"Come," she said.
Harry followed her into the room, and she closed the door, shutting out the noise.
"Now," she said, "will you tell me, if you please, why the feathers have been sent?"
She stood quietly before him; her face was pale, but Feversham could not gather from her expression any feeling which she might have beyond a desire and a determination to get at the truth. She spoke, too, with the same quietude. He answered, as he had answered before, directly and to the point, without any attempt at mitigation.
"A telegram came. It was sent by Castleton. It reached me when Captain Trench and Mr. Willoughby were dining with me. It told me that my regiment would be ordered on active service in Egypt. Castleton was dining with a man likely to know, and I did not question the accuracy of his message. He told me to tell Trench. I did not. I thought the matter over with the telegram in front of me. Castleton was leaving that night for Scotland, and he would go straight from Scotland to rejoin the regiment. He would not, therefore, see Trench for some weeks at the earliest, and by that time the telegram would very likely be forgotten or its date confused. I did not tell Trench. I threw the telegram into the fire, and that night sent in my papers. But Trench found out somehow. Durrance was at dinner, too,--good G.o.d, Durrance!" he suddenly broke out. "Most likely he knows like the rest."
It came upon him as something shocking and strangely new that his friend Durrance, who, as he knew very well, had been wont rather to look up to him, in all likelihood counted him a thing of scorn. But he heard Ethne speaking. After all, what did it matter whether Durrance knew, whether every man knew, from the South Pole to the North, since she, Ethne, knew?
"And is this all?" she asked.
"Surely it is enough," said he.
"I think not," she answered, and she lowered her voice a little as she went on. "We agreed, didn"t we, that no foolish misunderstandings should ever come between us? We were to be frank, and to take frankness each from the other without offence. So be frank with me! Please!" and she pleaded. "I could, I think, claim it as a right. At all events I ask for it 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 eyes upon the table. They could not be explained away; he wore "coward" like a blind man"s label; besides, he could never make her understand.
However, she wished for the explanation and had a right to it; she had been generous in asking for it, with a generosity not very common amongst 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 kept my fear to myself. There was no one to whom I could tell it. My mother was dead, and my father--" he stopped for a moment, with a deep intake of the breath. He could see his father, that lonely iron man, sitting at this very moment in his mother"s favourite seat upon the terrace, and looking over the moonlit fields toward the Suss.e.x Downs; he could imagine him dreaming of honours and distinctions worthy of the Fevershams to be gained immediately by his son in the Egyptian campaign.
Surely that old man"s stern heart would break beneath this blow. The magnitude of the bad thing which he had done, the misery which it would spread, were becoming very clear to Harry Feversham. He dropped his head between his hands and groaned aloud.
"My father," he resumed, "would, nay, could, never have understood. I know him. When danger came his way, it found him ready, but he did not foresee. That was my trouble always,--I foresaw. Any peril to be encountered, any risk to be run,--I foresaw them. I foresaw something else besides. My father would talk in his matter-of-fact way of the hours of waiting before the actual commencement of a battle, after the troops had been paraded. The mere antic.i.p.ation of the suspense and the strain of those hours was a torture to me. I foresaw the possibility of cowardice. Then one evening, when my father had his old friends about him on one of his Crimean nights, two dreadful stories were told--one of an officer, the other of a surgeon, who had both shirked. I was now confronted with the fact of cowardice. I took those stories up to bed with me. They never left my memory; they became a part of me. I saw myself behaving now as one, now as the other, of those two men had behaved, perhaps in the crisis of a battle bringing ruin upon my country, certainly dishonouring my father and all the dead men whose portraits 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 every hedge, 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 hounds were off. Durrance never knew what the moments of waiting before the coverts were drawn meant to me! So when this telegram came, I took the chance it seemed to offer and resigned."
He ended his explanation. He had spoken warily, having something to conceal. However earnestly she might ask for frankness, he must at all costs, for her sake, hide something from her. But at once she suspected it.
"Were you afraid, too, of disgracing me? Was I in any way the cause that you resigned?"
Feversham looked her in the eyes and lied:--
"No."
"If you had not been engaged to me, you would still have sent in your papers?"
"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"t understand;" and in the silence which followed upon her words Feversham heard something whirr and rattle upon the table. He looked and saw that she had slipped her engagement ring off her finger. It lay upon the table, 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 have married me and hidden it, had not these three feathers come?"
The words had been on her lips from the beginning, but she had not uttered them lest by a miracle he should after all have some unimagined explanation which would reestablish him in her thoughts. She had given him every chance. Now, however, she struck and laid bare the worst of his disloyalty. Feversham flinched, and he did not answer but allowed his silence to consent. Ethne, however, was just; she was in a way curious too: she wished to know the very bottom of the matter before she thrust it into the back of her mind.
"But yesterday," she said, "you were going to tell me something. I stopped you to point out the letter-box," and she laughed in a queer empty way. "Was it about the feathers?"
"Yes," answered Feversham, wearily. What did these persistent questions matter, since the feathers had come, since her ring lay flickering and winking on the table? "Yes, I think what you were saying rather compelled me."
"I remember," said Ethne, interrupting him rather hastily, "about seeing much of one another--afterwards. We will not speak of such things again," and Feversham swayed upon his feet as though he would fall. "I remember, too, you said one could make mistakes. You were right; I was wrong. 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 never recognised her value so thoroughly, as at this moment when he lost her.
She gleamed in the quiet room, wonderful, most wonderful, from the bright flowers in her hair to the white slipper on her foot. It was incredible to him that he should ever have won her. Yet he had, and disloyally had lost her. Then her voice broke in again upon his reflections.
"These, too, are yours. Will you take them, please?"
She was pointing with her fan to the feathers upon the table. Feversham obediently 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 was a fan of ivory and white feathers. She had broken off one of those feathers and added it on her own account to the three.
The thing which she had done was cruel, no doubt. But she wished to make an end--a complete, irrevocable end; though her voice was steady and her face, despite its pallor, calm, she was really tortured with humiliation and pain. All the details of Harry Feversham"s courtship, the interchange of looks, the letters she had written and received, the words which had been spoken, tingled and smarted unbearably in her recollections. Their lips had touched--she recalled it with horror. She desired never to see Harry Feversham after this night. Therefore she added her fourth feather to the three.
Harry Feversham took the feathers as she bade him, without a word of remonstrance, and indeed with a sort of dignity which even at that moment surprised her. All the time, too, he had kept his eyes steadily upon hers, he had answered her questions simply, there had been nothing abject in his manner; so that Ethne already began to regret this last thing which she had done. However, it _was_ done. Feversham had taken the 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 his eyes upon her face for some little while. Then very carefully he put the feathers into his breast pocket. Ethne at this time did not consider why. She only thought that here was the irrevocable end.
"We should be going back, I think," she said. "We have been some time away. 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 dance till daylight. We must show brave faces until daylight."
And with her hand resting upon his arm, they pa.s.sed into the ballroom.
CHAPTER V
THE PARIAH
Habit a.s.sisted them; the irresponsible chatter of the ballroom sprang automatically to their lips; the appearance of enjoyment never failed from off their faces; so that no one at Lennon House that night suspected that any swift cause of severance had come between them. Harry Feversham watched Ethne laugh and talk as though she had never a care, and was perpetually surprised, taking no thought that he wore the like mask of gaiety himself. When she swung past him the light rhythm of her feet almost persuaded him that her heart was in the dance. It seemed that she could even command the colour upon her cheeks. Thus they both wore brave faces as she had bidden. They even danced together. But all the while Ethne was conscious that she was holding up a great load of pain and humiliation which would presently crush her, and Feversham felt those four feathers burning at his breast. It was wonderful to him that the whole company did not know of them. He never approached a partner without the notion that she would turn upon him with the contemptuous name which was his upon her tongue. Yet he felt no fear on that account.
He would not indeed have cared had it happened, had the word been spoken. He had lost Ethne. He watched her and looked in vain amongst her guests, as indeed he surely knew he would, for a fit comparison.
There were women, pretty, graceful, even beautiful, but Ethne stood apart by the particular character of her beauty. The broad forehead, the perfect curve of the eyebrows, the great steady, clear, grey eyes, the full red lips which could dimple into tenderness and shut level with resolution, and the royal grace of her carriage, marked her out to Feversham"s thinking, and would do so in any company. He watched her in a despairing amazement that he had ever had a chance of owning her.
Only once did her endurance fail, and then only for a second. She was dancing with Feversham, and as she looked toward the windows she saw that the daylight was beginning to show very pale and cold upon the other side of the blinds.
"Look!" she said, and Feversham suddenly felt all her weight upon his arms. Her face lost its colour and grew tired and very grey. Her eyes shut tightly and then opened again. He thought that she would faint.
"The morning at last!" she exclaimed, and then in a voice as weary as her face, "I wonder whether it is right that one should suffer so much pain."
"Hush!" whispered Feversham. "Courage! A few minutes more--only a very few!" He stopped and stood in front of her until her strength returned.