'Three little white feathers,' were the words. Trench leaned back against the wall. It was he who had devised that message. 'Three little white feathers,' the voice repeated. 'This afternoon we were under the elms down by the Lennon River-do you remember, Harry? — just you and I. And then came three little white feathers; and the world's at an end.'
Trench had no longer any doubts. The man was quoting words, and words, no doubt, spoken by this girl Ethne on the night when the three feathers came. 'Harry,' she had said. 'Do you remember, Harry?' Trench was certain.
'Feversham!' he cried. 'Feversham!' And he shook the man whom he held in his arms and called to him again. 'Under the elms by the Lennon River-' Visions of green shade touched with gold, and of the sunlight flickering between the leaves, caught at Trench and drew him like a mirage in that desert of which Feversham had spoken. Feversham had been under the elms of the Lennon River on that afternoon before the feathers came, and he was in the House of Stone at Omdurman. But why? Trench asked himself the question and was not spared the answer.
'Willoughby took his feather back'-and upon that Feversham broke off. His voice rambled. He seemed to be running somewhere amid sandhills which continually shifted and danced about him as he ran, so that he could not tell which way he went. He was in the last stage of fatigue, too, so that his voice in his delirium became querulous and weak. 'Abou Fatma!' he cried, and the cry was the cry of a man whose throat is parched, and whose limbs fail beneath him. 'Abou Fatma! Abou Fatma!' He stumbled as he ran, picked himself up, ran and stumbled again; and about him the deep soft sand piled itself into pyramids, built itself into long slopes and ridges, and levelled itself flat with an extraordinary and a malicious rapidity. 'Abou Fatma!' cried Feversham, and he began to argue in a weak obstinate voice. 'I know the wells are here-close by-within half a mile. I know they are-I know they are.'
The clue to that speech Trench had not got. He knew nothing of Feversham's adventure at Berber; he could not tell that the wells were the Wells of Obak, or that Feversham, tired with the hurry of his travelling, and after a long day's march without water, had lost his way among the shifting sandhills. But he did know that Willoughby had taken back his feather, and he made a guess as to the motive which had brought Feversham now to the House of Stone. Even on that point, however, he was not to remain in doubt; for in a while he heard his own name upon Feversham's lips.
Remorse seized upon Colonel Trench. The sending of the feathers had been his invention and his alone. He could not thrust the responsibility of his invention upon either Willoughby or Castleton; it was just his doing. He had thought it rather a shrewd and clever stroke, he remembered at the time-a vengeance eminently just. Eminently just, no doubt, it was, but he had not thought of the woman. He had not imagined that she might be present when the feathers came. He had indeed almost forgotten the episode, he had never speculated upon the consequences, and now they rose up and smote the smiter.
And his remorse was to grow. For the night was not nearly at its end. All through the dark slow hours he supported Feversham and heard him talk. Now Feversham was lurking in the bazaar at Suakin and during the siege.
'During the siege,' thought Trench. 'While we were there, then, he was herding with the camel-drivers in the bazaar learning their tongues, watching for his chance. Three years of it!'
At another moment Feversham was slinking up the Nile to Wadi Halfa with a zither, in the company of some itinerant musicians, hiding from any who might remember him and accuse him with his name. Trench heard of a man slipping out from Wadi Halfa, crossing the Nile and wandering with the assumed manner of a lunatic southwards, starving and waterless, until one day he was snapped up by a Mahdist caravan and dragged to Dongola as a spy. And at Dongola things had happened of which the mere mention made Trench shake. He heard of leather cords which had been bound about the prisoner's wrists, and upon which water had been poured until the cords swelled and the wrists burst, but this was among the minor brutalities. Trench waited for the morning as he listened, wondering whether indeed it would ever come.
He heard the bolts dragged back at the last; he saw the door open and the good daylight. He stood up and with Ibrahim's help protected this new comrade until the eager rush was past. Then he supported him out into the zareeba. Worn, wasted in body and face, with a rough beard straggled upon his chin, and his eyes all sunk and very bright, it was still Harry Feversham. Trench laid him down in a corner of the zareeba where there would be shade; and in a few hours shade would be needed. Then with the rest he scrambled to the Nile for water and brought it back. As he poured it down Feversham's throat, Feversham seemed for a moment to recognise him. But it was only for a moment, and the incoherent tale of his adventures began again. Thus, after five years, and for the first time since Trench had dined as Feversham's guest in the high rooms overlooking St. James's Park, the two men met in the House of Stone.
Chapter XXVIII — Plans of Escape
For three days Feversham rambled and wandered in his talk, and for three days Trench fetched him water from the Nile, shared his food with him, and ministered to his wants; for three nights, too, he stood with Ibrahim and fought in front of Feversham in the House of Stone. But on the fourth morning Feversham waked to his senses and, looking up, with his own eyes saw bending over him the face of Trench. At first the face seemed part of his delirium. It was one of those nightmare faces which had used to grow big and had come so horribly close to him in the dark nights of his boyhood as he lay in bed. He put out a weak arm and thrust it aside. But he gazed about him. He was lying in the shadow of the prison house, and the hard blue sky above him, the brown bare trampled soil on which he lay, and the figures of his fellow-prisoners dragging their chains or lying prone upon the ground in some extremity of sickness gradually conveyed their meaning to him. He turned to Trench, caught at him as if he feared the next moment would snatch him out of reach, and then he smiled.
'I am in the prison at Omdurman,' he said, 'actually in the prison! This is Umm Hagar, the House of Stone. It seems too good to be true.'
He leaned back against the wall with an air of extreme relief. To Trench the words, the tone of satisfaction in which they were uttered, sounded like some sardonic piece of irony. A man who plumed himself upon indifference to pain and pleasure-who posed as a being of so much experience that joy and trouble could no longer stir a pulse or cause a frown, and who carried his pose to perfection-such a man, thought Trench, might have uttered Feversham's words in Feversham's voice. But Feversham was not that man; his delirium had proved it. The satisfaction, then, was genuine, the words sincere. The peril of Dongola was past, he had found Trench, he was in Omdurman. That prison house was his longed-for goal, and he had reached it. He might have been dangling on a gibbet hundreds of miles away down the stream of the Nile with the vultures perched upon his shoulders, the purpose for which he lived quite unfulfilled. But he was in the enclosure of the House of Stone in Omdurman.
'You have been here a long while,' he said.
'Three years.'
Feversham looked round the zareeba. 'Three years of it,' he murmured. 'I was afraid that I might not find you alive.'
Trench nodded.
'The nights are the worst, the nights in there. It's a wonder any man lives through a week of them, yet I have lived through a thousand nights.' And even to him who had endured them his endurance seemed incredible. 'A thousand nights of the House of Stone!' he exclaimed.
'But we may go down to the Nile by daytime,' said Feversham, and he started up with alarm as he gazed at the thorn zareeba. 'Surely we are allowed so much liberty. I was told so. An Arab at Wadi Halfa told me.'
'And it's true,' returned Trench. 'Look!' He pointed to the earthen bowl of water at his side. 'I filled that at the Nile this morning.'
'I must go,' said Feversham, and he lifted himself up from the ground. 'I must go this morning,' and since he spoke with a raised voice and a manner of excitement, Trench whispered to him: 'Hush. There are many prisoners here, and among them many tale-bearers.'
Feversham sank back on to the ground as much from weakness as in obedience to Trench's warning.
'But they cannot understand what we say,' he objected in a voice from which the excitement had suddenly gone.
