The Four Feathers Part 6

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

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

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

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

Feversham bowed his head in acquiescence.

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

Ethne did not object, but she turned and looked at him quickly with her brows drawn in a frown of perplexity. To wait for her father under such circ.u.mstances seemed to argue a certain courage. Indeed, she herself felt some apprehension as she heard the door of the study open and Dermod's footsteps on the floor. Dermod walked straight up to Harry Feversham, looking for once in a way what he was, a very old man, and stood there staring into Feversham's face with a muddled and bewildered expression. Twice he opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. In the end he turned to the table and lit his candle and Harry Feversham's.

Then he turned back toward Feversham, and rather quickly, so that Ethne took a step forward as if to get between them; but he did nothing more than stare at Feversham again and for a long time. Finally, he took up his candle.

"Well--" he said, and stopped. He snuffed the wick with the scissors and began again. "Well--" he said, and stopped again. Apparently his candle had not helped him to any suitable expressions. He stared into the flame now instead of into Feversham's face, and for an equal length of time.

He could think of nothing whatever to say, and yet he was conscious that something must be said. In the end he said lamely:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI

HARRY FEVERSHAM'S PLAN

It was the night of August 30. A month had pa.s.sed since the ball at Lennon House, but the uneventful country-side of Donegal was still busy with the stimulating topic of Harry Feversham's disappearance. The townsmen in the climbing street and the gentry at their dinner-tables gossiped to their hearts' contentment. It was a.s.serted that Harry Feversham had been seen on the very morning after the dance, and at five minutes to six--though according to Mrs. Brien O'Brien it was ten minutes past the hour--still in his dress clothes and with a white suicide's face, hurrying along the causeway by the Lennon Bridge. It was suggested that a drag-net would be the only way to solve the mystery.

Mr. Dennis Rafferty, who lived on the road to Rathmullen, indeed, went so far as to refuse salmon on the plea that he was not a cannibal, and the saying had a general vogue. Their conjectures as to the cause of the disappearance were no nearer to the truth. For there were only two who knew, and those two went steadily about the business of living as though no catastrophe had befallen them. They held their heads a trifle more proudly perhaps. Ethne might have become a little more gentle, Dermod a little more irascible, but these were the only changes. So gossip had the field to itself.

But Harry Feversham was in London, as Lieutenant Sutch discovered on the night of the 30th. All that day the town had been perturbed by rumours of a great battle fought at Ka.s.sa.s.sin in the desert east of Ismailia.

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

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

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

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

Sutch stopped his companion.

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

"Good G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+p," 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 pa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 pa.s.s the time. He began with the Crimean night at Broad Place, and ended with the ball at Lennon House.

"I came back across Lough Sw.i.l.l.y 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 att.i.tude, 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 G.o.d 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."