"Yes, but these fine distinctions are a little too elusive for practical purposes," he said. "You can't run the world on fine distinctions; so I cannot bring myself to believe that we three men were at all to blame, and if we were not, you of all people can have no reason for self-reproach."

Ethne did not consider what he precisely meant by the last reference to herself. For as he leaned complacently back in his seat, anger against him flamed suddenly hot in her. Occupied by his story, she had ceased to take stock of the story-teller. Now that he had ended, she looked him over from head to foot. An obstinate stupidity was the mark of the man to her eye. How dare he sit in judgment upon the meanest of his fellows, let alone Harry Feversham? she asked, and in the same moment recollected that she herself had endorsed his judgment. Shame tingled through all her blood; she sat with her lips set, keeping Willoughby under watch from the corners of her eyes, and waiting to pounce savagely the moment he opened his lips. There had been noticeable throughout his narrative a manner of condescension towards Feversham. "Let him use it again!" thought Ethne. But Captain Willoughby said nothing at all, and Ethne herself broke the silence. "Who of you three first thought of sending the feathers?" she asked aggressively. "Not you?"

"No; I think it was Trench," he replied.

"Ah, Trench!" Ethne exclaimed. She struck one clenched hand, the hand which held the feather, viciously into the palm of the other. "I will remember that name."

"But I share his responsibility," Willoughby assured her. "I do not shrink from it at all. I regret very much that we caused you pain and annoyance, but I do not acknowledge to any mistake in this matter. I take my feather back now, and I annul my accusation. But that is your doing."

"Mine?" asked Ethne. "What do you mean?"

Captain Willoughby turned with surprise to his companion.

"A man may live in the Soudan and even yet not be wholly ignorant of women and their great quality of forgiveness. You gave the feathers back to Feversham in order that he might redeem his honour. That is evident."

Ethne sprang to her feet before Captain Willoughby had come to the end of his sentence, and stood a little in front of him, with her face averted, and in an attitude remarkably still. Willoughby in his ignorance, like many another stupid man before him, had struck with a shrewdness and a vigour which he could never have compassed by the use of his wits. He had pointed out abruptly and suddenly to Ethne a way which she might have taken and had not, and her remorse warned her very clearly that it was the way which she ought to have taken. But she could rise to the heights. She did not seek to justify herself in her own eyes, nor would she allow Willoughby to continue in his misconception. She recognised that here she had failed in charity and justice, and she was glad that she had failed, since her failure had been the opportunity of greatness to Harry Feversham.

"Will you repeat what you said?" she asked in a low voice; "and ever so slowly, please."

"You gave the feathers back into Feversham's hand—"

"He told you that himself?"

"Yes;" and Willoughby resumed, "in order that he might by his subsequent bravery compel the men who sent them to take them back, and so redeem his honour."

"He did not tell you that?"

"No. I guessed it. You see, Feversham's disgrace was, on the face of it, impossible to retrieve. The opportunity might never have occurred—it was not likely to occur. As things happened, Feversham still waited for three years in the bazaar at Suakin before it did. No, Miss Eustace, it needed a woman's faith to conceive that plan—a woman's encouragement to keep the man who undertook it to his work."

Ethne laughed and turned back to him. Her face was tender with pride, and more than tender. Pride seemed in some strange way to hallow her, to give an unimagined benignance to her eyes, an unearthly brightness to the smile upon her lips and the colour upon her cheeks. So that Willoughby, looking at her, was carried out of himself.

"Yes," he cried, "you were the woman to plan this redemption."

Ethne laughed again, and very happily.

"Did he tell you of a fourth white feather?" she asked.

"No."

"I shall tell you the truth," she said, as she resumed her seat. "The plan was of his devising from first to last. Nor did I encourage him to its execution. For until to-day I never heard a word of it. Since the night of that dance in Donegal I have had no message from Mr. Feversham, and no news of him. I told him to take up those three feathers because they were his, and I wished to show him that I agreed with the accusations of which they were the symbols. That seems cruel? But I did more. I snapped a fourth white feather from my fan and gave him that to carry away too. It is only fair that you should know. I wanted to make an end for ever and ever, not only of my acquaintanceship with him, but of every kindly thought he might keep of me, of every kindly thought I might keep of him. I wanted to be sure myself, and I wanted him to be sure, that we should always be strangers now and—and afterwards," and the last words she spoke in a whisper. Captain Willoughby did not understand what she meant by them. It is possible that only Lieutenant Sutch and Harry Feversham himself would have understood.

"I was sad and sorry enough when I had done it," she resumed. "Indeed, indeed, I think I have always been sorry since. I think that I have never at any minute during these five years quite forgotten that fourth white feather and the quiet air of dignity with which he took it. But to-day I am glad." And her voice, though low, rang rich with the fulness of her pride. "Oh, very glad! For this was his thought, his deed. They are both all his, as I would have them be. I had no share, and of that I am very proud. He needed no woman's faith, no woman's encouragement."

"Yet he sent this back to you," said Willoughby, pointing in some perplexity to the feather which Ethne held.

"Yes," she said, "yes. He knew that I should be glad to know." And suddenly she held it close to her breast. Thus she sat for a while with her eyes shining, until Willoughby rose to his feet and pointed to the gap in the hedge by which they had entered the enclosure.

"By Jove! Jack Durrance," he exclaimed.

Durrance was standing in the gap, which was the only means of entering or going out.



CHAPTER XVI

CAPTAIN WILLOUGHBY RETIRES

Ethne had entirely forgotten even Colonel Durrance's existence. From the moment when Captain Willoughby had put that little soiled feather which had once been white, and was now yellow, into her hand, she had had no thought for any one but Harry Feversham. She had carried Willoughby into that enclosure, and his story had absorbed her and kept her memory on the rack, as she filled out with this or that recollected detail of Harry's gestures, or voice, or looks, the deficiencies in her companion's narrative. She had been swept away from that August garden of sunlight and coloured flowers; and those five most weary years, during which she had held her head high and greeted the world with a smile of courage, were blotted from her experience. How weary they had been perhaps she never knew, until she raised her head and saw Durrance at the entrance in the hedge.

"Hush!" she said to Willoughby, and her face paled and her eyes shut tight for a moment with a spasm of pain. But she had no time to spare for any indulgence of her feelings. Her few minutes' talk with Captain Willoughby had been a holiday, but the holiday was over. She must take up again the responsibilities with which those five years had charged her, and at once. If she could not accomplish that hard task of forgetting—and she now knew very well that she never would accomplish it—she must do the next best thing, and give no sign that she had not forgotten. Durrance must continue to believe that she brought more than friendship into the marriage account.

He stood at the very entrance to the enclosure; he advanced into it. He was so quick to guess, it was not wise that he should meet Captain Willoughby or even know of his coming. Ethne looked about her for an escape, knowing very well that she would look in vain. The creek was in front of them, and three walls of high thick hedge girt them in behind and at the sides. There was but one entrance to this enclosure, and Durrance himself barred the path to it.

"Keep still," she said in a whisper. "You know him?"

"Of course. We were together for three years at Suakin. I heard that he had gone blind. I am glad to know that it is not true." This he said, noticing the freedom of Durrance's gait.

"Speak lower," returned Ethne. "It is true. He is blind."

"One would never have thought it. Consolations seem so futile. What can I say to him?"

"Say nothing!"

Durrance was still standing just within the enclosure, and, as it seemed, looking straight towards the two people seated on the bench.

"Ethne," he said, rather than called; and the quiet unquestioning voice made the illusion that he saw extraordinarily complete.

"It's impossible that he is blind," said Willoughby. "He sees us."

"He sees nothing."

Again Durrance called "Ethne," but now in a louder voice, and a voice of doubt.

"Do you hear? He is not sure," whispered Ethne. "Keep very still."

"Why?"

"He must not know you are here," and lest Willoughby should move, she caught his arm tight in her hand. Willoughby did not pursue his inquiries. Ethne's manner constrained him to silence. She sat very still, still as she wished him to sit, and in a queer huddled attitude; she was even holding her breath; she was staring at Durrance with a great fear in her eyes; her face was strained forward, and not a muscle of it moved, so that Willoughby, as he looked at her, was conscious of a certain excitement, which grew on him for no reason but her remarkable apprehension. He began unaccountably himself to fear lest he and she should be discovered.

"He is coming towards us," he whispered.

"Not a word, not a movement."

"Ethne," Durrance cried again. He advanced farther into the enclosure and towards the seat. Ethne and Captain Willoughby sat rigid, watching him with their eyes. He passed in front of the bench, and stopped actually facing them. Surely, thought Willoughby, he sees. His eyes were upon them; he stood easily, as though he were about to speak. Even Ethne, though she very well knew that he did not see, began to doubt her knowledge.

"Ethne!" he said again, and this time in the quiet voice which he had first used. But since again no answer came, he shrugged his shoulders and turned towards the creek. His back was towards them now, but Ethne's experience had taught her to appreciate almost indefinable signs in his bearing, since nowadays his face showed her so little. Something in his attitude, in the poise of his head, even in the carelessness with which he swung his stick, told her that he was listening, and listening with all his might. Her grasp tightened on Willoughby's arm. Thus they remained for the space of a minute, and then Durrance turned suddenly and took a quick step towards the seat. Ethne, however, by this time knew the man and his ingenuities; she was prepared for some such unexpected movement. She did not stir, there was not audible the merest rustle of her skirt, and her grip still constrained Willoughby.

"I wonder where in the world she can be," said Durrance to himself aloud, and he walked back and out of the enclosure. Ethne did not free Captain Willoughby's arm until Durrance had disappeared from sight.

"That was a close shave," Willoughby said, when at last he was allowed to speak. "Suppose that Durrance had sat down on the top of us?"

"Why suppose, since he did not?" Ethne asked calmly. "You have told me everything?"

"So far as I remember."

"And all that you have told me happened in the spring?"

"The spring of last year," said Willoughby.

"Yes. I want to ask you a question. Why did you not bring this feather to me last summer?"

"Last year my leave was short. I spent it in the hills north of Suakin after ibex."

"I see," said Ethne, quietly; "I hope you had good sport."

"It wasn't bad."

Last summer Ethne had been free. If Willoughby had come home with his good news instead of shooting ibex on Jebel Araft, it would have made all the difference in her life, and the cry was loud at her heart, "Why didn't you come?" But outwardly she gave no sign of the irreparable harm which Willoughby's delay had brought about. She had the self-command of a woman who has been sorely tried, and she spoke so unconcernedly that Willoughby believed her questions prompted by the merest curiosity.

"You might have written," she suggested.

"Feversham did not suggest that there was any hurry. It would have been a long and difficult matter to explain in a letter. He asked me to go to you when I had an opportunity, and I had no opportunity before. To tell the truth, I thought it very likely that I might find Feversham had come back before me."

"Oh, no," returned Ethne, "there could be no possibility of that. The other two feathers still remain to be redeemed before he will ask me to take back mine."

Willoughby shook his head. "Feversham can never persuade Castleton and Trench to cancel their accusations as he persuaded me."

"Why not?"

"Major Castleton was killed when the square was broken at Tamai."

"Killed?" cried Ethne, and she laughed in a short and satisfied way. Willoughby turned and stared at her, disbelieving the evidence of his ears. But her face showed him quite clearly that she was thoroughly pleased. Ethne was a Celt, and she had the Celtic feeling that death was not a very important matter. She could hate, too, and she could be hard as iron to the men she hated. And these three men she hated exceedingly. It was true that she had agreed with them, that she had given a feather, the fourth feather, to Harry Feversham just to show that she agreed, but she did not trouble her head about that. She was very glad to hear that Major Castleton was out of the world and done with.

"And Colonel Trench too?" she said.

"No," Willoughby answered. "You are disappointed? But he is even worse off than that. He was captured when engaged on a reconnaissance. He is now a prisoner in Omdurman."

"Ah!" said Ethne.

"I don't think you can have any idea," said Willoughby, severely, "of what captivity in Omdurman implies. If you had, however much you disliked the captive, you would feel some pity."

"Not I," said Ethne, stubbornly.

"I will tell you something of what it does imply."

"No. I don't wish to hear of Colonel Trench. Besides, you must go. I want you to tell me one thing first," said she, as she rose from her seat. "What became of Mr. Feversham after he had given you that feather?"

"I told him that he had done everything which could be reasonably expected; and he accepted my advice. For he went on board the first steamer which touched at Suakin on its way to Suez and so left the Soudan."

"I must find out where he is. He must come, back. Did he need money?"

"No. He still drew his allowance from his father. He told me that he had more than enough."

"I am glad of that," said Ethne, and she bade Willoughby wait within the enclosure until she returned, and went out by herself to see that the way was clear. The garden was quite empty. Durrance had disappeared from it, and the great stone terrace of the house and the house itself, with its striped sunblinds, looked a place of sleep. It was getting towards one o'clock, and the very birds were quiet amongst the trees. Indeed the quietude of the garden struck upon Ethne's senses as something almost strange. Only the bees hummed drowsily about the flowerbeds, and the voice of a lad was heard calling from the slopes of meadow on the far side of the creek. She returned to Captain Willoughby.

"You can go now," she said. "I cannot pretend friendship for you, Captain Willoughby, but it was kind of you to find me out and tell me your story. You are going back at once to Kingsbridge? I hope so. For I do not wish Colonel Durrance to know of your visit or anything of what you have told me."

"Durrance was a friend of Feversham's—his great friend," Willoughby objected.

"He is quite unaware that any feathers were sent to Mr. Feversham, so there is no need he should be informed that one of them has been taken back," Ethne answered. "He does not know why my engagement to Mr. Feversham was broken off. I do not wish him to know. Your story would enlighten him, and he must not be enlightened."

"Why?" asked Willoughby. He was obstinate by nature, and he meant to have the reason for silence before he promised to keep it. Ethne gave it to him at once very simply.

"I am engaged to Colonel Durrance," she said. It was her fear that Durrance already suspected that no stronger feeling than friendship attached her to him. If once he heard that the fault which broke her engagement to Harry Feversham had been most bravely atoned, there could be no doubt as to the course which he would insist upon pursuing. He would strip himself of her, the one thing left to him, and that she was stubbornly determined he should not do. She was bound to him in honour, and it would be a poor way of manifesting her joy that Harry Feversham had redeemed his honour if she straightway sacrificed her own.

Captain Willoughby pursed up his lips and whistled.

"Engaged to Jack Durrance!" he exclaimed. "Then I seem to have wasted my time in bringing you that feather," and he pointed towards it. She was holding it in her open hand, and she drew her hand sharply away, as though she feared for a moment that he meant to rob her of it.

"I am most grateful for it," she returned.

"It's a bit of a muddle, isn't it?" Willoughby remarked. "It seems a little rough on Feversham perhaps. It's a little rough on Jack Durrance, too, when you come to think of it." Then he looked at Ethne. He noticed her careful handling of the feather; he remembered something of the glowing look with which she had listened to his story, something of the eager tones in which she had put her questions; and he added, "I shouldn't wonder if it was rather rough on you too, Miss Eustace."

Ethne did not answer him, and they walked together out of the enclosure towards the spot where Willoughby had moored his boat. She hurried him down the bank to the water's edge, intent that he should sail away unperceived.

But Ethne had counted without Mrs. Adair, who all that morning had seen much in Ethne's movements to interest her. From the drawing-room window she had watched Ethne and Durrance meet at the foot of the terrace-steps, she had seen them walk together towards the estuary, she had noticed Willoughby's boat as it ran aground in the wide gap between the trees, she had seen a man disembark, and Ethne go forward to meet him. Mrs. Adair was not the woman to leave her post of observation at such a moment, and from the cover of the curtains she continued to watch with all the curiosity of a woman in a village who draws down the blind, that unobserved she may get a better peep at the stranger passing down the street. Ethne and the man from the boat turned away and disappeared amongst the trees, leaving Durrance forgotten and alone. Mrs. Adair thought at once of that enclosure at the water's edge. The conversation lasted for some while, and since the couple did not promptly reappear, a question flashed into her mind. "Could the stranger be Harry Feversham?" Ethne had no friends in this part of the world. The question pressed upon Mrs. Adair. She longed for an answer, and of course for that particular answer which would convict Ethne Eustace of duplicity. Her interest grew into an excitement when she saw Durrance, tired of waiting, follow upon Ethne's steps. But what came after was to interest her still more.

Durrance reappeared, to her surprise alone, and came straight to the house, up the terrace, into the drawing-room.

"Have you seen Ethne?" he asked.

"Is she not in the little garden by the water?" Mrs. Adair asked.

"No. I went into it and called to her. It was empty."

"Indeed?" said Mrs. Adair. "Then I don't know where she is. Are you going?"

"Yes, home."

Mrs. Adair made no effort to detain him at that moment.

"Perhaps you will come in and dine to-night. Eight o'clock."

"Thanks, very much. I shall be pleased," said Durrance, but he did not immediately go. He stood by the window idly swinging to and fro the tassel of the blind.

"I did not know until to-day that it was your plan that I should come home and Ethne stay with you until I found out whether a cure was likely or possible. It was very kind of you, Mrs. Adair, and I am grateful."

"It was a natural plan to propose as soon as I heard of your ill-luck."

"And when was that?" he asked unconcernedly. "The day after Calder's telegram reached her from Wadi Halfa, I suppose."

Mrs. Adair was not deceived by his attitude of carelessness. She realised that his expression of gratitude had deliberately led up to this question.

"Oh, so you knew of that telegram," she said. "I thought you did not." For Ethne had asked her not to mention it on the very day when Durrance returned to England.

"Of course I knew of it," he returned, and without waiting any longer for an answer he went out on to the terrace.

Mrs. Adair dismissed for the moment the mystery of the telegram. She was occupied by her conjecture that in the little garden by the water's edge Durrance had stood and called aloud for Ethne, while within twelve yards of him, perhaps actually within his reach, she and some one else had kept very still and had given no answer. Her conjecture was soon proved true. She saw Ethne and her companion come out again on to the open lawn. Was it Feversham? She must have an answer to that question. She saw them descend the bank towards the boat, and, stepping from her window, ran.

Thus it happened that as Willoughby rose from loosening the painter, he saw Mrs. Adair's disappointed eyes gazing into his. Mrs. Adair called to Ethne, who stood by Captain Willoughby, and came down the bank to them.

"I noticed you cross the lawn from the drawing-room window," she said.

"Yes?" answered Ethne, and she said no more. Mrs. Adair, however, did not move away, and an awkward pause followed. Ethne was forced to give in.

"I was talking to Captain Willoughby," and she turned to him. "You do not know Mrs. Adair, I think?"

"No," he replied, as he raised his hat. "But I know Mrs. Adair very well by name. I know friends of yours, Mrs. Adair—Durrance, for instance; and of course I knew—"

A glance from Ethne brought him abruptly to a stop. He began vigorously to push the nose of his boat from the sand.

"Of course, what?" asked Mrs. Adair, with a smile.

"Of course I knew of you, Mrs. Adair."

Mrs. Adair was quite clear that this was not what Willoughby had been on the point of saying when Ethne turned her eyes quietly upon him and cut him short. He was on the point of adding another name. "Captain Willoughby," she repeated to herself. Then she said:—

"You belong to Colonel Durrance's regiment, perhaps?"

"No, I belong to the North Surrey," he answered.

"Ah! Mr. Feversham's old regiment," said Mrs. Adair, pleasantly. Captain Willoughby had fallen into her little trap with a guilelessness which provoked in her a desire for a closer acquaintanceship. Whatever Willoughby knew it would be easy to extract. Ethne, however, had disconcerting ways which at times left Mrs. Adair at a loss. She looked now straight into Mrs. Adair's eyes and said calmly:—

"Captain Willoughby and I have been talking of Mr. Feversham." At the same time she held out her hand to the captain. "Good-bye," she said.

Mrs. Adair hastily interrupted.

"Colonel Durrance has gone home, but he dines with us to-night. I came out to tell you that, but I am glad that I came, for it gives me the opportunity to ask your friend to lunch with us if he will."

Captain Willoughby, who already had one leg over the bows of his boat, withdrew it with alacrity.

"It's awfully good of you, Mrs. Adair," he began.

"It is very kind indeed," Ethne continued, "but Captain Willoughby has reminded me that his leave is very short, and we have no right to detain him. Good-bye."

Captain Willoughby gazed with a vain appeal upon Miss Eustace. He had travelled all night from London, he had made the scantiest breakfast at Kingsbridge, and the notion of lunch appealed to him particularly at that moment. But her eyes rested on his with a quiet and inexorable command. He bowed, got ruefully into his boat, and pushed off from the shore.

"It's a little bit rough on me too, perhaps, Miss Eustace," he said. Ethne laughed, and returned to the terrace with Mrs. Adair. Once or twice she opened the palm of her hand and disclosed to her companion's view a small white feather, at which she laughed again, and with a clear and rather low laugh. But she gave no explanation of Captain Willoughby's errand. Had she been in Mrs. Adair's place she would not have expected one. It was her business and only hers.



CHAPTER XVII

THE MUSOLINE OVERTURE

Mrs. Adair, on her side, asked for no explanations. She was naturally, behind her pale and placid countenance, a woman of a tortuous and intriguing mind. She preferred to look through a keyhole even when she could walk straight in at the door; and knowledge which could be gained by a little maneuvering was always more desirable and precious in her eyes than any information which a simple question would elicit. She avoided, indeed, the direct question on a perverted sort of principle, and she thought a day very well spent if at the close of it she had outwitted a companion into telling her spontaneously some trivial and unimportant piece of news which a straightforward request would have at once secured for her at breakfast-time.

Therefore, though she was mystified by the little white feather upon which Ethne seemed to set so much store, and wondered at the good news of Harry Feversham which Captain Willoughby had brought, and vainly puzzled her brains in conjecture as to what in the world could have happened on that night at Ramelton so many years ago, she betrayed nothing whatever of her perplexity all through lunch; on the contrary, she plied her guest with conversation upon indifferent topics. Mrs. Adair could be good company when she chose, and she chose now. But it was not to any purpose.

"I don't believe that you hear a single word I am saying!" she exclaimed.

Ethne laughed and pleaded guilty. She betook herself to her room as soon as lunch was finished, and allowed herself an afternoon of solitude. Sitting at her window, she repeated slowly the story which Willoughby had told to her that morning, and her heart thrilled to it as to music divinely played. The regret that he had not come home and told it a year ago, when she was free, was a small thing in comparison with the story itself. It could not outweigh the great gladness which that brought to her—it had, indeed, completely vanished from her thoughts. Her pride, which had never recovered from the blow which Harry Feversham had dealt to her in the hall at Lennon House, was now quite restored, and by the man who had dealt the blow. She was aglow with it, and most grateful to Harry Feversham for that he had, at so much peril to himself, restored it. She was conscious of a new exhilaration in the sunlight, of a quicker pulsation in her blood. Her youth was given back to her upon that August afternoon.

Ethne unlocked a drawer in her dressing-case, and took from it the portrait which alone of all Harry Feversham's presents she had kept. She rejoiced that she had kept it. It was the portrait of some one who was dead to her—that she knew very well, for there was no thought of disloyalty toward Durrance in her breast—but the some one was a friend. She looked at it with a great happiness and contentment, because Harry Feversham had needed no expression of faith from her to inspire him, and no encouragement from her to keep him through the years on the level of his high inspiration. When she put it back again, she laid the white feather in the drawer with it and locked the two things up together.

She came back to her window. Out upon the lawn a light breeze made the shadows from the high trees dance, the sunlight mellowed and reddened. But Ethne was of her county, as Harry Feversham had long ago discovered, and her heart yearned for it at this moment. It was the month of August. The first of the heather would be out upon the hillsides of Donegal, and she wished that the good news had been brought to her there. The regret that it had not was her crumpled rose-leaf. Here she was in a strange land; there the brown mountains, with their outcroppings of granite and the voices of the streams, would have shared, she almost thought, in her new happiness. Great sorrows or great joys had this in common for Ethne Eustace, they both drew her homewards, since there endurance was more easy and gladness more complete.

She had, however, one living tie with Donegal at her side, for Dermod's old collie dog had become her inseparable companion. To him she made her confidence, and if at times her voice broke in tears, why, the dog would not tell. She came to understand much which Willoughby had omitted, and which Feversham had never told. Those three years of concealment in the small and crowded city of Suakin, for instance, with the troops marching out to battle, and returning dust-strewn and bleeding and laurelled with victory. Harry Feversham had to slink away at their approach, lest some old friend of his—Durrance, perhaps, or Willoughby, or Trench—should notice him and penetrate his disguise. The panic which had beset him when first he saw the dark brown walls of Berber, the night in the ruined acres, the stumbling search for the well amongst the shifting sandhills of Obak,—Ethne had vivid pictures of these incidents, and as she thought of each she asked herself: "Where was I then? What was I doing?"

She sat in a golden mist until the lights began to change upon the still water of the creek, and the rooks wheeled noisily out from the tree-tops to sort themselves for the night, and warned her of evening.

She brought to the dinner-table that night a buoyancy of spirit which surprised her companions. Mrs. Adair had to admit that seldom had her eyes shone so starrily, or the colour so freshly graced her cheeks. She was more than ever certain that Captain Willoughby had brought stirring news; she was more than ever tortured by her vain efforts to guess its nature. But Mrs. Adair, in spite of her perplexities, took her share in the talk, and that dinner passed with a freedom from embarrassment unknown since Durrance had come home to Guessens. For he, too, threw off a burden of restraint; his spirits rose to match Ethne's; he answered laugh with laugh, and from his face that habitual look of tension, the look of a man listening with all his might that his ears might make good the loss of his eyes, passed altogether away.

"You will play on your violin to-night, I think," he said with a smile, as they rose from the table.

"Yes," she answered, "I will—with all my heart."

Durrance laughed and held open the door. The violin had remained locked in its case during these last two months. Durrance had come to look upon that violin as a gauge and test. If the world was going well with Ethne, the case was unlocked, the instrument was allowed to speak; if the world went ill, it was kept silent lest it should say too much, and open old wounds and lay them bare to other eyes. Ethne herself knew it for an indiscreet friend. But it was to be brought out to-night.

Mrs. Adair lingered until Ethne was out of ear-shot.

"You have noticed the change in her to-night?" she said.

"Yes. Have I not?" answered Durrance. "One has waited for it, hoped for it, despaired of it."

"Are you so glad of the change?"

Durrance threw back his head. "Do you wonder that I am glad? Kind, friendly, unselfish—these things she has always been. But there is more than friendliness evident to-night, and for the first time it's evident."

There came a look of pity upon Mrs. Adair's face, and she passed out of the room without another word. Durrance took all of that great change in Ethne to himself. Mrs. Adair drew up the blinds of the drawing-room, opened the window, and let the moonlight in; and then, as she saw Ethne unlocking the case of her violin, she went out on to the terrace. She felt that she could not sit patiently in her company. So that when Durrance entered the drawing-room he found Ethne alone there. She was seated in the window, and already tightening the strings of her violin. Durrance took a chair behind her in the shadows.

"What shall I play to you?" she asked.

"The Musoline Overture," he answered. "You played it on the first evening when I came to Ramelton. I remember so well how you played it then. Play it again to-night. I want to compare."

"I have played it since."

"Never to me."

They were alone in the room; the windows stood open; it was a night of moonlight. Ethne suddenly crossed to the lamp and put it out. She resumed her seat, while Durrance remained in the shadow, leaning forward, with his hands upon his knees, listening—but with an intentness of which he had given no sign that evening. He was applying, as he thought, a final test upon which his life and hers should be decided. Ethne's violin would tell him assuredly whether he was right or no. Would friendship speak from it or the something more than friendship?

Ethne played the overture, and as she played she forgot that Durrance was in the room behind her. In the garden the air was still and summer-warm and fragrant; on the creek the moonlight lay like a solid floor of silver; the trees stood dreaming to the stars; and as the music floated loud out across the silent lawn, Ethne had a sudden fancy that it might perhaps travel down the creek and over Salcombe Bar and across the moonlit seas, and strike small yet wonderfully clear like fairy music upon the ears of a man sleeping somewhere far away beneath the brightness of the southern stars with the cool night wind of the desert blowing upon his face.

"If he could only hear!" she thought. "If he could only wake and know that what he heard was a message of friendship!"

And with this fancy in her mind she played with such skill as she had never used before; she made of her violin a voice of sympathy. The fancy grew and changed as she played. The music became a bridge swung in mid-air across the world, upon which just for these few minutes she and Harry Feversham might meet and shake hands. They would separate, of course, forthwith, and each one go upon the allotted way. But these few minutes would be a help to both along the separate ways. The chords rang upon silence. It seemed to Ethne that they declaimed the pride which had come to her that day. Her fancy grew into a belief. It was no longer "If he should hear," but "He must hear!" And so carried away was she from the discretion of thought that a strange hope suddenly sprang up and enthralled her.

"If he could answer!"

She lingered upon the last bars, waiting for the answer; and when the music had died down to silence, she sat with her violin upon her knees, looking eagerly out across the moonlit garden.

And an answer did come, but it was not carried up the creek and across the lawn. It came from the dark shadows of the room behind her, and it was spoken through the voice of Durrance.

"Ethne, where do you think I heard that overture last played?"

Ethne was roused with a start to the consciousness that Durrance was in the room, and she answered like one shaken suddenly out of sleep.

"Why, you told me. At Ramelton, when you first came to Lennon House."

"I have heard it since, though it was not played by you. It was not really played at all. But a melody of it and not even that really, but a suggestion of a melody, I heard stumbled out upon a zither, with many false notes, by a Greek in a bare little whitewashed cafe, lit by one glaring lamp, at Wadi Halfa."

"This overture?" she said. "How strange!"

"Not so strange after all. For the Greek was Harry Feversham."

So the answer had come. Ethne had no doubt that it was an answer. She sat very still in the moonlight; only had any one bent over her with eyes to see, he would have discovered that her eyelids were closed. There followed a long silence. She did not consider why Durrance, having kept this knowledge secret so long, should speak of it now. She did not ask what Harry Feversham was doing that he must play the zither in a mean cafe at Wadi Halfa. But it seemed to her that he had spoken to her as she to him. The music had, after all, been a bridge. It was not even strange that he had used Durrance's voice wherewith to speak to her.

"When was this?" she asked at length.

"In February of this year. I will tell you about it."

"Yes, please, tell me."

And Durrance spoke out of the shadows of the room.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE ANSWER TO THE OVERTURE

Ethne did not turn towards Durrance or move at all from her attitude. She sat with her violin upon her knees, looking across the moonlit garden to the band of silver in the gap of the trees; and she kept her position deliberately. For it helped her to believe that Harry Feversham himself was speaking to her, she was able to forget that he was speaking through the voice of Durrance. She almost forgot that Durrance was even in the room. She listened with Durrance's own intentness, and anxious that the voice should speak very slowly, so that the message might take a long time in the telling, and she gather it all jealously to her heart.

"It was on the night before I started eastward into the desert—for the last time," said Durrance, and the deep longing and regret with which he dwelt upon that "last time" for once left Ethne quite untouched.

"Yes," she said. "That was in February. The middle of the month, wasn't it? Do you remember the day? I should like to know the exact day if you can tell me."

"The fifteenth," said Durrance; and Ethne repeated the date meditatively.

"I was at Glenalla all February," she said. "What was I doing on the fifteenth? It does not matter."

She had felt a queer sort of surprise all the time while Willoughby was telling his story that morning, that she had not known, by some instinct, of these incidents at the actual moment of their occurrence. The surprise returned to her now. It was strange that she should have had to wait for this August night and this summer garden of moonlight and closed flowers before she learned of the meeting between Feversham and Durrance on February 15 and heard the message. And remorse came to her because of that delay. "It was my own fault," she said to herself. "If I had kept my faith in him I should have known at once. I am well punished." It did not at all occur to her that the message could convey any but the best of news. It would carry on the good tidings which she had already heard. It would enlarge and complete, so that this day might be rounded to perfection. Of this she was quite sure.

"Well?" she said. "Go on!"

"I had been busy all that day in my office finishing up my work. I turned the key in the door at ten o'clock, thinking with relief that for six weeks I should not open it, and I strolled northward out of Wadi Halfa along the Nile bank into the little town of Tewfikieh. As I entered the main street I saw a small crowd—Arabs, negroes, a Greek or two, and some Egyptian soldiers, standing outside the cafe, and lit up by a glare of light from within. As I came nearer I heard the sound of a violin and a zither, both most vilely played, jingling out a waltz. I stood at the back of the crowd and looked over the shoulders of the men in front of me into the room. It was a place of four bare whitewashed walls; a bar stood in one corner, a wooden bench or two were ranged against the walls, and a single unshaded paraffin lamp swung and glared from the ceiling. A troupe of itinerant musicians were playing to that crowd of negroes and Arabs and Egyptians for a night's lodging and the price of a meal. There were four of them, and, so far as I could see, all four were Greeks. Two were evidently man and wife. They were both old, both slatternly and almost in rags; the man a thin, sallow-faced fellow, with grey hair and a black moustache; the woman fat, coarse of face, unwieldy of body. Of the other two, one it seemed must be their daughter, a girl of seventeen, not good-looking really, but dressed and turned out with a scrupulous care, which in those sordid and mean surroundings lent her good looks. The care, indeed, with which she was dressed assured me she was their daughter, and to tell the truth, I was rather touched by the thought that the father and mother would go in rags so that she at all costs might be trim. A clean ribbon bound back her hair, an untorn frock of some white stuff clothed her tidily; even her shoes were neat. The fourth was a young man; he was seated in the window, with his back towards me, bending over his zither. But I could see that he wore a beard. When I came up the old man was playing the violin, though playing is not indeed the word. The noise he made was more like the squeaking of a pencil on a slate; it set one's teeth on edge; the violin itself seemed to squeal with pain. And while he fiddled, and the young man hammered at his zither, the old woman and girl slowly revolved in a waltz. It may sound comic to hear about, but if you could have seen! ... It fairly plucked at one's heart. I do not think that I have ever in my life witnessed anything quite so sad. The little crowd outside, negroes, mind you, laughing at the troupe, passing from one to the other any sort of low jest at their expense, and inside the four white people—the old woman, clumsy, heavy-footed, shining with heat, lumbering round slowly, panting with her exertions; the girl, lissom and young; the two men with their discordant, torturing music; and just above you the great planets and stars of an African sky, and just about you the great silent and spacious dignity of the moonlit desert. Imagine it! The very ineptness of the entertainment actually hurt one."

He paused for a moment, while Ethne pictured to herself the scene which he had described. She saw Harry Feversham bending over his zither, and at once she asked herself, "What was he doing with that troupe?" It was intelligible enough that he would not care to return to England. It was certain that he would not come back to her, unless she sent for him. And she knew from what Captain Willoughby had said that he expected no message from her. He had not left with Willoughby the name of any place where a letter could reach him. But what was he doing at Wadi Halfa, masquerading with this itinerant troupe? He had money; so much Willoughby had told her.

"You spoke to him?" she asked suddenly.

"To whom? Oh, to Harry?" returned Durrance. "Yes, afterwards, when I found out it was he who was playing the zither."

"Yes, how did you find out?" Ethne asked.

"The waltz came to an end. The old woman sank exhausted upon the bench against the whitewashed wall; the young man raised his head from his zither; the old man scraped a new chord upon his violin, and the girl stood forward to sing. Her voice had youth and freshness, but no other quality of music. Her singing was as inept as the rest of the entertainment. Yet the old man smiled, the mother beat time with her heavy foot, and nodded at her husband with pride in their daughter's accomplishment. And again in the throng the ill-conditioned talk, the untranslatable jests of the Arabs and the negroes went their round. It was horrible, don't you think?"

"Yes," answered Ethne, but slowly, in an absent voice. As she had felt no sympathy for Durrance when he began to speak, so she had none to spare for these three outcasts of fortune. She was too absorbed in the mystery of Harry Feversham's presence at Wadi Halfa. She was listening too closely for the message which he sent to her. Through the open window the moon threw a broad panel of silver light upon the floor of the room close to her feet. She sat gazing into it as she listened, as though it was itself a window through which, if she looked but hard enough, she might see, very small and far away, that lighted cafe blazing upon the street of the little town of Tewfikieh on the frontier of the Soudan.

"Well?" she asked. "And after the song was ended?"

"The young man with his back towards me," Durrance resumed, "began to fumble out a solo upon the zither. He struck so many false notes, no tune was to be apprehended at the first. The laughter and noise grew amongst the crowd, and I was just turning away, rather sick at heart, when some notes, a succession of notes played correctly by chance, suddenly arrested me. I listened again, and a sort of haunting melody began to emerge—a weak thin thing with no soul in it, a ghost of a melody, and yet familiar. I stood listening in the street of sand, between the hovels fringed by a row of stunted trees, and I was carried away out of the East to Ramelton and to a summer night beneath a melting sky of Donegal, when you sat by the open window as you sit now and played the Musoline Overture, which you have played again to-night."

"It was a melody from this overture?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, and it was Harry Feversham who played the melody. I did not guess it at once. I was not very quick in those days."

"But you are now," said Ethne.

"Quicker, at all events. I should have guessed it now. Then, however, I was only curious. I wondered how it was that an itinerant Greek came to pick up the tune. At all events, I determined to reward him for his diligence. I thought that you would like me to."

"Yes," said Ethne, in a whisper.

"So, when he came out from the cafe, and with his hat in his hand passed through the jeering crowd, I threw a sovereign into the hat. He turned to me with a start of surprise. In spite of his beard I knew him. Besides, before he could check himself, he cried out 'Jack!'"

"You can have made no mistake, then," said Ethne, in a wondering voice. "No, the man who strummed upon the zither was—" the Christian name was upon her lips, but she had the wit to catch it back unuttered—"was Mr. Feversham. But he knew no music I remember very well." She laughed with a momentary recollection of Feversham's utter inability to appreciate any music except that which she herself evoked from her violin. "He had no ear. You couldn't invent a discord harsh enough even to attract his attention. He could never have remembered any melody from the Musoline Overture."

"Yet it was Harry Feversham," he answered. "Somehow he had remembered. I can understand it. He would have so little he cared to remember, and that little he would have striven with all his might to bring clearly back to mind. Somehow, too, by much practice, I suppose, he had managed to elicit from his zither some sort of resemblance to what he remembered. Can't you imagine him working the scrap of music out in his brain, humming it over, whistling it uncounted times with perpetual errors and confusions, until some fine day he got it safe and sure and fixed it in his thoughts? I can. Can't you imagine him, then, picking it out sedulously and laboriously on the strings? I can. Indeed, I can."

Thus Ethne got her answer, and Durrance interpreted it to her understanding. She sat silent and very deeply moved by the story he had told to her. It was fitting that this overture, her favourite piece of music, should convey the message that he had not forgotten her, that in spite of the fourth white feather he thought of her with friendship. Harry Feversham had not striven so laboriously to learn that melody in vain. Ethne was stirred as she had thought nothing would ever again have the power to stir her. She wondered whether Harry, as he sat in the little bare whitewashed cafe, and strummed out his music to the negroes and Greeks and Arabs gathered about the window, had dreamed, as she had done to-night, that somehow, thin and feeble as it was, some echo of the melody might reach across the world. She knew now for very certain that, however much she might in the future pretend to forget Harry Feversham, it would never be more than a pretence. The vision of the lighted cafe in the desert town would never be very far from her thoughts, but she had no intention of relaxing on that account from her determination to pretend to forget. The mere knowledge that she had at one time been unjustly harsh to Harry, made her yet more resolved that Durrance should not suffer for any fault of hers.

"I told you last year, Ethne, at Hill Street," Durrance resumed, "that I never wished to see Feversham again. I was wrong. The reluctance was all on his side and not at all on mine. For the moment that he realised he had called out my name he tried to edge backward from me into the crowd, he began to gabble Greek, but I caught him by the arm, and I would not let him go. He had done you some great wrong. That I know; that I knew. But I could not remember it then. I only remembered that years before Harry Feversham had been my friend, my one great friend; that we had rowed in the same college boat at Oxford, he at stroke, I at seven; that the stripes on his jersey during three successive eights had made my eyes dizzy during those last hundred yards of spurt past the barges. We had bathed together in Sandford Lasher on summer afternoons. We had had supper on Kennington Island; we had cut lectures and paddled up the Cher to Islip. And here he was at Wadi Halfa, herding with that troupe, an outcast, sunk to such a depth of ill-fortune that he must come to that squalid little town and play the zither vilely before a crowd of natives and a few Greek clerks for his night's lodging and the price of a meal."

"No," Ethne interrupted suddenly. "It was not for that reason that he went to Wadi Halfa."

"Why, then?" asked Durrance.

"I cannot think. But he was not in any need of money. His father had continued his allowance, and he had accepted it."

"You are sure?"

"Quite sure. I heard it only to-day," said Ethne.

It was a slip, but Ethne for once was off her guard that night. She did not even notice that she had made a slip. She was too engrossed in Durrance's story. Durrance himself, however, was not less preoccupied, and so the statement passed for the moment unobserved by either.

"So you never knew what brought Mr. Feversham to Halfa?" she asked. "Did you not ask him? Why didn't you? Why?"

She was disappointed, and the bitterness of her disappointment gave passion to her cry. Here was the last news of Harry Feversham, and it was brought to her incomplete, like the half sheet of a letter. The omission might never be repaired.

"I was a fool," said Durrance. There was almost as much regret in his voice now as there had been in hers; and because of that regret he did not remark the passion with which she had spoken. "I shall not easily forgive myself. He was my friend, you see. I had him by the arm, and I let him go. I was a fool." And he knocked upon his forehead with his fist.

"He tried Arabic," Durrance resumed, "pleading that he and his companions were just poor peaceable people, that if I had given him too much money, I should take it back, and all the while he dragged away from me. But I held him fast. I said, 'Harry Feversham, that won't do,' and upon that he gave in and spoke in English, whispering it. 'Let me go, Jack, let me go.' There was the crowd about us. It was evident that Harry had some reason for secrecy; it might have been shame, for all I knew, shame at his downfall. I said, 'Come up to my quarters in Halfa as soon as you are free,' and I let him go. All that night I waited for him on the verandah, but he did not come. In the morning I had to start across the desert. I almost spoke of him to a friend who came to see me start, to Calder, in fact—you know of him—the man who sent you the telegram," said Durrance, with a laugh.

"Yes, I remember," Ethne answered.

It was the second slip she had made that night. The receipt of Calder's telegram was just one of the things which Durrance was not to know. But again she was unaware that she had made a slip at all. She did not even consider how Durrance had come to know or guess that the telegram had ever been despatched.

"At the very last moment," Durrance resumed, "when my camel had risen from the ground, I stooped down to speak to him, to tell him to see to Feversham. But I did not. You see I knew nothing about his allowance. I merely thought that he had fallen rather low. It did not seem fair to him that another should know of it. So I rode on and kept silence."

Ethne nodded her head. She could not but approve, however poignant her regret for the lost news.

"So you never saw Mr. Feversham again?"

"I was away nine weeks. I came back blind," he answered simply, and the very simplicity of his words went to Ethne's heart. He was apologising for his blindness, which had hindered him from inquiring. She began to wake to the comprehension that it was really Durrance who was speaking to her, but he continued to speak, and what he said drove her quite out of all caution.

"I went at once to Cairo, and Calder came with me. There I told him of Harry Feversham, and how I had seen him at Tewfikieh. I asked Calder when he got back to Halfa to make inquiries, to find and help Harry Feversham if he could; I asked him, too, to let me know the result. I received a letter from Calder a week ago, and I am troubled by it, very much troubled."

"What did he say?" Ethne asked apprehensively, and she turned in her chair away from the moonlight towards the shadows of the room and Durrance. She bent forward to see his face, but the darkness hid it. A sudden fear struck through her and chilled her blood, but out of the darkness Durrance spoke.

"That the two women and the old Greek had gone back northward on a steamer to Assouan."

"Mr. Feversham remained at Wadi Halfa, then? That is so, isn't it?" she said eagerly.

"No," Durrance replied. "Harry Feversham did not remain. He slipped past Halfa the day after I started toward the east. He went out in the morning, and to the south."

"Into the desert?"

"Yes, but the desert to the south, the enemy's country. He went just as I saw him, carrying his zither. He was seen. There can be no doubt."

Ethne was quite silent for a little while. Then she asked:—

"You have that letter with you?"

"Yes."

"I should like to read it."

She rose from her chair and walked across to Durrance. He took the letter from his pocket and gave it to her, and she carried it over to the window. The moonlight was strong. Ethne stood close by the window, with a hand pressed upon her heart, and read it through once and again. The letter was explicit; the Greek who owned the cafe at which the troupe had performed admitted that Joseppi, under which name he knew Feversham, had wandered south, carrying a water-skin and a store of dates, though why, he either did not know or would not tell. Ethne had a question to ask, but it was some time before she could trust her lips to utter it distinctly and without faltering.

"What will happen to him?"

"At the best, capture; at the worst, death. Death by starvation, or thirst, or at the hands of the Dervishes. But there is just a hope it might be only capture and imprisonment. You see he was white. If caught, his captors might think him a spy; they would be sure he had knowledge of our plans and our strength. I think that they would most likely send him to Omdurman. I have written to Calder. Spies go out and in from Wadi Halfa. We often hear of things which happen in Omdurman. If Feversham is taken there, sooner or later I shall know. But he must have gone mad. It is the only explanation."

Ethne had another, and she knew hers to be the right one. She was off her guard, and she spoke it aloud to Durrance.

"Colonel Trench," said she, "is a prisoner at Omdurman."

"Oh, yes," answered Durrance. "Feversham will not be quite alone. There is some comfort in that, and perhaps something may be done. When I hear from Calder I will tell you. Perhaps something may be done."

It was evident that Durrance had misconstrued her remark. He at all events was still in the dark as to the motive which had taken Feversham southward beyond the Egyptian patrols. And he must remain in the dark. For Ethne did not even now slacken in her determination still to pretend to have forgotten. She stood at the window with the letter clenched in her hand. She must utter no cry, she must not swoon; she must keep very still and quiet, and speak when needed with a quiet voice, even though she knew that Harry Feversham had gone southward to join Colonel Trench at Omdurman. But so much was beyond her strength. For as Colonel Durrance began to speak again, the desire to escape, to be alone with this terrible news, became irresistible. The cool quietude of the garden, the dark shadows of the trees, called to her.

"Perhaps you will wonder," said Durrance, "why I have told you to-night what I have up till now kept to myself. I did not dare to tell it you before. I want to explain why."

Ethne did not notice the exultation in his voice; she did not consider what his explanation might be; she only felt that she could not now endure to listen to it. The mere sound of a human voice had become an unendurable thing. She hardly knew indeed that Durrance was speaking, she was only aware that a voice spoke, and that the voice must stop. She was close by the window; a single silent step, and she was across the sill and free. Durrance continued to speak out of the darkness, engrossed in what he said, and Ethne did not listen to a word. She gathered her skirts carefully, so that they should not rustle, and stepped from the window. This was the third slip which she made upon that eventful night.



CHAPTER XIX

MRS. ADAIR INTERFERES

Ethne had thought to escape quite unobserved; but Mrs. Adair was sitting upon the terrace in the shadow of the house and not very far from the open window of the drawing-room. She saw Ethne lightly cross the terrace and run down the steps into the garden, and she wondered at the precipitancy of her movements. Ethne seemed to be taking flight, and in a sort of desperation. The incident was singular, and remarkably singular to Mrs. Adair, who from the angle in which she sat commanded a view of that open window through which the moonlight shone. She had seen Ethne turn out the lamp, and the swift change in the room from light to dark, with its suggestion of secrecy and the private talk of lovers, had been a torture to her. But she had not fled from the torture. She had sat listening, and the music as it floated out upon the garden with its thrill of happiness, its accent of yearning, and the low, hushed conversation which followed upon its cessation in that darkened room, had struck upon a chord of imagination in Mrs. Adair and had kindled her jealousy into a scorching flame. Then suddenly Ethne had taken flight. The possibility of a quarrel Mrs. Adair dismissed from her thoughts. She knew very well that Ethne was not of the kind which quarrels, nor would she escape by running away, should she be entangled in a quarrel. But something still more singular occurred. Durrance continued to speak in that room from which Ethne had escaped. The sound of his voice reached Mrs. Adair's ears, though she could not distinguish the words. It was clear to her that he believed Ethne to be still with him. Mrs. Adair rose from her seat and, walking silently upon the tips of her toes, came close to the open window. She heard Durrance laugh light-heartedly, and she listened to the words he spoke. She could hear them plainly now, though she could not see the man who spoke them. He sat in the shadows.

"I began to find out," he was saying, "even on that first afternoon at Hill Street two months ago, that there was only friendship on your side. My blindness helped me. With your face and your eyes in view I should have believed without question just what you wished me to believe. But you had no longer those defences. I on my side had grown quicker. I began in a word to see. For the first time in my life I began to see."

Mrs. Adair did not move. Durrance, upon his side, appeared to expect no answer or acknowledgment. He spoke with the voice of enjoyment which a man uses recounting difficulties which have ceased to hamper him, perplexities which have been long since unravelled.

"I should have definitely broken off our engagement, I suppose, at once. For I still believed, and as firmly as ever, that there must be more than friendship on both sides. But I had grown selfish. I warned you, Ethne, selfishness was the blind man's particular fault. I waited and deferred the time of marriage. I made excuses. I led you to believe that there was a chance of recovery when I knew there was none. For I hoped, as a man will, that with time your friendship might grow into more than friendship. So long as there was a chance of that, I—Ethne, I could not let you go. So, I listened for some new softness in your voice, some new buoyancy in your laughter, some new deep thrill of the heart in the music which you played, longing for it—how much! Well, to-night I have burnt my boats. I have admitted to you that I knew friendship limited your thoughts of me. I have owned to you that there is no hope my sight will be restored. I have even dared to-night to tell you what I have kept secret for so long, my meeting with Harry Feversham and the peril he has run. And why? Because for the first time I have heard to-night just those signs for which I waited. The new softness, the new pride, in your voice, the buoyancy in your laughter—they have been audible to me all this evening. The restraint and the tension were gone from your manner. And when you played, it was as though some one with just your skill and knowledge played, but some one who let her heart speak resonantly through the music as until to-night you have never done. Ethne, Ethne!"

But at that moment Ethne was in the little enclosed garden whither she had led Captain Willoughby that morning. Here she was private; her collie dog had joined her; she had reached the solitude and the silence which had become necessities to her. A few more words from Durrance and her prudence would have broken beneath the strain. All that pretence of affection which during these last months she had so sedulously built up about him like a wall which he was never to look over, would have been struck down and levelled to the ground. Durrance, indeed, had already looked over the wall, was looking over it with amazed eyes at this instant, but that Ethne did not know, and to hinder him from knowing it she had fled. The moonlight slept in silver upon the creek; the tall trees stood dreaming to the stars; the lapping of the tide against the bank was no louder than the music of a river. She sat down upon the bench and strove to gather some of the quietude of that summer night into her heart, and to learn from the growing things of nature about her something of their patience and their extraordinary perseverance.

But the occurrences of the day had overtaxed her, and she could not. Only this morning, and in this very garden, the good news had come and she had regained Harry Feversham. For in that way she thought of Willoughby's message. This morning she had regained him, and this evening the bad news had come and she had lost him, and most likely right to the very end of mortal life. Harry Feversham meant to pay for his fault to the uttermost scruple, and Ethne cried out against his thoroughness, which he had learned from no other than herself. "Surely," she thought, "he might have been content. In redeeming his honour in the eyes of one of the three he has done enough, he has redeemed it in the eyes of all."

But he had gone south to join Colonel Trench in Omdurman. Of that squalid and shadowless town, of its hideous barbarities, of the horrors of its prison-house, Ethne knew nothing at all. But Captain Willoughby had hinted enough to fill her imagination with terrors. He had offered to explain to her what captivity in Omdurman implied, and she wrung her hands, as she remembered that she had refused to listen. What cruelties might not be practised? Even now, at that very hour perhaps, on this night of summer—but she dared not let her thoughts wander that way....

The lapping of the tide against the banks was like the music of a river. It brought to Ethne's mind one particular river which had sung and babbled in her ears when five years ago she had watched out another summer night till dawn. Never had she so hungered for her own country and the companionship of its brown hills and streams. No, not even this afternoon, when she had sat at her window and watched the lights change upon the creek. Donegal had a sanctity for her, it seemed when she dwelled in it to set her in a way apart from and above earthly taints; and as her heart went out in a great longing towards it now, a sudden fierce loathing for the concealments, the shifts and maneuvers which she had practised, and still must practise, sprang up within her. A great weariness came upon her, too. But she did not change from her fixed resolve. Two lives were not to be spoilt because she lived in the world. To-morrow she could gather up her strength and begin again. For Durrance must never know that there was another whom she placed before him in her thoughts. Meanwhile, however, Durrance within the drawing-room brought his confession to an end.

"So you see," he said, "I could not speak of Harry Feversham until to-night. For I was afraid that what I had to tell you would hurt you very much. I was afraid that you still remembered him, in spite of those five years. I knew, of course, that you were my friend. But I doubted whether in your heart you were not more than that to him. To-night, however, I could tell you without fear."

Now at all events he expected an answer. Mrs. Adair, still standing by the window, heard him move in the shadows.

"Ethne!" he said, with some surprise in his voice; and since again no answer came, he rose, and walked towards the chair in which Ethne had sat. Mrs. Adair could see him now. His hands felt for and grasped the back of the chair. He bent over it, as though he thought Ethne was leaning forward with her hands upon her knees.

"Ethne," he said again, and there was in this iteration of her name more trouble and doubt than surprise. It seemed to Mrs. Adair that he dreaded to find her silently weeping. He was beginning to speculate whether after all he had been right in his inference from Ethne's recapture of her youth to-night, whether the shadow of Feversham did not after all fall between them. He leaned farther forward, feeling with his hand, and suddenly a string of Ethne's violin twanged loud. She had left it lying on the chair, and his fingers had touched it.

Durrance drew himself up straight and stood quite motionless and silent, like a man who had suffered a shock and is bewildered. He passed his hand across his forehead once or twice, and then, without calling upon Ethne again, he advanced to the open window.

Mrs. Adair did not move, and she held her breath. There was just the width of the sill between them. The moonlight struck full upon Durrance, and she saw a comprehension gradually dawn in his face that some one was standing close to him.

"Ethne," he said a third time, and now he appealed.

He stretched out a hand timidly and touched her dress.

"It is not Ethne," he said with a start.

"No, it is not Ethne," Mrs. Adair answered quickly. Durrance drew back a step from the window, and for a little while was silent.

"Where has she gone?" he asked at length.

"Into the garden. She ran across the terrace and down the steps very quickly and silently. I saw her from my chair. Then I heard you speaking alone."

"Can you see her now in the garden?"

"No; she went across the lawn towards the trees and their great shadows. There is only the moonlight in the garden now."

Durrance stepped across the window sill and stood by the side of Mrs. Adair. The last slip which Ethne had made betrayed her inevitably to the man who had grown quick. There could be only one reason for her sudden unexplained and secret flight. He had told her that Feversham had wandered south from Wadi Halfa into the savage country; he had spoken out his fears as to Feversham's fate without reserve, thinking that she had forgotten him, and indeed rather inclined to blame her for the callous indifference with which she received the news. The callousness was a mere mask, and she had fled because she no longer had the strength to hold it up before her face. His first suspicions had been right. Feversham still stood between Ethne and himself and held them at arm's length.

"She ran as though she was in great trouble and hardly knew what she was doing," Mrs. Adair continued. "Did you cause that trouble?"

"Yes."

"I thought so, from what I heard you say."

Mrs. Adair wanted to hurt, and in spite of Durrance's impenetrable face, she felt that she had succeeded. It was a small sort of compensation for the weeks of mortification which she had endured. There is something which might be said for Mrs. Adair; extenuations might be pleaded, even if no defence was made. For she like Ethne was overtaxed that night. That calm pale face of hers hid the quick passions of the South, and she had been racked by them to the limits of endurance. There had been something grotesque, something rather horrible, in that outbreak and confession by Durrance, after Ethne had fled from the room. He was speaking out his heart to an empty chair. She herself had stood without the window with a bitter longing that he had spoken so to her and a bitter knowledge that he never would. She was sunk deep in humiliation. The irony of the position tortured her; it was like a jest of grim selfish gods played off upon ineffectual mortals to their hurt. And at the bottom of all the thoughts rankled that memory of the extinguished lamp, and the low, hushed voices speaking one to the other in darkness. Therefore she spoke to give pain and was glad that she gave it, even though it was to the man whom she coveted.

"There's one thing which I don't understand," said Durrance. "I mean the change which we both noticed in Ethne to-night. I mistook the cause of it, that's evident. I was a fool. But there must have been a cause. The gift of laughter had been restored to her. Her gravity, her air of calculation, had vanished. She became just what she was five years ago."

"Exactly," Mrs. Adair answered. "Just what she was before Mr. Feversham disappeared from Ramelton. You are so quick, Colonel Durrance. Ethne had good news of Mr. Feversham this morning."

Durrance turned quickly towards her, and Mrs. Adair felt a pleasure at his abrupt movement. She had provoked the display of some emotion, and the display of emotion was preferable to his composure.

"Are you quite sure?" he asked.

"As sure as that you gave her the worst of news to-night," she replied.

But Durrance did not need the answer. Ethne had made another slip that evening, and though unnoticed at the time, it came back to Durrance's memory now. She had declared that Feversham still drew an allowance from his father. "I heard it only to-day," she had said.

"Yes, Ethne heard news of Feversham to-day," he said slowly. "Did she make a mistake five years ago? There was some wrong thing Harry Feversham was supposed to have done. But was there really more misunderstanding than wrong? Did she misjudge him? Has she to-day learnt that she misjudged him?"

"I will tell you what I know. It is not very much. But I think it is fair that you should know it."

"Wait a moment, please, Mrs. Adair," said Durrance, sharply. He had put his questions rather to himself than to his companion, and he was not sure that he wished her to answer them. He walked abruptly away from her and leaned upon the balustrade with his face towards the garden.

It seemed to him rather treacherous to allow Mrs. Adair to disclose what Ethne herself evidently intended to conceal. But he knew why Ethne wished to conceal it. She wished him never to suspect that she retained any love for Harry Feversham. On the other hand, however, he did not falter from his own belief. Marriage between a man crippled like himself and a woman active and vigorous like Ethne could never be right unless both brought more than friendship. He turned back to Mrs. Adair.

"I am no casuist," he said. "But here disloyalty seems the truest loyalty of all. Tell me what you know, Mrs. Adair. Something might be done perhaps for Feversham. From Assouan or Suakin something might be done. This news—this good news came, I suppose, this afternoon when I was at home."

"No, this morning when you were here. It was brought by a Captain Willoughby, who was once an officer in Mr. Feversham's regiment."

"He is now Deputy-Governor of Suakin," said Durrance. "I know the man. For three years we were together in that town. Well?"

"He sailed down from Kingsbridge. You and Ethne were walking across the lawn when he landed from the creek. Ethne left you and went forward to meet him. I saw them meet, because I happened to be looking out of this window at the moment."

"Yes, Ethne went forward. There was a stranger whom she did not know. I remember."

"They spoke for a few moments, and then Ethne led him towards the trees, at once, without looking back—as though she had forgotten," said Mrs. Adair. That little stab she had not been able to deny herself, but it evoked no sign of pain.

"As though she had forgotten me, you mean," said Durrance, quietly completing her sentence. "No doubt she had."

"They went together into the little enclosed garden on the bank," and Durrance started as she spoke. "Yes, you followed them," continued Mrs. Adair, curiously. She had been puzzled as to how Durrance had missed them.

"They were there then," he said slowly, "on that seat, in the enclosure, all the while."

Mrs. Adair waited for a more definite explanation of the mystery, but she got none.

"Well?" he asked.

"They stayed there for a long while. You had gone home across the fields before they came outside into the open. I was in the garden, and indeed happened to be actually upon the bank."

"So you saw Captain Willoughby. Perhaps you spoke to him?"

"Yes. Ethne introduced him, but she would not let him stay. She hurried him into his boat and back to Kingsbridge at once."

"Then how do you know Captain Willoughby brought good news of Harry Feversham?"

"Ethne told me that they had been talking of him. Her manner and her laugh showed me no less clearly that the news was good."

"Yes," said Durrance, and he nodded his head in assent. Captain Willoughby's tidings had begotten that new pride and buoyancy in Ethne which he had so readily taken to himself. Signs of the necessary something more than friendship—so he had accounted them, and he was right so far. But it was not he who had inspired them. His very penetration and insight had led him astray. He was silent for a few minutes, and Mrs. Adair searched his face in the moonlight for some evidence that he resented Ethne's secrecy. But she searched in vain.

"And that is all?" said Durrance.

"Not quite. Captain Willoughby brought a token from Mr. Feversham. Ethne carried it back to the house in her hand. Her eyes were upon it all the way, her lips smiled at it. I do not think there is anything half so precious to her in all the world."

"A token?"

"A little white feather," said Mrs. Adair, "all soiled and speckled with dust. Can you read the riddle of that feather?"

"Not yet," Durrance replied. He walked once or twice along the terrace and back, lost in thought. Then he went into the house and fetched his cap from the hall. He came back to Mrs. Adair.

"It was kind of you to tell me this," he said. "I want you to add to your kindness. When I was in the drawing-room alone and you came to the window, how much did you hear? What were the first words?"

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.



CHAPTER XX

WEST AND EAST

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.