General Feversham laughed.
"Of course, I can't turn you out of the house," he said; and he added severely, "But I warn you that you are taking an improper advantage of your position as my guest."
"Yes, there is no doubt of that," Durrance answered calmly; and he told his story-the recovery of the Gordon letters from Berber, his own meeting with Harry Feversham at Wadi Halfa, and Harry's imprisonment at Omdurman. He brought it down to that very day, for he ended with the news of Lieutenant Sutch's departure for Suakin. General Feversham heard the whole account without an interruption, without even stirring in his chair. Durrance could not tell in what spirit he listened, but he drew some comfort from the fact that he did listen and without argument.
For some while after Durrance had finished, the general sat silent. He raised his hand to his forehead and shaded his eyes as though the man who had spoken could see, and thus he remained. Even when he did speak, he did not take his hand away. Pride forbade him to show to those portraits on the walls that he was capable even of so natural a weakness as joy at the reconquest of honour by his son.
"What I don't understand," he said slowly, "is why Harry ever resigned his commission. I could not understand it before; I understand it even less now since you have told me of his great bravery. It is one of the queer inexplicable things. They happen, and there's all that can be said. But I am very glad that you compelled me to listen to you, Durrance."
"I did it with a definite object. It is for you to say, of course, but for my part I do not see why Harry should not come home and enter in again to all that he lost."
"He cannot regain everything," said Feversham. "It is not right that he should. He committed the sin, and he must pay. He cannot regain his career for one thing."
"No, that is true; but he can find another. He is not yet so old but that he can find another. And that is all that he will have lost."
General Feversham now took his hand away and moved in his chair. He looked quickly at Durrance; he opened his mouth to ask a question, but changed his mind.
"Well," he said briskly, and as though the matter were of no particular importance, "if Sutch can manage Harry's escape from Omdurman, I see no reason, either, why he should not come home."
Durrance rose from his chair. "Thank you, General. If you can have me driven to the station, I can catch a train to town. There's one at six."
"But you will stay the night, surely," cried General Feversham.
"It is impossible. I start for Wiesbaden early to-morrow."
Feversham rang the bell and gave the order for a carriage. "I should have been very glad if you could have stayed," he said, turning to Durrance. "I see very few people nowadays. To tell the truth I have no great desire to see many. One grows old and a creature of customs."
"But you have your Crimean nights," said Durrance, cheerfully.
Feversham shook his head. "There have been none since Harry went away. I had no heart for them," he said slowly. For a second the mask was lifted and his stern features softened. He had suffered much during these five lonely years of his old age, though not one of his acquaintances up to this moment had ever detected a look upon his face or heard a sentence from his lips which could lead them so to think. He had shown a stubborn front to the world; he had made it a matter of pride that no one should be able to point a finger at him and say, "There's a man struck down." But on this one occasion and in these few words he revealed to Durrance the depth of his grief. Durrance understood how unendurable the chatter of his friends about the old days of war in the snowy trenches would have been. An anecdote recalling some particular act of courage would hurt as keenly as a story of cowardice. The whole history of his lonely life at Broad Place was laid bare in that simple statement that there had been no Crimean nights for he had no heart for them.
The wheels of the carriage rattled on the gravel.
"Good-bye," said Durrance, and he held out his hand.
"By the way," said Feversham, "to organise this escape from Omdurman will cost a great deal of money. Sutch is a poor man. Who is paying?"
"I am."
Feversham shook Durrance's hand in a firm clasp.
"It is my right, of course," he said.
"Certainly. I will let you know what it costs."
"Thank you."
General Feversham accompanied his visitor to the door. There was a question which he had it in his mind to ask, but the question was delicate. He stood uneasily on the steps of the house.
"Didn't I hear, Durrance," he said with an air of carelessness, "that you were engaged to Miss Eustace?"
"I think I said that Harry would regain all that he had lost except his career," said Durrance.
He stepped into the carriage and drove off to the station. His work was ended. There was nothing more for him now to do, except to wait at Wiesbaden and pray that Sutch might succeed. He had devised the plan, it remained for those who had eyes wherewith to see to execute it.
General Feversham stood upon the steps looking after the carriage until it disappeared among the pines. Then he walked slowly back into the hall. "There is no reason why he should not come back," he said. He looked up at the pictures. The dead Fevershams in their uniforms would not be disgraced. "No reason in the world," he said. "And, please God, he will come back soon." The dangers of an escape from the Dervish city remote among the sands began to loom very large on his mind. He owned to himself that he felt very tired and old, and many times that night he repeated his prayer, "Please God, Harry will come back soon," as he sat erect upon the bench which had once been his wife's favourite seat, and gazed out across the moonlit country to the Sussex Downs.
Chapter XXVII — The House of Stone
These were the days before the great mud wall was built about the House of Stone in Omdurman. Only a thorn zareeba as yet enclosed that noisome prison and the space about it. It stood upon the eastern border of the town, surely the most squalid capital of any empire since the world began. Not a flower bloomed in a single corner. There was no grass nor the green shade of any tree. A brown and stony plain, burnt by the sun, and, built upon it a straggling narrow city of hovels crawling with vermin and poisoned with disease.
Between the prison and the Nile no houses stood, and at this time the prisoners were allowed, so long as daylight lasted, to stumble in their chains down the half-mile of broken sloping earth to the Nile bank, so that they might draw water for their use and perform their ablutions. For the native or the negro, then, escape was not so difficult. For along that bank the dhows were moored and they were numerous; the river traffic, such as there was of it, had its harbour there, and the wide foreshore made a convenient market-place. Thus the open space between the river and the House of Stone was thronged and clamorous all day, captives rubbed elbows with their friends, concerted plans of escape, or then and there slipped into the thickest of the crowd and made their way to the first blacksmith, with whom the price of iron outweighed any risk he took. But even on their way to the blacksmith's shop, their fetters called for no notice in Omdurman. Slaves wore them as a daily habit, and hardly a street in all that long brown treeless squalid city was ever free from the clink of a man who walked in chains.
But for the European escape was another matter. There were not so many white prisoners but that each was a marked man. Besides relays of camels stationed through the desert, much money, long preparations, and above all, devoted natives who would risk their lives, were the first necessities for their evasion. The camels might be procured and stationed, but it did not follow that their drivers would remain at the stations; the long preparations might be made and the whip of the gaoler overset them at the end by flogging the captive within an inch of his life, on a suspicion that he had money; the devoted servant might shrink at the last moment. Colonel Trench began to lose all hope. His friends were working for him, he knew. For at times the boy who brought his food into the prison would bid him be ready; at times, too, when at some parade of the Khalifa's troops he was shown in triumph as an emblem of the destiny of all the Turks, a man perhaps would jostle against his camel and whisper encouragements. But nothing ever came of the encouragements. He saw the sun rise daily beyond the bend of the river behind the tall palm trees of Khartum and burn across the sky, and the months dragged one after the other.