The Four Feathers

River in Donegal, and there, to his surprise, had been made acquainted with Dermod’s daughter Ethne. For she surprised all who had first held speech with the father. Durrance had stayed for a night in the house, and through that evening she had played upon her violin, seated with her back toward her audience, as was her custom when she played, lest a look or a gesture should interrupt the concentration of her thoughts. The melodies which she had played rang in his ears now. For the girl possessed the gift of music, and the strings of her violin spoke to the questions of her bow. There was in particular an overture⁠—the “Melusine Overture”⁠—which had the very sob of the waves. Durrance had listened wondering, for the violin had spoken to him of many things of which the girl who played it could know nothing. It had spoken of long perilous journeys and the faces of strange countries; of the silver way across moonlit seas; of the beckoning voices from the under edges of the desert. It had taken a deeper, a more mysterious tone. It had told of great joys, quite unattainable, and of great griefs too, eternal, and with a sort of nobility by reason of their greatness; and of many unformulated longings beyond the reach of words; but with never a single note of mere complaint. So it had seemed to Durrance that night as he had sat listening while Ethne’s face was turned away. So it seemed to him now when he knew that her face was still to be turned away for all his days. He had drawn a thought from her playing which he was at some pains to keep definite in his mind. The true music cannot complain.

Therefore it was that as he rode the next morning into the Row his blue eyes looked out upon the world from his bronzed face with not a jot less of his usual friendliness. He waited at half-past nine by the clump of lilacs and laburnums at the end of the sand, but Harry Feversham did not join him that morning, nor indeed for the next three weeks. Ever since the two men had graduated from Oxford it had been their custom to meet at this spot and hour, when both chanced to be in town, and Durrance was puzzled. It seemed to him that he had lost his friend as well.

Meanwhile, however, the rumours of war grew to a certainty; and when at last Feversham kept the tryst, Durrance had news.

“I told you luck might look my way. Well, she has. I go out to Egypt on General Graham’s staff. There’s talk we may run down the Red Sea to Suakin afterward.”

The exhilaration of his voice brought an unmistakable envy into Feversham’s eyes. It seemed strange to Durrance, even at that moment of his good luck, that Harry Feversham should envy him⁠—strange and rather pleasant. But he interpreted the envy in the light of his own ambitions.

“It is rough on you,” he said sympathetically, “that your regiment has to stay behind.”

Feversham rode by his friend’s side in silence. Then, as they came to the chairs beneath the trees, he said:⁠—

“That was expected. The day you dined with me I sent in my papers.”

“That night?” said Durrance, turning in his saddle. “After we had gone?”

“Yes,” said Feversham, accepting the correction. He wondered whether it had been intended. But Durrance rode silently forward. Again Harry Feversham was conscious of a reproach in his friend’s silence, and again he was wrong. For Durrance suddenly spoke heartily, and with a laugh.

“I remember. You gave us your reasons that night. But for the life of me I can’t help wishing that we had been going out together. When do you leave for Ireland?”

“Tonight.”

“So soon?”

They turned their horses and rode westward again down the alley of trees. The morning was still fresh. The limes and chestnuts had lost nothing of their early green, and since the May was late that year, its blossoms still hung delicately white like snow upon the branches and shone red against the dark rhododendrons. The park shimmered in a haze of sunlight, and the distant roar of the streets was as the tumbling of river water.

“It is a long time since we bathed in Sandford Lasher,” said Durrance.

“Or froze in the Easter vacations in the big snow-gully on Great End,” returned Feversham. Both men had the feeling that on this morning a volume in their book of life was ended; and since the volume had been a pleasant one to read, and they did not know whether its successors would sustain its promise, they were looking backward through the leaves before they put it finally away.

“You must stay with us, Jack, when you come back,” said Feversham.

Durrance had schooled himself not to wince, and he did not, even at that anticipatory “us.” If his left hand tightened upon the thongs of his reins, the sign could not be detected by his friend.

“If I come back,” said Durrance. “You know my creed. I could never pity a man who died on active service. I would very much like to come by that end myself.”

It was a quite simple creed, consistent with the simplicity of the man who uttered it. It amounted to no more than this: that to die decently was worth a good many years of life. So that he uttered it without melancholy or any sign of foreboding. Even so, however, he had a fear that perhaps his friend might place another interpretation upon the words, and he looked quickly into his face. He only saw again, however, that puzzling look of envy in Feversham’s eyes.

“You see there are worse things which can happen,” he continued. “Disablement, for instance. Clever men could make a shift, perhaps, to put up with it. But what in the world should I do if I had to sit in a chair all my days? It makes me shiver