The Four Feathers

by A. E. W. Mason

  CHAPTER IV

  THE BALL AT LENNON HOUSE

  Yet Feversham had travelled to Dublin by the night mail after his ridewith Durrance in the Row. He had crossed Lough Swilly on the followingfore-noon by a little cargo steamer, which once a week steamed up theLennon River as far as Ramelton. On the quay-side Ethne was waiting forhim in her dog-cart; she gave him the hand and the smile of a comrade.

  "You are surprised to see me," said she, noting the look upon his face.

  "I always am," he replied. "For always you exceed my thoughts of you;"and the smile changed upon her face--it became something more than thesmile of a comrade.

  "I shall drive slowly," she said, as soon as his traps had been packedinto the cart; "I brought no groom on purpose. There will be guestscoming to-morrow. We have only to-day."

  She drove along the wide causeway by the riverside, and turned up thesteep, narrow street. Feversham sat silently by her side. It was hisfirst visit to Ramelton, and he gazed about him, noting the dark thicketof tall trees which climbed on the far side of the river, the old greybridge, the noise of the water above it as it sang over shallows, andthe drowsy quiet of the town, with a great curiosity and almost a prideof ownership, since it was here that Ethne lived, and all these thingswere part and parcel of her life.

  She was at that time a girl of twenty-one, tall, strong, and supple oflimb, and with a squareness of shoulder proportionate to her height. Shehad none of that exaggerated slope which our grandmothers esteemed, yetshe lacked no grace of womanhood on that account, and in her walk shewas light-footed as a deer. Her hair was dark brown, and she wore itcoiled upon the nape of her neck; a bright colour burned in her cheeks,and her eyes, of a very clear grey, met the eyes of those to whom shetalked with a most engaging frankness. And in character she was thecounterpart of her looks. She was honest; she had a certain simplicity,the straightforward simplicity of strength which comprises muchgentleness and excludes violence. Of her courage there is a story stilltold in Ramelton, which Feversham could never remember without a thrillof wonder. She had stopped at a door on that steep hill leading down tothe river, and the horse which she was driving took fright at the mereclatter of a pail and bolted. The reins were lying loose at the moment;they fell on the ground before Ethne could seize them. She was thusseated helpless in the dog-cart, and the horse was tearing down to wherethe road curves sharply over the bridge. The thing which she did, shedid quite coolly. She climbed over the front of the dog-cart as itpitched and raced down the hill, and balancing herself along the shafts,reached the reins at the horse's neck, and brought the horse to a stopten yards from the curve. But she had, too, the defects of herqualities, although Feversham was not yet aware of them.

  Ethne during the first part of this drive was almost as silent as hercompanion; and when she spoke, it was with an absent air, as though shehad something of more importance in her thoughts. It was not until shehad left the town and was out upon the straight, undulating road toLetterkenny that she turned quickly to Feversham and uttered it.

  "I saw this morning that your regiment was ordered from India to Egypt.You could have gone with it, had I not come in your way. There wouldhave been chances of distinction. I have hindered you, and I am verysorry. Of course, you could not know that there was any possibility ofyour regiment going, but I can understand it is very hard for you to beleft behind. I blame myself."

  Feversham sat staring in front of him for a moment. Then he said, in avoice suddenly grown hoarse:--

  "You need not."

  "How can I help it? I blame myself the more," she continued, "because Ido not see things quite like other women. For instance, supposing thatyou had gone to Egypt, and that the worst had happened, I should havefelt very lonely, of course, all my days, but I should have known quitesurely that when those days were over, you and I would see much of oneanother."

  She spoke without any impressive lowering of the voice, but in thesteady, level tone of one stating the simplest imaginable fact.Feversham caught his breath like a man in pain. But the girl's eyeswere upon his face, and he sat still, staring in front of him without somuch as a contraction of the forehead. But it seemed that he could nottrust himself to answer. He kept his lips closed, and Ethne continued:--

  "You see I can put up with the absence of the people I care about, alittle better perhaps than most people. I do not feel that I have lostthem at all," and she cast about for a while as if her thought wasdifficult to express. "You know how things happen," she resumed. "Onegoes along in a dull sort of way, and then suddenly a face springs outfrom the crowd of one's acquaintances, and you know it at once andcertainly for the face of a friend, or rather you recognise it, thoughyou have never seen it before. It is almost as though you had come uponsome one long looked for and now gladly recovered. Well, suchfriends--they are few, no doubt, but after all only the few reallycount--such friends one does not lose, whether they are absent, oreven--dead."

  "Unless," said Feversham, slowly, "one has made a mistake. Suppose theface in the crowd is a mask, what then? One may make mistakes."

  Ethne shook her head decidedly.

  "Of that kind, no. One may seem to have made mistakes, and perhaps for along while. But in the end one would be proved not to have made them."

  And the girl's implicit faith took hold upon the man and tortured him,so that he could no longer keep silence.

  "Ethne," he cried, "you don't know--" But at that moment Ethne reinedin her horse, laughed, and pointed with her whip.

  They had come to the top of a hill a couple of miles from Ramelton. Theroad ran between stone walls enclosing open fields upon the left, and awood of oaks and beeches on the right. A scarlet letter-box was builtinto the left-hand wall, and at that Ethne's whip was pointed.

  "I wanted to show you that," she interrupted. "It was there I used topost my letters to you during the anxious times." And so Feversham letslip his opportunity of speech.

  "The house is behind the trees to the right," she continued.

  "The letter-box is very convenient," said Feversham.

  "Yes," said Ethne, and she drove on and stopped again where the parkwall had crumbled.

  "That's where I used to climb over to post the letters. There's a treeon the other side of the wall as convenient as the letter-box. I used torun down the half-mile of avenue at night."

  "There might have been thieves," exclaimed Feversham.

  "There were thorns," said Ethne, and turning through the gates she droveup to the porch of the long, irregular grey house. "Well, we have stilla day before the dance."

  "I suppose the whole country-side is coming," said Feversham.

  "It daren't do anything else," said Ethne, with a laugh. "My fatherwould send the police to fetch them if they stayed away, just as hefetched your friend Mr. Durrance here. By the way, Mr. Durrance hassent me a present--a Guarnerius violin."

  The door opened, and a thin, lank old man, with a fierce peaked facelike a bird of prey, came out upon the steps. His face softened,however, into friendliness when he saw Feversham, and a smile playedupon his lips. A stranger might have thought that he winked. But hisleft eyelid continually drooped over the eye.

  "How do you do?" he said. "Glad to see you. Must make yourself at home.If you want any whiskey, stamp twice on the floor with your foot. Theservants understand," and with that he went straightway back into thehouse.

  * * * * *

  The biographer of Dermod Eustace would need to bring a wary mind to hiswork. For though the old master of Lennon House has not lain twentyyears in his grave, he is already swollen into a legendary character.Anecdotes have grown upon his memory like barnacles, and any man inthose parts with a knack of invention has only to foist his stories uponDermod to ensure a ready credence. There are, however, definite facts.He practised an ancient and tyrannous hospitality, keeping open houseupon the road to Letterkenny, and forcing bed and board even uponstrangers, as Durrance had once discovered. He was a man of anothercent
ury, who looked out with a glowering, angry eye upon a topsy-turvyworld, and would not be reconciled to it except after much alcohol. Hewas a sort of intoxicated Coriolanus, believing that the people shouldbe shepherded with a stick, yet always mindful of his manners, even tothe lowliest of women. It was said of him with pride by the townsfolkof Ramelton, that even at his worst, when he came galloping down thesteep cobbled streets, mounted on a big white mare of seventeen hands,with his inseparable collie dog for his companion,--a gaunt, grey-faced,grey-haired man, with a drooping eye, swaying with drink, yet by amiracle keeping his saddle,--he had never ridden down any one except aman. There are two points to be added. He was rather afraid of hisdaughter, who wisely kept him doubtful whether she was displeased withhim or not, and he had conceived a great liking for Harry Feversham.

  Harry saw little of him that day, however. Dermod retired into the roomwhich he was pleased to call his office, while Feversham and Ethne spentthe afternoon fishing for salmon in the Lennon River. It was anafternoon restful as a Sabbath, and the very birds were still. From thehouse the lawns fell steeply, shaded by trees and dappled by thesunlight, to a valley, at the bottom of which flowed the river swift andblack under overarching boughs. There was a fall, where the water slidover rocks with a smoothness so unbroken that it looked solid exceptjust at one point. There a spur stood sharply up, and the river brokeback upon itself in an amber wave through which the sun shone. Oppositethis spur they sat for a long while, talking at times, but for the mostpart listening to the roar of the water and watching its perpetual flow.And at last the sunset came, and the long shadows. They stood up, lookedat each other with a smile, and so walked slowly back to the house. Itwas an afternoon which Feversham was long to remember; for the nextnight was the night of the dance, and as the band struck up the openingbars of the fourth waltz, Ethne left her position at the drawing-roomdoor, and taking Feversham's arm passed out into the hall.

  The hall was empty, and the front door stood open to the cool of thesummer night. From the ballroom came the swaying lilt of the music andthe beat of the dancers' feet. Ethne drew a breath of relief at herreprieve from her duties, and then dropping her partner's arm, crossedto a side table.

  "The post is in," she said. "There are letters, one, two, three, foryou, and a little box."

  She held the box out to him as she spoke,--a little white jeweller'scardboard box,--and was at once struck by its absence of weight.

  "It must be empty," she said.

  Yet it was most carefully sealed and tied. Feversham broke the seals andunfastened the string. He looked at the address. The box had beenforwarded from his lodgings, and he was not familiar with thehandwriting.

  "There is some mistake," he said as he shook the lid open, and then hestopped abruptly. Three white feathers fluttered out of the box, swayedand rocked for a moment in the air, and then, one after another, settledgently down upon the floor. They lay like flakes of snow upon the darkpolished boards. But they were not whiter than Harry Feversham's cheeks.He stood and stared at the feathers until he felt a light touch upon hisarm. He looked and saw Ethne's gloved hand upon his sleeve.

  "What does it mean?" she asked. There was some perplexity in her voice,but nothing more than perplexity. The smile upon her face and the loyalconfidence in her eyes showed she had never a doubt that his first wordwould lift it from her. "What does it mean?"

  "That there are things which cannot be hid, I suppose," said Feversham.

  For a little while Ethne did not speak. The languorous music floatedinto the hall, and the trees whispered from the garden through the opendoor. Then she shook his arm gently, uttered a breathless little laugh,and spoke as though she were pleading with a child.

  "I don't think you understand, Harry. Here are three white feathers.They were sent to you in jest? Oh, of course in jest. But it is a cruelkind of jest--"

  "They were sent in deadly earnest."

  He spoke now, looking her straight in the eyes. Ethne dropped her handfrom his sleeve.

  "Who sent them?" she asked.

  Feversham had not given a thought to that matter. The message was all inall, the men who had sent it so unimportant. But Ethne reached out herhand and took the box from him. There were three visiting cards lying atthe bottom, and she took them out and read them aloud.

  "Captain Trench, Mr. Castleton, Mr. Willoughby. Do you know these men?"

  "All three are officers of my old regiment."

  The girl was dazed. She knelt down upon the floor and gathered thefeathers into her hand with a vague thought that merely to touch themwould help her to comprehension. They lay upon the palm of her whiteglove, and she blew gently upon them, and they swam up into the air andhung fluttering and rocking. As they floated downward she caught themagain, and so she slowly felt her way to another question.

  "Were they justly sent?" she asked.

  "Yes," said Harry Feversham.

  He had no thought of denial or evasion. He was only aware that thedreadful thing for so many years dreadfully anticipated had at lastbefallen him. He was known for a coward. The word which had long blazedupon the wall of his thoughts in letters of fire was now written largein the public places. He stood as he had once stood before the portraitsof his fathers, mutely accepting condemnation. It was the girl whodenied, as she still kneeled upon the floor.

  "I do not believe that is true," she said. "You could not look me in theface so steadily were it true. Your eyes would seek the floor, notmine."

  "Yet it is true."

  "Three little white feathers," she said slowly; and then, with a sob inher throat, "This afternoon we were under the elms down by the LennonRiver--do you remember, Harry?--just you and I. And then come threelittle white feathers, and the world's at an end."

  "Oh, don't!" cried Harry, and his voice broke upon the word. Up till nowhe had spoken with a steadiness matching the steadiness of his eyes. Butthese last words of hers, the picture which they evoked in his memories,the pathetic simplicity of her utterance, caught him by the heart. ButEthne seemed not to hear the appeal. She was listening with her faceturned toward the ballroom. The chatter and laughter of the voices theregrew louder and nearer. She understood that the music had ceased. Sherose quickly to her feet, clenching the feathers in her hand, and openeda door. It was the door of her sitting room.

  "Come," she said.

  Harry followed her into the room, and she closed the door, shutting outthe noise.

  "Now," she said, "will you tell me, if you please, why the feathers havebeen sent?"

  She stood quietly before him; her face was pale, but Feversham could notgather from her expression any feeling which she might have beyond adesire and a determination to get at the truth. She spoke, too, with thesame quietude. He answered, as he had answered before, directly and tothe point, without any attempt at mitigation.

  "A telegram came. It was sent by Castleton. It reached me when CaptainTrench and Mr. Willoughby were dining with me. It told me that myregiment would be ordered on active service in Egypt. Castleton wasdining with a man likely to know, and I did not question the accuracy ofhis message. He told me to tell Trench. I did not. I thought the matterover with the telegram in front of me. Castleton was leaving that nightfor Scotland, and he would go straight from Scotland to rejoin theregiment. He would not, therefore, see Trench for some weeks at theearliest, and by that time the telegram would very likely be forgottenor its date confused. I did not tell Trench. I threw the telegram intothe fire, and that night sent in my papers. But Trench found outsomehow. Durrance was at dinner, too,--good God, Durrance!" he suddenlybroke out. "Most likely he knows like the rest."

  It came upon him as something shocking and strangely new that his friendDurrance, who, as he knew very well, had been wont rather to look up tohim, in all likelihood counted him a thing of scorn. But he heard Ethnespeaking. After all, what did it matter whether Durrance knew, whetherevery man knew, from the South Pole to the North, since she, Ethne,knew?

  "And is this all?" she ask
ed.

  "Surely it is enough," said he.

  "I think not," she answered, and she lowered her voice a little as shewent on. "We agreed, didn't we, that no foolish misunderstandings shouldever come between us? We were to be frank, and to take frankness eachfrom the other without offence. So be frank with me! Please!" and shepleaded. "I could, I think, claim it as a right. At all events I ask forit as I shall never ask for anything else in all my life."

  There was a sort of explanation of his act, Harry Feversham remembered;but it was so futile when compared with the overwhelming consequence.Ethne had unclenched her hands; the three feathers lay before his eyesupon the table. They could not be explained away; he wore "coward" likea blind man's label; besides, he could never make her understand.However, she wished for the explanation and had a right to it; she hadbeen generous in asking for it, with a generosity not very commonamongst women. So Feversham gathered his wits and explained:--

  "All my life I have been afraid that some day I should play the coward,and from the very first I knew that I was destined for the army. I keptmy fear to myself. There was no one to whom I could tell it. My motherwas dead, and my father--" he stopped for a moment, with a deep intakeof the breath. He could see his father, that lonely iron man, sitting atthis very moment in his mother's favourite seat upon the terrace, andlooking over the moonlit fields toward the Sussex Downs; he couldimagine him dreaming of honours and distinctions worthy of theFevershams to be gained immediately by his son in the Egyptian campaign.Surely that old man's stern heart would break beneath this blow. Themagnitude of the bad thing which he had done, the misery which it wouldspread, were becoming very clear to Harry Feversham. He dropped his headbetween his hands and groaned aloud.

  "My father," he resumed, "would, nay, could, never have understood. Iknow him. When danger came his way, it found him ready, but he did notforesee. That was my trouble always,--I foresaw. Any peril to beencountered, any risk to be run,--I foresaw them. I foresaw somethingelse besides. My father would talk in his matter-of-fact way of thehours of waiting before the actual commencement of a battle, after thetroops had been paraded. The mere anticipation of the suspense and thestrain of those hours was a torture to me. I foresaw the possibility ofcowardice. Then one evening, when my father had his old friends abouthim on one of his Crimean nights, two dreadful stories were told--oneof an officer, the other of a surgeon, who had both shirked. I was nowconfronted with the fact of cowardice. I took those stories up to bedwith me. They never left my memory; they became a part of me. I sawmyself behaving now as one, now as the other, of those two men hadbehaved, perhaps in the crisis of a battle bringing ruin upon mycountry, certainly dishonouring my father and all the dead men whoseportraits hung ranged in the hall. I tried to get the best of my fears.I hunted, but with a map of the country-side in my mind. I foresaw everyhedge, every pit, every treacherous bank."

  "Yet you rode straight," interrupted Ethne. "Mr. Durrance told me so."

  "Did I?" said Feversham, vaguely. "Well, perhaps I did, once the houndswere off. Durrance never knew what the moments of waiting before thecoverts were drawn meant to me! So when this telegram came, I took thechance it seemed to offer and resigned."

  He ended his explanation. He had spoken warily, having something toconceal. However earnestly she might ask for frankness, he must at allcosts, for her sake, hide something from her. But at once she suspectedit.

  "Were you afraid, too, of disgracing me? Was I in any way the cause thatyou resigned?"

  Feversham looked her in the eyes and lied:--

  "No."

  "If you had not been engaged to me, you would still have sent in yourpapers?"

  "Yes."

  Ethne slowly stripped a glove off her hand. Feversham turned away.

  "I think that I am rather like your father," she said. "I don'tunderstand;" and in the silence which followed upon her words Fevershamheard something whirr and rattle upon the table. He looked and saw thatshe had slipped her engagement ring off her finger. It lay upon thetable, the stones winking at him.

  "And all this--all that you have told to me," she exclaimed suddenly,with her face very stern, "you would have hidden from me? You would havemarried me and hidden it, had not these three feathers come?"

  The words had been on her lips from the beginning, but she had notuttered them lest by a miracle he should after all have some unimaginedexplanation which would reestablish him in her thoughts. She had givenhim every chance. Now, however, she struck and laid bare the worst ofhis disloyalty. Feversham flinched, and he did not answer but allowedhis silence to consent. Ethne, however, was just; she was in a waycurious too: she wished to know the very bottom of the matter before shethrust it into the back of her mind.

  "But yesterday," she said, "you were going to tell me something. Istopped you to point out the letter-box," and she laughed in a queerempty way. "Was it about the feathers?"

  "Yes," answered Feversham, wearily. What did these persistent questionsmatter, since the feathers had come, since her ring lay flickering andwinking on the table? "Yes, I think what you were saying rathercompelled me."

  "I remember," said Ethne, interrupting him rather hastily, "aboutseeing much of one another--afterwards. We will not speak of such thingsagain," and Feversham swayed upon his feet as though he would fall. "Iremember, too, you said one could make mistakes. You were right; I waswrong. One can do more than seem to make them. Will you, if you please,take back your ring?"

  Feversham picked up the ring and held it in the palm of his hand,standing very still. He had never cared for her so much, he had neverrecognised her value so thoroughly, as at this moment when he lost her.She gleamed in the quiet room, wonderful, most wonderful, from thebright flowers in her hair to the white slipper on her foot. It wasincredible to him that he should ever have won her. Yet he had, anddisloyally had lost her. Then her voice broke in again upon hisreflections.

  "These, too, are yours. Will you take them, please?"

  She was pointing with her fan to the feathers upon the table. Fevershamobediently reached out his hand, and then drew it back in surprise.

  "There are four," he said.

  Ethne did not reply, and looking at her fan Feversham understood. It wasa fan of ivory and white feathers. She had broken off one of thosefeathers and added it on her own account to the three.

  The thing which she had done was cruel, no doubt. But she wished to makean end--a complete, irrevocable end; though her voice was steady and herface, despite its pallor, calm, she was really tortured with humiliationand pain. All the details of Harry Feversham's courtship, theinterchange of looks, the letters she had written and received, thewords which had been spoken, tingled and smarted unbearably in herrecollections. Their lips had touched--she recalled it with horror. Shedesired never to see Harry Feversham after this night. Therefore sheadded her fourth feather to the three.

  Harry Feversham took the feathers as she bade him, without a word ofremonstrance, and indeed with a sort of dignity which even at thatmoment surprised her. All the time, too, he had kept his eyes steadilyupon hers, he had answered her questions simply, there had been nothingabject in his manner; so that Ethne already began to regret this lastthing which she had done. However, it _was_ done. Feversham had takenthe four feathers.

  He held them in his fingers as though he was about to tear them across.But he checked the action. He looked suddenly towards her, and kept hiseyes upon her face for some little while. Then very carefully he put thefeathers into his breast pocket. Ethne at this time did not considerwhy. She only thought that here was the irrevocable end.

  "We should be going back, I think," she said. "We have been some timeaway. Will you give me your arm?" In the hall she looked at the clock."Only eleven o'clock," she said wearily. "When we dance here, we dancetill daylight. We must show brave faces until daylight."

  And with her hand resting upon his arm, they passed into the ballroom.