She stood where he left her, a tall, strong-limbed figure of womanhood, until he was gone out of sight. Then she climbed down to the house, and going into her room took one of her violins from its case. But it was the violin which Durrance had given to her, and before she had touched the strings with her bow she recognised it and put it suddenly away from her in its case. She snapped the case to. For a few moments she sat motionless in her chair, then she quickly crossed the room, and, taking her keys, unlocked a drawer. At the bottom of the drawer there lay hidden a photograph, and at this she looked for a long while and very wistfully.
Durrance meanwhile walked down to the trap which was waiting for him at the gates of the house, and saw that Dermod Eustace stood in the road with his hat upon his head.
“I will walk a few yards with you, Colonel Durrance,” said Dermod. “I have a word for your ear.”
Durrance suited his stride to the old man’s faltering step, and they walked behind the dogcart, and in silence. It was not the mere personal disappointment which weighed upon Durrance’s spirit. But he could not see with Ethne’s eyes, and as his gaze took in that quiet corner of Donegal, he was filled with a great sadness lest all her life should be passed in this seclusion, her grave dug in the end under the wall of the tiny church, and her memory linger only in a few white cottages scattered over the moorland, and for a very little while. He was recalled by the pressure of Dermod’s hand upon his elbow. There was a gleam of inquiry in the old man’s faded eyes, but it seemed that speech itself was a difficulty.
“You have news for me?” he asked, after some hesitation. “News of Harry Feversham? I thought that I would ask you before you went away.”
“None,” said Durrance.
“I am sorry,” replied Dermod, wistfully, “though I have no reason for sorrow. He struck us a cruel blow, Colonel Durrance. I should have nothing but curses for him in my mouth and my heart. A black-throated coward my reason calls him, and yet I would be very glad to hear how the world goes with him. You were his friend. But you do not know?”
It was actually of Harry Feversham that Dermod Eustace was speaking; and Durrance, as he remarked the old man’s wistfulness of voice and face, was seized with a certain remorse that he had allowed Ethne so to thrust his friend out of his thoughts. He speculated upon the mystery of Harry Feversham’s disappearance at times as he sat in the evening upon his verandah above the Nile at Wadi Halfa, piecing together the few hints which he had gathered. “A black-throated coward,” Dermod had called Harry Feversham, and Ethne had said enough to assure him that something graver than any dispute, something which had destroyed all her faith in the man, had put an end to their betrothal. But he could not conjecture at the particular cause, and the only consequence of his perplexed imaginings was the growth of a very real anger within him against the man who had been his friend. So the winter passed, and summer came to the Sudan and the month of May.
X
The Wells of Obak
In that month of May Durrance lifted his eyes from Wadi Halfa and began eagerly to look homeward. But in the contrary direction, five hundred miles to the south of his frontier town, on the other side of the great Nubian desert and the Belly of Stones, the events of real importance to him were occurring without his knowledge. On the deserted track between Berber and Suakin the wells of Obak are sunk deep amongst mounds of shifting sand. Eastward a belt of trees divides the dunes from a hard stony plain built upon with granite hills; westward the desert stretches for fifty-eight waterless miles to Mahobey and Berber on the Nile, a desert so flat that the merest tuft of grass knee-high seems at the distance of a mile a tree promising shade for a noonday halt, and a pile of stones no bigger than one might see by the side of any roadway in repair achieves the stature of a considerable hill. In this particular May there could be no spot more desolate than the wells of Obak. The sun blazed upon it from six in the morning with an intolerable heat, and all night the wind blew across it piercingly cold, and played with the sand as it would, building pyramids house-high and levelling them, tunnelling valleys, silting up long slopes, so that the face of the country was continually changed. The vultures and the sand-grouse held it undisturbed in a perpetual tenancy. And to make the spot yet more desolate, there remained scattered here and there the bleached bones and skeletons of camels to bear evidence that about these wells once the caravans had crossed and halted; and the remnants of a house built of branches bent in hoops showed that once Arabs had herded their goats and made their habitation there. Now the sun rose and set, and the hot sky pressed upon an empty round of honey-coloured earth. Silence brooded there like night upon the waters; and the absolute stillness made it a place of mystery and expectation.
Yet in this month of May one man sojourned by the wells and sojourned secretly. Every morning at sunrise he drove two camels, swift riding-mares of the pure Bisharin breed, from the belt of trees, watered them, and sat by the well-mouth for the space of three hours. Then he drove them back again into the shelter of the trees, and fed them delicately with dhurra upon a
