THE ANSWER TO THE OVERTURE
Ethne did not turn towards Durrance or move at all from her attitude.
She sat with her violin upon her knees, looking across the moonlit
garden to the band of silver in the gap of the trees; and she kept her
position deliberately. For it helped her to believe that Harry Feversham
himself was speaking to her, she was able to forget that he was speaking
through the voice of Durrance. She almost forgot that Durrance was even
in the room. She listened with Durrance's own intentness, and anxious
that the voice should speak very slowly, so that the message might take
a long time in the telling, and she gather it all jealously to her
heart.
"It was on the night before I started eastward into the desert--for the
last time," said Durrance, and the deep longing and regret with which he
dwelt upon that "last time" for once left Ethne quite untouched.
"Yes," she said. "That was in February. The middle of the month, wasn't
it? Do you remember the day? I should like to know the exact day if you
can tell me."
"The fifteenth," said Durrance; and Ethne repeated the date
meditatively.
"I was at Glenalla all February," she said. "What was I doing on the
fifteenth? It does not matter."
She had felt a queer sort of surprise all the time while Willoughby was
telling his story that morning, that she had not known, by some
instinct, of these incidents at the actual moment of their occurrence.
The surprise returned to her now. It was strange that she should have
had to wait for this August night and this summer garden of moonlight
and closed flowers before she learned of the meeting between Feversham
and Durrance on February 15 and heard the message. And remorse came to
her because of that delay. "It was my own fault," she said to herself.
"If I had kept my faith in him I should have known at once. I am well
punished." It did not at all occur to her that the message could convey
any but the best of news. It would carry on the good tidings which she
had already heard. It would enlarge and complete, so that this day might
be rounded to perfection. Of this she was quite sure.
"Well?" she said. "Go on!"
"I had been busy all that day in my office finishing up my work. I
turned the key in the door at ten o'clock, thinking with relief that for
six weeks I should not open it, and I strolled northward out of Wadi
Halfa along the Nile bank into the little town of Tewfikieh. As I
entered the main street I saw a small crowd--Arabs, negroes, a Greek or
two, and some Egyptian soldiers, standing outside the café, and lit up
by a glare of light from within. As I came nearer I heard the sound of a
violin and a zither, both most vilely played, jingling out a waltz. I
stood at the back of the crowd and looked over the shoulders of the men
in front of me into the room. It was a place of four bare whitewashed
walls; a bar stood in one corner, a wooden bench or two were ranged
against the walls, and a single unshaded paraffin lamp swung and glared
from the ceiling. A troupe of itinerant musicians were playing to that
crowd of negroes and Arabs and Egyptians for a night's lodging and the
price of a meal. There were four of them, and, so far as I could see,
all four were Greeks. Two were evidently man and wife. They were both
old, both slatternly and almost in rags; the man a thin, sallow-faced
fellow, with grey hair and a black moustache; the woman fat, coarse of
face, unwieldy of body. Of the other two, one it seemed must be their
daughter, a girl of seventeen, not good-looking really, but dressed and
turned out with a scrupulous care, which in those sordid and mean
surroundings lent her good looks. The care, indeed, with which she was
dressed assured me she was their daughter, and to tell the truth, I was
rather touched by the thought that the father and mother would go in
rags so that she at all costs might be trim. A clean ribbon bound back
her hair, an untorn frock of some white stuff clothed her tidily; even
her shoes were neat. The fourth was a young man; he was seated in the
window, with his back towards me, bending over his zither. But I could
see that he wore a beard. When I came up the old man was playing the
violin, though playing is not indeed the word. The noise he made was
more like the squeaking of a pencil on a slate; it set one's teeth on
edge; the violin itself seemed to squeal with pain. And while he
fiddled, and the young man hammered at his zither, the old woman and
girl slowly revolved in a waltz. It may sound comic to hear about, but
if you could have seen! ... It fairly plucked at one's heart. I do not
think that I have ever in my life witnessed anything quite so sad. The
little crowd outside, negroes, mind you, laughing at the troupe, passing
from one to the other any sort of low jest at their expense, and inside
the four white people--the old woman, clumsy, heavy-footed, shining with
heat, lumbering round slowly, panting with her exertions; the girl,
lissom and young; the two men with their discordant, torturing music;
and just above you the great planets and stars of an African sky, and
just about you the great silent and spacious dignity of the moonlit
desert. Imagine it! The very ineptness of the entertainment actually
hurt one."
He paused for a moment, while Ethne pictured to herself the scene which
he had described. She saw Harry Feversham bending over his zither, and
at once she asked herself, "What was he doing with that troupe?" It was
intelligible enough that he would not care to return to England. It was
certain that he would not come back to her, unless she sent for him. And
she knew from what Captain Willoughby had said that he expected no
message from her. He had not left with Willoughby the name of any place
where a letter could reach him. But what was he doing at Wadi Halfa,
masquerading with this itinerant troupe? He had money; so much
Willoughby had told her.
"You spoke to him?" she asked suddenly.
"To whom? Oh, to Harry?" returned Durrance. "Yes, afterwards, when I
found out it was he who was playing the zither."
"Yes, how did you find out?" Ethne asked.
"The waltz came to an end. The old woman sank exhausted upon the bench
against the whitewashed wall; the young man raised his head from his
zither; the old man scraped a new chord upon his violin, and the girl
stood forward to sing. Her voice had youth and freshness, but no other
quality of music. Her singing was as inept as the rest of the
entertainment. Yet the old man smiled, the mother beat time with her
heavy foot, and nodded at her husband with pride in their daughter's
accomplishment. And again in the throng the ill-conditioned talk, the
untranslatable jests of the Arabs and the negroes went their round. It
was horrible, don't you think?"
"Yes," answered Ethne, but slowly, in an absent voice. As she had felt
no sympathy for Durrance when he began to speak, so she had none to
spare for these three outcasts of fortune. She was too absorbed in the
mystery of Harry Feversham's presence at Wadi Halfa. She was listening
too closely for the message which he sent to her. Through the open
window the moon threw a broad panel of silver light upon the floor of
the room close to her feet. She sat gazing into it as she listened, as
though it was itself a window through which, if she looked but hard
enough, she might see, very small and far away, that lighted café
blazing upon the street of the little town of Tewfikieh on the frontier
of the Soudan.
"Well?" she asked. "And after the song was ended?"
"The young man with his back towards me," Durrance resumed, "began to
fumble out a solo upon the zither. He struck so many false notes, no
tune was to be apprehended at the first. The laughter and noise grew
amongst the crowd, and I was just turning away, rather sick at heart,
when some notes, a succession of notes played correctly by chance,
suddenly arrested me. I listened again, and a sort of haunting melody
began to emerge--a weak thin thing with no soul in it, a ghost of a
melody, and yet familiar. I stood listening in the street of sand,
between the hovels fringed by a row of stunted trees, and I was carried
away out of the East to Ramelton and to a summer night beneath a melting
sky of Donegal, when you sat by the open window as you sit now and
played the Musoline Overture, which you have played again to-night."
"It was a melody from this overture?" she exclaimed.
"Yes, and it was Harry Feversham who played the melody. I did not guess
it at once. I was not very quick in those days."
"But you are now," said Ethne.
"Quicker, at all events. I should have guessed it now. Then, however, I
was only curious. I wondered how it was that an itinerant Greek came to
pick up the tune. At all events, I determined to reward him for his
diligence. I thought that you would like me to."
"Yes," said Ethne, in a whisper.
"So, when he came out from the café, and with his hat in his hand passed
through the jeering crowd, I threw a sovereign into the hat. He turned
to me with a start of surprise. In spite of his beard I knew him.
Besides, before he could check himself, he cried out 'Jack!'"
"You can have made no mistake, then," said Ethne, in a wondering voice.
"No, the man who strummed upon the zither was--" the Christian name was
upon her lips, but she had the wit to catch it back unuttered--"was Mr.
Feversham. But he knew no music I remember very well." She laughed with
a momentary recollection of Feversham's utter inability to appreciate
any music except that which she herself evoked from her violin. "He had
no ear. You couldn't invent a discord harsh enough even to attract his
attention. He could never have remembered any melody from the Musoline
Overture."
"Yet it was Harry Feversham," he answered. "Somehow he had remembered. I
can understand it. He would have so little he cared to remember, and
that little he would have striven with all his might to bring clearly
back to mind. Somehow, too, by much practice, I suppose, he had managed
to elicit from his zither some sort of resemblance to what he
remembered. Can't you imagine him working the scrap of music out in his
brain, humming it over, whistling it uncounted times with perpetual
errors and confusions, until some fine day he got it safe and sure and
fixed it in his thoughts? I can. Can't you imagine him, then, picking it
out sedulously and laboriously on the strings? I can. Indeed, I can."
Thus Ethne got her answer, and Durrance interpreted it to her
understanding. She sat silent and very deeply moved by the story he had
told to her. It was fitting that this overture, her favourite piece of
music, should convey the message that he had not forgotten her, that in
spite of the fourth white feather he thought of her with friendship.
Harry Feversham had not striven so laboriously to learn that melody in
vain. Ethne was stirred as she had thought nothing would ever again have
the power to stir her. She wondered whether Harry, as he sat in the
little bare whitewashed café, and strummed out his music to the negroes
and Greeks and Arabs gathered about the window, had dreamed, as she had
done to-night, that somehow, thin and feeble as it was, some echo of the
melody might reach across the world. She knew now for very certain that,
however much she might in the future pretend to forget Harry Feversham,
it would never be more than a pretence. The vision of the lighted café
in the desert town would never be very far from her thoughts, but she
had no intention of relaxing on that account from her determination to
pretend to forget. The mere knowledge that she had at one time been
unjustly harsh to Harry, made her yet more resolved that Durrance should
not suffer for any fault of hers.
"I told you last year, Ethne, at Hill Street," Durrance resumed, "that I
never wished to see Feversham again. I was wrong. The reluctance was all
on his side and not at all on mine. For the moment that he realised he
had called out my name he tried to edge backward from me into the crowd,
he began to gabble Greek, but I caught him by the arm, and I would not
let him go. He had done you some great wrong. That I know; that I knew.
But I could not remember it then. I only remembered that years before
Harry Feversham had been my friend, my one great friend; that we had
rowed in the same college boat at Oxford, he at stroke, I at seven;
that the stripes on his jersey during three successive eights had made
my eyes dizzy during those last hundred yards of spurt past the barges.
We had bathed together in Sandford Lasher on summer afternoons. We had
had supper on Kennington Island; we had cut lectures and paddled up the
Cher to Islip. And here he was at Wadi Halfa, herding with that troupe,
an outcast, sunk to such a depth of ill-fortune that he must come to
that squalid little town and play the zither vilely before a crowd of
natives and a few Greek clerks for his night's lodging and the price of
a meal."
"No," Ethne interrupted suddenly. "It was not for that reason that he
went to Wadi Halfa."
"Why, then?" asked Durrance.
"I cannot think. But he was not in any need of money. His father had
continued his allowance, and he had accepted it."
"You are sure?"
"Quite sure. I heard it only to-day," said Ethne.
It was a slip, but Ethne for once was off her guard that night. She did
not even notice that she had made a slip. She was too engrossed in
Durrance's story. Durrance himself, however, was not less preoccupied,
and so the statement passed for the moment unobserved by either.
"So you never knew what brought Mr. Feversham to Halfa?" she asked. "Did
you not ask him? Why didn't you? Why?"
She was disappointed, and the bitterness of her disappointment gave
passion to her cry. Here was the last news of Harry Feversham, and it
was brought to her incomplete, like the half sheet of a letter. The
omission might never be repaired.
"I was a fool," said Durrance. There was almost as much regret in his
voice now as there had been in hers; and because of that regret he did
not remark the passion with which she had spoken. "I shall not easily
forgive myself. He was my friend, you see. I had him by the arm, and I
let him go. I was a fool." And he knocked upon his forehead with his
fist.
"He tried Arabic," Durrance resumed, "pleading that he and his
companions were just poor peaceable people, that if I had given him too
much money, I should take it back, and all the while he dragged away
from me. But I held him fast. I said, 'Harry Feversham, that won't do,'
and upon that he gave in and spoke in English, whispering it. 'Let me
go, Jack, let me go.' There was the crowd about us. It was evident that
Harry had some reason for secrecy; it might have been shame, for all I
knew, shame at his downfall. I said, 'Come up to my quarters in Halfa as
soon as you are free,' and I let him go. All that night I waited for him
on the verandah, but he did not come. In the morning I had to start
across the desert. I almost spoke of him to a friend who came to see me
start, to Calder, in fact--you know of him--the man who sent you the
telegram," said Durrance, with a laugh.
"Yes, I remember," Ethne answered.
It was the second slip she had made that night. The receipt of Calder's
telegram was just one of the things which Durrance was not to know. But
again she was unaware that she had made a slip at all. She did not even
consider how Durrance had come to know or guess that the telegram had
ever been despatched.
"At the very last moment," Durrance resumed, "when my camel had risen
from the ground, I stooped down to speak to him, to tell him to see to
Feversham. But I did not. You see I knew nothing about his allowance. I
merely thought that he had fallen rather low. It did not seem fair to
him that another should know of it. So I rode on and kept silence."
Ethne nodded her head. She could not but approve, however poignant her
regret for the lost news.
"So you never saw Mr. Feversham again?"
"I was away nine weeks. I came back blind," he answered simply, and the
very simplicity of his words went to Ethne's heart. He was apologising
for his blindness, which had hindered him from inquiring. She began to
wake to the comprehension that it was really Durrance who was speaking
to her, but he continued to speak, and what he said drove her quite out
of all caution.
"I went at once to Cairo, and Calder came with me. There I told him of
Harry Feversham, and how I had seen him at Tewfikieh. I asked Calder
when he got back to Halfa to make inquiries, to find and help Harry
Feversham if he could; I asked him, too, to let me know the result. I
received a letter from Calder a week ago, and I am troubled by it, very
much troubled."
"What did he say?" Ethne asked apprehensively, and she turned in her
chair away from the moonlight towards the shadows of the room and
Durrance. She bent forward to see his face, but the darkness hid it. A
sudden fear struck through her and chilled her blood, but out of the
darkness Durrance spoke.
"That the two women and the old Greek had gone back northward on a
steamer to Assouan."
"Mr. Feversham remained at Wadi Halfa, then? That is so, isn't it?" she
said eagerly.
"No," Durrance replied. "Harry Feversham did not remain. He slipped past
Halfa the day after I started toward the east. He went out in the
morning, and to the south."
"Into the desert?"
"Yes, but the desert to the south, the enemy's country. He went just as
I saw him, carrying his zither. He was seen. There can be no doubt."
Ethne was quite silent for a little while. Then she asked:--
"You have that letter with you?"
"Yes."
"I should like to read it."
She rose from her chair and walked across to Durrance. He took the
letter from his pocket and gave it to her, and she carried it over to
the window. The moonlight was strong. Ethne stood close by the window,
with a hand pressed upon her heart, and read it through once and again.
The letter was explicit; the Greek who owned the café at which the
troupe had performed admitted that Joseppi, under which name he knew
Feversham, had wandered south, carrying a water-skin and a store of
dates, though why, he either did not know or would not tell. Ethne had a
question to ask, but it was some time before she could trust her lips to
utter it distinctly and without faltering.
"What will happen to him?"
"At the best, capture; at the worst, death. Death by starvation, or
thirst, or at the hands of the Dervishes. But there is just a hope it
might be only capture and imprisonment. You see he was white. If caught,
his captors might think him a spy; they would be sure he had knowledge
of our plans and our strength. I think that they would most likely send
him to Omdurman. I have written to Calder. Spies go out and in from Wadi
Halfa. We often hear of things which happen in Omdurman. If Feversham is
taken there, sooner or later I shall know. But he must have gone mad. It
is the only explanation."
Ethne had another, and she knew hers to be the right one. She was off
her guard, and she spoke it aloud to Durrance.
"Colonel Trench," said she, "is a prisoner at Omdurman."
"Oh, yes," answered Durrance. "Feversham will not be quite alone. There
is some comfort in that, and perhaps something may be done. When I hear
from Calder I will tell you. Perhaps something may be done."
It was evident that Durrance had misconstrued her remark. He at all
events was still in the dark as to the motive which had taken Feversham
southward beyond the Egyptian patrols. And he must remain in the dark.
For Ethne did not even now slacken in her determination still to pretend
to have forgotten. She stood at the window with the letter clenched in
her hand. She must utter no cry, she must not swoon; she must keep very
still and quiet, and speak when needed with a quiet voice, even though
she knew that Harry Feversham had gone southward to join Colonel Trench
at Omdurman. But so much was beyond her strength. For as Colonel
Durrance began to speak again, the desire to escape, to be alone with
this terrible news, became irresistible. The cool quietude of the
garden, the dark shadows of the trees, called to her.
"Perhaps you will wonder," said Durrance, "why I have told you to-night
what I have up till now kept to myself. I did not dare to tell it you
before. I want to explain why."
Ethne did not notice the exultation in his voice; she did not consider
what his explanation might be; she only felt that she could not now
endure to listen to it. The mere sound of a human voice had become an
unendurable thing. She hardly knew indeed that Durrance was speaking,
she was only aware that a voice spoke, and that the voice must stop. She
was close by the window; a single silent step, and she was across the
sill and free. Durrance continued to speak out of the darkness,
engrossed in what he said, and Ethne did not listen to a word. She
gathered her skirts carefully, so that they should not rustle, and
stepped from the window. This was the third slip which she made upon
that eventful night.