The Four Feathers Page 10

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

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

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

  "You are going back to Glenalla?"

  "Yes."

  "You will live there alone?"

  "Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "What?" asked Durrance.

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

  "Very well."

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

  "Yes."

  "Have you forgotten the yarn he told you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter XII - Durrance Sharpens His Wits

  *

  It was a night of May, and outside the mess-room at Wadi Halfa three officers were smoking on a grass knoll above the Nile. The moon was at its full, and the strong light had robbed even the planets of their lustre. The smaller stars were not visible at all, and the sky washed of its dark colour, curved overhead, pearly-hued and luminous. The three officers sat in their lounge chairs and smoked silently, while the bull-frogs croaked from an island in mid-river. At the bottom of the small steep cliff on which they sat the Nile, so sluggish was its flow, shone like a burnished mirror, and from the opposite bank the desert stretched away to infinite distances, a vast plain with scattered hummocks, a plain white as a hoar frost on the surface of which the stones sparkled like jewels. Behind the three officers of the garrison the roof of the mess-room verandah threw a shadow on the ground; it seemed a solid piece of blackness.

  One of the three officers struck a match and held it to the end of his cigar. The flame lit up a troubled and anxious face.

  "I hope that no harm has come to him," he said, as he threw the match away. "I wish that I could say I believed it."

  The speaker was a man of middle age and the colonel of a Soudanese battalion. He was answered by a man whose hair had gone grey, it is true. But grey hair is frequent in the Soudan, and his unlined face still showed that he was young. He was Lieutenant Calder of the Engineers. Youth, however, in this instance had no optimism wherewith to challenge Colonel Dawson.

  "He left Halfa eight weeks ago, eh?" he said gloomily.

  "Eight weeks to-day," replied the colonel.

  It was the third officer, a tall, spare, long-necked major of the Army Service Corps, who alone hazarded a cheerful prophecy.

  "It's early days to conclude Durrance has got scuppered," said he. "One knows Durrance. Give him a camp-fire in the desert, and a couple of sheiks to sit round it with him, and he'll buck to them for a month and never feel bored at the end. While here there are letters, and there's an office, and there's a desk in the office and everything he loathes and can't do with. You'll see Durrance will turn up right enough, though he won't hurry about it."

  "He is three weeks overdue," objected the colonel, "and he's methodical after a fashion. I am afraid."

  Major Walters pointed out his arm to the white empty desert across the river.

  "If he had travelled that way, westward, I might agree," he said. "But Durrance went east through the mountain country toward Berenice and the Red Sea. The tribes he went to visit were quiet, even in the worst times, when Osman Digna lay before Suakin."

  The colonel, however, took no comfort from Walters's confidence. He tugged at his moustache and repeated, "He is three weeks overdue."

  Lieutenant Calder knocked the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. He leaned forward in his chair as he pressed the tobacco down with his thumb, and he said slowly:—

  "I wonder. It is just possible that some sort of trap was laid for Durrance. I am not sure. I never mentioned before what I knew, because until lately I did not suspect that it could have anything to do with his delay. But now I begin to wonder. You remember the night before he started?"

  "Yes," said Dawson, and he hitched his chair a little nearer. Calder was the one man in Wadi Halfa who could claim something like intimacy with Durrance. Despite their difference in rank there was no great disparity in age between the two men, and from the first when Calder had come inexperienced and fresh from England, but with a great ardour to acquire a comprehensive experience, Durrance in his reticent way had been at pains to show the newcomer considerable friendship. Calder, therefore, might be likely to know.

  "I too remember that night," said Walters. "Durrance dined at the mess and went away early to prepare for his journey."

  "His preparations were made already," said Calder. "He went away early, as you say. But he did not go to his quarters. He walked along the river-bank to Tewfikieh."

  Wadi Halfa was the military station, Tewfikieh a little frontier town to the north separated from Halfa by a mile of river-bank. A few Greeks kept stores there, a few bare and dirty cafés faced the street between native cook-shops and tobacconists'; a noisy little town where the negro from the Dinka country jolted the fellah from the Delta, and the air was torn with many dialects; a thronged little town, which yet lacked to European ears one distinctive element of a throng. There was no ring of footsteps. The crowd walked on sand and for the most part with naked feet, so that if for a rare moment the sharp high cries and the perpetual voices ceased, the figures of men and women flitted by noiseless as ghosts. And even at night, when the streets were most crowded and the uproar loudest, it seemed that underneath the noise, and almost appreciable to the ear, there lay a deep and brooding silence, the silence of deserts and the East.

  "Durrance went down to Tewfikieh at ten o'clock that night," said Calder. "I went to his quarters at eleven. He had not returned. He was starting eastward at four in the morning, and there was some detail of business on which I wished to speak to him before he went. So I waited for his return. He came in about a quarter of an hour afterwards and told me at once that I must be quick, since he was expecting a visitor. He spoke quickly and rather restlessly. He seemed to be labouring under some excitement. He barely listened to what I had to say, and he answered me at random. It was quite evident that he was moved, and rather deeply moved, by some unusual feeling, though at the nature of the feeling I could not guess. For at one moment it seemed certainly to be anger, and the next moment he relaxed into a laugh, as though in spite of himself he was glad. However, he bundled me out, and as I went I heard him telling his servant to go to bed, because, though he expected a visitor, he would admit the visitor himself."

  "Well!" said Dawson, "and who was the visitor?"

  "I do not know," answered Calder. "The one thing I do know is that when Durrance's servant went to call him at four o'clock for his journey, he found Durrance still sitting on the verandah outside his quarters, as though he still expected his visitor. The visitor had not come."

  "And Durrance left no message?"

  "No. I was up myself before he started. I thought that he was puzzled and worried. I thought, too, that he meant to tell me what was the matter. I still think that he had that in his mind, but that he could not decide. For even after he had taken his seat upon his saddle and his camel had risen from the ground, he turned and looked down towards me. But he thought better of it, or worse, as the case may be. At all events, he did not speak. He struck the camel on the flank with his stick, and rode slowly past the post-office and out into the desert, with his head sunk upon his breast. I wonder whether he rode into a trap. Who could this visitor have been whom he meets in the street of Tewfikieh, and who must come so secretly to Wadi Halfa? What can have been his business with Durrance? Important business, troublesome business—so much is evident. And he did not come to transact it. Was the whole thing a lure to which we have not the clue? Like Colonel Dawson, I am afraid."

  There was a silence after he had finished, which Major Walters was the first to break. He offered no argument—he simply expressed again his unalterable cheerfulness.

  "I don't think Durrance has got scuppered," said he, as he rose from his chair.

  "I know what I shall do," said the colonel. "I shall send out a strong search party in the morning."

  And the next morning, as they sat at breakfast on the vera
ndah, he at once proceeded to describe the force which he meant to despatch. Major Walters, too, it seemed, in spite of his hopeful prophecies, had pondered during the night over Calder's story, and he leaned across the table to Calder.

  "Did you never inquire whom Durrance talked with at Tewfikieh on that night?" he asked.

  "I did, and there's a point that puzzles me," said Calder. He was sitting with his back to the Nile and his face towards the glass doors of the mess-room, and he spoke to Walters, who was directly opposite. "I could not find that he talked to more than one person, and that one person could not by any likelihood have been the visitor he expected. Durrance stopped in front of a café where some strolling musicians, who had somehow wandered up to Tewfikieh, were playing and singing for their night's lodging. One of them, a Greek I was told, came outside into the street and took his hat round. Durrance threw a sovereign into the hat, the man turned to thank him, and they talked for a little time together;" and as he came to this point he raised his head. A look of recognition came into his face. He laid his hands upon the table-edge, and leaned forward with his feet drawn back beneath his chair as though he was on the point of springing up. But he did not spring up. His look of recognition became one of bewilderment. He glanced round the table and saw that Colonel Dawson was helping himself to cocoa, while Major Walters's eyes were on his plate. There were other officers of the garrison present, but not one had remarked his movement and its sudden arrest. Calder leaned back, and staring curiously in front of him and over the major's shoulder, continued his story. "But I could never hear that Durrance spoke to any one else. He seemed, except that one knows to the contrary, merely to have strolled through the village and back again to Wadi Halfa."