To Durrance it seemed that in all his experience nothing so horrible had ever occurred as this outburst by the woman who was Ethne’s friend, nothing so unforeseen.
“Ethne wrote to you at Wadi Halfa out of pity,” she went on, “that was all. She wrote out of pity; and, having written, she was afraid of what she had done; and being afraid, she had not courage to tell you she was afraid. You would not have blamed her, if she had frankly admitted it; you would have remained her friend. But she had not the courage.”
Durrance knew that there was another explanation of Ethne’s hesitations and timidities. He knew, too, that the other explanation was the true one. But to-morrow he himself would be gone from the Salcombe estuary, and Ethne would be on her way to the Irish Channel and Donegal. It was not worth while to argue against Mrs. Adair’s slanders. Besides, he was close upon the stile which separated the garden of The Pool from the fields. Once across that stile, he would be free of Mrs. Adair. He contented himself with saying quietly: —
“You are not just to Ethne.”
At that simple utterance the madness of Mrs. Adair went from her. She recognised the futility of all that she had said, of her boastings of courage, of her detractions of Ethne. Her words might be true or not, they could achieve nothing. Durrance was always in the room with Ethne, never upon the terrace with Mrs. Adair. She became conscious of her degradation, and she fell to excuses.
“I am a bad woman, I suppose. But after all, I have not had the happiest of lives. Perhaps there is something to be said for me.” It sounded pitiful and weak, even in her ears; but they had reached the stile, and Durrance had turned towards her. She saw that his face lost something of its sternness. He was standing quietly, prepared now to listen to what she might wish to say. He remembered that in the old days when he could see, he had always associated her with a dignity of carriage and a reticence of speech. It seemed hardly possible that it was the same woman who spoke to him now, and the violence of the contrast made him ready to believe that there must be perhaps something to be said on her behalf.
“Will you tell me?” he said gently.
“I was married almost straight from school. I was the merest girl. I knew nothing, and I was married to a man of whom I knew nothing. It was my mother’s doing, and no doubt she thought that she was acting for the very best. She was securing for me a position of a kind, and comfort and release from any danger of poverty. I accepted what she said blindly, ignorantly. I could hardly have refused, indeed, for my mother was an imperious woman, and I was accustomed to obedience. I did as she told me and married dutifully the man whom she chose. The case is common enough, no doubt, but its frequency does not make it easier of endurance.”
“But Mr. Adair?” said Durrance. “After all, I knew him. He was older, no doubt, than you, but he was kind. I think, too, he cared for you.”
“Yes. He was kindness itself, and he cared for me. Both things are true. The knowledge that he did care for me was the one link, if you understand. At the beginning I was contented, I suppose. I had a house in town and another here. But it was dull,” and she stretched out her arms. “Oh, how dull it was! Do you know the little back streets in a manufacturing town? Rows of small houses, side by side, with nothing to relieve them of their ugly regularity, each with the self-same windows, the self-same door, the self-same door-step. Overhead a drift of smoke, and every little green thing down to the plants in the window dirty and black. The sort of street whence any crazy religious charlatan who can promise a little colour to their grey lives can get as many votaries as he wants. Well, when I thought over my life, one of those little streets always came into my mind. There are women, heaps of them, no doubt, to whom the management of a big house, the season in London, the ordinary round of visits, are sufficient. I, worse luck, was not one of them. Dull! You, with your hundred thousand things to do, cannot conceive how oppressively dull my life was. And that was not all!” She hesitated, but she could not stop midway, and it was far too late for her to recover her ground. She went on to the end.
“I married, as I say, knowing nothing of the important things. I believed at the first that mine was just the allotted life of all women. But I began soon to have my doubts. I got to know that there was something more to be won out of existence than mere dulness; at least, that there was something more for others, though not for me. One could not help learning that. One passed a man and a woman riding together, and one chanced to look into the woman’s face as one passed; or one saw, perhaps, the woman alone and talked with her for a little while, and from the happiness of her looks and voice one knew with absolute certainty that there was ever so much more. Only the chance of that ever so much more my mother had denied to me.”
All the sternness had now gone from Durrance’s face, and Mrs. Adair was speaking with a great simplicity. Of the violence which she had used before there was no longer any trace. She did not appeal for pity, she was not even excusing herself; she was just telling her story quietly and gently.
“And then you came,” she continued. “I met you, and met you again. You went away upon your duties and you returned; and I learnt now, not that there was ever so much more, but just what that ever so much more was. But it was still, of course, denied to me. However, in spite of that I felt happier. I thought that I should be quite content to have you for a friend, to watch your progress, and to feel pride in it. But you see — Ethne came, too, and you turned to her. At once — oh, at once! If you had only been a little less quick to turn to her! In a very short while I was sad and sorry that you had ever come into my life.”
“I knew nothing of this,” said Durrance. “I never suspected. I am sorry.”
“I took care you should not suspect,” said Mrs. Adair. “But I tried to keep you; with all my wits I tried. No match-maker in the world ever worked so hard to bring two people together as I did to bring together Ethne and Mr. Feversham, and I succeeded.”
The statement came upon Durrance with a shock. He leaned back against the stile and could have laughed. Here was the origin of the whole sad business. From what small beginnings it had grown! It is a trite reflection, but the personal application of it is apt to take away the breath. It was so with Durrance as he thought himself backwards into those days when he had walked on his own path, heedless of the people with whom he came in touch, never dreaming that they were at that moment influencing his life right up to his dying day. Feversham’s disgrace and ruin, Ethne’s years of unhappiness, the wearying pretences of the last few months, all had their origin years ago when Mrs. Adair, to keep Durrance to herself, threw Feversham and Ethne into each other’s company.
“I succeeded,” continued Mrs. Adair. “You told me that I had succeeded one morning in the Row. How glad I was! You did not notice it, I am sure. The next moment you took all my gladness from me by telling me you were starting for the Soudan. You were away three years. They were not happy years for me. You came back. My husband was dead, but Ethne was free. Ethne refused you, but you went blind and she claimed you. You can see what ups and downs have fallen to me. But these months here have been the worst.”
“I am very sorry,” said Durrance. Mrs. Adair was quite right, he thought. There was indeed something to be said on her behalf. The world had gone rather hardly with her. He was able to realise what she had suffered, since he was suffering in much the same way himself. It was quite intelligible to him why she had betrayed Ethne’s secret that night upon the terrace, and he could not but be gentle with her.
“I am very sorry, Mrs. Adair,” he repeated lamely. There was nothing more which he could find to say, and he held out his hand to her.
“Good-bye,” she said, and Durrance climbed over the stile and crossed the fields to his house.
Mrs. Adair stood by that stile for a long while after he had gone. She had shot her bolt and hit no one but herself and the man for whom she cared.
She realised that distinctly. She looked forward a little, too, and she understood that if Durrance
did not, after all, keep Ethne to her promise and marry her and go with her to her country, he would come back to Guessens. That reflection showed Mrs. Adair yet more clearly the folly of her outcry. If she had only kept silence, she would have had a very true and constant friend for her neighbour, and that would have been something. It would have been a good deal. But, since she had spoken, they could never meet without embarrassment, and, practise cordiality as they might, there would always remain in their minds the recollection of what she had said and he had listened to on the afternoon when he left for Wiesbaden.
CHAPTER XXIV
ON THE NILE
IT WAS A callous country inhabited by a callous race, thought Calder, as he travelled down the Nile from Wadi Halfa to Assouan on his three months’ furlough. He leaned over the rail of the upper deck of the steamer and looked down upon the barge lashed alongside. On the lower deck of the barge among the native passengers stood an angareb, whereon was stretched the motionless figure of a human being shrouded in a black veil. The angareb and its burden had been carried on board early that morning at Korosko by two Arabs, who now sat laughing and chattering in the stern of the barge. It might have been a dead man or a dead woman who lay still and stretched out upon the bedstead, so little heed did they give to it. Calder lifted his eyes and looked to his right and his left across glaring sand and barren rocks shaped roughly into the hard forms of pyramids. The narrow meagre strip of green close by the water’s edge upon each bank was the only response which the Soudan made to Spring and Summer and the beneficent rain. A callous country inhabited by a callous people.
Calder looked downwards again to the angareb upon the barge’s deck and the figure lying upon it. Whether it was man or woman he could not tell. The black veil lay close about the face, outlining the nose, the hollows of the eyes and the mouth; but whether the lips wore a moustache and the chin a beard, it did not reveal.
The slanting sunlight crept nearer and nearer to the angareb. The natives seated close to it moved into the shadow of the upper deck, but no one moved the angareb, and the two men laughing in the stern gave no thought to their charge. Calder watched the blaze of yellow light creep over the black recumbent figure from the feet upwards. It burnt at last bright and pitiless upon the face. Yet the living creature beneath the veil never stirred. The veil never fluttered above the lips, the legs remained stretched out straight, the arms lay close against the side.
Calder shouted to the two men in the stern.
“Move the angareb into the shadow,” he cried, “and be quick!”
The Arabs rose reluctantly and obeyed him.
“Is it a man or woman?” asked Calder.
“A man. We are taking him to the hospital at Assouan, but we do not think that he will live. He fell from a palm tree three weeks ago.”
“You give him nothing to eat or drink?”
“He is too ill.”
It was a common story and the logical outcome of the belief that life and death are written and will inevitably befall after the manner of the writing. That man lying so quiet beneath the black covering had probably at the beginning suffered nothing more serious than a bruise, which a few simple remedies would have cured within a week. But he had been allowed to lie, even as he lay upon the angareb, at the mercy of the sun and the flies, unwashed, unfed, and with his thirst unslaked. The bruise had become a sore, the sore had gangrened, and when all remedies were too late, the Egyptian Mudir of Korosko had discovered the accident and sent the man on the steamer down to Assouan. But, familiar though the story was, Calder could not dismiss it from his thoughts. The immobility of the sick man upon the native bedstead in a way fascinated him, and when towards sunset a strong wind sprang up and blew against the stream, he felt an actual comfort in the knowledge that the sick man would gain some relief from it. And when his neighbour that evening at the dinner table spoke to him with a German accent, he suddenly asked upon an impulse: —
“You are not a doctor by any chance?”
“Not a doctor,” said the German, “but a student of medicine at Bonn. I came from Cairo to see the Second Cataract, but was not allowed to go farther than Wadi Halfa.”
Calder interrupted him at once. “Then I will trespass upon your holiday and claim your professional assistance.”
“For yourself? With pleasure, though I should never have guessed you were ill,” said the student, smiling good-naturedly behind his eyeglasses.
“Nor am I. It is an Arab for whom I ask your help.”
“The man on the bedstead?”
“Yes, if you will be so good. I will warn you — he was hurt three weeks ago, and I know these people. No one will have touched him since he was hurt. The sight will not be pretty. This is not a nice country for untended wounds.”
The German student shrugged his shoulders. “All experience is good,” said he, and the two men rose from the table and went out on to the upper deck.
The wind had freshened during the dinner, and, blowing up stream, had raised waves so that the steamer and its barge tossed and the water broke on board.
“He was below there,” said the student, as he leaned over the rail and peered downwards to the lower deck of the barge alongside. It was night, and the night was dark. Above that lower deck only one lamp, swung from the centre of the upper deck, glimmered and threw uncertain lights and uncertain shadows over a small circle. Beyond the circle all was black darkness, except at the bows, where the water breaking on board flung a white sheet of spray. It could be seen like a sprinkle of snow driven by the wind, it could be heard striking the deck like the lash of a whip.
“He has been moved,” said the German. “No doubt he has been moved. There is no one in the bows.”
Calder bent his head downwards and stared into the darkness for a little while without speaking.
“I believe the angareb is there,” he said at length. “I believe it is.”
Followed by the German, he hurried down the stairway to the lower deck of the steamer and went to the side. He could make certain now. The angareb stood in a wash of water on the very spot to which at Calder’s order it had been moved that morning. And on the angareb the figure beneath the black covering lay as motionless as ever, as inexpressive of life and feeling, though the cold spray broke continually upon its face.
“I thought it would be so,” said Calder. He got a lantern and with the German student climbed across the bulwarks on to the barge. He summoned the two Arabs.
“Move the angareb from the bows,” he said; and when they had obeyed, “Now take that covering off. I wish my friend who is a doctor to see the wound.”
The two men hesitated, and then one of them with an air of insolence objected. “There are doctors in Assouan, whither we are taking him.”
Calder raised the lantern and himself drew the veil away from off the wounded man. “Now if you please,” he said to his companion. The German student made his examination of the wounded thigh, while Calder held the lantern above his head. As Calder had predicted, it was not a pleasant business; for the wound crawled. The German student was glad to cover it up again.
“I can do nothing,” he said. “Perhaps, in a hospital, with baths and dressings — ! Relief will be given at all events; but more? I do not know. Here I could not even begin to do anything at all. Do these two men understand English?”
“No,” answered Calder.
“Then I can tell you something. He did not get the hurt by falling out of any palm tree. That is a lie. The injury was done by the blade of a spear or some weapon of the kind.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Calder bent down suddenly towards the Arab on the angareb. Although he never moved, the man was conscious. Calder had been looking steadily at him, and he saw that his eyes followed the spoken words.
“You understand English?” said Calder.
The Arab could not answer with his lips, but a look of comprehension came into his face.
“Where do yo
u come from?” asked Calder.
The lips tried to move, but not so much as a whisper escaped from them. Yet his eyes spoke, but spoke vainly. For the most which they could tell was a great eagerness to answer. Calder dropped upon his knee close by the man’s head and, holding the lantern close, enunciated the towns.
“From Dongola?”
No gleam in the Arab’s eyes responded to that name.
“From Metemneh? From Berber? From Omdurman? Ah!”
The Arab answered to that word. He closed his eyelids. Calder went on still more eagerly.
“You were wounded there? No. Where then? At Berber? Yes. You were in prison at Omdurman and escaped? No. Yet you were wounded.”
Calder sank back upon his knee and reflected. His reflections roused in him some excitement. He bent down to the Arab’s ear and spoke in a lower key.
“You were helping some one to escape? Yes. Who? El Kaimakam Trench? No.” He mentioned the names of other white captives in Omdurman, and to each name the Arab’s eyes answered “No.” “It was Effendi Feversham, then?” he said, and the eyes assented as clearly as though the lips had spoken.
But this was all the information which Calder could secure. “I too am pledged to help Effendi Feversham,” he said, but in vain. The Arab could not speak, he could not so much as tell his name, and his companions would not. Whatever those two men knew or suspected, they had no mind to meddle in the matter themselves, and they clung consistently to a story which absolved them from responsibility. Kinsmen of theirs in Korosko, hearing that they were travelling to Assouan, had asked them to take charge of the wounded man, who was a stranger to them, and they had consented. Calder could get nothing more explicit from them than this statement, however closely he questioned them. He had under his hand the information which he desired, the news of Harry Feversham for which Durrance asked by every mail, but it was hidden from him in a locked book. He stood beside the helpless man upon the angareb. There he was, eager enough to speak, but the extremity of weakness to which he had sunk laid a finger upon his lips. All that Calder could do was to see him safely bestowed within the hospital at Assouan. “Will he recover?” Calder asked, and the doctors shook their heads in doubt. There was a chance perhaps, a very slight chance; but at the best, recovery would be slow.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 382