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The strain of keeping up the pretence was telling too much on both of us. I go to Wiesbaden. An oculist lives there who serves me for an excuse. I shall wait at Wiesbaden until you bring Harry home." Sutch opened the door, and the two men went out into the hall. The servants had long since gone to bed. A couple of candlesticks stood upon a table beside a lamp.
It was not to be wondered at after all, he thought; there was nothing astonishing in the girl's fidelity to any one who was really acquainted with Harry Feversham, it was only an occasion of great gladness. Durrance would have to get out of the way, of course, but then he should never have crossed Harry Feversham's path. Sutch was cruel with the perfect cruelty of which love alone is capable.
"Harry shall have an hour's furlough from his bed. A single hour won't make much difference." Harry's eyes turned toward his father, and just for a moment rested upon his face with a curious steady gaze. It seemed to Sutch that they uttered a question, and, rightly or wrongly, he interpreted the question into words: "Are you blind?"
It was an honest wish, and it was honestly spoken. She knew nothing of the conversation which had passed between Harry Feversham and Lieutenant Sutch in the grill-room of the Criterion Restaurant; she knew nothing of Harry's plans; she had not heard of the Gordon letters recovered from the mud-wall of a ruined house in the city of the Dervishes on the Nile bank.
"By all means," said Sutch, but the tone of his voice quite clearly to Durrance's ears belied the heartiness of the words. Durrance, however, was prepared for a reluctant welcome, and he had purposely sent his telegram at the last moment. Had he given an address, he suspected that he might have received a refusal of his visit. And his suspicion was accurate enough.
But Harry Feversham plainly saw none of their defects. To him they were one and all portentous and terrible. He stood before them in the attitude of a criminal before his judges, reading his condemnation in their cold unchanging eyes. Lieutenant Sutch understood more clearly why the flame of the candle flickered. There was no draught in the hall, but the boy's hand shook.
He had always been doubtful whether Durrance was aware of Harry's fall into disgrace. Durrance plainly did not know. "There is only one person in the world, I believe," said Sutch, "who can answer both your questions." Durrance was in no way disconcerted. "Yes. I have waited here a month for you," he replied. Lieutenant Sutch pushed his fingers through his beard, and stared down at his companion.
Just above the flame of the candle, framed in the darkness of the hall, it showed white and drawn and haggard the face of an old worn man set upon the stalwart shoulders of a man in the prime of his years. "I have said very little to you in the way of sympathy," said Sutch. "I did not know that you would welcome it. But I am sorry. I am very sorry." "Thanks," said Durrance, simply.
They held their heads a trifle more proudly perhaps. Ethne might have become a little more gentle, Dermod a little more irascible, but these were the only changes. So gossip had the field to itself. But Harry Feversham was in London, as Lieutenant Sutch discovered on the night of the 30th.
For thirty years he had lived inactive on the world's half-pay list, to quote his own phrase; and at the end of all that long time, miraculously, something had fallen to him to do something important, something which needed energy and tact and decision. Lieutenant Sutch, in a word, was to be employed again. He was feverish to begin his employment.
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