The Four Feathers Part 4

She spoke without any impressive lowering of the voice, but in the steady, level tone of one stating the simplest imaginable fact.

Feversham caught his breath like a man in pain. But the girl's eyes were upon his face, and he sat still, staring in front of him without so much as a contraction of the forehead. But it seemed that he could not trust 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, a little better perhaps than most people. I do not feel that I have lost them at all," and she cast about for a while as if her thought was difficult to express. "You know how things happen," she resumed. "One goes along in a dull sort of way, and then suddenly a face springs out from the crowd of one's acquaintances, and you know it at once and certainly for the face of a friend, or rather you recognise it, though you have never seen it before. It is almost as though you had come upon some one long looked for and now gladly recovered. Well, such friends--they are few, no doubt, but after all only the few really count--such friends one does not lose, whether they are absent, or even--dead."

"Unless," said Feversham, slowly, "one has made a mistake. Suppose the face 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 a long 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 reined in her horse, laughed, and pointed with her whip.

They had come to the top of a hill a couple of miles from Ramelton. The road ran between stone walls enclosing open fields upon the left, and a wood of oaks and beeches on the right. A scarlet letter-box was built into 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 to post my letters to you during the anxious times." And so Feversham let slip 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 park wall had crumbled.

"That's where I used to climb over to post the letters. There's a tree on the other side of the wall as convenient as the letter-box. I used to run 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 drove up to the porch of the long, irregular grey house. "Well, we have still a 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 father would send the police to fetch them if they stayed away, just as he fetched your friend Mr. Durrance here. By the way, Mr. Durrance has sent me a present--a Guarnerius violin."

The door opened, and a thin, lank old man, with a fierce peaked face like a bird of prey, came out upon the steps. His face softened, however, into friendliness when he saw Feversham, and a smile played upon his lips. A stranger might have thought that he winked. But his left 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. The servants understand," and with that he went straightway back into the house.

The biographer of Dermod Eustace would need to bring a wary mind to his work. For though the old master of Lennon House has not lain twenty years in his grave, he is already swollen into a legendary character.

Anecdotes have grown upon his memory like barnacles, and any man in those parts with a knack of invention has only to foist his stories upon Dermod to ensure a ready credence. There are, however, definite facts.

He practised an ancient and tyrannous hospitality, keeping open house upon the road to Letterkenny, and forcing bed and board even upon strangers, as Durrance had once discovered. He was a man of another century, who looked out with a glowering, angry eye upon a topsy-turvy world, and would not be reconciled to it except after much alcohol. He was a sort of intoxicated Coriola.n.u.s, believing that the people should be shepherded with a stick, yet always mindful of his manners, even to the lowliest of women. It was said of him with pride by the townsfolk of Ramelton, that even at his worst, when he came galloping down the steep 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 a miracle keeping his saddle,--he had never ridden down any one except a man. There are two points to be added. He was rather afraid of his daughter, who wisely kept him doubtful whether she was displeased with him or not, and he had conceived a great liking for Harry Feversham.

Harry saw little of him that day, however. Dermod retired into the room which he was pleased to call his office, while Feversham and Ethne spent the afternoon fis.h.i.+ng for salmon in the Lennon River. It was an afternoon restful as a Sabbath, and the very birds were still. From the house the lawns fell steeply, shaded by trees and dappled by the sunlight, to a valley, at the bottom of which flowed the river swift and black under overarching boughs. There was a fall, where the water slid over rocks with a smoothness so unbroken that it looked solid except just at one point. There a spur stood sharply up, and the river broke back upon itself in an amber wave through which the sun shone. Opposite this spur they sat for a long while, talking at times, but for the most part 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, looked at each other with a smile, and so walked slowly back to the house. It was an afternoon which Feversham was long to remember; for the next night was the night of the dance, and as the band struck up the opening bars of the fourth waltz, Ethne left her position at the drawing-room door, and taking Feversham's arm pa.s.sed out into the hall.

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

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

She held the box out to him as she spoke,--a little white jeweller's cardboard 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 and unfastened the string. He looked at the address. The box had been forwarded from his lodgings, and he was not familiar with the handwriting.

"There is some mistake," he said as he shook the lid open, and then he stopped abruptly. Three white feathers fluttered out of the box, swayed and rocked for a moment in the air, and then, one after another, settled gently down upon the floor. They lay like flakes of snow upon the dark polished 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 his arm. 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 loyal confidence in her eyes showed she had never a doubt that his first word would 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 floated into the hall, and the trees whispered from the garden through the open door. 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 cruel kind of jest--"

"They were sent in deadly earnest."

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

"Who sent them?" she asked.

Feversham had not given a thought to that matter. The message was all in all, the men who had sent it so unimportant. But Ethne reached out her hand and took the box from him. There were three visiting cards lying at the 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 the feathers into her hand with a vague thought that merely to touch them would help her to comprehension. They lay upon the palm of her white glove, and she blew gently upon them, and they swam up into the air and hung fluttering and rocking. As they floated downward she caught them again, 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 the dreadful thing for so many years dreadfully antic.i.p.ated had at last befallen him. He was known for a coward. The word which had long blazed upon the wall of his thoughts in letters of fire was now written large in the public places. He stood as he had once stood before the portraits of his fathers, mutely accepting condemnation. It was the girl who denied, as she still kneeled upon the floor.

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

"Yet it is true."

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

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