CAPTAIN WILLOUGHBY REAPPEARS
During the months of July and August Ethne's apprehensions grew, and
once at all events they found expression on her lips.
"I am afraid," she said, one morning, as she stood in the sunlight at an
open window of Mrs. Adair's house upon a creek of the Salcombe estuary.
In the room behind her Mrs. Adair smiled quietly.
"Of what? That some accident happened to Colonel Durrance yesterday in
London?"
"No," Ethne answered slowly, "not of that. For he is at this moment
crossing the lawn towards us."
Again Mrs. Adair smiled, but she did not raise her head from the book
which she was reading, so that it might have been some passage in the
book which so amused and pleased her.
"I thought so," she said, but in so low a voice that the words barely
reached Ethne's ears. They did not penetrate to her mind, for as she
looked across the stone-flagged terrace and down the broad shallow
flight of steps to the lawn, she asked abruptly:--
"Do you think he has any hope whatever that he will recover his sight?"
The question had not occurred to Mrs. Adair before, and she gave to it
now no importance in her thoughts.
"Would he travel up to town so often to see his oculist if he had
none?" she asked in reply. "Of course he hopes."
"I am afraid," said Ethne, and she turned with a sudden movement towards
her friend. "Haven't you noticed how quick he has grown and is growing?
Quick to interpret your silences, to infer what you do not say from what
you do, to fill out your sentences, to make your movements the
commentary of your words? Laura, haven't you noticed? At times I think
the very corners of my mind are revealed to him. He reads me like a
child's lesson book."
"Yes," said Mrs. Adair, "you are at a disadvantage. You no longer have
your face to screen your thoughts."
"And his eyes no longer tell me anything at all," Ethne added.
There was truth in both remarks. So long as Durrance had had Ethne's
face with its bright colour and her steady, frank, grey eyes visible
before him, he could hardly weigh her intervals of silence and her
movements against her spoken words with the detachment which was now
possible to him. On the other hand, whereas before she had never been
troubled by a doubt as to what he meant or wished, or intended, now she
was often in the dark. Durrance's blindness, in a word, had produced an
effect entirely opposite to that which might have been expected. It had
reversed their positions.
Mrs. Adair, however, was more interested in Ethne's unusual burst of
confidence. There was no doubt of it, she reflected. The girl, once
remarkable for a quiet frankness of word and look, was declining into a
creature of shifts and agitation.
"There is something, then, to be concealed from him?" she asked
quietly.
"Yes."
"Something rather important?"
"Something which at all costs I must conceal," Ethne exclaimed, and was
not sure, even while she spoke, that Durrance had not already found it
out. She stepped over the threshold of the window on to the terrace. In
front of her the lawn stretched to a hedge; on the far side of that
hedge a couple of grass fields lifted and fell in gentle undulations;
and beyond the fields she could see amongst a cluster of trees the smoke
from the chimneys of Colonel Durrance's house. She stood for a little
while hesitating upon the terrace. On the left the lawn ran down to a
line of tall beeches and oaks which fringed the creek. But a broad space
had been cleared to make a gap upon the bank, so that Ethne could see
the sunlight on the water and the wooded slope on the farther side, and
a sailing-boat some way down the creek tacking slowly against the light
wind. Ethne looked about her, as though she was summoning her resources,
and even composing her sentences ready for delivery to the man who was
walking steadily towards her across the lawn. If there was hesitation
upon her part, there was none at all, she noticed, on the part of the
blind man. It seemed that Durrance's eyes took in the path which his
feet trod, and with the stick which he carried in his hand he switched
at the blades of grass like one that carries it from habit rather than
for any use. Ethne descended the steps and advanced to meet him. She
walked slowly, as if to a difficult encounter.
But there was another who only waited an opportunity to engage in it
with eagerness. For as Ethne descended the steps Mrs. Adair suddenly
dropped the book which she had pretended to resume and ran towards the
window. Hidden by the drapery of the curtain she looked out and watched.
The smile was still upon her lips, but a fierce light had brightened in
her eyes, and her face had the drawn look of hunger.
"Something which at all costs she must conceal," she said to herself,
and she said it in a voice of exultation. There was contempt too in her
tone, contempt for Ethne Eustace, the woman of the open air who was
afraid, who shrank from marriage with a blind man, and dreaded the
restraint upon her freedom. It was that shrinking which Ethne had to
conceal--Mrs. Adair had no doubt of it. "For my part, I am glad," she
said, and she was--fiercely glad that blindness had disabled Durrance.
For if her opportunity ever came, as it seemed to her now more and more
likely to come, blindness reserved him to her, as no man was ever
reserved to any woman. So jealous was she of his every word and look
that his dependence upon her would be the extreme of pleasure. She
watched Ethne and Durrance meet on the lawn at the foot of the terrace
steps. She saw them turn and walk side by side across the grass towards
the creek. She noticed that Ethne seemed to plead, and in her heart she
longed to overhear.
And Ethne was pleading.
"You saw your oculist yesterday?" she asked quickly, as soon as they
met. "Well, what did he say?"
Durrance shrugged his shoulders.
"That one must wait. Only time can show whether a cure is possible or
not," he answered, and Ethne bent forward a little and scrutinised his
face as though she doubted that he spoke the truth.
"But must you and I wait?" she asked.
"Surely," he returned. "It would be wiser on all counts." And thereupon
he asked her suddenly a question of which she did not see the drift. "It
was Mrs. Adair, I imagine, who proposed this plan that I should come
home to Guessens and that you should stay with her here across the
fields?"
Ethne was puzzled by the question, but she answered it directly and
truthfully. "I was in great distress when I heard of your accident. I
was so distressed that at the first I could not think what to do. I came
to London and told Laura, since she is my friend, and this was her plan.
Of course I welcomed it with all my heart;" and the note of pleading
rang in her voice. She was asking Durrance to confirm her words, and he
understood that. He turned towards her with a smile.
"I know that very well, Ethne," he said gently.
Ethne drew a breath of relief, and the anxiety passed for a little while
from her face.
"It was kind of Mrs. Adair," he resumed, "but it is rather hard on you,
who would like to be back in your own country. I remember very well a
sentence which Harry Feversham--" He spoke the name quite carelessly,
but paused just for a moment after he had spoken it. No expression upon
his face showed that he had any intention in so pausing, but Ethne
suspected one. He was listening, she suspected, for some movement of
uneasiness, perhaps of pain, into which she might possibly be betrayed.
But she made no movement. "A sentence which Harry Feversham spoke a long
while since," he continued, "in London just before I left London for
Egypt. He was speaking of you, and he said: 'She is of her country and
more of her county. I do not think she could be happy in any place which
was not within reach of Donegal.' And when I remember that, it seems
rather selfish that I should claim to keep you here at so much cost to
you."
"I was not thinking of that," Ethne exclaimed, "when I asked why we must
wait. That makes me out most selfish. I was merely wondering why you
preferred to wait, why you insist upon it. For, of course, although one
hopes and prays with all one's soul that you will get your sight back,
the fact of a cure can make no difference."
She spoke slowly, and her voice again had a ring of pleading. This time
Durrance did not confirm her words, and she repeated them with a greater
emphasis, "It can make no difference."
Durrance started like a man roused from an abstraction.
"I beg your pardon, Ethne," he said. "I was thinking at the moment of
Harry Feversham. There is something which I want you to tell me. You
said a long time ago at Glenalla that you might one day bring yourself
to tell it me, and I should rather like to know now. You see, Harry
Feversham was my friend. I want you to tell me what happened that night
at Lennon House to break off your engagement, to send him away an
outcast."
Ethne was silent for a while, and then she said gently: "I would rather
not. It is all over and done with. I don't want you to ask me ever."
Durrance did not press for an answer in the slightest degree.
"Very well," he said cheerily, "I won't ask you. It might hurt you to
answer, and I don't want, of course, to cause you pain."
"It's not on that account that I wish to say nothing," Ethne explained
earnestly. She paused and chose her words. "It isn't that I am afraid of
any pain. But what took place, took place such a long while ago--I look
upon Mr. Feversham as a man whom one has known well, and who is now
dead."
They were walking toward the wide gap in the line of trees upon the bank
of the creek, and as Ethne spoke she raised her eyes from the ground.
She saw that the little boat which she had noticed tacking up the creek
while she hesitated upon the terrace had run its nose into the shore.
The sail had been lowered, the little pole mast stuck up above the grass
bank of the garden, and upon the bank itself a man was standing and
staring vaguely towards the house as though not very sure of his ground.
"A stranger has landed from the creek," she said. "He looks as if he had
lost his way. I will go on and put him right."
She ran forward as she spoke, seizing upon that stranger's presence as a
means of relief, even if the relief was only to last for a minute. Such
relief might be felt, she imagined, by a witness in a court when the
judge rises for his half-hour at luncheon-time. For the close of an
interview with Durrance left her continually with the sense that she had
just stepped down from a witness-box where she had been subjected to a
cross-examination so deft that she could not quite clearly perceive its
tendency, although from the beginning she suspected it.
The stranger at the same time advanced to her. He was a man of the
middle size, with a short snub nose, a pair of vacuous protruding brown
eyes, and a moustache of some ferocity. He lifted his hat from his head
and disclosed a round forehead which was going bald.
"I have sailed down from Kingsbridge," he said, "but I have never been
in this part of the world before. Can you tell me if this house is
called The Pool?"
"Yes; you will find Mrs. Adair if you go up the steps on to the
terrace," said Ethne.
"I came to see Miss Eustace."
Ethne turned back to him with surprise.
"I am Miss Eustace."
The stranger contemplated her in silence.
"So I thought."
He twirled first one moustache and then the other before he spoke again.
"I have had some trouble to find you, Miss Eustace. I went all the way
to Glenalla--for nothing. Rather hard on a man whose leave is short!"
"I am very sorry," said Ethne, with a smile; "but why have you been put
to this trouble?"
Again the stranger curled a moustache. Again his eyes dwelt vacantly
upon her before he spoke.
"You have forgotten my name, no doubt, by this time."
"I do not think that I have ever heard it," she answered.
"Oh, yes, you have, believe me. You heard it five years ago. I am
Captain Willoughby."
Ethne drew sharply back; the bright colour paled in her cheeks; her lips
set in a firm line, and her eyes grew very hard. She glowered at him
silently.
Captain Willoughby was not in the least degree discomposed. He took his
time to speak, and when he did it was rather with the air of a man
forgiving a breach of manners, than of one making his excuses.
"I can quite understand that you do not welcome me, Miss Eustace, but
none of us could foresee that you would be present when the three white
feathers came into Feversham's hands."
Ethne swept the explanation aside.
"How do you know that I was present?" she asked.
"Feversham told me."
"You have seen him?"
The cry leaped loudly from her lips. It was just a throb of the heart
made vocal. It startled Ethne as much as it surprised Captain
Willoughby. She had schooled herself to omit Harry Feversham from her
thoughts, and to obliterate him from her affections, and the cry showed
to her how incompletely she had succeeded. Only a few minutes since she
had spoken of him as one whom she looked upon as dead, and she had
believed that she spoke the truth.
"You have actually seen him?" she repeated in a wondering voice. She
gazed at her stolid companion with envy. "You have spoken to him? And he
to you? When?"
"A year ago, at Suakin. Else why should I be here?"
The question came as a shock to Ethne. She did not guess the correct
answer; she was not, indeed, sufficiently mistress of herself to
speculate upon any answer, but she dreaded it, whatever it might be.
"Yes," she said slowly, and almost reluctantly. "After all, why are you
here?"
Willoughby took a letter-case from his breast, opened it with
deliberation, and shook out from one of its pockets into the palm of his
hand a tiny, soiled, white feather. He held it out to Ethne.
"I have come to give you this."
Ethne did not take it. In fact, she positively shrank from it.
"Why?" she asked unsteadily.
"Three white feathers, three separate accusations of cowardice, were
sent to Feversham by three separate men. This is actually one of those
feathers which were forwarded from his lodgings to Ramelton five years
ago. I am one of the three men who sent them. I have come to tell you
that I withdraw my accusation. I take my feather back."
"And you bring it to me?"
"He asked me to."
Ethne took the feather in her palm, a thing in itself so light and
fragile and yet so momentous as a symbol, and the trees and the garden
began to whirl suddenly about her. She was aware that Captain Willoughby
was speaking, but his voice had grown extraordinarily distant and thin;
so that she was annoyed, since she wished very much to hear all that he
had to say. She felt very cold, even upon that August day of sunlight.
But the presence of Captain Willoughby, one of the three men whom she
never would forgive, helped her to command herself. She would give no
exhibition of weakness before any one of the detested three, and with an
effort she recovered herself when she was on the very point of swooning.
"Come," she said, "I will hear your story. Your news was rather a shock
to me. Even now I do not quite understand."
She led the way from that open space to a little plot of grass above the
creek. On three sides thick hedges enclosed it, at the back rose the
tall elms and poplars, in front the water flashed and broke in ripples,
and beyond the water the trees rose again and were overtopped by sloping
meadows. A gap in the hedge made an entrance into this enclosure, and a
garden-seat stood in the centre of the grass.
"Now," said Ethne, and she motioned to Captain Willoughby to take a seat
at her side. "You will take your time, perhaps. You will forget nothing.
Even his words, if you remember them! I shall thank you for his words."
She held that white feather clenched in her hand. Somehow Harry
Feversham had redeemed his honour, somehow she had been unjust to him;
and she was to learn how. She was in no hurry. She did not even feel one
pang of remorse that she had been unjust. Remorse, no doubt, would come
afterwards. At present the mere knowledge that she had been unjust was
too great a happiness to admit of abatement. She opened her hand and
looked at the feather. And as she looked, memories sternly repressed for
so long, regrets which she had thought stifled quite out of life,
longings which had grown strange, filled all her thoughts. The
Devonshire meadows were about her, the salt of the sea was in the air,
but she was back again in the midst of that one season at Dublin during
a spring five years ago, before the feathers came to Ramelton.
Willoughby began to tell his story, and almost at once even the memory
of that season vanished.
Ethne was in the most English of counties, the county of Plymouth and
Dartmouth and Brixham and the Start, where the red cliffs of its
coast-line speak perpetually of dead centuries, so that one cannot put
into any harbour without some thought of the Spanish Main and of the
little barques and pinnaces which adventured manfully out on their long
voyages with the tide. Up this very creek the clink of the
ship-builders' hammers had rung, and the soil upon its banks was
vigorous with the memories of British sailors. But Ethne had no thought
for these associations. The country-side was a shifting mist before her
eyes, which now and then let through a glimpse of that strange wide
country in the East, of which Durrance had so often told her. The only
trees which she saw were the stunted mimosas of the desert; the only sea
the great stretches of yellow sand; the only cliffs the sharp-peaked
pyramidal black rocks rising abruptly from its surface. It was part of
the irony of her position that she was able so much more completely to
appreciate the trials which one lover of hers had undergone through the
confidences which had been made to her by the other.