The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

The next few days were very terrible for Eva. Perhaps it was fortunate for her that her brother needed so much attention and that his state harrowed her sufficiently to keep her mind from the greater tragedy. James made a very slow recovery, and she could not feel that she was justified in telling him of a climax in their affairs which might fall with devastating effect on a mind already torn by his adventure. Little by little he began to talk more freely of this, and always with a communicated awe. At first it seemed that he could never recover his hopes, or his faith in himself. He was far too weak to feel that he could ever return to the struggle: but in a little while he began to realise that he must make a new beginning. Then, as the fever left his body, and his mind became less perilously clear, the old impulse gradually returned, and he began to make plans for the new campaign. “This time,” he said, “I shall not be fighting in the dark. I think I know the worst. Nothing could be worse . . . nothing. If only God will give me strength. I must not be beaten. I’m only dealing with the same thing as the prophets and the early Christians. If I were not quite so utterly alone . . . And yet, if the trial is greater, so will be the triumph.”

In the end she found he could speak to her almost dispassionately of his adventure, although he never told her any details of the affair, and she knew better than to ask him. Indeed she knew very well that when he spoke to her it was really no more than a little attempt to share his trouble with another creature, to evade the utter loneliness of which he had complained, and that it didn’t matter to him whether she understood him or no. All the time it was clear that he found the whole business in retrospect rather thrilling, and even though he never once mentioned the crowning horror of the night, he talked quite frankly of small things which he remembered: of his passage of the M’ssente River under the rising moon; of the coarse grasses which had cut his fingers. Indeed he might well remember those, for his hands were still bandaged so that he could not hold a book. The ragged wound on his forehead worried him: for he could not be certain how he had come by it. “I remember nothing after a certain point,” he said. “I know it seemed to me that they were all rushing towards me. Perhaps I cried out, and they hadn’t seen me before. And yet they must have known that I was there. The hill was full of them. I just remember them all rushing towards me in the firelight. I remember how white their eyes and their teeth were. And that’s all. Yes . . . I think I must have cried out in spite of myself.”

And all the time that he spoke of these things she was thinking of M‘Crae, wondering what enormities he might be suffering in the house of Godovius. She did not realise herself how much she missed him, what a stable and reassuring element in her life he had been. She supposed that she would never see him again; and though this seemed no stranger to her than the fact that they had ever met, she found it difficult to reconcile herself to the prospect; for she had begun to think that nobody else in the world could possibly look after him, remembering, with the greatest tenderness, the time when he had been so dependent on her care. She had never in her life known a man so intimately as M‘Crae. She didn’t suppose that another man like him existed. The impression which she recalled most fondly was that of his absolute frankness: the desperate care which he had taken to make their relation free once and for all from anything that was not strictly true. She was thankful that it had been so. Musing on the strange story of his life, she was grateful to him for having told her so much without extenuation or pleading. She would have felt less happy if he had not cleared the way for their friendship by abandoning the name which he had worn as a disguise.

From time to time, thinking of his captivity and of what she owed him, the last words of Godovius would return to her: “If he should escape, what would you give me?” She knew exactly what that meant: and when she thought of it, even though the idea were so unspeakably horrible, she couldn’t help fancying that after all she might trick Godovius, that she might keep him to his side of the bargain and escape the fulfilment of her own, very much as she had planned to do when first he had threatened them. It seemed to her that this would be a natural thing to do: that if she could screw up her courage to a certain point she might manage to keep Godovius going and give M‘Crae at least the chance of escape. After all, it was the sort of thing that a woman could easily do. It might even be done without any too terrible risk. But always when she allowed her thoughts to turn in this direction she would find herself peculiarly conscious of the absent M‘Crae’s disapproval. She remembered how gravely he had spoken to her when she had made her last confession. “It never pays to put things off,” he had said, and even though she couldn’t persuade herself that in this case it might not pay after all, she felt that in taking so great a risk of failure and its consequences she would not be as loyal to his ideals as he would have expected her to be. And so, even though the project pestered her mind, she felt that she was bound in honour to abandon it. He wouldn’t like it, she thought, and that was enough. “I am not as good naturally as he thinks me,” she said to herself. “Not nearly as good as he is.”

Once when she was sitting beside James’ bed and thinking as usual of M‘Crae, the voice of her brother invaded her thoughts so suddenly that she found herself blushing. He said: “I’ve just remembered. . . . On the night when they brought me back there was somebody here. I asked you who it was. . . . I remember asking. And you said it was a hunter, a stranger who had turned up. You told me the name. Mac . . . Mac . . . Mackay. . . . No, it wasn’t Mackay. I get things mixed up. Who was it?”

“M‘Crae,” she said. “That was the name.”

“But what happened to him? I don’t remember. I’m sorry I didn’t see him. Where did he go?”

“He went away next day,” she said.

“I hope you made him comfortable. It’s the least one can do. Where did he go when he left us?”

“He went to Mr. Godovius’s house,” she said. It amazed her to find that it was easy to speak the truth. M‘Crae would have approved of that, she thought.