Ensign Knightley and Other Stories Part 3

Knightley's voice was heard behind them, and they turned back into the room. The Ensign had shaved his matted beard and combed out his hair, which now curled and shone graciously about his head and shoulders; his face, too, for all that it was wasted, had taken almost a boyish zest, and his figure, revealed in the graceful dress of his regiment, showed youth in every movement. He was plainly by some years a younger man than Scrope.

He saluted the Major, and Wyley noticed that with his uniform he seemed to have drawn on something of a soldierly confidence.

"There's your supper, lad," said Shackleton, pointing to a few poor herrings and a crust of bread which an orderly had spread upon the table. "It is scanty."

"I like it the better," said Knightley with a laugh; "for so I am a.s.sured I am at home, in Tangier. There is no beef, I suppose?"

"Not so much as a hoof."

"No b.u.t.ter?"

"Not enough to cover a sixpence."

"There is cheese, however." He lifted up a sc.r.a.p upon a fork.

"There will be none to-morrow."

"And as for pay?" he asked slyly.

"Two years and a half in arrears."

Knightley laughed again.

"Moreover," added Shackleton, "out of our nothing we may presently have to feed the fleet. It is indeed the pleasantest joke imaginable."

"In a week, no doubt," rejoined Knightley, "I shall be less sensible of its humour. But to-night--well, I am home in Tangier, and that contents me. Nothing has changed." At that he stopped suddenly.

"Nothing has changed?" This time the phrase was put as a question, and with the halting timidity which he had shown before. No one answered the question. "No, nothing has changed," he said a third time, and again his eyes began to travel wistfully from face to face.

Tessin abruptly turned his back; Shackleton blinked his eyes at the ceiling with altogether too profound an unconcern; Scrope reached out for the wine, and spilt it as he filled his gla.s.s; Wyley busily drew diagrams with a wet finger on the table.

All these details Knightley remarked. He laid down his fork, he rested his elbow on the table, his forehead upon his hand. Then absently he began to hum over to himself a tune. The rhythm of it was somehow familiar to the Surgeon's ears. Where had he heard it before? Then with a start he remembered. It was this very rhythm, that very tune, which Scrope's fingers had beaten out on the table when he first saw Knightley. And as he had absently drummed it then, so Knightley absently hummed it now.

Surely, then, the tune had some part in the relations of the two men--perhaps a part in this story. "A foolish song." The words flashed into Wyley's mind.

"She was singing a foolish song." What if the tune was the tune of that song? But then--Wyley's argument came to a sudden conclusion. For if the tune _was_ the tune of that song, why, then Knightley must know the truth, since he remembered that song. Was Scrope right after all?

Was Knightley playing with him? Wyley glanced at Knightley in the keenest excitement. He wanted words fitted to that tune, and in a little the words came--first one or two fitted here and there to a note, and murmured unconsciously, then an entire phrase which filled out a bar, finally this verse in its proper sequence:

"No, no, fair heretick, it needs must be But an ill love in me, And worse for thee; For were it in my power To love thee now this hour More than I did the last, 'Twould then so fall I might not love at all.

Love that can flow...."

And then the song broke off, and silence followed. Wyley looked again at Knightley, but the latter had not changed his position. He still sat with his face shaded by his hand.

The Surgeon was startled by a light touch on the arm. He turned with almost a jump, and he saw Scrope bending across the table towards him, his eyes ablaze with an excitement no less keen than his own.

"He knows, he knows!" whispered Scrope. "It was that song she was singing; at that word 'flow' he pushed open the door of the room."

Knightley raised his head and drew his hand across his forehead, as though Scrope's whisper had aroused him. Scrope seated himself hurriedly.

"Nothing has changed, eh?" Knightley asked, like a man fresh from his sleep. Then he stood, and quietly, slowly, walked round the table until he stood directly behind Scrope's chair. Scrope's face hardened; he laid the palms of his hands upon the edge of the table ready to spring up; he looked across to Wyley with the expectation of death in his eyes.

One of the officers shuffled his feet. Tessin said "Hus.h.!.+" Knightley took a step forward and dropped a hand on Scrope's shoulder, very lightly; but none the less Scrope started and turned white as though he had been stabbed.

"Harry," said the Ensign, "my--my wife is still in Tangier?"

Scrope drew in a breath. "Yes."

"Ah, waiting for me! You have shown her what kindness you could during my slavery?"

He spoke in a wavering voice, as if he were not sure of his ground, and as he spoke he felt Scrope s.h.i.+ver beneath his hand, and saw upon the faces of his companions an unmistakable shrinking. He turned away and staggered, rather than walked, to the window, where he stood leaning against the sill.

"The day is breaking," he said quietly. Wyley looked up; outside the window the colour was fading down the sky. It was purple still towards the zenith, but across the Straits its edges rested white upon the hills of Spain.

"Love that can flow ..." murmured Knightley, and of a sudden he flung back into the room. "Let me have the truth of it," he burst out, confronting his brother-officers gathered about the table--"the truth, though it knell out my d.a.m.nation. If you only knew how up there, at Fez, at Mequinez, I have pictured your welcome when I should get back!

I made of my antic.i.p.ation a very anodyne. The cudgelling, the chains, the hunger, the sun, hot as though a burning gla.s.s was held above my head--it would all make a good story for the guard-room when I got back--when I got back. And yet I do get back, and one and all of you draw away from me as though I were one of the Tangier lepers we jostle in the streets. 'Love that can flow ...'" he broke off. "I ask myself"--he hesitated, and with a great cry, "I ask you, did I play the coward on that night I was captured two years ago?"

"The coward?" exclaimed Shackleton in bewilderment.

Wyley, for all his sympathy, could not refrain from a triumphant glance at Scrope. "Here is the instance you needed," he said.

"Yes, did I play the coward?" Knightley seated himself sideways on the edge of the table, and clasping his hands between his knees, went on in a quick, lowered voice. "'Love that can flow'--those are the last words I remember. You sent me, Major, to the Governor with a message.

I delivered it; I started back. On my way back I pa.s.sed my house. I went in. I stood in the _patio_. My wife was singing that song. The window of the room in which she sang opened on to the _patio_. I stood there listening for a second. Then I went upstairs. I turned the handle of the door. I remember quite clearly the light upon the room wall as I opened the door. Those words 'love that can flow' came swelling through the opening; and--and--the next thing I am aware of, I was riding chained upon a camel into slavery."

Tessin and Major Shackleton looked suddenly towards Wyley in recognition of the accuracy of his guess. Scrope simply wiped the perspiration from his forehead and waited.

"But how does that--forgetfulness, shall we say?--persuade you to the fear that you played the coward?" asked Wyley.

"Well," replied Knightley, and his voice sank to a whisper, "I played the coward afterwards at Mequinez. At the first it used to amuse me to wonder what happened after I opened the door and before I was captured outside Tangier; later it only puzzled me, and in the end it began to frighten me. You see, I could not tell; it was all a blank to me, as it is now; and a man overdriven--well, he nurses sickly fancies.

No need to say what mine were until the day I played the coward in Mequinez. They set me to build the walls of the Emperor's new Palace.

We used the stones of the old Roman town and built them up in Mequinez, and in the walls we were bidden to build Christian slaves alive to the glory of Allah. I refused. They stripped the flesh off my feet with their bastinadoes, starved me of food and drink, and brought me back again to the walls. Again I refused." Knightley looked up at his audience, and whether or no he mistook their breathless silence for disbelief,--"I did," he implored. "Twice I refused, and twice they tortured me. The third time--I was so broken, the whistle of a cane in the air made me cry out with pain--I was sunk to that pitch of cowardice--" He stopped, unable to complete the sentence. He clasped and unclasped his hands convulsively, he moistened his dry lips with his tongue, and looked about him with a weak, almost despairing laugh.

Then he began in another way. "The Christian was a Portuguee from Marmora. He was set in the wall with his arms outstretched on either side--the att.i.tude of a man crucified. I built in his arms--his right arm first--and mortised the stones, then his left arm in the same way.

I was careful not to look in his face. No, no! I didn't look in his face." Knightley repeated the words with a horrible leer of cunning, and hugged himself with his arms. To Wyley's thinking he was strung almost to madness. "After his arms I built in his feet, and upwards from his feet I built in his legs and his body until I came to his neck. All this while he had been crying out for pity, babbling prayers, and the rest of it. When I reached his neck he ceased his clamour. I suppose he was dumb with horror. I did not know. All I knew was that now I should have to meet his eyes as I built in his face.

I thought for a moment of blinding him. I could have done it quite easily with a stone. I picked up a stone to do it, and then, well--I could not help looking at him. He drew my eyes to his like a steel filing to a magnet. And once I had looked, once I had heard his eyes speaking, I--I tore down the stones. I freed his body, his legs, his feet and one arm. When the guards noticed what I was doing I cannot tell. I could not tell you when their sticks began to beat me. But they dragged me away when I had freed only one arm. I remember seeing him tugging at the other. What happened to me,"--he s.h.i.+vered,--"I could not describe to you. But you see I had played the coward finely at Mequinez, and when that question recurred to me as to what had happened after I had opened the door, I began to wonder whether by any chance I had played the coward at Tangier. I dismissed the thought as a sickly fancy, but it came again and again; and I came back here, and you draw aloof from me with averted faces and forced welcomes on your lips. Did I play the coward on that night I was captured? Tell me!

Tell me!" And so the torrent of his speech came to an end.

The Major rose gravely from his seat, walked round the table and held out his hand.

"Put your hand there, lad," he said gravely.

Knightley looked at the outstretched hand, then at the Major's face.

He took the hand diffidently, and the Major's grasp was of the heartiest.

"Neither at Mequinez nor at Tangier did you play the coward," said the Major. "You fell by my side in the van of the attack."

And then Knightley began to cry. He blubbered like a child, and with his blubbering he mixed apologies. He was weak, he was tired, his relief was too great; he was thoroughly ashamed.

"You see," he said, "there was need that I should know. My wife is waiting for me. I could not go back to her bearing that stigma.

Indeed, I hardly dared ask news of her. Now I can go back; and, gentlemen, I wish you good-night."