—that he had not forgotten. As she waited at the window she understood very clearly that it was she herself who must buckle to the hard work of forgetting. Or if that was impossible, she must be careful always that by no word let slip in a forgetful moment she betrayed that she had not forgotten.
"No," she said, "two lives shall not be spoilt because of me," and she turned towards Mrs. Adair.
"Are you quite sure, Ethne," said Mrs. Adair, "that the two lives will not be more surely spoilt by this way of yours—the way of marriage? Don't you think that you will come to feel Colonel Durrance, in spite of your will, something of a hindrance and a drag? Isn't it possible that he may come to feel that too? I wonder. I very much wonder."
"No," said Ethne, decisively. "I shall not feel it, and he must not."
The two lives, according to Mrs. Adair, were not the lives of Durrance and Harry Feversham, but of Durrance and Ethne herself. There she was wrong; but Ethne did not dispute the point, she was indeed rather glad that her friend was wrong, and she allowed her to continue in her wrong belief.
Ethne resumed her watch at the window, foreseeing her life, planning it out so that never might she be caught off her guard. The task would be difficult, no doubt, and it was no wonder that in these minutes while she waited fear grew upon her lest she should fail. But the end was well worth the effort, and she set her eyes upon that. Durrance had lost everything which made life to him worth living the moment he went blind—everything, except one thing. "What should I do if I were crippled?" he had said to Harry Feversham on the morning when for the last time they had ridden together in the Row. "A clever man might put up with it. But what should I do if I had to sit in a chair all my days?" Ethne had not heard the words, but she understood the man well enough without them. He was by birth the inheritor of the other places, and he had lost his heritage. The things which delighted him, the long journeys, the faces of strange countries, the camp-fire, a mere spark of red light amidst black and empty silence, the hours of sleep in the open under bright stars, the cool night wind of the desert, and the work of government—all these things he had lost. Only one thing remained to him—herself, and only, as she knew very well, herself so long as he could believe she wanted him. And while she was still occupied with her resolve, the cab for which she waited stopped unnoticed at the door. It was not until Durrance's servant had actually rung the bell that her attention was again attracted to the street.
"He has come!" she said with a start.
Durrance, it was true, was not particularly acute; he had never been inquisitive; he took his friends as he found them; he put them under no microscope. It would have been easy at any time, Ethne reflected, to quiet his suspicions, should he have ever come to entertain any. Butnowit would be easier than ever. There was no reason for apprehension. Thus she argued, but in spite of the argument she rather nerved herself to an encounter than went forward to welcome her betrothed.
Mrs. Adair slipped out of the room, so that Ethne was alone when Durrance entered at the door. She did not move immediately; she retained her attitude and position, expecting that the change in him would for the first moment shock her. But she was surprised; for the particular changes which she had expected were noticeable only through their absence. His face was worn, no doubt, his hair had gone grey, but there was no air of helplessness or uncertainty, and it was that which for his own sake she most dreaded. He walked forward into the room as though his eyes saw; his memory seemed to tell him exactly where each piece of the furniture stood. The most that he did was once or twice to put out a hand where he expected a chair.
Ethne drew silently back into the window rather at a loss with what words to greet him, and immediately he smiled and came straight towards her.
"Ethne," he said.
"It isn't true, then," she exclaimed. "You have recovered." The words were forced from her by the readiness of his movement.
"It is quite true, and I have not recovered," he answered. "But you moved at the window and so I knew that you were there."
"How did you know? I made no noise."
"No, but the window's open. The noise in the street became suddenly louder, so I knew that some one in front of the window had moved aside. I guessed that it was you."
Their words were thus not perhaps the most customary greeting between a couple meeting on the first occasion after they have become engaged, but they served to hinder embarrassment. Ethne shrank from any perfunctory expression of regret, knowing that there was no need for it, and Durrance had no wish to hear it. For there were many things which these two understood each other well enough to take as said. They did no more than shake hands when they had spoken, and Ethne moved back into the room.
"I will give you some tea," she said, "then we can talk."
"Yes, we must have a talk, mustn't we?" Durrance answered seriously. He threw off his serious air, however, and chatted with good humour about the details of his journey home. He even found a subject of amusement in his sense of helplessness during the first days of his blindness; and Ethne's apprehensions rapidly diminished. They had indeed almost vanished from her mind when something in his attitude suddenly brought them back.
"I wrote to you from Wadi Halfa," he said. "I don't know whether you could read the letter."
"Quite well," said Ethne.
"I got a friend of mine to hold the paper and tell me when I was writing on it or merely on the blotting-pad," he continued with a laugh. "Calder—of the Sappers—but you don't know him."
He shot the name out rather quickly, and it came upon Ethne with a shock that he had set a trap to catch her. The curious stillness of his face seemed to tell her that he was listening with an extreme intentness for some start, perhaps even a checked exclamation, which would betray that she knew something of Calder of the Sappers. Did he suspect, she asked herself? Did he know of the telegram? Did he guess that her letter was sent out of pity? She looked into Durrance's face, and it told her nothing except that it was very alert. In the old days, a year ago, the expression of his eyes would have answered her quite certainly, however close he held his tongue.
"I could read the letter without difficulty," she answered gently. "It was the letter you would have written. But I had written to you before, and of course your bad news could make no difference. I take back no word of what I wrote."
Durrance sat with his hands upon his knees, leaning forward a little. Again Ethne was at a loss. She could not tell from his manner or his face whether he accepted or questioned her answer; and again she realised that a year ago while he had his sight she would have been in no doubt.
"Yes, I know you. You would take nothing back," he said at length. "But there is my point of view."
Ethne looked at him with apprehension.
"Yes?" she replied, and she strove to speak with unconcern. "Will you tell me it?"
Durrance assented, and began in the deliberate voice of a man who has thought out his subject, knows it by heart, and has decided, moreover, the order of words by which it will be most lucidly developed.
"I know what blindness means to all men—a growing, narrowing egotism unless one is perpetually on one's guard. And will one be perpetually on one's guard? Blindness means that to all men," he repeated emphatically. "But it must mean more to me, who am deprived of every occupation. If I were a writer, I could still dictate. If I were a business man, I could conduct my business. But I am a soldier, and not a clever soldier. Jealousy, a continual and irritable curiosity—there is no Paul Pry like your blind man—a querulous claim upon your attention—these are my special dangers." And Ethne laughed gently in contradiction of his argument.
"Well, perhaps one may hold them off," he acknowledged, "but they are to be considered. I have considered them. I am not speaking to you without thought. I have pondered and puzzled over the whole matter night after night since I got your letter, wondering what I should do. You know how gladly, with what gratitude, I would have answered you, 'Yes, let the marriage go on,' if I dared. If I dared! But I think—don't you?—that a great trouble rather clears one's wits. I used to lie awake at Cairo and think; and the unimportant trivial considerations gradually dropped away; and a few straight and simple truths stood out rather vividly. One felt that one had to cling to them and with all one's might, because nothing else was left."
"Yes, that I do understand," Ethne replied in a low voice. She had gone through just such an experience herself. It might have been herself, and not Durrance, who was speaking. She looked up at him, and for the first time began to understand that after all she and he might have much in common. She repeated over to herself with an even firmer determination, "Two lives shall not be spoilt because of me."
"Well?" she asked.
"Well, here's one of the very straight and simple truths. Marriage between a man crippled like myself, whose life is done, and a woman like you, active and young, whose life is in its flower, would be quite wrong unless each brought to it much more than friendship. It would be quite wrong if it implied a sacrifice for you."
"It implies no sacrifice," she answered firmly.
Durrance nodded. It was evident that the answer contented him, and Ethne felt that it was the intonation to which he listened rather than the words. His very attitude of concentration showed her that. She began to wonder whether it would be so easy after all to quiet his suspicions now that he was blind; she began to realise that it might possibly on that very account be all the more difficult.
"Then do you bring more than friendship?" he asked suddenly. "You will be very honest, I know. Tell me."
Ethne was in a quandary. She knew that she must answer, and at once and without ambiguity. In addition, she must answer honestly.
"There is nothing," she replied, and as firmly as before, "nothing in the world which I wish for so earnestly as that you and I should marry."
It was an honest wish, and it was honestly spoken. She knew nothing of the conversation which had passed between Harry Feversham and Lieutenant Sutch in the grill-room of the Criterion Restaurant; she knew nothing of Harry's plans; she had not heard of the Gordon letters recovered from the mud-wall of a ruined house in the city of the Dervishes on the Nile bank. Harry Feversham had, so far as she knew and meant, gone forever completely out of her life. Therefore her wish was an honest one. But it was not an exact answer to Durrance's question, and she hoped that again he would listen to the intonation, rather than to the words. However, he seemed content with it.
"Thank you, Ethne," he said, and he took her hand and shook it. His face smiled at her. He asked no other questions. There was not a doubt, she thought; his suspicions were quieted; he was quite content. And upon that Mrs. Adair came with discretion into the room.
She had the tact to greet Durrance as one who suffered under no disadvantage, and she spoke as though she had seen him only the week before.
"I suppose Ethne has told you of our plan," she said, as she took her tea from her friend's hand.
"No, not yet," Ethne answered.
"What plan?" asked Durrance.
"It is all arranged," said Mrs. Adair. "You will want to go home to Guessens in Devonshire. I am your neighbour—a couple of fields separate us, that's all. So Ethne will stay with me during the interval before you are married."
"That's very kind of you, Mrs. Adair," Durrance exclaimed; "because, of course, there will be an interval."
"A short one, no doubt," said Mrs. Adair.
"Well, it's this way. If there's a chance that I may recover my sight, it would be better that I should seize it at once. Time means a good deal in these cases."
"Then there is a chance?" cried Ethne.
"I am going to see a specialist here to-morrow," Durrance answered. "And, of course, there's the oculist at Wiesbaden. But it may not be necessary to go so far. I expect that I shall be able to stay at Guessens and come up to London when it is necessary. Thank you very much, Mrs. Adair. It is a good plan." And he added slowly, "From my point of view there could be no better."
Ethne watched Durrance drive away with his servant to his old rooms in St. James's Street, and stood by the window after he had gone, in much the same attitude and absorption as that which had characterised her before he had come. Outside in the street the carriages were now coming back from the park, and there was just one other change. Ethne's apprehensions had taken a more definite shape.
She believed that suspicion was quieted in Durrance for to-day, at all events. She had not heard his conversation with Calder in Cairo. She did not know that he believed there was no cure which could restore him to sight. She had no remotest notion that the possibility of a remedy might be a mere excuse. But none the less she was uneasy. Durrance had grown more acute. Not only his senses had been sharpened,—that, indeed, was to be expected,—but trouble and thought had sharpened his mind as well. It had become more penetrating. She felt that she was entering upon an encounter of wits, and she had a fear lest she should be worsted. "Two lives shall not be spoilt because of me," she repeated, but it was a prayer now, rather than a resolve. For one thing she recognised quite surely: Durrance saw ever so much more clearly now that he was blind.
During the months of July and August Ethne's apprehensions grew, and once at all events they found expression on her lips.
"I am afraid," she said, one morning, as she stood in the sunlight at an open window of Mrs. Adair's house upon a creek of the Salcombe estuary. In the room behind her Mrs. Adair smiled quietly.
"Of what? That some accident happened to Colonel Durrance yesterday in London?"
"No," Ethne answered slowly, "not of that. For he is at this moment crossing the lawn towards us."
Again Mrs. Adair smiled, but she did not raise her head from the book which she was reading, so that it might have been some passage in the book which so amused and pleased her.
"I thought so," she said, but in so low a voice that the words barely reached Ethne's ears. They did not penetrate to her mind, for as she looked across the stone-flagged terrace and down the broad shallow flight of steps to the lawn, she asked abruptly:—
"Do you think he has any hope whatever that he will recover his sight?"
The question had not occurred to Mrs. Adair before, and she gave to it now no importance in her thoughts.
"Would he travel up to town so often to see his oculist if he had none?" she asked in reply. "Of course he hopes."
"I am afraid," said Ethne, and she turned with a sudden movement towards her friend. "Haven't you noticed how quick he has grown and is growing? Quick to interpret your silences, to infer what you do not say from what you do, to fill out your sentences, to make your movements the commentary of your words? Laura, haven't you noticed? At times I think the very corners of my mind are revealed to him. He reads me like a child's lesson book."
"Yes," said Mrs. Adair, "you are at a disadvantage. You no longer have your face to screen your thoughts."
"And his eyes no longer tell me anything at all," Ethne added.
There was truth in both remarks. So long as Durrance had had Ethne's face with its bright colour and her steady, frank, grey eyes visible before him, he could hardly weigh her intervals of silence and her movements against her spoken words with the detachment which was now possible to him. On the other hand, whereas before she had never been troubled by a doubt as to what he meant or wished, or intended, now she was often in the dark. Durrance's blindness, in a word, had produced an effect entirely opposite to that which might have been expected. It had reversed their positions.
Mrs. Adair, however, was more interested in Ethne's unusual burst of confidence. There was no doubt of it, she reflected. The girl, once remarkable for a quiet frankness of word and look, was declining into a creature of shifts and agitation.
"There is something, then, to be concealed from him?" she asked quietly.
"Yes."
"Something rather important?"
"Something which at all costs I must conceal," Ethne exclaimed, and was not sure, even while she spoke, that Durrance had not already found it out. She stepped over the threshold of the window on to the terrace. In front of her the lawn stretched to a hedge; on the far side of that hedge a couple of grass fields lifted and fell in gentle undulations; and beyond the fields she could see amongst a cluster of trees the smoke from the chimneys of Colonel Durrance's house. She stood for a little while hesitating upon the terrace. On the left the lawn ran down to a line of tall beeches and oaks which fringed the creek. But a broad space had been cleared to make a gap upon the bank, so that Ethne could see the sunlight on the water and the wooded slope on the farther side, and a sailing-boat some way down the creek tacking slowly against the light wind. Ethne looked about her, as though she was summoning her resources, and even composing her sentences ready for delivery to the man who was walking steadily towards her across the lawn. If there was hesitation upon her part, there was none at all, she noticed, on the part of the blind man. It seemed that Durrance's eyes took in the path which his feet trod, and with the stick which he carried in his hand he switched at the blades of grass like one that carries it from habit rather than for any use. Ethne descended the steps and advanced to meet him. She walked slowly, as if to a difficult encounter.
But there was another who only waited an opportunity to engage in it with eagerness. For as Ethne descended the steps Mrs. Adair suddenly dropped the book which she had pretended to resume and ran towards the window. Hidden by the drapery of the curtain she looked out and watched. The smile was still upon her lips, but a fierce light had brightened in her eyes, and her face had the drawn look of hunger.
"Something which at all costs she must conceal," she said to herself, and she said it in a voice of exultation. There was contempt too in her tone, contempt for Ethne Eustace, the woman of the open air who was afraid, who shrank from marriage with a blind man, and dreaded the restraint upon her freedom. It was that shrinking which Ethne had to conceal—Mrs. Adair had no doubt of it. "For my part, I am glad," she said, and she was—fiercely glad that blindness had disabled Durrance. For if her opportunity ever came, as it seemed to her now more and more likely to come, blindness reserved him to her, as no man was ever reserved to any woman. So jealous was she of his every word and look that his dependence upon her would be the extreme of pleasure. She watched Ethne and Durrance meet on the lawn at the foot of the terrace steps. She saw them turn and walk side by side across the grass towards the creek. She noticed that Ethne seemed to plead, and in her heart she longed to overhear.
And Ethne was pleading.
"You saw your oculist yesterday?" she asked quickly, as soon as they met. "Well, what did he say?"
Durrance shrugged his shoulders.
"That one must wait. Only time can show whether a cure is possible or not," he answered, and Ethne bent forward a little and scrutinised his face as though she doubted that he spoke the truth.
"But must you and I wait?" she asked.
"Surely," he returned. "It would be wiser on all counts." And thereupon he asked her suddenly a question of which she did not see the drift. "It was Mrs. Adair, I imagine, who proposed this plan that I should come home to Guessens and that you should stay with her here across the fields?"
Ethne was puzzled by the question, but she answered it directly and truthfully. "I was in great distress when I heard of your accident. I was so distressed that at the first I could not think what to do. I came to London and told Laura, since she is my friend, and this was her plan. Of course I welcomed it with all my heart;" and the note of pleading rang in her voice. She was asking Durrance to confirm her words, and he understood that. He turned towards her with a smile.
"I know that very well, Ethne," he said gently.
Ethne drew a breath of relief, and the anxiety passed for a little while from her face.
"It was kind of Mrs. Adair," he resumed, "but it is rather hard on you, who would like to be back in your own country. I remember very well a sentence which Harry Feversham—" He spoke the name quite carelessly, but paused just for a moment after he had spoken it. No expression upon his face showed that he had any intention in so pausing, but Ethne suspected one. He was listening, she suspected, for some movement of uneasiness, perhaps of pain, into which she might possibly be betrayed. But she made no movement. "A sentence which Harry Feversham spoke a long while since," he continued, "in London just before I left London for Egypt. He was speaking of you, and he said: 'She is of her country and more of her county. I do not think she could be happy in any place which was not within reach of Donegal.' And when I remember that, it seems rather selfish that I should claim to keep you here at so much cost to you."
"I was not thinking of that," Ethne exclaimed, "when I asked why we must wait. That makes me out most selfish. I was merely wondering why you preferred to wait, why you insist upon it. For, of course, although one hopes and prays with all one's soul that you will get your sight back, the fact of a cure can make no difference."
She spoke slowly, and her voice again had a ring of pleading. This time Durrance did not confirm her words, and she repeated them with a greater emphasis, "It can make no difference."
Durrance started like a man roused from an abstraction.
"I beg your pardon, Ethne," he said. "I was thinking at the moment of Harry Feversham. There is something which I want you to tell me. You said a long time ago at Glenalla that you might one day bring yourself to tell it me, and I should rather like to know now. You see, Harry Feversham was my friend. I want you to tell me what happened that night at Lennon House to break off your engagement, to send him away an outcast."
Ethne was silent for a while, and then she said gently: "I would rather not. It is all over and done with. I don't want you to ask me ever."
Durrance did not press for an answer in the slightest degree.
"Very well," he said cheerily, "I won't ask you. It might hurt you to answer, and I don't want, of course, to cause you pain."
"It's not on that account that I wish to say nothing," Ethne explained earnestly. She paused and chose her words. "It isn't that I am afraid of any pain. But what took place, took place such a long while ago—I look upon Mr. Feversham as a man whom one has known well, and who is now dead."
They were walking toward the wide gap in the line of trees upon the bank of the creek, and as Ethne spoke she raised her eyes from the ground. She saw that the little boat which she had noticed tacking up the creek while she hesitated upon the terrace had run its nose into the shore. The sail had been lowered, the little pole mast stuck up above the grass bank of the garden, and upon the bank itself a man was standing and staring vaguely towards the house as though not very sure of his ground.
"A stranger has landed from the creek," she said. "He looks as if he had lost his way. I will go on and put him right."
She ran forward as she spoke, seizing upon that stranger's presence as a means of relief, even if the relief was only to last for a minute. Such relief might be felt, she imagined, by a witness in a court when the judge rises for his half-hour at luncheon-time. For the close of an interview with Durrance left her continually with the sense that she had just stepped down from a witness-box where she had been subjected to a cross-examination so deft that she could not quite clearly perceive its tendency, although from the beginning she suspected it.
The stranger at the same time advanced to her. He was a man of the middle size, with a short snub nose, a pair of vacuous protruding brown eyes, and a moustache of some ferocity. He lifted his hat from his head and disclosed a round forehead which was going bald.
"I have sailed down from Kingsbridge," he said, "but I have never been in this part of the world before. Can you tell me if this house is called The Pool?"
"Yes; you will find Mrs. Adair if you go up the steps on to the terrace," said Ethne.
"I came to see Miss Eustace."
Ethne turned back to him with surprise.
"I am Miss Eustace."
The stranger contemplated her in silence.
"So I thought."
He twirled first one moustache and then the other before he spoke again.
"I have had some trouble to find you, Miss Eustace. I went all the way to Glenalla—for nothing. Rather hard on a man whose leave is short!"
"I am very sorry," said Ethne, with a smile; "but why have you been put to this trouble?"
Again the stranger curled a moustache. Again his eyes dwelt vacantly upon her before he spoke.
"You have forgotten my name, no doubt, by this time."
"I do not think that I have ever heard it," she answered.
"Oh, yes, you have, believe me. You heard it five years ago. I am Captain Willoughby."
Ethne drew sharply back; the bright colour paled in her cheeks; her lips set in a firm line, and her eyes grew very hard. She glowered at him silently.
Captain Willoughby was not in the least degree discomposed. He took his time to speak, and when he did it was rather with the air of a man forgiving a breach of manners, than of one making his excuses.
"I can quite understand that you do not welcome me, Miss Eustace, but none of us could foresee that you would be present when the three white feathers came into Feversham's hands."
Ethne swept the explanation aside.
"How do you know that I was present?" she asked.
"Feversham told me."
"You have seen him?"
The cry leaped loudly from her lips. It was just a throb of the heart made vocal. It startled Ethne as much as it surprised Captain Willoughby. She had schooled herself to omit Harry Feversham from her thoughts, and to obliterate him from her affections, and the cry showed to her how incompletely she had succeeded. Only a few minutes since she had spoken of him as one whom she looked upon as dead, and she had believed that she spoke the truth.
"You have actually seen him?" she repeated in a wondering voice. She gazed at her stolid companion with envy. "You have spoken to him? And he to you? When?"
"A year ago, at Suakin. Else why should I be here?"
The question came as a shock to Ethne. She did not guess the correct answer; she was not, indeed, sufficiently mistress of herself to speculate upon any answer, but she dreaded it, whatever it might be.
"Yes," she said slowly, and almost reluctantly. "After all, why are you here?"
Willoughby took a letter-case from his breast, opened it with deliberation, and shook out from one of its pockets into the palm of his hand a tiny, soiled, white feather. He held it out to Ethne.
"I have come to give you this."
Ethne did not take it. In fact, she positively shrank from it.
"Why?" she asked unsteadily.
"Three white feathers, three separate accusations of cowardice, were sent to Feversham by three separate men. This is actually one of those feathers which were forwarded from his lodgings to Ramelton five years ago. I am one of the three men who sent them. I have come to tell you that I withdraw my accusation. I take my feather back."
"And you bring it to me?"
"He asked me to."
Ethne took the feather in her palm, a thing in itself so light and fragile and yet so momentous as a symbol, and the trees and the garden began to whirl suddenly about her. She was aware that Captain Willoughby was speaking, but his voice had grown extraordinarily distant and thin; so that she was annoyed, since she wished very much to hear all that he had to say. She felt very cold, even upon that August day of sunlight. But the presence of Captain Willoughby, one of the three men whom she never would forgive, helped her to command herself. She would give no exhibition of weakness before any one of the detested three, and with an effort she recovered herself when she was on the very point of swooning.
"Come," she said, "I will hear your story. Your news was rather a shock to me. Even now I do not quite understand."
She led the way from that open space to a little plot of grass above the creek. On three sides thick hedges enclosed it, at the back rose the tall elms and poplars, in front the water flashed and broke in ripples, and beyond the water the trees rose again and were overtopped by sloping meadows. A gap in the hedge made an entrance into this enclosure, and a garden-seat stood in the centre of the grass.
"Now," said Ethne, and she motioned to Captain Willoughby to take a seat at her side. "You will take your time, perhaps. You will forget nothing. Even his words, if you remember them! I shall thank you for his words." She held that white feather clenched in her hand. Somehow Harry Feversham had redeemed his honour, somehow she had been unjust to him; and she was to learn how. She was in no hurry. She did not even feel one pang of remorse that she had been unjust. Remorse, no doubt, would come afterwards. At present the mere knowledge that she had been unjust was too great a happiness to admit of abatement. She opened her hand and looked at the feather. And as she looked, memories sternly repressed for so long, regrets which she had thought stifled quite out of life, longings which had grown strange, filled all her thoughts. The Devonshire meadows were about her, the salt of the sea was in the air, but she was back again in the midst of that one season at Dublin during a spring five years ago, before the feathers came to Ramelton.
Willoughby began to tell his story, and almost at once even the memory of that season vanished.
Ethne was in the most English of counties, the county of Plymouth and Dartmouth and Brixham and the Start, where the red cliffs of its coast-line speak perpetually of dead centuries, so that one cannot put into any harbour without some thought of the Spanish Main and of the little barques and pinnaces which adventured manfully out on their long voyages with the tide. Up this very creek the clink of the ship-builders' hammers had rung, and the soil upon its banks was vigorous with the memories of British sailors. But Ethne had no thought for these associations. The country-side was a shifting mist before her eyes, which now and then let through a glimpse of that strange wide country in the East, of which Durrance had so often told her. The only trees which she saw were the stunted mimosas of the desert; the only sea the great stretches of yellow sand; the only cliffs the sharp-peaked pyramidal black rocks rising abruptly from its surface. It was part of the irony of her position that she was able so much more completely to appreciate the trials which one lover of hers had undergone through the confidences which had been made to her by the other.
"I will not interrupt you," said Ethne, as Willoughby took his seat beside her, and he had barely spoken a score of words before she broke that promise.
"I am Deputy-Governor of Suakin," he began. "My chief was on leave in May. You are fortunate enough not to know Suakin, Miss Eustace, particularly in May. No white woman can live in that town. It has a sodden intolerable heat peculiar to itself. The air is heavy with brine; you can't sleep at night for its oppression. Well, I was sitting in the verandah on the first floor of the palace about ten o'clock at night, looking out over the harbour and the distillation works, and wondering whether it was worth while to go to bed at all, when a servant told me that a man, who refused to give his name, wished particularly to see me. The man was Feversham. There was only a lamp burning in the verandah, and the night was dark, so that I did not recognise him until he was close to me."
And at once Ethne interrupted.
"How did he look?"
Willoughby wrinkled his forehead and opened his eyes wide.
"Really, I do not know," he said doubtfully. "Much like other men, I suppose, who have been a year or two in the Soudan, a trifle overtrained and that sort of thing."
"Never mind," said Ethne, with a sigh of disappointment. For five years she had heard no word of Harry Feversham. She fairly hungered for news of him, for the sound of his habitual phrases, for the description of his familiar gestures. She had the woman's anxiety for his bodily health, she wished to know whether he had changed in face or figure, and, if so, how and in what measure. But she glanced at the obtuse, unobservant countenance of Captain Willoughby, and she understood that however much she craved for these particulars, she must go without.
"I beg your pardon," she said. "Will you go on?"
"I asked him what he wanted," Willoughby resumed, "and why he had not sent in his name. 'You would not have seen me if I had,' he replied, and he drew a packet of letters out of his pocket. Now, those letters, Miss Eustace, had been written a long while ago by General Gordon in Khartum. They had been carried down the Nile as far as Berber. But the day after they reached Berber, that town surrendered to the Mahdists. Abou Fatma, the messenger who carried them, hid them in the wall of the house of an Arab called Yusef, who sold rock-salt in the market-place. Abou was then thrown into prison on suspicion, and escaped to Suakin. The letters remained hidden in that wall until Feversham recovered them. I looked over them and saw that they were of no value, and I asked Feversham bluntly why he, who had not dared to accompany his regiment on active service, had risked death and torture to get them back."
Standing upon that verandah, with the quiet pool of water in front of him, Feversham had told his story quietly and without exaggeration. He had related how he had fallen in with Abou Fatma at Suakin, how he had planned the recovery of the letters, how the two men had travelled together as far as Obak, and since Abou Fatma dared not go farther, how he himself, driving his grey donkey, had gone on alone to Berber. He had not even concealed that access of panic which had loosened his joints when first he saw the low brown walls of the town and the towering date palms behind on the bank of the Nile; which had set him running and leaping across the empty desert in the sunlight, a marrowless thing of fear. He made, however, one omission. He said nothing of the hours which he had spent crouching upon the hot sand, with his coat drawn over his head, while he drew a woman's face toward him across the continents and seas and nerved himself to endure by the look of sorrow which it wore.
"He went down into Berber at the setting of the sun," said Captain Willoughby, and it was all that he had to say. It was enough, however, for Ethne Eustace. She drew a deep breath of relief, her face softened, there came a light into her grey eyes, and a smile upon her lips.
"He went down into Berber," she repeated softly.
"And found that the old town had been destroyed by the orders of the Emir, and that a new one was building upon its southern confines," continued Willoughby. "All the landmarks by which Feversham was to know the house in which the letters were hidden had gone. The roofs had been torn off, the houses dismantled, the front walls carried away. Narrow alleys of crumbling fives-courts—that was how Feversham described the place—crossing this way and that and gaping to the stars. Here and there perhaps a broken tower rose up, the remnant of a rich man's house. But of any sign which could tell a man where the hut of Yusef, who had once sold rock-salt in the market-place, had stood, there was no hope in those acres of crumbling mud. The foxes had already made their burrows there."
The smile faded from Ethne's face, but she looked again at the white feather lying in her palm, and she laughed with a great contentment. It was yellow with the desert dust. It was a proof that in this story there was to be no word of failure.
"Go on," she said.
Willoughby related the despatch of the negro with the donkey to Abou Fatma at the Wells of Obak.
"Feversham stayed for a fortnight in Berber," Willoughby continued. "A week during which he came every morning to the well and waited for the return of his negro from Obak, and a week during which that negro searched for Yusef, who had once sold rock-salt in the market-place. I doubt, Miss Eustace, if you can realise, however hard you try, what that fortnight must have meant to Feversham—the anxiety, the danger, the continued expectation that a voice would bid him halt and a hand fall upon his shoulder, the urgent knowledge that if the hand fell, death would be the least part of his penalty. I imagine the town—a town of low houses and broad streets of sand, dug here and there into pits for mud wherewith to build the houses, and overhead the blistering sun and a hot shadowless sky. In no corner was there any darkness or concealment. And all day a crowd jostled and shouted up and down these streets—for that is the Mahdist policy to crowd the towns so that all may be watched and every other man may be his neighbour's spy. Feversham dared not seek the shelter of a roof at night, for he dared not trust his tongue. He could buy his food each day at the booths, but he was afraid of any conversation. He slept at night in some corner of the old deserted town, in the acres of the ruined fives-courts. For the same reason he must not slink in the by-ways by day lest any should question him about his business; nor listen on the chance of hearing Yusef's name in the public places lest other loiterers should joke with him and draw him into their talk. Nor dare he in the daylight prowl about those crumbled ruins. From sunrise to sunset he must go quickly up and down the streets of the town like a man bent upon urgent business which permits of no delay. And that continued for a fortnight, Miss Eustace! A weary, trying life, don't you think? I wish I could tell you of it as vividly as he told me that night upon the balcony of the palace at Suakin."
Ethne wished it too with all her heart. Harry Feversham had made his story very real that night to Captain Willoughby; so that even after the lapse of fifteen months this unimaginative creature was sensible of a contrast and a deficiency in his manner of narration.
"In front of us was the quiet harbour and the Red Sea, above us the African stars. Feversham spoke in the quietest manner possible, but with a peculiar deliberation and with his eyes fixed upon my face, as though he was forcing me to feel with him and to understand. Even when he lighted his cigar he did not avert his eyes. For by this time I had given him a cigar and offered him a chair. I had really, I assure you, Miss Eustace. It was the first time in four years that he had sat with one of his equals, or indeed with any of his countrymen on a footing of equality. He told me so. I wish I could remember all that he told me." Willoughby stopped and cudgelled his brains helplessly. He gave up the effort in the end.
"Well," he resumed, "after Feversham had skulked for a fortnight in Berber, the negro discovered Yusef, no longer selling salt, but tending a small plantation of dhurra on the river's edge. From Yusef, Feversham obtained particulars enough to guide him to the house where the letters were concealed in the inner wall. But Yusef was no longer to be trusted. Possibly Feversham's accent betrayed him. The more likely conjecture is that Yusef took Feversham for a spy, and thought it wise to be beforehand and to confess to Mohammed-el-Kheir, the Emir, his own share in the concealment of the letters. That, however, is a mere conjecture. The important fact is this. On the same night Feversham went alone to old Berber."
"Alone!" said Ethne. "Yes?"
"He found the house fronting a narrow alley, and the sixth of the row. The front wall was destroyed, but the two side walls and the back wall still stood. Three feet from the floor and two feet from the right-hand corner the letters were hidden in that inner wall. Feversham dug into the mud bricks with his knife; he made a hole wherein he could slip his hand. The wall was thick; he dug deep, stopping now and again to feel for the packet. At last his fingers clasped and drew it out; as he hid it in a fold of his jibbeh, the light of a lantern shone upon him from behind."
Ethne started as though she had been trapped herself. Those acres of roofless fives-courts, with here and there a tower showing up against the sky, the lonely alleys, the dead silence here beneath the stars, the cries and the beating of drums and the glare of lights from the new town, Harry Feversham alone with the letters, with, in a word, some portion of his honour redeemed, and finally, the lantern flashing upon him in that solitary place,—the scene itself and the progress of the incidents were so visible to Ethne at that moment that even with the feather in her open palm she could hardly bring herself to believe that Harry Feversham had escaped.
"Well, well?" she asked.
"He was standing with his face to the wall, the light came from the alley behind him. He did not turn, but out of the corner of his eye he could see a fold of a white robe hanging motionless. He carefully secured the package, with a care indeed and a composure which astonished him even at that moment. The shock had strung him to a concentration and lucidity of thought unknown to him till then. His fingers were trembling, he remarked, as he tied the knots, but it was with excitement, and an excitement which did not flurry. His mind worked rapidly, but quite coolly, quite deliberately. He came to a perfectly definite conclusion as to what he must do. Every faculty which he possessed was extraordinarily clear, and at the same time extraordinarily still. He had his knife in his hand, he faced about suddenly and ran. There were two men waiting. Feversham ran at the man who held the lantern. He was aware of the point of a spear, he ducked and beat it aside with his left arm, he leaped forward and struck with his right. The Arab fell at his feet; the lantern was extinguished. Feversham sprang across the white-robed body and ran eastward, toward the open desert. But in no panic; he had never been so collected. He was followed by the second soldier. He had foreseen that he would be followed. If he was to escape, it was indeed necessary that he should be. He turned a corner, crouched behind a wall, and as the Arab came running by he leaped out upon his shoulders. And again as he leaped he struck."
Captain Willoughby stopped at this point of his story and turned towards Ethne. He had something to say which perplexed and at the same time impressed him, and he spoke with a desire for an explanation.
"The strangest feature of those few fierce, short minutes," he said, "was that Feversham felt no fear. I don't understand that, do you? From the first moment when the lantern shone upon him from behind, to the last when he turned his feet eastward, and ran through the ruined alleys and broken walls toward the desert and the Wells of Obak, he felt no fear."
This was the most mysterious part of Harry Feversham's story to Captain Willoughby. Here was a man who so shrank from the possibilities of battle, that he must actually send in his papers rather than confront them; yet when he stood in dire and immediate peril he felt no fear. Captain Willoughby might well turn to Ethne for an explanation.
There had been no mystery in it to Harry Feversham, but a great bitterness of spirit. He had sat on the verandah at Suakin, whittling away at the edge of Captain Willoughby's table with the very knife which he had used in Berber to dig out the letters, and which had proved so handy a weapon when the lantern shone out behind him—the one glimmering point of light in that vast acreage of ruin. Harry Feversham had kept it carefully uncleansed of blood; he had treasured it all through his flight across the two hundred and forty odd miles of desert into Suakin; it was, next to the white feathers, the thing which he held most precious of his possessions, and not merely because it would serve as a corroboration of his story to Captain Willoughby, but because the weapon enabled him to believe and realise it himself. A brown clotted rust dulled the whole length of the blade, and often during the first two days and nights of his flight, when he travelled alone, hiding and running and hiding again, with the dread of pursuit always at his heels, he had taken the knife from his breast, and stared at it with incredulous eyes, and clutched it close to him like a thing of comfort. He had lost his way amongst the sandhills of Obak on the evening of the second day, and had wandered vainly, with his small store of dates and water exhausted, until he had stumbled and lay prone, parched and famished and enfeebled, with the bitter knowledge that Abou Fatma and the Wells were somewhere within a mile of the spot on which he lay. But even at that moment of exhaustion the knife had been a talisman and a help. He grasped the rough wooden handle, all too small for a Western hand, and he ran his fingers over the rough rust upon the blade, and the weapon spoke to him and bade him take heart, since once he had been put to the test and had not failed. But long before he saw the white houses of Suakin that feeling of elation vanished, and the knife became an emblem of the vain tortures of his boyhood and the miserable folly which culminated in his resignation of his commission. He understood now the words which Lieutenant Sutch had spoken in the grill-room of the Criterion Restaurant, when citing Hamlet as his example, "The thing which he saw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and in the consequence—that he shrank from. Yet when the moment of action comes sharp and immediate, does he fail?" And remembering the words, Harry Feversham sat one May night, four years afterwards, in Captain Willoughby's verandah, whittling away at the table with his knife, and saying over and over again in a bitter savage voice: "It was an illusion, but an illusion which has caused a great deal of suffering to a woman I would have shielded from suffering. But I am well paid for it, for it has wrecked my life besides."
Captain Willoughby could not understand, any more than General Feversham could have understood, or than Ethne had. But Willoughby could at all events remember and repeat, and Ethne had grown by five years of unhappiness since the night when Harry Feversham, in the little room off the hall at Lennon House, had told her of his upbringing, of the loss of his mother, and the impassable gulf between his father and himself, and of the fear of disgrace which had haunted his nights and disfigured the world for him by day.
"Yes, it was an illusion," she cried. "I understand. I might have understood a long while since, but I would not. When those feathers came he told me why they were sent, quite simply, with his eyes on mine. When my father knew of them, he waited quite steadily and faced my father."
There was other evidence of the like kind not within Ethne's knowledge. Harry Feversham had journeyed down to Broad Place in Surrey and made his confession no less unflinchingly to the old general. But Ethne knew enough. "It was the possibility of cowardice from which he shrank, not the possibility of hurt," she exclaimed. "If only one had been a little older, a little less sure about things, a little less narrow! I should have listened. I should have understood. At all events, I should not, I think, have been cruel."
Not for the first time did remorse for that fourth feather which she had added to the three, seize upon her. She sat now crushed by it into silence. Captain Willoughby, however, was a stubborn man, unwilling upon any occasion to admit an error. He saw that Ethne's remorse by implication condemned himself, and that he was not prepared to suffer.
"Yes, but these fine distinctions are a little too elusive for practical purposes," he said. "You can't run the world on fine distinctions; so I cannot bring myself to believe that we three men were at all to blame, and if we were not, you of all people can have no reason for self-reproach."
Ethne did not consider what he precisely meant by the last reference to herself. For as he leaned complacently back in his seat, anger against him flamed suddenly hot in her. Occupied by his story, she had ceased to take stock of the story-teller. Now that he had ended, she looked him over from head to foot. An obstinate stupidity was the mark of the man to her eye. How dare he sit in judgment upon the meanest of his fellows, let alone Harry Feversham? she asked, and in the same moment recollected that she herself had endorsed his judgment. Shame tingled through all her blood; she sat with her lips set, keeping Willoughby under watch from the corners of her eyes, and waiting to pounce savagely the moment he opened his lips. There had been noticeable throughout his narrative a manner of condescension towards Feversham. "Let him use it again!" thought Ethne. But Captain Willoughby said nothing at all, and Ethne herself broke the silence. "Who of you three first thought of sending the feathers?" she asked aggressively. "Not you?"
"No; I think it was Trench," he replied.
"Ah, Trench!" Ethne exclaimed. She struck one clenched hand, the hand which held the feather, viciously into the palm of the other. "I will remember that name."
"But I share his responsibility," Willoughby assured her. "I do not shrink from it at all. I regret very much that we caused you pain and annoyance, but I do not acknowledge to any mistake in this matter. I take my feather back now, and I annul my accusation. But that is your doing."
"Mine?" asked Ethne. "What do you mean?"
Captain Willoughby turned with surprise to his companion.
"A man may live in the Soudan and even yet not be wholly ignorant of women and their great quality of forgiveness. You gave the feathers back to Feversham in order that he might redeem his honour. That is evident."
Ethne sprang to her feet before Captain Willoughby had come to the end of his sentence, and stood a little in front of him, with her face averted, and in an attitude remarkably still. Willoughby in his ignorance, like many another stupid man before him, had struck with a shrewdness and a vigour which he could never have compassed by the use of his wits. He had pointed out abruptly and suddenly to Ethne a way which she might have taken and had not, and her remorse warned her very clearly that it was the way which she ought to have taken. But she could rise to the heights. She did not seek to justify herself in her own eyes, nor would she allow Willoughby to continue in his misconception. She recognised that here she had failed in charity and justice, and she was glad that she had failed, since her failure had been the opportunity of greatness to Harry Feversham.
"Will you repeat what you said?" she asked in a low voice; "and ever so slowly, please."
"You gave the feathers back into Feversham's hand—"
"He told you that himself?"
"Yes;" and Willoughby resumed, "in order that he might by his subsequent bravery compel the men who sent them to take them back, and so redeem his honour."
"He did not tell you that?"
"No. I guessed it. You see, Feversham's disgrace was, on the face of it, impossible to retrieve. The opportunity might never have occurred—it was not likely to occur. As things happened, Feversham still waited for three years in the bazaar at Suakin before it did. No, Miss Eustace, it needed a woman's faith to conceive that plan—a woman's encouragement to keep the man who undertook it to his work."
Ethne laughed and turned back to him. Her face was tender with pride, and more than tender. Pride seemed in some strange way to hallow her, to give an unimagined benignance to her eyes, an unearthly brightness to the smile upon her lips and the colour upon her cheeks. So that Willoughby, looking at her, was carried out of himself.
"Yes," he cried, "you were the woman to plan this redemption."
Ethne laughed again, and very happily.
"Did he tell you of a fourth white feather?" she asked.
"No."
"I shall tell you the truth," she said, as she resumed her seat. "The plan was of his devising from first to last. Nor did I encourage him to its execution. For until to-day I never heard a word of it. Since the night of that dance in Donegal I have had no message from Mr. Feversham, and no news of him. I told him to take up those three feathers because they were his, and I wished to show him that I agreed with the accusations of which they were the symbols. That seems cruel? But I did more. I snapped a fourth white feather from my fan and gave him that to carry away too. It is only fair that you should know. I wanted to make an end for ever and ever, not only of my acquaintanceship with him, but of every kindly thought he might keep of me, of every kindly thought I might keep of him. I wanted to be sure myself, and I wanted him to be sure, that we should always be strangers now and—and afterwards," and the last words she spoke in a whisper. Captain Willoughby did not understand what she meant by them. It is possible that only Lieutenant Sutch and Harry Feversham himself would have understood.
"I was sad and sorry enough when I had done it," she resumed. "Indeed, indeed, I think I have always been sorry since. I think that I have never at any minute during these five years quite forgotten that fourth white feather and the quiet air of dignity with which he took it. But to-day I am glad." And her voice, though low, rang rich with the fulness of her pride. "Oh, very glad! For this was his thought, his deed. They are both all his, as I would have them be. I had no share, and of that I am very proud. He needed no woman's faith, no woman's encouragement."
"Yet he sent this back to you," said Willoughby, pointing in some perplexity to the feather which Ethne held.
"Yes," she said, "yes. He knew that I should be glad to know." And suddenly she held it close to her breast. Thus she sat for a while with her eyes shining, until Willoughby rose to his feet and pointed to the gap in the hedge by which they had entered the enclosure.
"By Jove! Jack Durrance," he exclaimed.
Durrance was standing in the gap, which was the only means of entering or going out.