CHAPTER XIV

CAPTAIN WILLOUGHBY REAPPEARS

During the months of July and August Ethne's apprehensions grew, and once at all events they found expression on her lips.

"I am afraid," she said, one morning, as she stood in the sunlight at an open window of Mrs. Adair's house upon a creek of the Salcombe estuary.

In the room behind her Mrs. Adair smiled quietly.

"Of what? That some accident happened to Colonel Durrance yesterday in London?"

"No," Ethne answered slowly, "not of that. For he is at this moment crossing the lawn towards us."

Again Mrs. Adair smiled, but she did not raise her head from the book which she was reading, so that it might have been some pa.s.sage in the book which so amused and pleased her.

"I thought so," she said, but in so low a voice that the words barely reached Ethne's ears. They did not penetrate to her mind, for as she looked across the stone-flagged terrace and down the broad shallow flight of steps to the lawn, she asked abruptly:--

"Do you think he has any hope whatever that he will recover his sight?"

The question had not occurred to Mrs. Adair before, and she gave to it now no importance in her thoughts.

"Would he travel up to town so often to see his oculist if he had none?" she asked in reply. "Of course he hopes."

"I am afraid," said Ethne, and she turned with a sudden movement towards her friend. "Haven't you noticed how quick he has grown and is growing?

Quick to interpret your silences, to infer what you do not say from what you do, to fill out your sentences, to make your movements the commentary of your words? Laura, haven't you noticed? At times I think the very corners of my mind are revealed to him. He reads me like a child's lesson book."

"Yes," said Mrs. Adair, "you are at a disadvantage. You no longer have your face to screen your thoughts."

"And his eyes no longer tell me anything at all," Ethne added.

There was truth in both remarks. So long as Durrance had had Ethne's face with its bright colour and her steady, frank, grey eyes visible before him, he could hardly weigh her intervals of silence and her movements against her spoken words with the detachment which was now possible to him. On the other hand, whereas before she had never been troubled by a doubt as to what he meant or wished, or intended, now she was often in the dark. Durrance's blindness, in a word, had produced an effect entirely opposite to that which might have been expected. It had reversed their positions.

Mrs. Adair, however, was more interested in Ethne's unusual burst of confidence. There was no doubt of it, she reflected. The girl, once remarkable for a quiet frankness of word and look, was declining into a creature of shifts and agitation.

"There is something, then, to be concealed from him?" she asked quietly.

"Yes."

"Something rather important?"

"Something which at all costs I must conceal," Ethne exclaimed, and was not sure, even while she spoke, that Durrance had not already found it out. She stepped over the threshold of the window on to the terrace. In front of her the lawn stretched to a hedge; on the far side of that hedge a couple of gra.s.s fields lifted and fell in gentle undulations; and beyond the fields she could see amongst a cl.u.s.ter of trees the smoke from the chimneys of Colonel Durrance's house. She stood for a little while hesitating upon the terrace. On the left the lawn ran down to a line of tall beeches and oaks which fringed the creek. But a broad s.p.a.ce had been cleared to make a gap upon the bank, so that Ethne could see the sunlight on the water and the wooded slope on the farther side, and a sailing-boat some way down the creek tacking slowly against the light wind. Ethne looked about her, as though she was summoning her resources, and even composing her sentences ready for delivery to the man who was walking steadily towards her across the lawn. If there was hesitation upon her part, there was none at all, she noticed, on the part of the blind man. It seemed that Durrance's eyes took in the path which his feet trod, and with the stick which he carried in his hand he switched at the blades of gra.s.s like one that carries it from habit rather than for any use. Ethne descended the steps and advanced to meet him. She walked slowly, as if to a difficult encounter.

But there was another who only waited an opportunity to engage in it with eagerness. For as Ethne descended the steps Mrs. Adair suddenly dropped the book which she had pretended to resume and ran towards the window. Hidden by the drapery of the curtain she looked out and watched.

The smile was still upon her lips, but a fierce light had brightened in her eyes, and her face had the drawn look of hunger.

"Something which at all costs she must conceal," she said to herself, and she said it in a voice of exultation. There was contempt too in her tone, contempt for Ethne Eustace, the woman of the open air who was afraid, who shrank from marriage with a blind man, and dreaded the restraint upon her freedom. It was that shrinking which Ethne had to conceal--Mrs. Adair had no doubt of it. "For my part, I am glad," she said, and she was--fiercely glad that blindness had disabled Durrance.

For if her opportunity ever came, as it seemed to her now more and more likely to come, blindness reserved him to her, as no man was ever reserved to any woman. So jealous was she of his every word and look that his dependence upon her would be the extreme of pleasure. She watched Ethne and Durrance meet on the lawn at the foot of the terrace steps. She saw them turn and walk side by side across the gra.s.s towards the creek. She noticed that Ethne seemed to plead, and in her heart she longed to overhear.

And Ethne was pleading.

"You saw your oculist yesterday?" she asked quickly, as soon as they met. "Well, what did he say?"

Durrance shrugged his shoulders.

"That one must wait. Only time can show whether a cure is possible or not," he answered, and Ethne bent forward a little and scrutinised his face as though she doubted that he spoke the truth.

"But must you and I wait?" she asked.

"Surely," he returned. "It would be wiser on all counts." And thereupon he asked her suddenly a question of which she did not see the drift. "It was Mrs. Adair, I imagine, who proposed this plan that I should come home to Guessens and that you should stay with her here across the fields?"

Ethne was puzzled by the question, but she answered it directly and truthfully. "I was in great distress when I heard of your accident. I was so distressed that at the first I could not think what to do. I came to London and told Laura, since she is my friend, and this was her plan.

Of course I welcomed it with all my heart;" and the note of pleading rang in her voice. She was asking Durrance to confirm her words, and he understood that. He turned towards her with a smile.

"I know that very well, Ethne," he said gently.

Ethne drew a breath of relief, and the anxiety pa.s.sed for a little while from her face.

"It was kind of Mrs. Adair," he resumed, "but it is rather hard on you, who would like to be back in your own country. I remember very well a sentence which Harry Feversham--" He spoke the name quite carelessly, but paused just for a moment after he had spoken it. No expression upon his face showed that he had any intention in so pausing, but Ethne suspected one. He was listening, she suspected, for some movement of uneasiness, perhaps of pain, into which she might possibly be betrayed.

But she made no movement. "A sentence which Harry Feversham spoke a long while since," he continued, "in London just before I left London for Egypt. He was speaking of you, and he said: 'She is of her country and more of her county. I do not think she could be happy in any place which was not within reach of Donegal.' And when I remember that, it seems rather selfish that I should claim to keep you here at so much cost to you."

"I was not thinking of that," Ethne exclaimed, "when I asked why we must wait. That makes me out most selfish. I was merely wondering why you preferred to wait, why you insist upon it. For, of course, although one hopes and prays with all one's soul that you will get your sight back, the fact of a cure can make no difference."

She spoke slowly, and her voice again had a ring of pleading. This time Durrance did not confirm her words, and she repeated them with a greater emphasis, "It can make no difference."

Durrance started like a man roused from an abstraction.

"I beg your pardon, Ethne," he said. "I was thinking at the moment of Harry Feversham. There is something which I want you to tell me. You said a long time ago at Glenalla that you might one day bring yourself to tell it me, and I should rather like to know now. You see, Harry Feversham was my friend. I want you to tell me what happened that night at Lennon House to break off your engagement, to send him away an outcast."

Ethne was silent for a while, and then she said gently: "I would rather not. It is all over and done with. I don't want you to ask me ever."

Durrance did not press for an answer in the slightest degree.

"Very well," he said cheerily, "I won't ask you. It might hurt you to answer, and I don't want, of course, to cause you pain."

"It's not on that account that I wish to say nothing," Ethne explained earnestly. She paused and chose her words. "It isn't that I am afraid of any pain. But what took place, took place such a long while ago--I look upon Mr. Feversham as a man whom one has known well, and who is now dead."

They were walking toward the wide gap in the line of trees upon the bank of the creek, and as Ethne spoke she raised her eyes from the ground.

She saw that the little boat which she had noticed tacking up the creek while she hesitated upon the terrace had run its nose into the sh.o.r.e.

The sail had been lowered, the little pole mast stuck up above the gra.s.s bank of the garden, and upon the bank itself a man was standing and staring vaguely towards the house as though not very sure of his ground.

"A stranger has landed from the creek," she said. "He looks as if he had lost his way. I will go on and put him right."

She ran forward as she spoke, seizing upon that stranger's presence as a means of relief, even if the relief was only to last for a minute. Such relief might be felt, she imagined, by a witness in a court when the judge rises for his half-hour at luncheon-time. For the close of an interview with Durrance left her continually with the sense that she had just stepped down from a witness-box where she had been subjected to a cross-examination so deft that she could not quite clearly perceive its tendency, although from the beginning she suspected it.

The stranger at the same time advanced to her. He was a man of the middle size, with a short snub nose, a pair of vacuous protruding brown eyes, and a moustache of some ferocity. He lifted his hat from his head and disclosed a round forehead which was going bald.

"I have sailed down from Kingsbridge," he said, "but I have never been in this part of the world before. Can you tell me if this house is called The Pool?"