LIEUTENANT SUTCH IS TEMPTED TO LIE
Durrance reached London one morning in June, and on that afternoon took
the first walk of the exile, into Hyde Park, where he sat beneath the
trees marvelling at the grace of his countrywomen and the delicacy of
their apparel, a solitary figure, sunburnt and stamped already with that
indefinable expression of the eyes and face which marks the men set
apart in the distant corners of the world. Amongst the people who
strolled past him, one, however, smiled, and, as he rose from his chair,
Mrs. Adair came to his side. She looked him over from head to foot with
a quick and almost furtive glance which might have told even Durrance
something of the place which he held in her thoughts. She was comparing
him with the picture which she had of him now three years old. She was
looking for the small marks of change which those three years might have
brought about, and with eyes of apprehension. But Durrance only noticed
that she was dressed in black. She understood the question in his mind
and answered it.
"My husband died eighteen months ago," she explained in a quiet voice.
"He was thrown from his horse during a run with the Pytchley. He was
killed at once."
"I had not heard," Durrance answered awkwardly. "I am very sorry."
Mrs. Adair took a chair beside him and did not reply. She was a woman of
perplexing silences; and her pale and placid face, with its cold correct
outline, gave no clue to the thoughts with which she occupied them. She
sat without stirring. Durrance was embarrassed. He remembered Mr. Adair
as a good-humoured man, whose one chief quality was his evident
affection for his wife, but with what eyes the wife had looked upon him
he had never up till now considered. Mr. Adair indeed had been at the
best a shadowy figure in that small household, and Durrance found it
difficult even to draw upon his recollections for any full expression of
regret. He gave up the attempt and asked:--
"Are Harry Feversham and his wife in town?"
Mrs. Adair was slow to reply.
"Not yet," she said, after a pause, but immediately she corrected
herself, and said a little hurriedly, "I mean--the marriage never took
place."
Durrance was not a man easily startled, and even when he was, his
surprise was not expressed in exclamations.
"I don't think that I understand. Why did it never take place?" he
asked. Mrs. Adair looked sharply at him, as though inquiring for the
reason of his deliberate tones.
"I don't know why," she said. "Ethne can keep a secret if she wishes,"
and Durrance nodded his assent. "The marriage was broken off on the
night of a dance at Lennon House."
Durrance turned at once to her.
"Just before I left England three years ago?"
"Yes. Then you knew?"
"No. Only you have explained to me something which occurred on the very
night that I left Dover. What has become of Harry?"
Mrs. Adair shrugged her shoulders.
"I do not know. I have met no one who does know. I do not think that I
have met any one who has even seen him since that time. He must have
left England."
Durrance pondered on this mysterious disappearance. It was Harry
Feversham, then, whom he had seen upon the pier as the Channel boat cast
off. The man with the troubled and despairing face was, after all, his
friend.
"And Miss Eustace?" he asked after a pause, with a queer timidity. "She
has married since?"
Again Mrs. Adair took her time to reply.
"No," said she.
"Then she is still at Ramelton?"
Mrs. Adair shook her head.
"There was a fire at Lennon House a year ago. Did you ever hear of a
constable called Bastable?"
"Indeed, I did. He was the means of introducing me to Miss Eustace and
her father. I was travelling from Londonderry to Letterkenny. I received
a letter from Mr. Eustace, whom I did not know, but who knew from my
friends at Letterkenny that I was coming past his house. He asked me to
stay the night with him. Naturally enough I declined, with the result
that Bastable arrested me on a magistrate's warrant as soon as I landed
from the ferry."
"That is the man," said Mrs. Adair, and she told Durrance the history
of the fire. It appeared that Bastable's claim to Dermod's friendship
rested upon his skill in preparing a particular brew of toddy, which
needed a single oyster simmering in the saucepan to give it its
perfection of flavour. About two o'clock of a June morning the spirit
lamp on which the saucepan stewed had been overset; neither of the two
confederates in drink had their wits about them at the moment, and the
house was half burnt and the rest of it ruined by water before the fire
could be got under.
"There were consequences still more distressing than the destruction of
the house," she continued. "The fire was a beacon warning to Dermod's
creditors for one thing, and Dermod, already overpowered with debts,
fell in a day upon complete ruin. He was drenched by the water hoses
besides, and took a chill which nearly killed him, from the effects of
which he has never recovered. You will find him a broken man. The
estates are let, and Ethne is now living with her father in a little
mountain village in Donegal."
Mrs. Adair had not looked at Durrance while she spoke. She kept her eyes
fixed steadily in front of her, and indeed she spoke without feeling on
one side or the other, but rather like a person constraining herself to
speech because speech was a necessity. Nor did she turn to look at
Durrance when she had done.
"So she has lost everything?" said Durrance.
"She still has a home in Donegal," returned Mrs. Adair.
"And that means a great deal to her," said Durrance, slowly. "Yes, I
think you are right."
"It means," said Mrs. Adair, "that Ethne with all her ill-luck has
reason to be envied by many other women."
Durrance did not answer that suggestion directly. He watched the
carriages drive past, he listened to the chatter and the laughter of the
people about him, his eyes were refreshed by the women in their
light-coloured frocks; and all the time his slow mind was working toward
the lame expression of his philosophy. Mrs. Adair turned to him with a
slight impatience in the end.
"Of what are you thinking?" she asked.
"That women suffer much more than men when the world goes wrong with
them," he answered, and the answer was rather a question than a definite
assertion. "I know very little, of course. I can only guess. But I think
women gather up into themselves what they have been through much more
than we do. To them what is past becomes a real part of them, as much a
part of them as a limb; to us it's always something external, at the
best the rung of a ladder, at the worst a weight on the heel. Don't you
think so, too? I phrase the thought badly. But put it this way: Women
look backwards, we look ahead; so misfortune hits them harder, eh?"
Mrs. Adair answered in her own way. She did not expressly agree. But a
certain humility became audible in her voice.
"The mountain village at which Ethne is living," she said in a low
voice, "is called Glenalla. A track strikes up towards it from the road
halfway between Rathmullen and Ramelton." She rose as she finished the
sentence and held out her hand. "Shall I see you?"
"You are still in Hill Street?" said Durrance. "I shall be for a time
in London."
Mrs. Adair raised her eyebrows. She looked always by nature for the
intricate and concealed motive, so that conduct which sprang from a
reason, obvious and simple, was likely to baffle her. She was baffled
now by Durrance's resolve to remain in town. Why did he not travel at
once to Donegal, she asked herself, since thither his thoughts
undoubtedly preceded him. She heard of his continual presence at his
Service Club, and could not understand. She did not even have a
suspicion of his motive when he himself informed her that he had
travelled into Surrey and had spent a day with General Feversham.
It had been an ineffectual day for Durrance. The general kept him
steadily to the history of the campaign from which he had just returned.
Only once was he able to approach the topic of Harry Feversham's
disappearance, and at the mere mention of his son's name the old
general's face set like plaster. It became void of expression and
inattentive as a mask.
"We will talk of something else, if you please," said he; and Durrance
returned to London not an inch nearer to Donegal.
Thereafter he sat under the great tree in the inner courtyard of his
club, talking to this man and to that, and still unsatisfied with the
conversation. All through that June the afternoons and evenings found
him at his post. Never a friend of Feversham's passed by the tree but
Durrance had a word for him, and the word led always to a question. But
the question elicited no answer except a shrug of the shoulders, and a
"Hanged if I know!"
Harry Feversham's place knew him no more; he had dropped even out of the
speculations of his friends.
Toward the end of June, however, an old retired naval officer limped
into the courtyard, saw Durrance, hesitated, and began with a remarkable
alacrity to move away.
Durrance sprang up from his seat.
"Mr. Sutch," said he. "You have forgotten me?"
"Colonel Durrance, to be sure," said the embarrassed lieutenant. "It is
some while since we met, but I remember you very well now. I think we
met--let me see--where was it? An old man's memory, Colonel Durrance, is
like a leaky ship. It comes to harbour with its cargo of recollections
swamped."
Neither the lieutenant's present embarrassment nor his previous
hesitation escaped Durrance's notice.
"We met at Broad Place," said he. "I wish you to give me news of my
friend Feversham. Why was his engagement with Miss Eustace broken off?
Where is he now?"
The lieutenant's eyes gleamed for a moment with satisfaction. He had
always been doubtful whether Durrance was aware of Harry's fall into
disgrace. Durrance plainly did not know.
"There is only one person in the world, I believe," said Sutch, "who can
answer both your questions."
Durrance was in no way disconcerted.
"Yes. I have waited here a month for you," he replied.
Lieutenant Sutch pushed his fingers through his beard, and stared down
at his companion.
"Well, it is true," he admitted. "I can answer your questions, but I
will not."
"Harry Feversham is my friend."
"General Feversham is his father, yet he knows only half the truth. Miss
Eustace was betrothed to him, and she knows no more. I pledged my word
to Harry that I would keep silence."
"It is not curiosity which makes me ask."
"I am sure that, on the contrary, it is friendship," said the
lieutenant, cordially.
"Nor that entirely. There is another aspect of the matter. I will not
ask you to answer my questions, but I will put a third one to you. It is
one harder for me to ask than for you to answer. Would a friend of Harry
Feversham be at all disloyal to that friendship, if"--and Durrance
flushed beneath his sunburn--"if he tried his luck with Miss Eustace?"
The question startled Lieutenant Sutch.
"You?" he exclaimed, and he stood considering Durrance, remembering the
rapidity of his promotion, speculating upon his likelihood to take a
woman's fancy. Here was an aspect of the case, indeed, to which he had
not given a thought, and he was no less troubled than startled. For
there had grown up within him a jealousy on behalf of Harry Feversham as
strong as a mother's for a favourite second son. He had nursed with a
most pleasurable anticipation a hope that, in the end, Harry would come
back to all that he once had owned, like a rethroned king. He stared at
Durrance and saw the hope stricken. Durrance looked the man of courage
which his record proved him to be, and Lieutenant Sutch had his theory
of women. "Brute courage--they make a god of it."
"Well?" asked Durrance.
Lieutenant Sutch was aware that he must answer. He was sorely tempted to
lie. For he knew enough of the man who questioned him to be certain that
the lie would have its effect. Durrance would go back to the Soudan, and
leave his suit unpressed.
"Well?"
Sutch looked up at the sky and down upon the flags. Harry had foreseen
that this complication was likely to occur, he had not wished that Ethne
should wait. Sutch imagined him at this very moment, lost somewhere
under the burning sun, and compared that picture with the one before his
eyes--the successful soldier taking his ease at his club. He felt
inclined to break his promise, to tell the whole truth, to answer both
the questions which Durrance had first asked. And again the pitiless
monosyllable demanded his reply.
"Well?"
"No," said Sutch, regretfully. "There would be no disloyalty."
And on that evening Durrance took the train for Holyhead.