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 zeriba. 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 zeriba 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.
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 woke 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 zeriba. “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 zeriba. “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 talebearers.”
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.
“They can see that we talk together and earnestly. Idris would know of it within the hour, the Khalifa before sunset. There would be heavier fetters and the courbatch if we spoke at all. Lie still. You are weak, and I too am very tired. We will sleep, and later in the day we will go together down to the Nile.”
Trench lay down beside Feversham and in a moment was asleep. Feversham watched him, and saw, now that his features were relaxed, the marks of those three years very plainly in his face. It was towards noon before he awoke.
“There is no one to bring you food?” he asked, and Feversham answered:—
“Yes. A boy should come. He should bring news as well.”
They waited until the
