“Ai, ai!” shouted Feversham, roaring with laughter, as the prisoner half rose and soused again. “I have some concealed on me. Idris took what I did not conceal.”
“Good!” said Trench. “Idris will come to you today or tomorrow. He will talk to you of the goodness of Allah who has brought you out of the wickedness of the world to the holy city of Omdurman. He will tell you at great length of the peril of your soul and of the only means of averting it, and he will wind up with a few significant sentences about his starving family. If you come to the aid of his starving family and bid him keep for himself fifteen dollars out of the amount he took from you, you may get permission to sleep in the zeriba outside the prison. Be content with that for a night or two. Then he will come to you again, and again you will assist his starving family, and this time you will ask for permission for me to sleep in the open too. Come! There’s Idris shepherding us home.”
It fell out as Trench had predicted. Idris read Feversham an abnormally long lecture that afternoon. Feversham learned that now God loved him; and how Hicks Pasha’s army had been destroyed. The holy angels had done that, not a single shot was fired, not a single spear thrown by the Mahdi’s soldiers. The spears flew from their hands by the angels’ guidance and pierced the unbelievers. Feversham heard for the first time of a most convenient spirit, Nebbi Khiddr, who was the Khalifa’s eyes and ears and reported to him all that went on in the gaol. It was pointed out to Feversham that if Nebbi Khiddr reported against him, he would have heavier shackles riveted upon his feet, and many unpleasant things would happen. At last came the exordium about the starving children, and Feversham begged Idris to take fifteen dollars.
Trench’s plan succeeded. That night Feversham slept in the open, and two nights later Trench lay down beside him. Overhead was a clear sky and the blazing stars.
“Only three more days,” said Feversham, and he heard his companion draw in a long breath. For a while they lay side by side in silence, breathing the cool night air, and then Trench said:—
“Are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” and with some hesitation he made that confidence which he had repressed on the day when they sat upon the foreshore of the Nile. “Each man has his particular weak spot of sentiment, I suppose. I have mine. I am not a marrying man, so it’s not sentiment of that kind. Perhaps you will laugh at it. It isn’t merely that I loathe this squalid, shadeless, vile town of Omdurman, or the horrors of its prison. It isn’t merely that I hate the emptiness of those desert wastes. It isn’t merely that I am sick of the palm trees of Khartum, or these chains or the whips of the gaolers. But there’s something more. I want to die at home, and I have been desperately afraid so often that I should die here. I want to die at home—not merely in my own country, but in my own village, and be buried there under the trees I know, in the sight of the church and the houses I know, and the trout stream where I fished when I was a boy. You’ll laugh, no doubt.”
Feversham was not laughing. The words had a queer ring of familiarity to him, and he knew why. They never had actually been spoken to him, but they might have been and by Ethne Eustace.
“No, I am not laughing,” he answered. “I understand.” And he spoke with a warmth of tone which rather surprised Trench. And indeed an actual friendship sprang up between the two men, and it dated from that night.
It was a fit moment for confidences. Lying side by side in that enclosure, they made them one to the other in low voices. The shouts and yells came muffled from within the House of Stone, and gave to them both a feeling that they were well off. They could breathe; they could see; no low roof oppressed them; they were in the cool of the night air. That night air would be very cold before morning and wake them to shiver in their rags and huddle together in their corner. But at present they lay comfortably upon their backs with their hands clasped behind their heads and watched the great stars and planets burn in the blue dome of sky.
“It will be strange to find them dim and small again,” said Trench.
“There will be compensations,” answered Feversham, with a laugh; and they fell to making plans of what they would do when they had crossed the desert and the Mediterranean and the continent of Europe, and had come to their own country of dim small stars. Fascinated and enthralled by the pictures which the simplest sentence, the most commonplace phrase, through the magic of its associations was able to evoke in their minds, they let the hours slip by unnoticed. They were no longer prisoners in that barbarous town which lay a murky stain upon the solitary wide spaces of sand; they were in their own land, following their old pursuits. They were standing outside clumps of trees, guns in their hands, while the sharp cry, “Mark! Mark!” came to their ears. Trench heard again the unmistakable rattle of the reel of his fishing-rod as he wound in his line upon the bank of his trout stream. They talked of theatres in London, and the last plays which they had seen, the last books which they had read six years ago.
“There goes the Great Bear,” said Trench, suddenly. “It is late.” The tail of the constellation was dipping behind the thorn hedge of the zeriba. They turned
