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

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

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

Sutch stopped his companion.

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

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

Again Lieutenant Sutch asked no questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He never will," interrupted Harry.

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

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

Sutch took his hand suddenly from his forehead.

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course," said Harry, in reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Trench, Castleton, Willoughby," began Feversham.

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

"Dermod Eustace and—and—Ethne."

"They will not speak."

"You, Durrance perhaps, and my father."

Sutch leaned back in his chair and stared.

"Your father! You wrote to him?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You have kept them?" exclaimed Sutch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I understand," said Sutch.

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VII

THE LAST RECONNAISSANCE

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

"No one, sir," Captain Mather agreed.

"We will move forward."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The fort," said he.

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

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

"Hallo!" said he.

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

"And lately," said Durrance.

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

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

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

"I come back to it," said Durrance.

"Why?"

"I like it. I like the people."

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

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

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

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

Mather laughed, and answered thoughtfully:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why did you hide?" asked Durrance.

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

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

The answer came without hesitation.

"I know a few words."

"Where did you learn them?"

"In Khartum."

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

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

Durrance called Mather to his side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you no friends?"

And there was a pause.

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VIII

LIEUTENANT SUTCH IS TEMPTED TO LIE

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

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

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

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

"Are Harry Feversham and his wife in town?"

Mrs. Adair was slow to reply.

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

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

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

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

Durrance turned at once to her.

"Just before I left England three years ago?"

"Yes. Then you knew?"

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

Mrs. Adair shrugged her shoulders.

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

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

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

Again Mrs. Adair took her time to reply.

"No," said she.

"Then she is still at Ramelton?"

Mrs. Adair shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

"So she has lost everything?" said Durrance.

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

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

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

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

"Of what are you thinking?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Durrance sprang up from his seat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Durrance was in no way disconcerted.

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

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

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

"Harry Feversham is my friend."

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

"It is not curiosity which makes me ask."

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

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

The question startled Lieutenant Sutch.

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

"Well?" asked Durrance.

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

"Well?"

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

"Well?"

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

And on that evening Durrance took the train for Holyhead.



CHAPTER IX

AT GLENALLA

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

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

Ethne greeted him without the least mark of surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And you go back there?" she said.

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

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

Ethne kneeled upon the grass at his side.

"I shall miss you," she said.

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

"Of what are you thinking?"

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

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

"There is your father," he said.

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

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

"Nor was I," said she.

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

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

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

And again he answered:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she drew back from his outstretched hands.

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

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

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

They shook hands as she spoke.

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

Ethne's eyes and her smile consented.

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

"I may write?" he exclaimed eagerly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"None," said Durrance.

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

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



CHAPTER X

THE WELLS OF OBAK

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

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

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

The Arab bowed his head and returned the salutation.

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

"It is Abou Fatma?" asked the negro.

The Arab nodded an assent.

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

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

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

The negro, however, held his ground.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XI

DURRANCE HEARS NEWS OF FEVERSHAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You are going back to Glenalla?"

"Yes."

"You will live there alone?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" asked Durrance.

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

"Very well."

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

"Yes."

"Have you forgotten the yarn he told you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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