Ensign Knightley | Page 9

back I passed my house. I went
in. I stood in the patio. My wife was singing that song. The window of
the room in which she sang opened on to the patio. I stood there
listening for a second. Then I went upstairs. I turned the handle of the
door. I remember quite clearly the light upon the room wall as I opened
the door. Those words 'love that can flow' came swelling through the

opening; and--and--the next thing I am aware of, I was riding chained
upon a camel into slavery."
Tessin and Major Shackleton looked suddenly towards Wyley in
recognition of the accuracy of his guess. Scrope simply wiped the
perspiration from his forehead and waited.
"But how does that--forgetfulness, shall we say?--persuade you to the
fear that you played the coward?" asked Wyley.
"Well," replied Knightley, and his voice sank to a whisper, "I played
the coward afterwards at Mequinez. At the first it used to amuse me to
wonder what happened after I opened the door and before I was
captured outside Tangier; later it only puzzled me, and in the end it
began to frighten me. You see, I could not tell; it was all a blank to me,
as it is now; and a man overdriven--well, he nurses sickly fancies. No
need to say what mine were until the day I played the coward in
Mequinez. They set me to build the walls of the Emperor's new Palace.
We used the stones of the old Roman town and built them up in
Mequinez, and in the walls we were bidden to build Christian slaves
alive to the glory of Allah. I refused. They stripped the flesh off my feet
with their bastinadoes, starved me of food and drink, and brought me
back again to the walls. Again I refused." Knightley looked up at his
audience, and whether or no he mistook their breathless silence for
disbelief,--"I did," he implored. "Twice I refused, and twice they
tortured me. The third time--I was so broken, the whistle of a cane in
the air made me cry out with pain--I was sunk to that pitch of
cowardice--" He stopped, unable to complete the sentence. He clasped
and unclasped his hands convulsively, he moistened his dry lips with
his tongue, and looked about him with a weak, almost despairing laugh.
Then he began in another way. "The Christian was a Portuguee from
Marmora. He was set in the wall with his arms outstretched on either
side--the attitude of a man crucified. I built in his arms--his right arm
first--and mortised the stones, then his left arm in the same way. I was
careful not to look in his face. No, no! I didn't look in his face."
Knightley repeated the words with a horrible leer of cunning, and
hugged himself with his arms. To Wyley's thinking he was strung
almost to madness. "After his arms I built in his feet, and upwards from
his feet I built in his legs and his body until I came to his neck. All this
while he had been crying out for pity, babbling prayers, and the rest of

it. When I reached his neck he ceased his clamour. I suppose he was
dumb with horror. I did not know. All I knew was that now I should
have to meet his eyes as I built in his face. I thought for a moment of
blinding him. I could have done it quite easily with a stone. I picked up
a stone to do it, and then, well--I could not help looking at him. He
drew my eyes to his like a steel filing to a magnet. And once I had
looked, once I had heard his eyes speaking, I--I tore down the stones. I
freed his body, his legs, his feet and one arm. When the guards noticed
what I was doing I cannot tell. I could not tell you when their sticks
began to beat me. But they dragged me away when I had freed only one
arm. I remember seeing him tugging at the other. What happened to
me,"--he shivered,--"I could not describe to you. But you see I had
played the coward finely at Mequinez, and when that question recurred
to me as to what had happened after I had opened the door, I began to
wonder whether by any chance I had played the coward at Tangier. I
dismissed the thought as a sickly fancy, but it came again and again;
and I came back here, and you draw aloof from me with averted faces
and forced welcomes on your lips. Did I play the coward on that night I
was captured? Tell me! Tell me!" And so the torrent of his speech came
to an end.
The