"I am very sorry, Mrs. Adair," he repeated lamely. There was nothing more which he could find to say, and he held out his hand to her.
"Good-bye," she said, and Durrance climbed over the stile and crossed the fields to his house.
Mrs. Adair stood by that stile for a long while after he had gone. She had shot her bolt and hit no one but herself and the man for whom she cared.
She realised that distinctly. She looked forward a little, too, and she understood that if Durrance did not, after all, keep Ethne to her promise and marry her and go with her to her country, he would come back to Guessens. That reflection showed Mrs. Adair yet more clearly the folly of her outcry. If she had only kept silence, she would have had a very true and constant friend for her neighbour, and that would have been something. It would have been a good deal. But, since she had spoken, they could never meet without embarrassment, and, practise cordiality as they might, there would always remain in their minds the recollection of what she had said and he had listened to on the afternoon when he left for Wiesbaden.
CHAPTER XXIV
ON THE NILE
It was a callous country inhabited by a callous race, thought Calder, as he travelled down the Nile from Wadi Halfa to Assouan on his three months' furlough. He leaned over the rail of the upper deck of the steamer and looked down upon the barge lashed alongside. On the lower deck of the barge among the native passengers stood an angareb,[2] whereon was stretched the motionless figure of a human being shrouded in a black veil. The angareb and its burden had been carried on board early that morning at Korosko by two Arabs, who now sat laughing and chattering in the stern of the barge. It might have been a dead man or a dead woman who lay still and stretched out upon the bedstead, so little heed did they give to it. Calder lifted his eyes and looked to his right and his left across glaring sand and barren rocks shaped roughly into the hard forms of pyramids. The narrow meagre strip of green close by the water's edge upon each bank was the only response which the Soudan made to Spring and Summer and the beneficent rain. A callous country inhabited by a callous people.
Calder looked downwards again to the angareb upon the barge's deck and the figure lying upon it. Whether it was man or woman he could not tell. The black veil lay close about the face, outlining the nose, the hollows of the eyes and the mouth; but whether the lips wore a moustache and the chin a beard, it did not reveal.
The slanting sunlight crept nearer and nearer to the angareb. The natives seated close to it moved into the shadow of the upper deck, but no one moved the angareb, and the two men laughing in the stern gave no thought to their charge. Calder watched the blaze of yellow light creep over the black recumbent figure from the feet upwards. It burnt at last bright and pitiless upon the face. Yet the living creature beneath the veil never stirred. The veil never fluttered above the lips, the legs remained stretched out straight, the arms lay close against the side.