THE STORY OF THE FIRST FEATHER
"I will not interrupt you," said Ethne, as Willoughby took his seat
beside her, and he had barely spoken a score of words before she broke
that promise.
"I am Deputy-Governor of Suakin," he began. "My chief was on leave in
May. You are fortunate enough not to know Suakin, Miss Eustace,
particularly in May. No white woman can live in that town. It has a
sodden intolerable heat peculiar to itself. The air is heavy with brine;
you can't sleep at night for its oppression. Well, I was sitting in the
verandah on the first floor of the palace about ten o'clock at night,
looking out over the harbour and the distillation works, and wondering
whether it was worth while to go to bed at all, when a servant told me
that a man, who refused to give his name, wished particularly to see me.
The man was Feversham. There was only a lamp burning in the verandah,
and the night was dark, so that I did not recognise him until he was
close to me."
And at once Ethne interrupted.
"How did he look?"
Willoughby wrinkled his forehead and opened his eyes wide.
"Really, I do not know," he said doubtfully. "Much like other men, I
suppose, who have been a year or two in the Soudan, a trifle overtrained
and that sort of thing."
"Never mind," said Ethne, with a sigh of disappointment. For five years
she had heard no word of Harry Feversham. She fairly hungered for news
of him, for the sound of his habitual phrases, for the description of
his familiar gestures. She had the woman's anxiety for his bodily
health, she wished to know whether he had changed in face or figure,
and, if so, how and in what measure. But she glanced at the obtuse,
unobservant countenance of Captain Willoughby, and she understood that
however much she craved for these particulars, she must go without.
"I beg your pardon," she said. "Will you go on?"
"I asked him what he wanted," Willoughby resumed, "and why he had not
sent in his name. 'You would not have seen me if I had,' he replied, and
he drew a packet of letters out of his pocket. Now, those letters, Miss
Eustace, had been written a long while ago by General Gordon in Khartum.
They had been carried down the Nile as far as Berber. But the day after
they reached Berber, that town surrendered to the Mahdists. Abou Fatma,
the messenger who carried them, hid them in the wall of the house of an
Arab called Yusef, who sold rock-salt in the market-place. Abou was then
thrown into prison on suspicion, and escaped to Suakin. The letters
remained hidden in that wall until Feversham recovered them. I looked
over them and saw that they were of no value, and I asked Feversham
bluntly why he, who had not dared to accompany his regiment on active
service, had risked death and torture to get them back."
Standing upon that verandah, with the quiet pool of water in front of
him, Feversham had told his story quietly and without exaggeration. He
had related how he had fallen in with Abou Fatma at Suakin, how he had
planned the recovery of the letters, how the two men had travelled
together as far as Obak, and since Abou Fatma dared not go farther, how
he himself, driving his grey donkey, had gone on alone to Berber. He had
not even concealed that access of panic which had loosened his joints
when first he saw the low brown walls of the town and the towering date
palms behind on the bank of the Nile; which had set him running and
leaping across the empty desert in the sunlight, a marrowless thing of
fear. He made, however, one omission. He said nothing of the hours which
he had spent crouching upon the hot sand, with his coat drawn over his
head, while he drew a woman's face toward him across the continents and
seas and nerved himself to endure by the look of sorrow which it wore.
"He went down into Berber at the setting of the sun," said Captain
Willoughby, and it was all that he had to say. It was enough, however,
for Ethne Eustace. She drew a deep breath of relief, her face softened,
there came a light into her grey eyes, and a smile upon her lips.
"He went down into Berber," she repeated softly.
"And found that the old town had been destroyed by the orders of the
Emir, and that a new one was building upon its southern confines,"
continued Willoughby. "All the landmarks by which Feversham was to know
the house in which the letters were hidden had gone. The roofs had been
torn off, the houses dismantled, the front walls carried away. Narrow
alleys of crumbling fives-courts--that was how Feversham described the
place--crossing this way and that and gaping to the stars. Here and
there perhaps a broken tower rose up, the remnant of a rich man's house.
But of any sign which could tell a man where the hut of Yusef, who had
once sold rock-salt in the market-place, had stood, there was no hope in
those acres of crumbling mud. The foxes had already made their burrows
there."
The smile faded from Ethne's face, but she looked again at the white
feather lying in her palm, and she laughed with a great contentment. It
was yellow with the desert dust. It was a proof that in this story there
was to be no word of failure.
"Go on," she said.
Willoughby related the despatch of the negro with the donkey to Abou
Fatma at the Wells of Obak.
"Feversham stayed for a fortnight in Berber," Willoughby continued. "A
week during which he came every morning to the well and waited for the
return of his negro from Obak, and a week during which that negro
searched for Yusef, who had once sold rock-salt in the market-place. I
doubt, Miss Eustace, if you can realise, however hard you try, what that
fortnight must have meant to Feversham--the anxiety, the danger, the
continued expectation that a voice would bid him halt and a hand fall
upon his shoulder, the urgent knowledge that if the hand fell, death
would be the least part of his penalty. I imagine the town--a town of
low houses and broad streets of sand, dug here and there into pits for
mud wherewith to build the houses, and overhead the blistering sun and
a hot shadowless sky. In no corner was there any darkness or
concealment. And all day a crowd jostled and shouted up and down these
streets--for that is the Mahdist policy to crowd the towns so that all
may be watched and every other man may be his neighbour's spy. Feversham
dared not seek the shelter of a roof at night, for he dared not trust
his tongue. He could buy his food each day at the booths, but he was
afraid of any conversation. He slept at night in some corner of the old
deserted town, in the acres of the ruined fives-courts. For the same
reason he must not slink in the by-ways by day lest any should question
him about his business; nor listen on the chance of hearing Yusef's name
in the public places lest other loiterers should joke with him and draw
him into their talk. Nor dare he in the daylight prowl about those
crumbled ruins. From sunrise to sunset he must go quickly up and down
the streets of the town like a man bent upon urgent business which
permits of no delay. And that continued for a fortnight, Miss Eustace! A
weary, trying life, don't you think? I wish I could tell you of it as
vividly as he told me that night upon the balcony of the palace at
Suakin."
Ethne wished it too with all her heart. Harry Feversham had made his
story very real that night to Captain Willoughby; so that even after the
lapse of fifteen months this unimaginative creature was sensible of a
contrast and a deficiency in his manner of narration.
"In front of us was the quiet harbour and the Red Sea, above us the
African stars. Feversham spoke in the quietest manner possible, but with
a peculiar deliberation and with his eyes fixed upon my face, as though
he was forcing me to feel with him and to understand. Even when he
lighted his cigar he did not avert his eyes. For by this time I had
given him a cigar and offered him a chair. I had really, I assure you,
Miss Eustace. It was the first time in four years that he had sat with
one of his equals, or indeed with any of his countrymen on a footing of
equality. He told me so. I wish I could remember all that he told me."
Willoughby stopped and cudgelled his brains helplessly. He gave up the
effort in the end.
"Well," he resumed, "after Feversham had skulked for a fortnight in
Berber, the negro discovered Yusef, no longer selling salt, but tending
a small plantation of dhurra on the river's edge. From Yusef, Feversham
obtained particulars enough to guide him to the house where the letters
were concealed in the inner wall. But Yusef was no longer to be trusted.
Possibly Feversham's accent betrayed him. The more likely conjecture is
that Yusef took Feversham for a spy, and thought it wise to be
beforehand and to confess to Mohammed-el-Kheir, the Emir, his own share
in the concealment of the letters. That, however, is a mere conjecture.
The important fact is this. On the same night Feversham went alone to
old Berber."
"Alone!" said Ethne. "Yes?"
"He found the house fronting a narrow alley, and the sixth of the row.
The front wall was destroyed, but the two side walls and the back wall
still stood. Three feet from the floor and two feet from the right-hand
corner the letters were hidden in that inner wall. Feversham dug into
the mud bricks with his knife; he made a hole wherein he could slip his
hand. The wall was thick; he dug deep, stopping now and again to feel
for the packet. At last his fingers clasped and drew it out; as he hid
it in a fold of his jibbeh, the light of a lantern shone upon him from
behind."
Ethne started as though she had been trapped herself. Those acres of
roofless fives-courts, with here and there a tower showing up against
the sky, the lonely alleys, the dead silence here beneath the stars, the
cries and the beating of drums and the glare of lights from the new
town, Harry Feversham alone with the letters, with, in a word, some
portion of his honour redeemed, and finally, the lantern flashing upon
him in that solitary place,--the scene itself and the progress of the
incidents were so visible to Ethne at that moment that even with the
feather in her open palm she could hardly bring herself to believe that
Harry Feversham had escaped.
"Well, well?" she asked.
"He was standing with his face to the wall, the light came from the
alley behind him. He did not turn, but out of the corner of his eye he
could see a fold of a white robe hanging motionless. He carefully
secured the package, with a care indeed and a composure which astonished
him even at that moment. The shock had strung him to a concentration and
lucidity of thought unknown to him till then. His fingers were
trembling, he remarked, as he tied the knots, but it was with
excitement, and an excitement which did not flurry. His mind worked
rapidly, but quite coolly, quite deliberately. He came to a perfectly
definite conclusion as to what he must do. Every faculty which he
possessed was extraordinarily clear, and at the same time
extraordinarily still. He had his knife in his hand, he faced about
suddenly and ran. There were two men waiting. Feversham ran at the man
who held the lantern. He was aware of the point of a spear, he ducked
and beat it aside with his left arm, he leaped forward and struck with
his right. The Arab fell at his feet; the lantern was extinguished.
Feversham sprang across the white-robed body and ran eastward, toward
the open desert. But in no panic; he had never been so collected. He was
followed by the second soldier. He had foreseen that he would be
followed. If he was to escape, it was indeed necessary that he should
be. He turned a corner, crouched behind a wall, and as the Arab came
running by he leaped out upon his shoulders. And again as he leaped he
struck."
Captain Willoughby stopped at this point of his story and turned towards
Ethne. He had something to say which perplexed and at the same time
impressed him, and he spoke with a desire for an explanation.
"The strangest feature of those few fierce, short minutes," he said,
"was that Feversham felt no fear. I don't understand that, do you? From
the first moment when the lantern shone upon him from behind, to the
last when he turned his feet eastward, and ran through the ruined alleys
and broken walls toward the desert and the Wells of Obak, he felt no
fear."
This was the most mysterious part of Harry Feversham's story to Captain
Willoughby. Here was a man who so shrank from the possibilities of
battle, that he must actually send in his papers rather than confront
them; yet when he stood in dire and immediate peril he felt no fear.
Captain Willoughby might well turn to Ethne for an explanation.
There had been no mystery in it to Harry Feversham, but a great
bitterness of spirit. He had sat on the verandah at Suakin, whittling
away at the edge of Captain Willoughby's table with the very knife which
he had used in Berber to dig out the letters, and which had proved so
handy a weapon when the lantern shone out behind him--the one glimmering
point of light in that vast acreage of ruin. Harry Feversham had kept it
carefully uncleansed of blood; he had treasured it all through his
flight across the two hundred and forty odd miles of desert into Suakin;
it was, next to the white feathers, the thing which he held most
precious of his possessions, and not merely because it would serve as a
corroboration of his story to Captain Willoughby, but because the weapon
enabled him to believe and realise it himself. A brown clotted rust
dulled the whole length of the blade, and often during the first two
days and nights of his flight, when he travelled alone, hiding and
running and hiding again, with the dread of pursuit always at his heels,
he had taken the knife from his breast, and stared at it with
incredulous eyes, and clutched it close to him like a thing of comfort.
He had lost his way amongst the sandhills of Obak on the evening of the
second day, and had wandered vainly, with his small store of dates and
water exhausted, until he had stumbled and lay prone, parched and
famished and enfeebled, with the bitter knowledge that Abou Fatma and
the Wells were somewhere within a mile of the spot on which he lay. But
even at that moment of exhaustion the knife had been a talisman and a
help. He grasped the rough wooden handle, all too small for a Western
hand, and he ran his fingers over the rough rust upon the blade, and the
weapon spoke to him and bade him take heart, since once he had been put
to the test and had not failed. But long before he saw the white houses
of Suakin that feeling of elation vanished, and the knife became an
emblem of the vain tortures of his boyhood and the miserable folly which
culminated in his resignation of his commission. He understood now the
words which Lieutenant Sutch had spoken in the grill-room of the
Criterion Restaurant, when citing Hamlet as his example, "The thing
which he saw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and in
the consequence--that he shrank from. Yet when the moment of action
comes sharp and immediate, does he fail?" And remembering the words,
Harry Feversham sat one May night, four years afterwards, in Captain
Willoughby's verandah, whittling away at the table with his knife, and
saying over and over again in a bitter savage voice: "It was an
illusion, but an illusion which has caused a great deal of suffering to
a woman I would have shielded from suffering. But I am well paid for it,
for it has wrecked my life besides."
Captain Willoughby could not understand, any more than General Feversham
could have understood, or than Ethne had. But Willoughby could at all
events remember and repeat, and Ethne had grown by five years of
unhappiness since the night when Harry Feversham, in the little room
off the hall at Lennon House, had told her of his upbringing, of the
loss of his mother, and the impassable gulf between his father and
himself, and of the fear of disgrace which had haunted his nights and
disfigured the world for him by day.
"Yes, it was an illusion," she cried. "I understand. I might have
understood a long while since, but I would not. When those feathers came
he told me why they were sent, quite simply, with his eyes on mine. When
my father knew of them, he waited quite steadily and faced my father."
There was other evidence of the like kind not within Ethne's knowledge.
Harry Feversham had journeyed down to Broad Place in Surrey and made his
confession no less unflinchingly to the old general. But Ethne knew
enough. "It was the possibility of cowardice from which he shrank, not
the possibility of hurt," she exclaimed. "If only one had been a little
older, a little less sure about things, a little less narrow! I should
have listened. I should have understood. At all events, I should not, I
think, have been cruel."
Not for the first time did remorse for that fourth feather which she had
added to the three, seize upon her. She sat now crushed by it into
silence. Captain Willoughby, however, was a stubborn man, unwilling upon
any occasion to admit an error. He saw that Ethne's remorse by
implication condemned himself, and that he was not prepared to suffer.
"Yes, but these fine distinctions are a little too elusive for practical
purposes," he said. "You can't run the world on fine distinctions; so I
cannot bring myself to believe that we three men were at all to blame,
and if we were not, you of all people can have no reason for
self-reproach."
Ethne did not consider what he precisely meant by the last reference to
herself. For as he leaned complacently back in his seat, anger against
him flamed suddenly hot in her. Occupied by his story, she had ceased to
take stock of the story-teller. Now that he had ended, she looked him
over from head to foot. An obstinate stupidity was the mark of the man
to her eye. How dare he sit in judgment upon the meanest of his fellows,
let alone Harry Feversham? she asked, and in the same moment recollected
that she herself had endorsed his judgment. Shame tingled through all
her blood; she sat with her lips set, keeping Willoughby under watch
from the corners of her eyes, and waiting to pounce savagely the moment
he opened his lips. There had been noticeable throughout his narrative a
manner of condescension towards Feversham. "Let him use it again!"
thought Ethne. But Captain Willoughby said nothing at all, and Ethne
herself broke the silence. "Who of you three first thought of sending
the feathers?" she asked aggressively. "Not you?"
"No; I think it was Trench," he replied.
"Ah, Trench!" Ethne exclaimed. She struck one clenched hand, the hand
which held the feather, viciously into the palm of the other. "I will
remember that name."
"But I share his responsibility," Willoughby assured her. "I do not
shrink from it at all. I regret very much that we caused you pain and
annoyance, but I do not acknowledge to any mistake in this matter. I
take my feather back now, and I annul my accusation. But that is your
doing."
"Mine?" asked Ethne. "What do you mean?"
Captain Willoughby turned with surprise to his companion.
"A man may live in the Soudan and even yet not be wholly ignorant of
women and their great quality of forgiveness. You gave the feathers back
to Feversham in order that he might redeem his honour. That is evident."
Ethne sprang to her feet before Captain Willoughby had come to the end
of his sentence, and stood a little in front of him, with her face
averted, and in an attitude remarkably still. Willoughby in his
ignorance, like many another stupid man before him, had struck with a
shrewdness and a vigour which he could never have compassed by the use
of his wits. He had pointed out abruptly and suddenly to Ethne a way
which she might have taken and had not, and her remorse warned her very
clearly that it was the way which she ought to have taken. But she could
rise to the heights. She did not seek to justify herself in her own
eyes, nor would she allow Willoughby to continue in his misconception.
She recognised that here she had failed in charity and justice, and she
was glad that she had failed, since her failure had been the opportunity
of greatness to Harry Feversham.
"Will you repeat what you said?" she asked in a low voice; "and ever so
slowly, please."
"You gave the feathers back into Feversham's hand--"
"He told you that himself?"
"Yes;" and Willoughby resumed, "in order that he might by his
subsequent bravery compel the men who sent them to take them back, and
so redeem his honour."
"He did not tell you that?"
"No. I guessed it. You see, Feversham's disgrace was, on the face of it,
impossible to retrieve. The opportunity might never have occurred--it
was not likely to occur. As things happened, Feversham still waited for
three years in the bazaar at Suakin before it did. No, Miss Eustace, it
needed a woman's faith to conceive that plan--a woman's encouragement to
keep the man who undertook it to his work."
Ethne laughed and turned back to him. Her face was tender with pride,
and more than tender. Pride seemed in some strange way to hallow her, to
give an unimagined benignance to her eyes, an unearthly brightness to
the smile upon her lips and the colour upon her cheeks. So that
Willoughby, looking at her, was carried out of himself.
"Yes," he cried, "you were the woman to plan this redemption."
Ethne laughed again, and very happily.
"Did he tell you of a fourth white feather?" she asked.
"No."
"I shall tell you the truth," she said, as she resumed her seat. "The
plan was of his devising from first to last. Nor did I encourage him to
its execution. For until to-day I never heard a word of it. Since the
night of that dance in Donegal I have had no message from Mr. Feversham,
and no news of him. I told him to take up those three feathers because
they were his, and I wished to show him that I agreed with the
accusations of which they were the symbols. That seems cruel? But I did
more. I snapped a fourth white feather from my fan and gave him that to
carry away too. It is only fair that you should know. I wanted to make
an end for ever and ever, not only of my acquaintanceship with him, but
of every kindly thought he might keep of me, of every kindly thought I
might keep of him. I wanted to be sure myself, and I wanted him to be
sure, that we should always be strangers now and--and afterwards," and
the last words she spoke in a whisper. Captain Willoughby did not
understand what she meant by them. It is possible that only Lieutenant
Sutch and Harry Feversham himself would have understood.
"I was sad and sorry enough when I had done it," she resumed. "Indeed,
indeed, I think I have always been sorry since. I think that I have
never at any minute during these five years quite forgotten that fourth
white feather and the quiet air of dignity with which he took it. But
to-day I am glad." And her voice, though low, rang rich with the fulness
of her pride. "Oh, very glad! For this was his thought, his deed. They
are both all his, as I would have them be. I had no share, and of that I
am very proud. He needed no woman's faith, no woman's encouragement."
"Yet he sent this back to you," said Willoughby, pointing in some
perplexity to the feather which Ethne held.
"Yes," she said, "yes. He knew that I should be glad to know." And
suddenly she held it close to her breast. Thus she sat for a while with
her eyes shining, until Willoughby rose to his feet and pointed to the
gap in the hedge by which they had entered the enclosure.
"By Jove! Jack Durrance," he exclaimed.
Durrance was standing in the gap, which was the only means of entering
or going out.