The Four Feathers

by A. E. W. Mason

  CHAPTER XV

  THE STORY OF THE FIRST FEATHER

  "I will not interrupt you," said Ethne, as Willoughby took his seatbeside her, and he had barely spoken a score of words before she brokethat promise.

  "I am Deputy-Governor of Suakin," he began. "My chief was on leave inMay. You are fortunate enough not to know Suakin, Miss Eustace,particularly in May. No white woman can live in that town. It has asodden 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 theverandah on the first floor of the palace about ten o'clock at night,looking out over the harbour and the distillation works, and wonderingwhether it was worth while to go to bed at all, when a servant told methat 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 wasclose 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, Isuppose, who have been a year or two in the Soudan, a trifle overtrainedand that sort of thing."

  "Never mind," said Ethne, with a sigh of disappointment. For five yearsshe had heard no word of Harry Feversham. She fairly hungered for newsof him, for the sound of his habitual phrases, for the description ofhis familiar gestures. She had the woman's anxiety for his bodilyhealth, 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 thathowever 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 notsent in his name. 'You would not have seen me if I had,' he replied, andhe drew a packet of letters out of his pocket. Now, those letters, MissEustace, 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 afterthey reached Berber, that town surrendered to the Mahdists. Abou Fatma,the messenger who carried them, hid them in the wall of the house of anArab called Yusef, who sold rock-salt in the market-place. Abou was thenthrown into prison on suspicion, and escaped to Suakin. The lettersremained hidden in that wall until Feversham recovered them. I lookedover them and saw that they were of no value, and I asked Fevershambluntly why he, who had not dared to accompany his regiment on activeservice, had risked death and torture to get them back."

  Standing upon that verandah, with the quiet pool of water in front ofhim, Feversham had told his story quietly and without exaggeration. Hehad related how he had fallen in with Abou Fatma at Suakin, how he hadplanned the recovery of the letters, how the two men had travelledtogether as far as Obak, and since Abou Fatma dared not go farther, howhe himself, driving his grey donkey, had gone on alone to Berber. He hadnot even concealed that access of panic which had loosened his jointswhen first he saw the low brown walls of the town and the towering datepalms behind on the bank of the Nile; which had set him running andleaping across the empty desert in the sunlight, a marrowless thing offear. He made, however, one omission. He said nothing of the hours whichhe had spent crouching upon the hot sand, with his coat drawn over hishead, while he drew a woman's face toward him across the continents andseas 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 CaptainWilloughby, 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 theEmir, and that a new one was building upon its southern confines,"continued Willoughby. "All the landmarks by which Feversham was to knowthe house in which the letters were hidden had gone. The roofs had beentorn off, the houses dismantled, the front walls carried away. Narrowalleys of crumbling fives-courts--that was how Feversham described theplace--crossing this way and that and gaping to the stars. Here andthere 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 hadonce sold rock-salt in the market-place, had stood, there was no hope inthose acres of crumbling mud. The foxes had already made their burrowsthere."

  The smile faded from Ethne's face, but she looked again at the whitefeather lying in her palm, and she laughed with a great contentment. Itwas yellow with the desert dust. It was a proof that in this story therewas to be no word of failure.

  "Go on," she said.

  Willoughby related the despatch of the negro with the donkey to AbouFatma at the Wells of Obak.

  "Feversham stayed for a fortnight in Berber," Willoughby continued. "Aweek during which he came every morning to the well and waited for thereturn of his negro from Obak, and a week during which that negrosearched for Yusef, who had once sold rock-salt in the market-place. Idoubt, Miss Eustace, if you can realise, however hard you try, what thatfortnight must have meant to Feversham--the anxiety, the danger, thecontinued expectation that a voice would bid him halt and a hand fallupon his shoulder, the urgent knowledge that if the hand fell, deathwould be the least part of his penalty. I imagine the town--a town oflow houses and broad streets of sand, dug here and there into pits formud wherewith to build the houses, and overhead the blistering sun anda hot shadowless sky. In no corner was there any darkness orconcealment. And all day a crowd jostled and shouted up and down thesestreets--for that is the Mahdist policy to crowd the towns so that allmay be watched and every other man may be his neighbour's spy. Fevershamdared not seek the shelter of a roof at night, for he dared not trusthis tongue. He could buy his food each day at the booths, but he wasafraid of any conversation. He slept at night in some corner of the olddeserted town, in the acres of the ruined fives-courts. For the samereason he must not slink in the by-ways by day lest any should questionhim about his business; nor listen on the chance of hearing Yusef's namein the public places lest other loiterers should joke with him and drawhim into their talk. Nor dare he in the daylight prowl about thosecrumbled ruins. From sunrise to sunset he must go quickly up and downthe streets of the town like a man bent upon urgent business whichpermits of no delay. And that continued for a fortnight, Miss Eustace! Aweary, trying life, don't you think? I wish I could tell you of it asvividly as he told me that night upon the balcony of the palace atSuakin."

  Ethne wished it too with all her heart. Harry Feversham had made hisstory very real that night to Captain Willoughby; so that even after thelapse of fifteen months this unimaginative creature was sensible of acontrast and a deficiency in his manner of narration.

  "In front of us was the quiet harbour and the Red Sea, above us theAfrican stars. Feversham spoke in the quietest manner possible, but witha peculiar deliberation and with his eyes fixed upon my face, as thoughhe was forcing me to feel with him and to understand. Even when helighted his cigar he did not avert his eyes. For by this time I hadgiven 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 withone of his equals, or indeed with any of his countrymen on a footing ofequality. He told me so. I wish I could remember all that he told me."Willoughby stopped and cudgelled his brains helplessly. He gave up theeffort in the end.

  "Well," he resumed, "after Feversham had skulked for a fortnight inBerber, the negro discovered Yusef, no longer selling salt, but tendinga small plantation of dhurra on the river's edge. From Yusef, Fevershamobtained particulars enough to guide him to the house where the letterswere concealed in the inner wall. But Yusef was no longer to be trusted.Possibly Feversham's accent betrayed him. The more likely conjecture isthat Yusef took Feversham for a spy, and thought it wise to bebeforehand an
d to confess to Mohammed-el-Kheir, the Emir, his own sharein the concealment of the letters. That, however, is a mere conjecture.The important fact is this. On the same night Feversham went alone toold 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 wallstill stood. Three feet from the floor and two feet from the right-handcorner the letters were hidden in that inner wall. Feversham dug intothe mud bricks with his knife; he made a hole wherein he could slip hishand. The wall was thick; he dug deep, stopping now and again to feelfor the packet. At last his fingers clasped and drew it out; as he hidit in a fold of his jibbeh, the light of a lantern shone upon him frombehind."

  Ethne started as though she had been trapped herself. Those acres ofroofless fives-courts, with here and there a tower showing up againstthe sky, the lonely alleys, the dead silence here beneath the stars, thecries and the beating of drums and the glare of lights from the newtown, Harry Feversham alone with the letters, with, in a word, someportion of his honour redeemed, and finally, the lantern flashing uponhim in that solitary place,--the scene itself and the progress of theincidents were so visible to Ethne at that moment that even with thefeather in her open palm she could hardly bring herself to believe thatHarry Feversham had escaped.

  "Well, well?" she asked.

  "He was standing with his face to the wall, the light came from thealley behind him. He did not turn, but out of the corner of his eye hecould see a fold of a white robe hanging motionless. He carefullysecured the package, with a care indeed and a composure which astonishedhim even at that moment. The shock had strung him to a concentration andlucidity of thought unknown to him till then. His fingers weretrembling, he remarked, as he tied the knots, but it was withexcitement, and an excitement which did not flurry. His mind workedrapidly, but quite coolly, quite deliberately. He came to a perfectlydefinite conclusion as to what he must do. Every faculty which hepossessed was extraordinarily clear, and at the same timeextraordinarily still. He had his knife in his hand, he faced aboutsuddenly and ran. There were two men waiting. Feversham ran at the manwho held the lantern. He was aware of the point of a spear, he duckedand beat it aside with his left arm, he leaped forward and struck withhis right. The Arab fell at his feet; the lantern was extinguished.Feversham sprang across the white-robed body and ran eastward, towardthe open desert. But in no panic; he had never been so collected. He wasfollowed by the second soldier. He had foreseen that he would befollowed. If he was to escape, it was indeed necessary that he shouldbe. He turned a corner, crouched behind a wall, and as the Arab camerunning by he leaped out upon his shoulders. And again as he leaped hestruck."

  Captain Willoughby stopped at this point of his story and turned towardsEthne. He had something to say which perplexed and at the same timeimpressed 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? Fromthe first moment when the lantern shone upon him from behind, to thelast when he turned his feet eastward, and ran through the ruined alleysand broken walls toward the desert and the Wells of Obak, he felt nofear."

  This was the most mysterious part of Harry Feversham's story to CaptainWilloughby. Here was a man who so shrank from the possibilities ofbattle, that he must actually send in his papers rather than confrontthem; 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 greatbitterness of spirit. He had sat on the verandah at Suakin, whittlingaway at the edge of Captain Willoughby's table with the very knife whichhe had used in Berber to dig out the letters, and which had proved sohandy a weapon when the lantern shone out behind him--the one glimmeringpoint of light in that vast acreage of ruin. Harry Feversham had kept itcarefully uncleansed of blood; he had treasured it all through hisflight across the two hundred and forty odd miles of desert into Suakin;it was, next to the white feathers, the thing which he held mostprecious of his possessions, and not merely because it would serve as acorroboration of his story to Captain Willoughby, but because the weaponenabled him to believe and realise it himself. A brown clotted rustdulled the whole length of the blade, and often during the first twodays and nights of his flight, when he travelled alone, hiding andrunning and hiding again, with the dread of pursuit always at his heels,he had taken the knife from his breast, and stared at it withincredulous 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 thesecond day, and had wandered vainly, with his small store of dates andwater exhausted, until he had stumbled and lay prone, parched andfamished and enfeebled, with the bitter knowledge that Abou Fatma andthe Wells were somewhere within a mile of the spot on which he lay. Buteven at that moment of exhaustion the knife had been a talisman and ahelp. He grasped the rough wooden handle, all too small for a Westernhand, and he ran his fingers over the rough rust upon the blade, and theweapon spoke to him and bade him take heart, since once he had been putto the test and had not failed. But long before he saw the white housesof Suakin that feeling of elation vanished, and the knife became anemblem of the vain tortures of his boyhood and the miserable folly whichculminated in his resignation of his commission. He understood now thewords which Lieutenant Sutch had spoken in the grill-room of theCriterion Restaurant, when citing Hamlet as his example, "The thingwhich he saw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and inthe consequence--that he shrank from. Yet when the moment of actioncomes sharp and immediate, does he fail?" And remembering the words,Harry Feversham sat one May night, four years afterwards, in CaptainWilloughby's verandah, whittling away at the table with his knife, andsaying over and over again in a bitter savage voice: "It was anillusion, but an illusion which has caused a great deal of suffering toa 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 Fevershamcould have understood, or than Ethne had. But Willoughby could at allevents remember and repeat, and Ethne had grown by five years ofunhappiness since the night when Harry Feversham, in the little roomoff the hall at Lennon House, had told her of his upbringing, of theloss of his mother, and the impassable gulf between his father andhimself, and of the fear of disgrace which had haunted his nights anddisfigured the world for him by day.

  "Yes, it was an illusion," she cried. "I understand. I might haveunderstood a long while since, but I would not. When those feathers camehe told me why they were sent, quite simply, with his eyes on mine. Whenmy 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 hisconfession no less unflinchingly to the old general. But Ethne knewenough. "It was the possibility of cowardice from which he shrank, notthe possibility of hurt," she exclaimed. "If only one had been a littleolder, a little less sure about things, a little less narrow! I shouldhave listened. I should have understood. At all events, I should not, Ithink, have been cruel."

  Not for the first time did remorse for that fourth feather which she hadadded to the three, seize upon her. She sat now crushed by it intosilence. Captain Willoughby, however, was a stubborn man, unwilling uponany occasion to admit an error. He saw that Ethne's remorse byimplication condemned himself, and that he was not prepared to suffer.

  "Yes, but these fine distinctions are a little too elusive for practicalpurposes," he said. "You can't run the world on fine distinctions; so Icannot 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 forself-reproach."

  Ethne did not consider what he precisely meant by the last reference toherself. For as he leaned complacently bac
k in his seat, anger againsthim flamed suddenly hot in her. Occupied by his story, she had ceased totake stock of the story-teller. Now that he had ended, she looked himover from head to foot. An obstinate stupidity was the mark of the manto 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 recollectedthat she herself had endorsed his judgment. Shame tingled through allher blood; she sat with her lips set, keeping Willoughby under watchfrom the corners of her eyes, and waiting to pounce savagely the momenthe opened his lips. There had been noticeable throughout his narrative amanner of condescension towards Feversham. "Let him use it again!"thought Ethne. But Captain Willoughby said nothing at all, and Ethneherself broke the silence. "Who of you three first thought of sendingthe feathers?" she asked aggressively. "Not you?"

  "No; I think it was Trench," he replied.

  "Ah, Trench!" Ethne exclaimed. She struck one clenched hand, the handwhich held the feather, viciously into the palm of the other. "I willremember that name."

  "But I share his responsibility," Willoughby assured her. "I do notshrink from it at all. I regret very much that we caused you pain andannoyance, but I do not acknowledge to any mistake in this matter. Itake my feather back now, and I annul my accusation. But that is yourdoing."

  "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 ofwomen and their great quality of forgiveness. You gave the feathers backto Feversham in order that he might redeem his honour. That is evident."

  Ethne sprang to her feet before Captain Willoughby had come to the endof his sentence, and stood a little in front of him, with her faceaverted, and in an attitude remarkably still. Willoughby in hisignorance, like many another stupid man before him, had struck with ashrewdness and a vigour which he could never have compassed by the useof his wits. He had pointed out abruptly and suddenly to Ethne a waywhich she might have taken and had not, and her remorse warned her veryclearly that it was the way which she ought to have taken. But she couldrise to the heights. She did not seek to justify herself in her owneyes, nor would she allow Willoughby to continue in his misconception.She recognised that here she had failed in charity and justice, and shewas glad that she had failed, since her failure had been the opportunityof greatness to Harry Feversham.

  "Will you repeat what you said?" she asked in a low voice; "and ever soslowly, 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 hissubsequent bravery compel the men who sent them to take them back, andso 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--itwas not likely to occur. As things happened, Feversham still waited forthree years in the bazaar at Suakin before it did. No, Miss Eustace, itneeded a woman's faith to conceive that plan--a woman's encouragement tokeep 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, togive an unimagined benignance to her eyes, an unearthly brightness tothe smile upon her lips and the colour upon her cheeks. So thatWilloughby, 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. "Theplan was of his devising from first to last. Nor did I encourage him toits execution. For until to-day I never heard a word of it. Since thenight 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 becausethey were his, and I wished to show him that I agreed with theaccusations of which they were the symbols. That seems cruel? But I didmore. I snapped a fourth white feather from my fan and gave him that tocarry away too. It is only fair that you should know. I wanted to makean end for ever and ever, not only of my acquaintanceship with him, butof every kindly thought he might keep of me, of every kindly thought Imight keep of him. I wanted to be sure myself, and I wanted him to besure, that we should always be strangers now and--and afterwards," andthe last words she spoke in a whisper. Captain Willoughby did notunderstand what she meant by them. It is possible that only LieutenantSutch 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 havenever at any minute during these five years quite forgotten that fourthwhite feather and the quiet air of dignity with which he took it. Butto-day I am glad." And her voice, though low, rang rich with the fulnessof her pride. "Oh, very glad! For this was his thought, his deed. Theyare both all his, as I would have them be. I had no share, and of that Iam very proud. He needed no woman's faith, no woman's encouragement."

  "Yet he sent this back to you," said Willoughby, pointing in someperplexity to the feather which Ethne held.

  "Yes," she said, "yes. He knew that I should be glad to know." Andsuddenly she held it close to her breast. Thus she sat for a while withher eyes shining, until Willoughby rose to his feet and pointed to thegap 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 enteringor going out.