And again he answered:—
“There is no need that you should. Wadi Halfa is not the only place where a soldier can find work to his hand.”
His voice had taken a new hopefulness. For he had listened intently to the words which she had spoken, and he had construed them by the dictionary of his desires. She had not said that friendship bounded all her thoughts of him. Therefore he need not believe it. Women were given to a hinting modesty of speech, at all events the best of them. A man might read a little more emphasis into their tones, and underline their words and still be short of their meaning, as he argued. A subtle delicacy graced them in nature. Durrance was near to Benedick’s mood. “One whom I value”; “I shall miss you”; there might be a double meaning in the phrases. When she said that she needed to be assured that she had sure friends, did she not mean that she needed their companionship? But the argument, had he been acute enough to see it, proved how deep he was sunk in error. For what this girl spoke, she habitually meant, and she habitually meant no more. Moreover, upon this occasion she had particularly weighed her words.
“No doubt,” she said, “a soldier can. But can this soldier find work so suitable? Listen, please, till I have done. I was so very glad to hear all that you have told me about your work and your journeys. I was still more glad because of the satisfaction with which you told it. For it seemed to me, as I listened and as I watched, that you had found the one true straight channel along which your life could run swift and smoothly and unharassed. And so few do that—so very few!” And she wrung her hands and cried, “And now you spoil it all.”
Durrance suddenly faced her. He ceased from argument; he cried in a voice of passion:—
“I am for you, Ethne! There’s the true straight channel, and upon my word I believe you are for me. I thought—I admit it—at one time I would spend my life out there in the East, and the thought contented me. But I had schooled myself into contentment, for I believed you married.” Ethne ever so slightly flinched, and he himself recognised that he had spoken in a voice overloud, so that it had something almost of brutality.
“Do I hurt you?” he continued. “I am sorry. But let me speak the whole truth out, I cannot afford reticence, I want you to know the first and last of it. I say now that I love you. Yes, but I could have said it with equal truth five years ago. It is five years since your father arrested me at the ferry down there on Lough Swilly, because I wished to press on to Letterkenny, and not delay a night by stopping with a stranger. Five years since I first saw you, first heard the language of your violin. I remember how you sat with your back towards me. The light shone on your hair; I could just see your eyelashes and the colour of your cheeks. I remember the sweep of your arm. … My dear, you are for me; I am for you.”
But she drew back from his outstretched hands.
“No,” she said very gently, but with a decision he could not mistake. She saw more clearly into his mind than he did himself. The restlessness of the born traveller, the craving for the large and lonely spaces in the outlandish corners of the world, the incurable intermittent fever to be moving, ever moving amongst strange peoples and under strange skies—these were deep-rooted qualities of the man. Passion might obscure them for a while, but they would make their appeal in the end, and the appeal would torture. The home would become a prison. Desires would so clash within him, there could be no happiness. That was the man. For herself, she looked down the slope of the hill across the brown country. Away on the right waved the woods about Ramelton, at her feet flashed a strip of the Lough; and this was her country; she was its child and the sister of its people.
“No,” she repeated, as she rose to her feet. Durrance rose with her. He was still not so much disheartened as conscious of a blunder. He had put his case badly; he should never have given her the opportunity to think that marriage would be an interruption of his career.
“We will say goodbye here,” she said, “in the open. We shall be none the less good friends because three thousand miles hinder us from shaking hands.”
They shook hands as she spoke.
“I shall be in England again in a year’s time,” said Durrance. “May I come back?”
Ethne’s eyes and her smile consented.
“I should be sorry to lose you altogether,” she said, “although even if I did not see you, I should know that I had not lost your friendship.” She added, “I should also be glad to hear news of you and what you are doing, if ever you have the time to spare.”
“I may write?” he exclaimed eagerly.
“Yes,” she answered, and his eagerness made her linger a little doubtfully upon the word. “That is, if you think it fair. I mean, it might be best for you, perhaps, to get rid of me entirely from your thoughts;” and Durrance laughed and without any bitterness, so that in a moment Ethne found herself laughing too, though at what she laughed she would have discovered it difficult to explain. “Very well, write to me then.” And she added drily, “But it will be about—other things.”
And again Durrance read into her words the interpretation he desired; and again she meant just what she said, and not
