Part 27 (1/2)
”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 a.s.souan, 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 b.u.t.t 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 pa.s.sion 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 ca.n.a.l. The song of the Arabs coaling the s.h.i.+p 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 ca.n.a.l, 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 cas.e.m.e.nts; 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 bal.u.s.trade 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 a.s.sumed. 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 a.s.suring 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.