hummed Dicky musingly. Then he added slowly: “Fielding, fellows of that kind always flare up a bit according to Cavendish, just before the end. I’ve seen it once or twice before. It’s the last clutch at the grass as they go slip—slip—slipping down. Take my word for it, Heatherby’s near the finish.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. Selamlik, the old leper, ‘ll lay in wait for him. He’ll get lost in the sugar-cane one of these evenings soon.”
“Couldn’t we...” Dicky paused.
Fielding started, looked at Dicky intently, and then shook his head sadly. “It’s no good, Dicky. It never is.”
“‘While the lamp holds out to burn...’” said Dicky, and lighted another cigarette.
Precisely at seven o’clock Heatherby appeared. He had on a dress-suit, brown and rusty, a white tie made of a handkerchief torn in two, and a pair of patent leather shoes, scraggy and cracked.
Fielding behaved well, Dicky was amiable and attentive, and the dinner being ready to the instant, there was no waiting, there were no awkward pauses. No names of English people were mentioned, England was not named; nor Cairo, nor anything that English people abroad love to discuss. The fellah, the pasha, the Soudan were the only topics. Under Fielding’s courtesy and Dicky’s acute suggestions, Heatherby’s weakened brain awaked, and he talked intelligently, till the moment coffee was brought in. Then, as Mahommed Seti retired, Heatherby suddenly threw himself forward, his arms on the table, and burst into sobs.
“Oh, you fellows, you fellows!” he said. There was silence for a minute, then he sobbed out again: “It’s the first time I’ve been treated like a gentleman by men that knew me, these fifteen years. It—it gets me in the throat!”
His body shook with sobs. Fielding and Dicky were uncomfortable, for these were not the sobs of a driveller or a drunkard. Behind them was the blank failure of a life—fifteen years of miserable torture, of degradation, of a daily descent lower into the pit, of the servitude of shame. When at last he raised his streaming eyes, Fielding and Dicky could see the haunting terror of the soul, at whose elbow, as it were, every man cried: “You are without the pale!” That look told them how Heatherby of the Buffs had gone from table d’hote to table d’hote of Europe, from town to town, from village to village, to make acquaintances who repulsed him when they discovered who he really was.
Shady Heatherby, who cheated at cards!