Mrs. Adair's answer relieved him of a fear. Ethne had heard nothing whatever of his confession.
"Yes," he said, "she moved to the window to read a letter by the moonlight. She must have escaped from the room the moment she had read it. Consequently she did not hear that I had no longer any hope of recovering my sight, and that I merely used the pretence of a hope in order to delay our marriage. I am glad of that, very glad." He shook hands with Mrs. Adair, and said good-night. "You see," he added absently, "if I hear that Harry Feversham is in Omdurman, something might perhaps be done—from Suakin or Assouan, something might be done. Which way did Ethne go?"
"Over to the water."
"She had her dog with her, I hope."
"The dog followed her," said Mrs. Adair.
"I am glad," said Durrance. He knew quite well what comfort the dog would be to Ethne in this bad hour, and perhaps he rather envied the dog. Mrs. Adair wondered that at a moment of such distress to him he could still spare a thought for so small an alleviation of Ethne's trouble. She watched him cross the garden to the stile in the hedge. He walked steadily forward upon the path like a man who sees. There was nothing in his gait or bearing to reveal that the one thing left to him had that evening been taken away.
Durrance found his body-servant waiting up for him when he had come across the fields to his own house of "Guessens."
"You can turn the lights out and go to bed," said Durrance, and he walked through the hall into his study. The name hardly described the room, for it had always been more of a gun-room than a study.
He sat for some while in his chair and then began to walk gently about the room in the dark. There were many cups and goblets scattered about the room, which Durrance had won in his past days. He knew them each one by their shape and position, and he drew a kind of comfort from the feel of them. He took them up one by one and touched them and fondled them, wondering whether, now that he was blind, they were kept as clean and bright as they used to be. This one, a thin-stemmed goblet, he had won in a regimental steeple-chase at Colchester; he could remember the day with its clouds and grey sky and the dull look of the ploughed fields between the hedges. That pewter, which stood upon his writing table and which had formed a convenient holder for his pens, when pens had been of use, he had acquired very long ago in his college "fours," when he was a freshman at Oxford. The hoof of a favourite horse mounted in silver made an ornament upon the mantelpiece. His trophies made the room a gigantic diary; he fingered his records of good days gone by and came at last to his guns and rifles.
He took them down from their racks. They were to him much what Ethne's violin was to her and had stories for his ear alone. He sat with a Remington across his knee and lived over again one long hot day in the hills to the west of Berenice, during which he had stalked a lion across stony, open country, and killed him at three hundred yards just before sunset. Another talked to him, too, of his first ibex shot in the Khor Baraka, and of antelope stalked in the mountains northward of Suakin. There was a little Greener gun which he had used upon midwinter nights in a boat upon this very creek of the Salcombe estuary. He had brought down his first mallard with that, and he lifted it and slid his left hand along the under side of the barrel and felt the butt settle comfortably into the hollow of his shoulder. But his weapons began to talk over loudly in his ears, even as Ethne's violin, in the earlier days after Harry Feversham was gone and she was left alone, had spoken with too penetrating a note to her. As he handled the locks, and was aware that he could no longer see the sights, the sum of his losses was presented to him in a very definite and incontestable way.
He put his guns away, and was seized suddenly with a desire to disregard his blindness, to pretend that it was no hindrance and to pretend so hard that it should prove not to be one. The desire grew and shook him like a passion and carried him winged out of the countries of dim stars straight to the East. The smell of the East and its noises and the domes of its mosques, the hot sun, the rabble in its streets, and the steel-blue sky overhead, caught at him till he was plucked from his chair and set pacing restlessly about his room.
He dreamed himself to Port Said, and was marshalled in the long procession of steamers down the waterway of the canal. The song of the Arabs coaling the ship was in his ears, and so loud that he could see them as they went at night-time up and down the planks between the barges and the deck, an endless chain of naked figures monotonously chanting and lurid in the red glare of the braziers. He travelled out of the canal, past the red headlands of the Sinaitic Peninsula, into the chills of the Gulf of Suez. He zigzagged down the Red Sea while the Great Bear swung northward low down in the sky above the rail of the quarterdeck, and the Southern Cross began to blaze in the south; he touched at Tor and at Yambo; he saw the tall white houses of Yeddah lift themselves out of the sea, and admired the dark brine-withered woodwork of their carved casements; he walked through the dusk of its roofed bazaars with the joy of the homesick after long years come home; and from Yeddah he crossed between the narrowing coral-reefs into the land-locked harbour of Suakin.
Westward from Suakin stretched the desert, with all that it meant to this man whom it had smitten and cast out—the quiet padding of the camels' feet in sand; the great rock-cones rising sheer and abrupt as from a rippleless ocean, towards which you march all day and get no nearer; the gorgeous momentary blaze of sunset colours in the west; the rustle of the wind through the short twilight when the west is a pure pale green and the east the darkest blue; and the downward swoop of the planets out of nothing to the earth. The inheritor of the other places dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro, forgetful of his blindness and parched with desire as with a fever—until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds and the swallows bustling and piping in the garden, and knew that outside his windows the world was white with dawn.
He waked from his dream at the homely sound. There were to be no more journeys for him; affliction had caged him and soldered a chain about his leg. He felt his way by the balustrade up the stairs to his bed. He fell asleep as the sun rose.
But at Dongola, on the great curve of the Nile southwards of Wadi Halfa, the sun was already blazing and its inhabitants were awake. There was sport prepared for them this morning under the few palm trees before the house of the Emir Wad El Nejoumi. A white prisoner captured a week before close to the wells of El Agia on the great Arbain road, by a party of Arabs, had been brought in during the night and now waited his fate at the Emir's hands. The news spread quick as a spark through the town; already crowds of men and women and children flocked to this rare and pleasant spectacle. In front of the palm trees an open space stretched to the gateway of the Emir's house; behind them a slope of sand descended flat and bare to the river.
Harry Feversham was standing under the trees, guarded by four of the Ansar soldiery. His clothes had been stripped from him; he wore only a torn and ragged jibbeh upon his body and a twist of cotton on his head to shield him from the sun. His bare shoulders and arms were scorched and blistered. His ankles were fettered, his wrists were bound with a rope of palm fibre, an iron collar was locked about his neck, to which a chain was attached, and this chain one of the soldiers held. He stood and smiled at the mocking crowd about him and seemed well pleased, like a lunatic.
That was the character which he had assumed. If he could sustain it, if he could baffle his captors, so that they were at a loss whether he was a man really daft or an agent with promises of help and arms to the disaffected tribes of Kordofan—then there was a chance that they might fear to dispose of him themselves and send him forward to Omdurman. But it was hard work. Inside the house the Emir and his counsellors were debating his destiny; on the river-bank and within his view a high gallows stood out black and most sinister against the yellow sand. Harry Feversham was very glad of the chain about his neck and the fetters on his legs. They helped him to betray no panic, by assuring him of its futility.
These hours of waiting, while the sun rose higher and higher and no one came from the gateway, were the worst he had ever as yet endured. All through that fortnight in Berber a hope of escape had sustained him, and when that lantern shone upon him from behind in the ruined acres, what had to be done must be done so quickly there was no time for fear or thought. Here there was time and too much of it.
He had time to anticipate and foresee. He felt his heart sinking till he was faint, just as in those distant days when he had heard the hounds scuffling and whining in a covert and he himself had sat shaking upon his horse. He glanced furtively towards the gallows, and foresaw the vultures perched upon his shoulders, fluttering about his eyes. But the man had grown during his years of probation. The fear of physical suffering was not uppermost in his mind, nor even the fear that he would walk unmanfully to the high gallows, but a greater dread that if he died now, here, at Dongola, Ethne would never take back that fourth feather, and his strong hope of the "afterwards" would never come to its fulfilment. He was very glad of the collar about his neck and the fetters on his legs. He summoned his wits together and standing there alone, without a companion to share his miseries, laughed and scraped and grimaced at his tormentors.
An old hag danced and gesticulated before him, singing the while a monotonous song. The gestures were pantomimic and menaced him with abominable mutilations; the words described in simple and unexpurgated language the grievous death agonies which immediately awaited him, and the eternity of torture in hell which he would subsequently suffer. Feversham understood and inwardly shuddered, but he only imitated her gestures and nodded and mowed at her as though she was singing to him of Paradise. Others, taking their war-trumpets, placed the mouths against the prisoner's ears and blew with all their might.
"Do you hear, Kaffir?" cried a child, dancing with delight before him. "Do you hear our ombeyehs? Blow louder! Blow louder!"
But the prisoner only clapped his hands, and cried out that the music was good.
Finally there came to the group a tall warrior with a long, heavy spear. A cry was raised at his approach, and a space was cleared. He stood before the captive and poised his spear, swinging it backward and forward, to make his arm supple before he thrust, like a bowler before he delivers a ball at a cricket match. Feversham glanced wildly about him, and seeing no escape, suddenly flung out his breast to meet the blow. But the spear never reached him. For as the warrior lunged from the shoulder, one of the four guards jerked the neck chain violently from behind, and the prisoner was flung, half throttled, upon his back. Three times, and each time to a roar of delight, this pastime was repeated, and then a soldier appeared in the gateway of Nejoumi's house.
"Bring him in!" he cried; and followed by the curses and threats of the crowd, the prisoner was dragged under the arch across a courtyard into a dark room.
For a few moments Feversham could see nothing. Then his eyes began to adapt themselves to the gloom, and he distinguished a tall, bearded man, who sat upon an angareb, the native bedstead of the Soudan, and two others, who squatted beside him on the ground. The man on the angareb was the Emir.
"You are a spy of the Government from Wadi Halfa," he said.
"No, I am a musician," returned the prisoner, and he laughed happily, like a man that has made a jest.
Nejoumi made a sign, and an instrument with many broken strings was handed to the captive. Feversham seated himself upon the ground, and with slow, fumbling fingers, breathing hard as he bent over the zither, he began to elicit a wavering melody. It was the melody to which Durrance had listened in the street of Tewfikieh on the eve of his last journey into the desert; and which Ethne Eustace had played only the night before in the quiet drawing-room at Southpool. It was the only melody which Feversham knew. When he had done Nejoumi began again.
"You are a spy."
"I have told you the truth," answered Feversham, stubbornly, and Nejoumi took a different tone. He called for food, and the raw liver of a camel, covered with salt and red pepper, was placed before Feversham. Seldom has a man had smaller inclination to eat, but Feversham ate, none the less, even of that unattractive dish, knowing well that reluctance would be construed as fear, and that the signs of fear might condemn him to death. And, while he ate, Nejoumi questioned him, in the silkiest voice, about the fortifications of Cairo and the strength of the garrison at Assouan, and the rumours of dissension between the Khedive and the Sirdar.
But to each question Feversham replied:—
"How should a Greek know of these matters?"
Nejoumi rose from his angareb and roughly gave an order. The soldiers seized upon Feversham and dragged him out again into the sunlight. They poured water upon the palm-rope which bound his wrists, so that the thongs swelled and bit into his flesh.
"Speak, Kaffir. You carry promises to Kordofan."
Feversham was silent. He clung doggedly to the plan over which he had so long and so carefully pondered. He could not improve upon it, he was sure, by any alteration suggested by fear, at a moment when he could not think clearly. A rope was flung about his neck, and he was pushed and driven beneath the gallows.
"Speak, Kaffir," said Nejoumi; "so shall you escape death."
Feversham smiled and grimaced, and shook his head loosely from side to side. It was astonishing to him that he could do it, that he did not fall down upon his knees and beg for mercy. It was still more astonishing to him that he felt no temptation so to demean himself. He wondered whether the oft repeated story was true, that criminals in English prisons went quietly and with dignity to the scaffold, because they had been drugged. For without drugs he seemed to be behaving with no less dignity himself. His heart was beating very fast, but it was with a sort of excitement. He did not even think of Ethne at that moment; and certainly the great dread that his strong hope would never be fulfilled did not trouble him at all. He had his allotted part to play, and he just played it; and that was all.
Nejoumi looked at him sourly for a moment. He turned to the men who stood ready to draw away from Feversham the angareb on which he was placed:—
"To-morrow," said he, "the Kaffir shall go to Omdurman."
Feversham began to feel then that the rope of palm fibre tortured his wrists.
Mrs. Adair speculated with some uneasiness upon the consequences of the disclosures which she had made to Durrance. She was in doubt as to the course which he would take. It seemed possible that he might frankly tell Ethne of the mistake which he had made. He might admit that he had discovered the unreality of her affection for him, and the reality of her love for Feversham; and if he made that admission, however carefully he tried to conceal her share in his discovery, he would hardly succeed. She would have to face Ethne, and she dreaded the moment when her companion's frank eyes would rest quietly upon hers and her lips demand an explanation. It was consequently a relief to her at first that no outward change was visible in the relations of Ethne and Durrance. They met and spoke as though that day on which Willoughby had landed at the garden, and the evening when Ethne had played the Musoline Overture upon the violin, had been blotted from their experience. Mrs. Adair was relieved at first, but when the sense of personal danger passed from her, and she saw that her interference had been apparently without effect, she began to be puzzled. A little while, and she was both angry and disappointed.
Durrance, indeed, quickly made up his mind. Ethne wished him not to know; it was some consolation to her in her distress to believe that she had brought happiness to this one man whose friend she genuinely was. And of that consolation Durrance was aware. He saw no reason to destroy it—for the present. He must know certainly whether a misunderstanding or an irreparable breach separated Ethne from Feversham before he took the steps he had in mind. He must have sure knowledge, too, of Harry Feversham's fate. Therefore he pretended to know nothing; he abandoned even his habit of attention and scrutiny, since for these there was no longer any need; he forced himself to a display of contentment; he made light of his misfortune, and professed to find in Ethne's company more than its compensation.
"You see," he said to her, "one can get used to blindness and take it as the natural thing. But one does not get used to you, Ethne. Each time one meets you, one discovers something new and fresh to delight one. Besides, there is always the possibility of a cure."
He had his reward, for Ethne understood that he had laid aside his suspicions, and she was able to set off his indefatigable cheerfulness against her own misery. And her misery was great. If for one day she had recaptured the lightness of heart which had been hers before the three white feathers came to Ramelton, she had now recaptured something of the grief which followed upon their coming. A difference there was, of course. Her pride was restored, and she had a faint hope born of Durrance's words that Harry after all might perhaps be rescued. But she knew again the long and sleepless nights and the dull hot misery of the head as she waited for the grey of the morning. For she could no longer pretend to herself that she looked upon Harry Feversham as a friend who was dead. He was living, and in what straits she dreaded to think, and yet thirsted to know. At rare times, indeed, her impatience got the better of her will.
"I suppose that escape is possible from Omdurman," she said one day, constraining her voice to an accent of indifference.
"Possible? Yes, I think so," Durrance answered cheerfully. "Of course it is difficult and would in any case take time. Attempts, for instance, have been made to get Trench out and others, but the attempts have not yet succeeded. The difficulty is the go-between."
Ethne looked quickly at Durrance.
"The go-between?" she asked, and then she said, "I think I begin to understand," and pulled herself up abruptly. "You mean the Arab who can come and go between Omdurman and the Egyptian frontier?"
"Yes. He is usually some Dervish pedlar or merchant trading with the tribes of the Soudan, who slips into Wadi Halfa or Assouan or Suakin and undertakes the work. Of course his risk is great. He would have short shrift in Omdurman if his business were detected. So it is not to be wondered at that he shirks the danger at the last moment. As often as not, too, he is a rogue. You make your arrangements with him in Egypt, and hand him over the necessary money. In six months or a year he comes back alone, with a story of excuses. It was summer, and the season unfavourable for an escape. Or the prisoners were more strictly guarded. Or he himself was suspected. And he needs more money. His tale may be true, and you give him more money; and he comes back again, and again he comes back alone."
Ethne nodded her head.
"Exactly."
Durrance had unconsciously explained to her a point which till now she had not understood. She was quite sure that Harry Feversham aimed in some way at bringing help to Colonel Trench, but in what way his own capture was to serve that aim she could not determine. Now she understood: he was to be his own go-between, and her hopes drew strength from this piece of new knowledge. For it was likely that he had laid his plans with care. He would be very anxious that the second feather should come back to her, and if he could fetch Trench safely out of Omdurman, he would not himself remain behind.
Ethne was silent for a little while. They were sitting on the terrace, and the sunset was red upon the water of the creek.
"Life would not be easy, I suppose, in the prison of Omdurman," she said, and again she forced herself to indifference.
"Easy!" exclaimed Durrance; "no, it would not be easy. A hovel crowded with Arabs, without light or air, and the roof perhaps two feet above your head, into which you were locked up from sundown to morning; very likely the prisoners would have to stand all night in that foul den, so closely packed would they be. Imagine it, even here in England, on an evening like this! Think what it would be on an August night in the Soudan! Especially if you had memories, say, of a place like this, to make the torture worse."
Ethne looked out across that cool garden. At this very moment Harry Feversham might be struggling for breath in that dark and noisome hovel, dry of throat and fevered with the heat, with a vision before his eyes of the grass slopes of Ramelton and with the music of the Lennon River liquid in his ears.
"One would pray for death," said Ethne, slowly, "unless—" She was on the point of adding "unless one went there deliberately with a fixed thing to do," but she cut the sentence short. Durrance carried it on:—
"Unless there was a chance of escape," he said. "And there is a chance—if Feversham is in Omdurman."
He was afraid that he had allowed himself to say too much about the horrors of the prison in Omdurman, and he added: "Of course, what I have described to you is mere hearsay and not to be trusted. We have no knowledge. Prisoners may not have such bad times as we think;" and thereupon he let the subject drop. Nor did Ethne mention it again. It occurred to her at times to wonder in what way Durrance had understood her abrupt disappearance from the drawing-room on the night when he had told her of his meeting with Harry Feversham. But he never referred to it himself, and she thought it wise to imitate his example. The noticeable change in his manner, the absence of that caution which had so distressed her, allayed her fears. It seemed that he had found for himself some perfectly simple and natural explanation. At times, too, she asked herself why Durrance had told her of that meeting in Wadi Halfa, and of Feversham's subsequent departure to the south. But for that she found an explanation—a strange explanation, perhaps, but it was simple enough and satisfactory to her. She believed that the news was a message of which Durrance was only the instrument. It was meant for her ears, and for her comprehension alone, and Durrance was bound to convey it to her by the will of a power above him. His real reason she had not stayed to hear.
During the month of September, then, they kept up the pretence. Every morning when Durrance was in Devonshire he would come across the fields to Ethne at The Pool, and Mrs. Adair, watching them as they talked and laughed without a shadow of embarrassment or estrangement, grew more angry, and found it more difficult to hold her peace and let the pretence go on. It was a month of strain and tension to all three, and not one of them but experienced a great relief when Durrance visited his oculist in London. And those visits increased in number, and lengthened in duration. Even Ethne was grateful for them. She could throw off the mask for a little while; she had an opportunity to be tired; she had solitude wherein to gain strength to resume her high spirits upon Durrance's return. There came hours when despair seized hold of her. "Shall I be able to keep up the pretence when we are married, when we are always together?" she asked herself. But she thrust the question back unanswered; she dared not look forward, lest even now her strength should fail her.
After the third visit Durrance said to her:—
"Do you remember that I once mentioned a famous oculist at Wiesbaden? It seems advisable that I should go to him."
"You are recommended to go?"
"Yes, and to go alone."
Ethne looked up at him with a shrewd, quick glance.
"You think that I should be dull at Wiesbaden," she said. "There is no fear of that. I can rout out some relative to go with me."
"No; it is on my own account," answered Durrance. "I shall perhaps have to go into a home. It is better to be quite quiet and to see no one for a time."
"You are sure?" Ethne asked. "It would hurt me if I thought you proposed this plan because you felt I would be happier at Glenalla."
"No, that is not the reason," Durrance answered, and he answered quite truthfully. He felt it necessary for both of them that they should separate. He, no less than Ethne, suffered under the tyranny of perpetual simulation. It was only because he knew how much store she set upon carrying out her resolve that two lives should not be spoilt because of her, that he was able to hinder himself from crying out that he knew the truth.
"I am returning to London next week," he added, "and when I come back I shall be in a position to tell you whether I am to go to Wiesbaden or not."
Durrance had reason to be glad that he had mentioned his plan before the arrival of Calder's telegram from Wadi Halfa. Ethne was unable to connect his departure from her with the receipt of any news about Feversham. The telegram came one afternoon, and Durrance took it across to The Pool in the evening and showed it to Ethne. There were only four words to the telegram:—
"Feversham imprisoned at Omdurman."
Durrance, with one of the new instincts of delicacy which had been born in him lately by reason of his sufferings and the habit of thought, had moved away from Ethne's side as soon as he had given it to her, and had joined Mrs. Adair, who was reading a book in the drawing-room. He had folded up the telegram, besides, so that by the time Ethne had unfolded it and saw the words, she was alone upon the terrace. She remembered what Durrance had said to her about the prison, and her imagination enlarged upon his words. The quiet of a September evening was upon the fields, a light mist rose from the creek and crept over the garden bank across the lawn. Already the prison doors were shut in that hot country at the junction of the Niles. "He is to pay for his fault ten times over, then," she cried, in revolt against the disproportion. "And the fault was his father's and mine too more than his own. For neither of us understood."
She blamed herself for the gift of that fourth feather. She leaned upon the stone balustrade with her eyes shut, wondering whether Harry would outlive this night, whether he was still alive to outlive it. The very coolness of the stones on which her hands pressed became the bitterest of reproaches.
"Something can now be done."
Durrance was coming from the window of the drawing-room, and spoke as he came, to warn her of his approach. "He was and is my friend; I cannot leave him there. I shall write to-night to Calder. Money will not be spared. He is my friend, Ethne. You will see. From Suakin or from Assouan something will be done."
He put all the help to be offered to the credit of his own friendship. Ethne was not to believe that he imagined she had any further interest in Harry Feversham.
She turned to him suddenly, almost interrupting him.
"Major Castleton is dead?" she said.
"Castleton?" he exclaimed. "There was a Castleton in Feversham's regiment. Is that the man?"
"Yes. He is dead?"
"He was killed at Tamai."
"You are sure—quite sure?"
"He was within the square of the Second Brigade on the edge of the great gulley when Osman Digna's men sprang out of the earth and broke through. I was in that square, too. I saw Castleton killed."
"I am glad," said Ethne.
She spoke quite simply and distinctly. The first feather had been brought back by Captain Willoughby. It was just possible that Colonel Trench might bring back the second. Harry Feversham had succeeded once under great difficulties, in the face of great peril. The peril was greater now, the difficulties more arduous to overcome; that she clearly understood. But she took the one success as an augury that another might follow it. Feversham would have laid his plans with care; he had money wherewith to carry them out; and, besides, she was a woman of strong faith. But she was relieved to know that the sender of the third feather could never be approached. Moreover, she hated him, and there was an end of the matter.
Durrance was startled. He was a soldier of a type not so rare as the makers of war stories wish their readers to believe. Hector of Troy was his ancestor; he was neither hysterical in his language nor vindictive in his acts; he was not an elderly schoolboy with a taste for loud talk, but a quiet man who did his work without noise, who could be stern when occasion needed and of an unflinching severity, but whose nature was gentle and compassionate. And this barbaric utterance of Ethne Eustace he did not understand.
"You disliked Major Castleton so much?" he exclaimed.
"I never knew him."
"Yet you are glad that he is dead?"
"I am quite glad," said Ethne, stubbornly.
She made another slip when she spoke thus of Major Castleton, and Durrance did not pass it by unnoticed. He remembered it, and thought it over in his gun-room at Guessens. It added something to the explanation which he was building up of Harry Feversham's disgrace and disappearance. The story was gradually becoming clear to his sharpened wits. Captain Willoughby's visit and the token he had brought had given him the clue. A white feather could mean nothing but an accusation of cowardice. Durrance could not remember that he had ever detected any signs of cowardice in Harry Feversham, and the charge startled him perpetually into incredulity.
But the fact remained. Something had happened on the night of the ball at Lennon House, and from that date Harry had been an outcast. Suppose that a white feather had been forwarded to Lennon House, and had been opened in Ethne's presence? Or more than one white feather? Ethne had come back from her long talk with Willoughby holding that white feather as though there was nothing so precious in all the world.
So much Mrs. Adair had told him.
It followed, then, that the cowardice was atoned, or in one particular atoned. Ethne's recapture of her youth pointed inevitably to that conclusion. She treasured the feather because it was no longer a symbol of cowardice but a symbol of cowardice atoned.
But Harry Feversham had not returned, he still slunk in the world's by-ways. Willoughby, then, was not the only man who had brought the accusation; there were others—two others. One of the two Durrance had long since identified. When Durrance had suggested that Harry might be taken to Omdurman, Ethne had at once replied, "Colonel Trench is in Omdurman." She needed no explanation of Harry's disappearance from Wadi Halfa into the southern Soudan. It was deliberate; he had gone out to be captured, to be taken to Omdurman. Moreover, Ethne had spoken of the untrustworthiness of the go-between, and there again had helped Durrance in his conjectures. There was some obligation upon Feversham to come to Trench's help. Suppose that Feversham had laid his plans of rescue, and had ventured out into the desert that he might be his own go-between. It followed that a second feather had been sent to Ramelton, and that Trench had sent it.
To-night Durrance was able to join Major Castleton to Trench and Willoughby. Ethne's satisfaction at the death of a man whom she did not know could mean but the one thing. There would be the same obligation resting upon Feversham with regard to Major Castleton if he lived. It seemed likely that a third feather had come to Lennon House, and that Major Castleton had sent it.
Durrance pondered over the solution of the problem, and more and more he found it plausible. There was one man who could have told him the truth and who had refused to tell it, who would no doubt still refuse to tell it. But that one man's help Durrance intended to enlist, and to this end he must come with the story pat upon his lips and no request for information.
"Yes," he said, "I think that after my next visit to London I can pay a visit to Lieutenant Sutch."
Captain Willoughby was known at his club for a bore. He was a determined raconteur of pointless stories about people with whom not one of his audience was acquainted. And there was no deterring him, for he did not listen, he only talked. He took the most savage snub with a vacant and amicable face; and, wrapped in his own dull thoughts, he continued his copious monologue. In the smoking-room or at the supper-table he crushed conversation flat as a steam-roller crushes a road. He was quite irresistible. Trite anecdotes were sandwiched between aphorisms of the copybook; and whether anecdote or aphorism, all was delivered with the air of a man surprised by his own profundity. If you waited long enough, you had no longer the will power to run away, you sat caught in a web of sheer dulness. Only those, however, who did not know him waited long enough; the rest of his fellow-members at his appearance straightway rose and fled.
It happened, therefore, that within half an hour of his entrance to his club, he usually had one large corner of the room entirely to himself; and that particular corner up to the moment of his entrance had been the most frequented. For he made it a rule to choose the largest group as his audience. He was sitting in this solitary state one afternoon early in October, when the waiter approached him and handed to him a card.
Captain Willoughby took it with alacrity, for he desired company, and his acquaintances had all left the club to fulfil the most pressing and imperative engagements. But as he read the card his countenance fell. "Colonel Durrance!" he said, and scratched his head thoughtfully. Durrance had never in his life paid him a friendly visit before, and why should he go out of his way to do so now? It looked as if Durrance had somehow got wind of his journey to Kingsbridge.
"Does Colonel Durrance know that I am in the club?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," replied the waiter.
"Very well. Show him in."
Durrance had, no doubt come to ask questions, and diplomacy would be needed to elude them. Captain Willoughby had no mind to meddle any further in the affairs of Miss Ethne Eustace. Feversham and Durrance must fight their battle without his intervention. He did not distrust his powers of diplomacy, but he was not anxious to exert them in this particular case, and he looked suspiciously at Durrance as he entered the room. Durrance, however, had apparently no questions to ask. Willoughby rose from his chair, and crossing the room, guided his visitor over to his deserted corner.
"Will you smoke?" he said, and checked himself. "I beg your pardon."
"Oh, I'll smoke," Durrance answered. "It's not quite true that a man can't enjoy his tobacco without seeing the smoke of it. If I let my cigar out, I should know at once. But you will see, I shall not let it out." He lighted his cigar with deliberation and leaned back in his chair.
"I am lucky to find you, Willoughby," he continued, "for I am only in town for to-day. I come up every now and then from Devonshire to see my oculist, and I was very anxious to meet you if I could. On my last visit Mather told me that you were away in the country. You remember Mather, I suppose? He was with us in Suakin."
"Of course, I remember him quite well," said Willoughby, heartily. He was more than willing to talk about Mather; he had a hope that in talking about Mather, Durrance might forget that other matter which caused him anxiety.
"We are both of us curious," Durrance continued, "and you can clear up the point we are curious about. Did you ever come across an Arab called Abou Fatma?"
"Abou Fatma," said Willoughby, slowly, "one of the Hadendoas?"
"No, a man of the Kabbabish tribe."
"Abou Fatma?" Willoughby repeated, as though for the first time he had heard the name. "No, I never came across him;" and then he stopped. It occurred to Durrance that it was not a natural place at which to stop; Willoughby might have been expected to add, "Why do you ask me?" or some question of the kind. But he kept silent. As a matter of fact, he was wondering how in the world Durrance had ever come to hear of Abou Fatma, whose name he himself had heard for the first and last time a year ago upon the verandah of the Palace at Suakin. For he had spoken the truth. He never had come across Abou Fatma, although Feversham had spoken of him.
"That makes me still more curious," Durrance continued. "Mather and I were together on the last reconnaissance in '84, and we found Abou Fatma hiding in the bushes by the Sinkat fort. He told us about the Gordon letters which he had hidden in Berber. Ah! you remember his name now."
"I was merely getting my pipe out of my pocket," said Willoughby. "But I do remember the name now that you mention the letters."
"They were brought to you in Suakin fifteen months or so back. Mather showed me the paragraph in theEvening Standard. And I am curious as to whether Abou Fatma returned to Berber and recovered them. But since you have never come across him, it follows that he was not the man."
Captain Willoughby began to feel sorry that he had been in such haste to deny all acquaintance with Abou Fatma of the Kabbabish tribe.
"No; it was not Abou Fatma," he said, with an awkward sort of hesitation. He dreaded the next question which Durrance would put to him. He filled his pipe, pondering what answer he should make to it. But Durrance put no question at all for the moment.
"I wondered," he said slowly. "I thought that Abou Fatma would hardly return to Berber. For, indeed, whoever undertook the job undertook it at the risk of his life, and, since Gordon was dead, for no very obvious reason."
"Quite so," said Willoughby, in a voice of relief. It seemed that Durrance's curiosity was satisfied with the knowledge that Abou Fatma had not recovered the letters. "Quite so. Since Gordon was dead, for no reason."
"For no obvious reason, I think I said," Durrance remarked imperturbably. Willoughby turned and glanced suspiciously at his companion, wondering whether, after all, Durrance knew of his visit to Kingsbridge and its motive. Durrance, however, smoked his cigar, leaning back in his chair with his face tilted up towards the ceiling. He seemed, now that his curiosity was satisfied, to have lost interest in the history of the Gordon letters. At all events, he put no more questions upon that subject to embarrass Captain Willoughby, and indeed there was no need that he should. Thinking over the possible way by which Harry Feversham might have redeemed himself in Willoughby's eyes from the charge of cowardice, Durrance could only hit upon this recovery of the letters from the ruined wall in Berber. There had been no personal danger to the inhabitants of Suakin since the days of that last reconnaissance. The great troop-ships had steamed between the coral reefs towards Suez, and no cry for help had ever summoned them back. Willoughby risked only his health in that white palace on the Red Sea. There could not have been a moment when Feversham was in a position to say, "Your life was forfeit but for me, whom you call coward." And Durrance, turning over in his mind all the news and gossip which had come to him at Wadi Halfa or during his furloughs, had been brought to conjecture whether that fugitive from Khartum, who had told him his story in the glacis of the silent ruined fort of Sinkat during one drowsy afternoon of May, had not told it again at Suakin within Feversham's hearing. He was convinced now that his conjecture was correct.
Willoughby's reticence was in itself a sufficient confirmation. Willoughby, without doubt, had been instructed by Ethne to keep his tongue in a leash. Colonel Durrance was prepared for reticence, he looked to reticence as the answer to his conjecture. His trained ear, besides, had warned him that Willoughby was uneasy at his visit and careful in his speech. There had been pauses, during which Durrance was as sure as though he had eyes wherewith to see, that his companion was staring at him suspiciously and wondering how much he knew, or how little. There had been an accent of wariness and caution in his voice, which was hatefully familiar to Durrance's ears, for just with that accent Ethne had been wont to speak. Moreover, Durrance had set traps,—that remark of his "for no obvious reason, I think I said," had been one,—and a little start here, or a quick turn there, showed him that Willoughby had tumbled into them.
He had no wish, however, that Willoughby should write off to Ethne and warn her that Durrance was making inquiries. That was a possibility, he recognised, and he set himself to guard against it.
"I want to tell you why I was anxious to meet you," he said. "It was because of Harry Feversham;" and Captain Willoughby, who was congratulating himself that he was well out of an awkward position, fairly jumped in his seat. It was not Durrance's policy, however, to notice his companion's agitation, and he went on quickly: "Something happened to Feversham. It's more than five years ago now. He did something, I suppose, or left something undone,—the secret, at all events, has been closely kept,—and he dropped out, and his place knew him no more. Now you are going back to the Soudan, Willoughby?"
"Yes," Willoughby answered, "in a week's time."
"Well, Harry Feversham is in the Soudan," said Durrance, leaning towards his companion.
"You know that?" exclaimed Willoughby.
"Yes, for I came across him this Spring at Wadi Halfa," Durrance continued. "He had fallen rather low," and he told Willoughby of their meeting outside of the café of Tewfikieh. "It's strange, isn't it?—a man whom one knew very well going under like that in a second, disappearing before your eyes as it were, dropping plumb out of sight as though down an oubliette in an old French castle. I want you to look out for him, Willoughby, and do what you can to set him on his legs again. Let me know if you chance on him. Harry Feversham was a friend of mine—one of my few real friends."
"All right," said Willoughby, cheerfully. Durrance knew at once from the tone of his voice that suspicion was quieted in him. "I will look out for Feversham. I remember he was a great friend of yours."
He stretched out his hand towards the matches upon the table beside him. Durrance heard the scrape of the phosphorus and the flare of the match. Willoughby was lighting his pipe. It was a well-seasoned piece of briar, and needed a cleaning; it bubbled as he held the match to the tobacco and sucked at the mouthpiece.
"Yes, a great friend," said Durrance. "You and I dined with him in his flat high up above St. James's Park just before we left England."
And at that chance utterance Willoughby's briar pipe ceased suddenly to bubble. A moment's silence followed, then Willoughby swore violently, and a second later he stamped upon the carpet. Durrance's imagination was kindled by this simple sequence of events, and he straightway made up a little picture in his mind. In one chair himself smoking his cigar, a round table holding a match-stand on his left hand, and on the other side of the table Captain Willoughby in another chair. But Captain Willoughby lighting his pipe and suddenly arrested in the act by a sentence spoken without significance, Captain Willoughby staring suspiciously in his slow-witted way at the blind man's face, until the lighted match, which he had forgotten, burnt down to his fingers, and he swore and dropped it and stamped it out upon the floor. Durrance had never given a thought to that dinner till this moment. It was possible it might deserve much thought.
"There were you and I and Feversham present," he went on. "Feversham had asked us there to tell us of his engagement to Miss Eustace. He had just come back from Dublin. That was almost the last we saw of him." He took a pull at his cigar and added, "By the way, there was a third man present."
"Was there?" asked Willoughby. "It's so long ago."
"Yes—Trench."
"To be sure, Trench was present. It will be a long time, I am afraid, before we dine at the same table with poor old Trench again."
The carelessness of his voice was well assumed; he leaned forwards and struck another match and lighted his pipe. As he did so, Durrance laid down his cigar upon the table edge.
"And we shall never dine with Castleton again," he said slowly.
"Castleton wasn't there," Willoughby exclaimed, and quickly enough to betray that, however long the interval since that little dinner in Feversham's rooms, it was at all events still distinct in his recollections.
"No, but he was expected," said Durrance.
"No, not even expected," corrected Willoughby. "He was dining elsewhere. He sent the telegram, you remember."
"Ah, yes, a telegram came," said Durrance.
That dinner party certainly deserved consideration. Willoughby, Trench, Castleton—these three men were the cause of Harry Feversham's disgrace and disappearance. Durrance tried to recollect all the details of the evening; but he had been occupied himself on that occasion. He remembered leaning against the window above St. James's Park; he remembered hearing the tattoo from the parade-ground of Wellington Barracks—and a telegram had come.
Durrance made up another picture in his mind. Harry Feversham at the table reading and re-reading his telegram, Trench and Willoughby waiting silently, perhaps expectantly, and himself paying no heed, but staring out from the bright room into the quiet and cool of the park.
"Castleton was dining with a big man from the War Office that night," Durrance said, and a little movement at his side warned him that he was getting hot in his search. He sat for a while longer talking about the prospects of the Soudan, and then rose up from his chair.
"Well, I can rely on you, Willoughby, to help Feversham if ever you find him. Draw on me for money."
"I will do my best," said Willoughby. "You are going? I could have won a bet off you this afternoon."
"How?"
"You said that you did not let your cigars go out. This one's stone cold."
"I forgot about it; I was thinking of Feversham. Good-bye."
He took a cab and drove away from the club door. Willoughby was glad to see the last of him, but he was fairly satisfied with his own exhibition of diplomacy. It would have been strange, after all, he thought, if he had not been able to hoodwink poor old Durrance; and he returned to the smoking-room and refreshed himself with a whiskey and potass.
Durrance, however, had not been hoodwinked. The last perplexing question had been answered for him that afternoon. He remembered now that no mention had been made at the dinner which could identify the sender of the telegram. Feversham had read it without a word, and without a word had crumpled it up and tossed it into the fire. But to-day Willoughby had told him that it had come from Castleton, and Castleton had been dining with a high official of the War Office. The particular act of cowardice which had brought the three white feathers to Ramelton was easy to discern. Almost the next day Feversham had told Durrance in the Row that he had resigned his commission, and Durrance knew that he had not resigned it when the telegram came. That telegram could have brought only one piece of news, that Feversham's regiment was ordered on active service. The more Durrance reflected, the more certain he felt that he had at last hit upon the truth. Nothing could be more natural than that Castleton should telegraph his good news in confidence to his friends. Durrance had the story now complete, or rather, the sequence of facts complete. For why Feversham should have been seized with panic, why he should have played the coward the moment after he was engaged to Ethne Eustace—at a time, in a word, when every manly quality he possessed should have been at its strongest and truest, remained for Durrance, and indeed, was always to remain, an inexplicable problem. But he put that question aside, classing it among the considerations which he had learnt to estimate as small and unimportant. The simple and true thing—the thing of real importance—emerged definite and clear: Harry Feversham was atoning for his one act of cowardice with a full and an overflowing measure of atonement.
"I shall astonish old Sutch," he thought, with a chuckle. He took the night mail into Devonshire the same evening, and reached his home before midday.
Within the drawing-room at The Pool, Durrance said good-bye to Ethne. He had so arranged it that there should be little time for that leave-taking, and already the carriage stood at the steps of Guessens, with his luggage strapped upon the roof and his servant waiting at the door.
Ethne came out with him on to the terrace, where Mrs. Adair stood at the top of the flight of steps. Durrance held out his hand to her, but she turned to Ethne and said:—
"I want to speak to Colonel Durrance before he goes."
"Very well," said Ethne. "Then we will say good-bye here," she added to Durrance. "You will write from Wiesbaden? Soon, please!"
"The moment I arrive," answered Durrance. He descended the steps with Mrs. Adair, and left Ethne standing upon the terrace. The last scene of pretence had been acted out, the months of tension and surveillance had come to an end, and both were thankful for their release. Durrance showed that he was glad even in the briskness of his walk, as he crossed the lawn at Mrs. Adair's side. She, however, lagged, and when she spoke it was in a despondent voice.
"So you are going," she said. "In two days' time you will be at Wiesbaden and Ethne at Glenalla. We shall all be scattered. It will be lonely here."
She had had her way; she had separated Ethne and Durrance for a time at all events; she was no longer to be tortured by the sight of them and the sound of their voices; but somehow her interference had brought her little satisfaction. "The house will seem very empty after you are all gone," she said; and she turned at Durrance's side and walked down with him into the garden.
"We shall come back, no doubt," said Durrance, reassuringly.
Mrs. Adair looked about her garden. The flowers were gone, and the sunlight; clouds stretched across the sky overhead, the green of the grass underfoot was dull, the stream ran grey in the gap between the trees, and the leaves from the branches were blown russet and yellow about the lawns.
"How long shall you stay at Wiesbaden?" she asked.
"I can hardly tell. But as long as it's advisable," he answered.
"That tells me nothing at all. I suppose it was meant not to tell me anything."
Durrance did not answer her, and she resented his silence. She knew nothing whatever of his plans; she was unaware whether he meant to break his engagement with Ethne or to hold her to it, and curiosity consumed her. It might be a very long time before she saw him again, and all that long time she must remain tortured with doubts.
"You distrust me?" she said defiantly, and with a note of anger in her voice.
Durrance answered her quite gently:—
"Have I no reason to distrust you? Why did you tell me of Captain Willoughby's coming? Why did you interfere?"
"I thought you ought to know."
"But Ethne wished the secret kept. I am glad to know, very glad. But, after all, you told me, and you were Ethne's friend."
"Yours, too, I hope," Mrs. Adair answered, and she exclaimed: "How could I go on keeping silence? Don't you understand?"
"No."
Durrance might have understood, but he had never given much thought to Mrs. Adair, and she knew it. The knowledge rankled within her, and his simple "no" stung her beyond bearing.
"I spoke brutally, didn't I?" she said. "I told you the truth as brutally as I could. Doesn't that help you to understand?"
Again Durrance said "No," and the monosyllable exasperated her out of all prudence, and all at once she found herself speaking incoherently the things which she had thought. And once she had begun, she could not stop. She stood, as it were, outside of herself, and saw that her speech was madness; yet she went on with it.
"I told you the truth brutally on purpose. I was so stung because you would not see what was so visible had you only the mind to see. I wanted to hurt you. I am a bad, bad woman, I suppose. There were you and she in the room talking together in the darkness; there was I alone upon the terrace. It was the same again to-day. You and Ethne in the room, I alone upon the terrace. I wonder whether it will always be so. But you will not say—you will not say." She struck her hands together with a gesture of despair, but Durrance had no words for her. He walked silently along the garden path towards the stile, and he quickened his pace a little, so that Mrs. Adair had to walk fast to keep up with him. That quickening of the pace was a sort of answer, but Mrs. Adair was not deterred by it. Her madness had taken hold of her.
"I do not think I would have minded so much," she continued, "if Ethne had really cared for you; but she never cared more than as a friend cares, just a mere friend. And what's friendship worth?" she asked scornfully.
"Something, surely," said Durrance.
"It does not prevent Ethne from shrinking from her friend," cried Mrs. Adair. "She shrinks from you. Shall I tell you why? Because you are blind. She is afraid. While I—I will tell you the truth—I am glad. When the news first came from Wadi Halfa that you were blind, I was glad; when I saw you in Hill Street, I was glad; ever since, I have been glad—quite glad. Because I saw that she shrank. From the beginning she shrank, thinking how her life would be hampered and fettered," and the scorn of Mrs. Adair's voice increased, though her voice itself was sunk to a whisper. "I am not afraid," she said, and she repeated the words passionately again and again. "I am not afraid. I am not afraid."
To Durrance it seemed that in all his experience nothing so horrible had ever occurred as this outburst by the woman who was Ethne's friend, nothing so unforeseen.
"Ethne wrote to you at Wadi Halfa out of pity," she went on, "that was all. She wrote out of pity; and, having written, she was afraid of what she had done; and being afraid, she had not courage to tell you she was afraid. You would not have blamed her, if she had frankly admitted it; you would have remained her friend. But she had not the courage."
Durrance knew that there was another explanation of Ethne's hesitations and timidities. He knew, too, that the other explanation was the true one. But to-morrow he himself would be gone from the Salcombe estuary, and Ethne would be on her way to the Irish Channel and Donegal. It was not worth while to argue against Mrs. Adair's slanders. Besides, he was close upon the stile which separated the garden of The Pool from the fields. Once across that stile, he would be free of Mrs. Adair. He contented himself with saying quietly:—
"You are not just to Ethne."
At that simple utterance the madness of Mrs. Adair went from her. She recognised the futility of all that she had said, of her boastings of courage, of her detractions of Ethne. Her words might be true or not, they could achieve nothing. Durrance was always in the room with Ethne, never upon the terrace with Mrs. Adair. She became conscious of her degradation, and she fell to excuses.
"I am a bad woman, I suppose. But after all, I have not had the happiest of lives. Perhaps there is something to be said for me." It sounded pitiful and weak, even in her ears; but they had reached the stile, and Durrance had turned towards her. She saw that his face lost something of its sternness. He was standing quietly, prepared now to listen to what she might wish to say. He remembered that in the old days when he could see, he had always associated her with a dignity of carriage and a reticence of speech. It seemed hardly possible that it was the same woman who spoke to him now, and the violence of the contrast made him ready to believe that there must be perhaps something to be said on her behalf.
"Will you tell me?" he said gently.
"I was married almost straight from school. I was the merest girl. I knew nothing, and I was married to a man of whom I knew nothing. It was my mother's doing, and no doubt she thought that she was acting for the very best. She was securing for me a position of a kind, and comfort and release from any danger of poverty. I accepted what she said blindly, ignorantly. I could hardly have refused, indeed, for my mother was an imperious woman, and I was accustomed to obedience. I did as she told me and married dutifully the man whom she chose. The case is common enough, no doubt, but its frequency does not make it easier of endurance."
"But Mr. Adair?" said Durrance. "After all, I knew him. He was older, no doubt, than you, but he was kind. I think, too, he cared for you."
"Yes. He was kindness itself, and he cared for me. Both things are true. The knowledge that he did care for me was the one link, if you understand. At the beginning I was contented, I suppose. I had a house in town and another here. But it was dull," and she stretched out her arms. "Oh, how dull it was! Do you know the little back streets in a manufacturing town? Rows of small houses, side by side, with nothing to relieve them of their ugly regularity, each with the self-same windows, the self-same door, the self-same door-step. Overhead a drift of smoke, and every little green thing down to the plants in the window dirty and black. The sort of street whence any crazy religious charlatan who can promise a little colour to their grey lives can get as many votaries as he wants. Well, when I thought over my life, one of those little streets always came into my mind. There are women, heaps of them, no doubt, to whom the management of a big house, the season in London, the ordinary round of visits, are sufficient. I, worse luck, was not one of them. Dull! You, with your hundred thousand things to do, cannot conceive how oppressively dull my life was. And that was not all!" She hesitated, but she could not stop midway, and it was far too late for her to recover her ground. She went on to the end.
"I married, as I say, knowing nothing of the important things. I believed at the first that mine was just the allotted life of all women. But I began soon to have my doubts. I got to know that there was something more to be won out of existence than mere dulness; at least, that there was something more for others, though not for me. One could not help learning that. One passed a man and a woman riding together, and one chanced to look into the woman's face as one passed; or one saw, perhaps, the woman alone and talked with her for a little while, and from the happiness of her looks and voice one knew with absolute certainty that there was ever so much more. Only the chance of that ever so much more my mother had denied to me."
All the sternness had now gone from Durrance's face, and Mrs. Adair was speaking with a great simplicity. Of the violence which she had used before there was no longer any trace. She did not appeal for pity, she was not even excusing herself; she was just telling her story quietly and gently.
"And then you came," she continued. "I met you, and met you again. You went away upon your duties and you returned; and I learnt now, not that there was ever so much more, but just what that ever so much more was. But it was still, of course, denied to me. However, in spite of that I felt happier. I thought that I should be quite content to have you for a friend, to watch your progress, and to feel pride in it. But you see—Ethne came, too, and you turned to her. At once—oh, at once! If you had only been a little less quick to turn to her! In a very short while I was sad and sorry that you had ever come into my life."
"I knew nothing of this," said Durrance. "I never suspected. I am sorry."
"I took care you should not suspect," said Mrs. Adair. "But I tried to keep you; with all my wits I tried. No match-maker in the world ever worked so hard to bring two people together as I did to bring together Ethne and Mr. Feversham, and I succeeded."
The statement came upon Durrance with a shock. He leaned back against the stile and could have laughed. Here was the origin of the whole sad business. From what small beginnings it had grown! It is a trite reflection, but the personal application of it is apt to take away the breath. It was so with Durrance as he thought himself backwards into those days when he had walked on his own path, heedless of the people with whom he came in touch, never dreaming that they were at that moment influencing his life right up to his dying day. Feversham's disgrace and ruin, Ethne's years of unhappiness, the wearying pretences of the last few months, all had their origin years ago when Mrs. Adair, to keep Durrance to herself, threw Feversham and Ethne into each other's company.
"I succeeded," continued Mrs. Adair. "You told me that I had succeeded one morning in the Row. How glad I was! You did not notice it, I am sure. The next moment you took all my gladness from me by telling me you were starting for the Soudan. You were away three years. They were not happy years for me. You came back. My husband was dead, but Ethne was free. Ethne refused you, but you went blind and she claimed you. You can see what ups and downs have fallen to me. But these months here have been the worst."
"I am very sorry," said Durrance. Mrs. Adair was quite right, he thought. There was indeed something to be said on her behalf. The world had gone rather hardly with her. He was able to realise what she had suffered, since he was suffering in much the same way himself. It was quite intelligible to him why she had betrayed Ethne's secret that night upon the terrace, and he could not but be gentle with her.
"I am very sorry, Mrs. Adair," he repeated lamely. There was nothing more which he could find to say, and he held out his hand to her.
"Good-bye," she said, and Durrance climbed over the stile and crossed the fields to his house.
Mrs. Adair stood by that stile for a long while after he had gone. She had shot her bolt and hit no one but herself and the man for whom she cared.
She realised that distinctly. She looked forward a little, too, and she understood that if Durrance did not, after all, keep Ethne to her promise and marry her and go with her to her country, he would come back to Guessens. That reflection showed Mrs. Adair yet more clearly the folly of her outcry. If she had only kept silence, she would have had a very true and constant friend for her neighbour, and that would have been something. It would have been a good deal. But, since she had spoken, they could never meet without embarrassment, and, practise cordiality as they might, there would always remain in their minds the recollection of what she had said and he had listened to on the afternoon when he left for Wiesbaden.