Читать книгу The Four Feathers - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 12

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 anticipated 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.

"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 God, 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 Sussex 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 anticipation 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 passed into the ballroom.