“It is not all harm which has come of these years. They were not wasted.”
But Feversham thought of her lonely years in this village of Glenalla—and thought with a man’s thought, unaware that nowhere else would she have chosen to live. He looked into her face, and saw the marks of the years upon it. It was not that she had aged so much. Her big grey eyes shone as clearly as before, the colour was still as bright upon her cheeks. But there was more of character. She had suffered; she had eaten of the tree of knowledge.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I did you a great wrong six years ago, and I need not.”
She held out her hand to him.
“Will you give it me, please?”
And for a moment he did not understand.
“That fourth feather,” she said.
He drew his letter-case from his coat, and shook two feathers out into the palm of his hand. The larger one, the ostrich feather, he held out to her. But she said:—
“Both.”
There was no reason why he should keep Castleton’s feather any longer. He handed them both to her, since she asked for them, and she clasped them, and with a smile treasured them against her breast.
“I have the four feathers now,” she said.
“Yes,” answered Feversham; “all four. What will you do with them?”
Ethne’s smile became a laugh.
“Do with them!” she cried in scorn. “I shall do nothing with them. I shall keep them. I am very proud to have them to keep.”
She kept them, as she had once kept Harry Feversham’s portrait. There was something perhaps in Durrance’s contention that women so much more than men gather up their experiences and live upon them, looking backwards. Feversham, at all events, would now have dropped the feathers then and there and crushed them into the dust of the path with his heel; they had done their work. They could no longer reproach, they were no longer needed to encourage, they were dead things. Ethne, however, held them tight in her hand; to her they were not dead.
“Colonel Trench was here a fortnight ago,” she said. “He told me you were bringing it back to me.”
“But he did not know of the fourth feather,” said Feversham. “I never told any man that I had it.”
“Yes. You told Colonel Trench on your first night in the House of Stone at Omdurman. He told me. I no longer hate him,” she added, but without a smile and quite seriously, as though it was an important statement which needed careful recognition.
“I am glad of that,” said Feversham. “He is a great friend of mine.”
Ethne was silent for a moment or two. Then she said:—
“I wonder whether you have forgotten our drive from Ramelton to our house when I came to fetch you from the quay? We were alone in the dogcart, and we spoke—”
“Of the friends whom one knows for friends the first moment, and whom one seems to recognise even though one has never seen them before,” interrupted Feversham. “Indeed I remember.”
“And whom one never loses whether absent or dead,” continued Ethne. “I said that one could always be sure of such friends, and you answered—”
“I answered that one could make mistakes,” again Feversham interrupted.
“Yes, and I disagreed. I said that one might seem to make mistakes, and perhaps think so for a long while, but that in the end one would be proved not to have made them. I have often thought of those words. I remembered them very clearly when Captain Willoughby brought to me the first feather, and with a great deal of remorse. I remember them again very clearly today, although I have no room in my thoughts for remorse. I was right, you see, and I should have clung firmly to my faith. But I did not.” Her voice shook a little, and pleaded as she went on: “I was young. I knew very little. I was unaware how little. I judged hastily; but today I understand.”
She opened her hand and gazed for a while at the white feathers. Then she turned and went inside the church. Feversham followed her.
XXXII
In the Church at Glenalla
Ethne sat down in the corner of a pew next to the aisle, and Feversham took his stand beside her. It was very quiet and peaceful within that tiny church. The afternoon sun shone through the upper windows and made a golden haze about the roof. The natural murmurs of the summer floated pleasantly through the open door.
“I am glad that you remembered our drive and what we said,” she continued. “It is rather important to me that you should remember. Because, although I have got you back, I am going to send you away from me again. You will be one of the absent friends whom I shall not lose because you are absent.”
She spoke slowly, looking straight in front of her without faltering. It was a difficult speech for her to deliver, but she had thought over it night and day during this last fortnight, and the words were ready to her lips. At the first sight of Harry Feversham, recovered to her after so many years, so much suspense, so much suffering, it had seemed to her that she never would be able to speak them, however necessary it was that they should be spoken. But as they stood over against one another she had forced herself to remember that necessity until she actually recognised and felt it. Then she had gone back into the church and taken a seat, and gathered up her strength.
It would be easier for both of them, she thought, if she should give no sign of what so quick a separation cost her. He would know surely enough, and she wished him to know; she wished him to understand that not one moment of his six years, so far as she was concerned, had been spent
