Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “Be frank with me, Miss Villiers. Tell me candidly what it is that makes you suspect me of — of whatever you do suspect?”

  She shook her head; she would not or she could not speak; but her fine, unfaltering eyes never left his nor relaxed for one instant their soul-searching scrutiny.

  “Was it about those papers?” pursued the other.

  “That — for one thing.”

  “I see. You think I never had them at all!”

  “I think you never would have thought of a lost overcoat if I hadn’t put the words into your mouth!”

  There was a pause; and the man’s face showed, as plainly as rent sail or splintered spar, that the shot had gone home.

  “Why did you do it?” he cried unwarily.

  “You may well ask! Goodness knows — not I!”

  “But I have lost a coat,” he added, vehemently, perceiving his mistake. “I give you my word I lost one to-day; and those papers were in it as certainly as that moon is in the sky. You may believe or doubt it as you like. It is the case, and you will know it by and by. What else is there suspicious about me?”

  Evidently he had forgotten his revolver; but Irralie knew that it was in his pocket still, though she did not intend to remind him of that. His tone was both angry and injured, but the injury appealed to her more than the anger. It destroyed her self-confidence, and, in doing so, restored some confidence in him. Then she recalled her earliest prejudicial observation, and smiled at her momentary misgivings.

  “There was your horse!” said she — and saw him wince at the word.

  “What about my horse?”

  “It had come farther than you said; it had gone longer without water. A horse can go twice as long as a man; yet you were only thirsty, but your horse was hollow as a drum and nearly dead!”

  For some moments he either could not or would not face her eyes; when once more he did so it was with a recovered calm, and something more than his former urbanity of speech.

  “Will you then kindly tell me what you think?”

  “I cannot!” cried the girl. “I think one thing one moment and another thing the next. I give you up; but as I had never any right to attempt to unriddle you, I also beg your pardon. Consider unsaid every word I’ve spoken; and forgive me if you can.”

  He laughed aloud.

  “Forgive you, Miss Villiers! That’s taking it a little too seriously, I am sure. But — the fact is — you are right! And upon my word I’ve a good mind to tell you everything on the spot!”

  Irralie looked in the handsome, reckless face, and involuntarily drew back. “You must do as you please,” she said.

  “I could trust you? Yes, yes, I could trust you with my life. You are not the one to give a fellow away!”

  “I hope not. But that would depend.”

  “That — would — depend,” he repeated slowly. “On the nature of the confidence, of course! Well, well, let it rest. There was something else you were going to show me before we went in?”

  “There was,” said the girl. “Come this way; it’s something that I think is certain to appeal to you.”

  And once more she led him through the moonlit pines, with a heart in chaos, and thoughts so tangled that unravelment seemed as distant as the day of doom. This much she knew: there was a loaded pistol in his pocket, and the crackling of each twig was like the cocking of the hammer behind her back. And, again, this much she knew even better: that she would have felt no safer out shooting with her father than here and now under the eye of this privily armed man.

  So she led him through the soft sand between pine and hop-bush; and the moon peeped over one shoulder now, and now the other, until at last it shone with startling brilliance on white palings, and on a granite column in the midst of them, broken as a tree by the wind.

  “A grave!” said Irralie’s companion. But the girl said nothing. And when she looked at him his head was bare.

  Indeed the unexpectedness of the spot and its memorial compelled an unpremeditated awe; nor could a stranger or a sweeter place have been chosen for the repose of human ashes. Homestead and outbuildings were alike beyond sight and sound. Here was no music but that of the constant cricket and the wind among the trees; and here, for days or for weeks together, no eyes save those of heaven itself. Companion of a thousand pines, yet still with a stillness which exaggerated their every sound and motion, stood the painted palings, the simply storied pedestal, the granite column snapped like a mast. And the spirit of the sepulchre, which all who came there must feel, was one unattainable in sunlit, sweet-smelling cemetery or cool cathedral crypt. It brought the living nearer to the dead; it left the dead more convincingly at peace and rest for ever.

  Still bare-headed, the man crept forward and read —

  SACRED

  TO

  THE MEMORY OF

  CECIL GORTON GILES,

  BORN AT HAMPSTEAD, LONDON,

  May15th, 1853,

  DIED AT ARRAN DOWNS, N.S.W.,

  January 4th, 1875.

  “How sad!” murmured Fullarton. “I know of nothing in life like the pity of a young fellow cut off in all his sins and all his joy. And suddenly, too! I think this is the most touching tomb I have ever seen. Who was he; and how did it happen?” Irralie was watching him with keen eyes. “It was before our time,” she said; “but he was a young fellow almost straight from his public school, like Mr. Hodding; only he came up here as storekeeper. His people had the memorial sent up from Melbourne. But it was by his own request that he was buried here; he lived some hours after it happened.”

  “But what did happen?”

  “A bushranger shot him through the lungs.”

  He looked at her sharply; she was more than looking at him. Without a word he signified his readiness to return to the house; without a word she led the way.

  CHAPTER IV

  NIGHT AND DAY

  This was one of Irralie’s bad nights. Like most strong characters, the girl had her complement of unexpected weaknesses, and one of these was an irritating inability to sleep in the least difficulty or the smallest vexation of the spirit. Another and a weaker trait was a certain tendency of Irralie’s to meet the vexations half-way and to double the difficulties; but this was less generally known; for an unruly imagination was balanced by a reserve almost stoical, and yet little suspected by those who knew only the high-spirited outward girl.

  Imagination and reserve were, indeed, characteristics of a nature otherwise breezily courageous and independent to a fault. They were the two quarrelsome elements in a harmonious whole. And not for the first time did they pray upon each other to-night and tear the heart of Irralie in two between them.

  She imagined, or suspected, so much; and was so ashamed of her suspicions, or imaginations, that she would sooner have died than betray a word of them to living soul. So she reasoned with herself through the long slow hours, and would prove her visions baseless, only to see them plainer than ever for her pains.

  Here was the humor of it. The man was not the man he represented himself to be. Very well; then he must have an object for his imposture; and what possible object could there be? Exposure must follow soon or late, and if robbery were the design, how could impersonation expedite that? Plain robbery was easy enough in the bush, when there was anything to rob; but what was there here? Gold escorts were one thing, sheep stations another. And a drove of pure merinos were surely an unwieldy equivalent for a few handfuls of yellow dust.

  Again, if it was a case of impersonation, what had become of the impersonated? He must be somewhere — then where? Irralie thought of novels that she had read with plots founded upon this idea; at the bottom of most there was a murder; but murder was the one suspicion which did not plague her on the head of the real or soi-disant Greville Fullarton.

  Yet again: in such a case there would be reasonable precautions on the villain’s part; but this villain took none. He showed his weapons, and he came just as he was, in his rough bushman’s clothes, and wit
h his candid, impudent, dare-devil smile. And at the conjured portrait the girl smiled too, for could a calculating desperado look like that? But the smile froze; for could a man who looked like that be the real owner, and an Earl’s son?

  No; there was something sinister and wrong and underhand; moreover, the man had nearly confessed to her what it was. He had been within an ace of throwing himself upon her mercy! Well, she was thankful he had not done that. Her suspicions she might keep to herself, but not the guilty confidences of the most attractive villain unhung. On the contrary, if she once knew him for that — well, then she would know also how to act.

  And yet — and yet — had she not taken his part — taken it actively — already? Instinctively she had kept to herself his possession of arms; instinctively also she had come to his aid with the ready suggestion of a lost overcoat. And what did these instincts mean? She was a girl who looked things in the face; did they mean his innocence or her own infatuation? In an instant she was out of bed, and kneeling in the moonlight, and praying with all her soul that it might be the innocence of the man which alone put her on his side without her will. For she forgot to allow for a certain large, unreasonable chivalry in herself, ever likely to create in her a wilful sympathy with the unorthodox and the ungodly; more probably, however, she was unaware of the growth in her heart of this particular weed of original wickedness.

  Morning came, and with it a few minutes of fevered sleep; but the girl’s dreams were worse than her waking imaginations; they had the added terror of vagueness; and she fled, rather than rose, from her bed. The outer veranda, whereon her room opened, was as still and private as her room itself. From it she saw the red Riverina dawn, across a sea of sand flecked with sage-green salt-bush; and the touch of the dawn upon her face and feet gave her new strength and a first surcease from her shameful suspicions.

  And shameful was no word for them a little later, when cold water and clean sunshine had done their work, and the station day had begun with all its immemorial humdrum regularity. It was a Sunday, and the girl knew it by all the old, unmistakable signs.

  On Sundays her young brothers ran up the horses; she heard their spurs in the veranda, their voices thick with biscuit, and finally their ponies cantering toward the horse-paddock gate. Irralie had then just shut her door; and when next she opened it the boys were returning with the drove of horses in a cloud of sand. The thunder of their hoofs was like the charge of cavalry, with stock-whips cracking for musketry. Nor was it possible to see and hear it for the thousandth time and to harbor one moment longer the preposterous notions of the night.

  She walked round the house. The Chinaman was smoking his early morning pipe and bringing wood from the wood-heap for the kitchen fire. Irralie was greeted on every hand with the reassurance of the normal and the unromantic. A couple of chairs stood side by side on the veranda, an empty glass within reach of either. It was as though Irralie had seen her father and the owner drain and rise and part for the night at the latter’s door. A little after she had occasion to pass the door herself, when she heard the owner whistling as he dressed. And a little later yet she met her father in his Sunday suit. Irralie kissed him, but left her palms upon his shoulders, and searched him with a smile that made him wonder what was coming.

  “Well, father, what do you think of our friend?”

  “Fullarton?”

  “Yes.”

  “A very excellent fellow,” declared the manager, with a conviction that brought a thankful flush to the girl’s face. “We sat up quite late, and I haven’t enjoyed a chat so much for a long time. But, mind you” — and he lowered his voice—” the man’s no more like an Earl’s son than you or I.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Irralie, paling in a moment. Luckily she was dealing with no close observer; indeed, this very thought contributed to her pallor: here was also the least suspicious of men.

  “How do I mean?” he said. “Well, it’s a bit difficult to explain; I like him, and all that, much better than I expected; but then I expected a lot of gloss, and this fellow has less than none. It’s all the jollier — only somehow it doesn’t seem quite the thing. Look at his clothes, for instance!”

  “He must have picked them up from some tramp and put them on for a joke,” said Irralie on the spur. “But I’m glad you like him — and here he is!”

  And there he was: in clothes which fitted him uncommonly well to have been picked up in the way suggested, but which looked worse than ever in the full glare of day. He was also unshaven, and a grimy blue from ear to ear; the gross effect, in the words of Mr. Villiers, was decidedly not “quite the thing.”

  Irralie returned a formal greeting and slipped away; her heart was once more throbbing with the black doubts of the night; and this time it was slowlier stilled. Her father and Fullarton drove off after breakfast to look for the lost overcoat. They returned before lunch without it; nor was Irralie surprised. She had known exactly what to expect; and anticipated with confidence the like result of a cognate quest, undertaken by the store-keeper, who had gone with the spring-cart to meet the mail and to bring back the new owner’s luggage.

  “I only hope it’s there,” he said to her, with deep meaning.

  “I only hope so too!” she replied, with a deeper yet.

  “Then in ten minutes you won’t know me: I shall be shaved and clothed and in my right mind.”

  “You are certainly not in it now.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Or you would never tempt Providence as you are doing!”

  And the girl turned on her heel, loathing herself for the unpremeditated warning, and him for the inexplicable attraction which compelled the words in her own despite. Then for Irralie it was the night all over again — with its suspicions, doubts, arguments, lapses of involuntary introspection, and agonies of acute self-contempt. Only now she could wander and rend her spirit in the open air; she was no longer imprisoned in the dark between burning sheets. The scent of the pines was in her nostrils, the shadows of the pines striped and fluted the whiteness of her cool attire; and to look at her, with bent head and red sunshade and raven hair, her maiden meditations, if not fancy-free, might have been guaranteed free as a child’s from grave concern. Yet there was mischief in her feet as in her mind. It led her to the broken column and the lonely grave; and there it held her, still with thought, and gazing at the inscription with eyes that read not; nor ever moving till a breaking twig broke also the spell that bound the girl.

  CHAPTER V

  AN ACCIDENT

  Irralie started. But the step was not Fullarton’s. And the two-edged stab of disappointment and relief, instantly experienced by the girl, alarmed her later when she found time to think of it. At the moment, however, there was George Young — for he it was — to be faced and fenced with; and one glance at his heavy, wholesome face discovered it alight with unmistakable news.

  “Well?” cried Irralie, and held her breath with the monosyllable. The luggage, like the overcoat, had not been found! The impostor was already exposed! That must be the news; what else?

  The overseer looked from Irralie to the inscription at the base of the column, and again significantly at the girl. Irralie could have struck him for the delay.

  “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you speak?” she gasped. “Something has happened — and there you stand!”

  “Oh, it’s nothing near home, Miss Villiers; only I was just thinking, seeing the name of poor Giles there, that there may be one or two more to join him before long!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bushrangers!” replied the other. “Our friend Stingaree at it again!”

  “Here?” she steeled herself to say. “Well, no; not on the run; but somewhere or other in these back-blocks, there is little doubt. You see, Jevons has just come back with the mail — and those portmanteaus—”

  “Has he brought the portmanteaus?” She steadied herself by one of the wooden palings round the grave.

  “Oh,
yes, he’s brought them all right; it was about that I came to you; but this bit of news is the thing that’s made us all sit up! Not that he’s likely to come here, Miss Villiers,” continued the overseer reassuringly, to unheeding ears. “Stingaree never stuck up a station in his life. Gold-escorts are his lay; he goes where money is; still, yesterday morning it seems he stuck up a bush pub by way of a change. I suppose there was money there. I know the shanty — it’s over in the Balranald district — that is straight across country from here, say seventy miles by the crow. And that’s far enough — across country. It would be a different thing if it were north or south of us, anywhere up or down this stock-route. Still — it’s near enough to be exciting!”

  Of all this Irralie had heard two sentences exactly. So not a soul save herself had suspected him here! And now — it seemed incredible — the portmanteaus had actually come, and even she could suspect nothing more. So ran her thoughts, and the overseer’s voice was as the babble of a creek.

  “It was about that you came to me?” she repeated after him, when he had done, as though the words had been his last. They were the last that she remembered.

  “About — ah, that luggage!” said George Young. He paused; and in his change of expression Irralie’s quickened eyes perceived an enemy of Greville Fullarton, and found herself wondering what the enemy would have given for her late suspicions. “That luggage,” he continued, in a tone changed like his face, “is more bother than it’s worth. It’s great, big, heavy, regular new chum’s baggage, and was bother enough to fetch. And now he’s got it he can’t get into it! Lost every blessed key! ““Lost — every — key!” repeated Irralie, in a voice that must have flashed her own idea through a brain less slow than that of the overseer, who, however, bore it in mind. It was an idea that made Irralie tremble for one moment — freeze the next; and so remain, with proud, white face and flashing eye. “They said you might have one that would fit,” pursued Young; “and they asked me to go and look for you.”