Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “Who asked you?”

  “Fullarton himself.”

  “It was like his impertinence!”

  “It was so! I’m glad to hear you say that, for in my opinion a more—”

  “That’ll do,” replied Irralie, tartly. “Don’t hang a man before you try him!” And with a sudden, feverish haste, she led the way homeward through the pines; the overseer following, with a very healthy craving for the new owner’s blood.

  On the veranda, sure enough, were the portmanteaus, hat - box, gun - case, and dressing-bag of a sufficiently new chum. The labels of the voyage still adhered to the raw, unseasoned leather. Indeed, with the single exception of the gun-case, everything was flagrantly new and redolent of the London outfitter. And on the largest piece of all, the careless centre of a keenly interested group, sat a picturesque, unshaven adventurer, like a beggar enthroned.

  “You are my last hope, Miss Villiers,” said he, as the girl came up. “I’ve tried all the keys on the premises but yours. If you fail me — —”

  “I shall fail you,” said Irralie. “I keep nothing in the world under lock and key.”

  “Indeed! Then I am done.”

  “I am afraid you are.”

  The words were said in a way that attracted no third person’s attention. Yet Fullarton winced as his eyes met Irralie’s — winced, and then smiled. Next moment he was holding out his hand to one of her young brothers.

  “That knife of yours,” said he.

  “To force the lock?

  Fullarton took the knife without replying, opened the big blade, got lazily to his feet, and as lazily reseated himself, cross-legged, on the veranda-boards, within reach of the brass and leather fastenings. The circle of inquisitive faces had closed in upon him when he paused to search it for the face of Irralie. All he saw was her black hair vanishing.

  “Don’t go away, Miss Villiers!”

  “Why not — Mr. Fullarton?”

  “Because I’ve got something in here that I want you to see. You remember our little discussion about lawn-tennis rackets? You said they were still made curved, and I said they weren’t. Well, on the lower side of this portmanteau — at the very bottom — underneath my shirts — there is, or ought to be, a racket of this year. We’ll see if there is, Miss Villiers; and we’ll see which of us is right.”

  He had spoken with smiling eyes upon the girl; and his smile broadened as he specified, with more and more exactitude, the precise position of the racket. It was the address of a conjurer before his greatest trick; yet Irralie alone understood. As he finished speaking, he raised the knife and stabbed with sudden energy at the leather above the lock. Indeed the point of the blade caught the plate of brass, and the blade itself closed upon his hand amid the exclamations of the onlookers.

  “You’ll ruin it!” cried one or two, meaning the portmanteau.

  “He’s cut himself,” said another.

  But Fullarton doubled his fist before the blood had time to flow. “It’s nothing!” he muttered, and, with his left hand, cut the straps, sawed round the lock, and had the portmanteau open in an instant. In another, the shirts were displayed and disarranged, and the lawn-tennis racket duly produced.

  “As straight as my face, I think!” said Fullarton, as he held it out to Irralie. She hardly looked at it. But, from her place among the others, she did look at Fullarton — humbly, steadfastly — with an expression which he alone could read. To the rest there had merely been a friendly argument, and Irralie was merely in the wrong. Yet to the more observant there was an unprecedented absence of humor, and of spirit in Irralie’s acknowledgment of the fact.

  “You are right,” she said, as if it were quite a tragic matter. “You are right, and I was a perfect fool! Forgive me if you ever can.”

  “On one condition. The racket is yours. I have more than I can use.”

  She then took it from him, but no thanks would come. A “perfect fool” indeed, the depth of her folly — the knowledge that he had plumbed it — and the good - humored tact of his reproof, all struck home together and choked her with simple shame. She made one effort; another, and she would have broken down; but she was saved, and strangely, at that moment.

  “Mr. Fullarton!” she heard her father cry. “Your hand! your hand!”

  Fullarton looked; the blood was welling through his clenched fingers. He turned his back and examined the cut.

  “Deeper than I thought!” he muttered to the manager. “Have you any gut in the medicine-chest? That’s an artery pumping. Gut and tweezers and a basin of water in the dining-room!”

  And in the dining-room he sat with his bare arm over a basin of reddening water, and, using the tweezers with his own left hand, picked up the arteries himself and called for somebody to tie them with the gut. The manager tried, but his fingers were all hard thumbs; he was only good for standing by with the whiskey, which was needed but refused. Mrs. Villiers was too nervous; and it was Irralie herself who finally tied the arteries with her firm, nimble fingers, and who helped to bind up the hand. The young men and the boys looked on; and, when all was over, there was but one heart left for the wounded man to win, who reeled when he rose, and had to be supported to his room. The boys gave him a rousing cheer, led by their frenzied tutor; and it was none other than Jevons who cried, “One more!”

  But Irralie shut herself in her room, clasped her hands stained with his blood, and went in thankfulness upon her knees. Her doubts were at an end; yet, in the first ecstasy of secret and spiritual deliverance, they seemed less preposterous than at any previous stage. The horror had been too strong for her to cease to take it seriously the moment it was removed.

  CHAPTER VI

  TWO VOICES

  The Fourth Commandment was not totally broken at Arran Downs; it was merely observed in a modified form. The family remembered the Sabbath-night, if not the day, and kept it holy in a rather winning way of their own. The piano was wheeled into the broad veranda, forms were put across, and lanterns hung. Then the station bell would ring for five minutes, and the men would troop over from the hut, slipping hot pipes into their pockets as they entered the veranda. Mr. Villiers would be discovered sitting at a small table with the books. The men, too, remained seated during the entire service.

  This was never long. A few prayers were read, then a chapter, then something pithy from a book. It was not always a sermon so-called. But there were always hymns, and Irralie was never absent from the piano. She was certainly not a good performer; but she could play a hymn, and lead it, too, with a voice not free from possibilities. She was also a great favorite with the men.

  On the night of the knife accident, however, the men’s hut sent a contingent without numerical precedent. And the attraction, of course, was the new chum-owner with the blooming handle to his blooming name. Such of the men, indeed, as had already seen him, described the hut as the “proper blooming place for ‘im — if you jokers could suffer the cove.” Others, who had yet to behold him at short range, and who came to service for that purpose alone, were punished by a complete take-in.

  “That the cove?” said one. “Why, ‘e’s a bloomin’ toff like all the rest o’ them new chummies. Wot were yer givin’ us?”

  “Blowed if he hasn’t been and dressed himself up! Hardly knew him myself; looks a fine chap now, eh, don’t ‘e?”

  “Plucky fine! Wot’s ‘e done with ‘is ‘and?”

  And so forth — under cover of the first hymn. For Fullarton had been helped into a well-cut suit of light gray flannel. He now wore also an impeccable colored shirt, a white collar, and a good tie badly tied by Hodding, the tutor, who had also essayed an easy shave, and achieved an easier than Fullarton anticipated. The net result was a change astonishing enough, if essentially superficial. To be sure, too, a sleeve hung loose, which prevented the coat from fitting as a coat should. Still, the garments were by the most celebrated of all firms, as Hodding told Jevons (who had never heard of that firm) with bated breath. And, without a doub
t, pale as he was from loss of blood, the handsome, headlong scapegrace looked no longer a son of whom the noblest Earl need have felt very sorely ashamed.

  So thought Irralie on the piano-stool before her duties obliged her to turn her back. This occurred at the first hymn, of which the very first verse had an instantaneously depressing effect upon the girl. Not that it was a hymn she disliked; it was “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” which she loved and had chosen. But here was a new, hoarse voice braying out of tune in her ear, and she was only too well aware whose voice it was. Anything more painful, anything so raucous, ear-splitting, and grotesque, Irralie had never heard. It stabbed her nerves like the squeak of a slate-pencil. It was no more certain of a note than a drunken man of his steps. And it came from lips which Irralie had so recently suspected of falsehood and deceit, that, but for the incident of the tennis-racket, her new-born faith had been once more shaken to its base.

  As it was she found herself disillusioned and disappointed in the hour of relief. And the most mortifying moment of all was when, in the second hymn, the infliction suddenly ceased, and the honest, painstaking, sure - footed bass of George Young (which it had drowned) was heard for the first time coming down like a steam-hammer on every note.

  Irralie was provoked beyond rhyme or reason. She had made up her mind to think so very well now of the man of whom — on grounds disgracefully slight — she had thought so very, very badly. And it was a fair mind, anxious to do justice always, and to make prompt amends where it failed; but here was this miserable little fly of a voice in the ointment of her new content.

  Yet it might have been worse; earlier in the day, at least, she would have thought more of it. For if there was such a thing as a typical bush-ranging bellow, Irralie would then have made certain that she had heard it to-night. As it was, however, when the second hymn had been sung without further atrocities, the girl turned round on her music-stool and revived her spirits by side-long glances at the empty, well-cut sleeve.

  “I must apologize for making that row,” he said to her, under cover of the men’s stampede. “I’m sorry I sang.”

  “Why?” asked Irralie, coloring.

  “I saw your shoulders up to your ears. I seemed to hear your teeth on edge! And suddenly I remembered what they all used to say at home. My father’s a clergyman, you know; he used to like us all to join in; but my brothers and sisters petitioned him to forbid me to!”

  “It was really quite unconscious on my part,” said Irralie. “I — I never heard anything.”

  The other laughed.

  “Your friend Young sings well,” said he.

  “Too well!” said Irralie, who felt vaguely annoyed at having poor George styled her friend — by Fullarton. Nor did she like the singer any better for being one just then. But Fullarton only laughed.

  “Too well, Miss Villiers!”

  “There’s no interest in being so good and doing things perfectly.”

  “He is a very good fellow, then, this George Young? I thought he looked it.”

  “Offensively good!” said Irralie, and changed the subject with characteristic abruptness.

  In fact, she had remembered Fullarton’s wound, and the memory expressed itself in that solicitude for him which was to be her outward way of atoning for the folly that was still heinous in her eyes. She had wronged him before, she must make up for it now. So seriously she continued to put it to herself; and yet her friends did not know her as a serious person, but rather for a hearty, hard-riding, impudent, charming, independent child of the bush.

  Was she changing? Had she already changed? Deliberate introspection would have come amiss to her the week, nay, the very day before; hitherto she had coupled it with insomnia (to which hers had been always due) as an occasional disorder at the worst. Now — as it were in a moment — it was her perpetual pitfall — a besetting sin. This very reflection she made alone in the moonlight later in the evening. And why alone? To think about herself — for no other reason, unless it was to think —

  An unreasoning anger filled the heart of the girl. She looked about for one on whom to vent it, and was given George Young, who at that moment stepped down from the veranda and was proceeding with bent head toward the young men’s rooms. His very carriage was an offence; but his excellent singing that night had been a greater. Irralie determined to be even with him on the spot. He was the only one who had never said a word about the wounded hand. That was another thing; she would ask him what it all meant. And yet she might have known. George Young was a friend of some few years’ standing. He could remember her short dresses and her black pigtail. But Greville Fullarton was the acquaintance of a single day.

  “George!” cried Irralie, authoritatively. “Who has frightened you?” she scornfully added, as he came up staring.

  “You astonished me.”

  “How?”

  “By calling me like that.”

  “Oh, so I haven’t known you long enough to call you George, eh? Certainly we live and learn!”

  “You know I didn’t mean that, Irralie.”

  She did know, and she relented. “Then what’s the matter with you? What have I done — or anybody else — that you should look as you have looked all the evening, and — and not behave like other people? Who’s offended you? That’s what I want to know!”

  Nobody. He was not offended at all. That was all he would say. Yet he said it with such a tragic tremor, and was at one and the same time so dignified and manly and pig-headed, that Irralie could not leave ill alone, but must needs answer for him.

  “I know who!” she whispered, and pointed across the yard to the front veranda. It showed a firmament of tiny red stars. The new owner had got at his cigars; and Young alone had professed to prefer his own pipe.

  Young made no answer now.

  “You hate him!” pursued Irralie, in a low, excited voice. “Why should you? How do you dare?”

  “Dare!” said the other softly.

  No retort could have stung Irralie more. “Then presume,” she said. “Yes, presume is the better word for you. You do presume when you take a scunner against a man you know nothing about!”

  “A man I know nothing about! That’s it — exactly.”

  He turned, and walked toward the pines. She followed him until their ordinary voices were out of earshot of the veranda. At the wire fence they stopped, and Irralie turned upon him with subdued fury.

  “At all events you know who he is!”

  “Who is he?”

  “You know as well as I do that he’s the son of an Earl — Lord Fullarton!”

  For one moment she thought his smile a sneer at her glibness with the titles; the next, she divined a yet more sinister meaning, and it held her speechless. Her suspicions of last night were his of this! It was incredible, monstrous, absurd; and yet the case. His silence was significant — and the more shame for him! It had been bad enough in her when there were the rough clothes to excite a prejudice, and no luggage to allay it. But in George Young — now — after all that had happened under his eyes — it was mere malicious idiocy. Irralie laughed in his face.

  “So you think that!”

  “What?”

  “That he’s not what he says he is!” Young looked at her firmly with his obstinate, set face.

  “Yes — I think that. Stop a moment, Irralie! You have forced me to speak, and now there’s one question — no, two — that I’ve got for you. Have you ever seen the signature of Greville Fullarton?”

  “Never.”

  “Then I have. There’s his note to your father still lying about the store. Have you ever seen the signature of the man who turned up last night?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Nor will you ever!” said Young, emphatically.

  “Why not? What are you driving at?”

  “He has injured his right hand!”

  His meaning was slow to dawn upon ‘her; yet some vague sense of it was already troubling her heart.

  “Well?
” she said. “What then? It was a most unfortunate accident.”

  “I don’t agree with you. On the contrary, if you ask me, I should call it a very happy accident indeed! There are more documents in the air than those he professes to have lost. Some had come up by the mail. And your father had asked him to sign them! “There was a pause.

  “I see: so you don’t think it was an accident at all,” said Irralie, with the stinging contempt of sudden and complete self-control.

  “No, I do not.”

  And he faced her doggedly as with insolent scorn she turned lightly from him, retreated a few steps, and turned again.

  “And pray how do you account for the racket in the portmanteau? You were there, I think? You know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I was there. The explanation of that is fairly simple, too.”

  “Give it me!” she cried, stamping her foot.

  “No, I shall not,” he replied quietly. “I shall do nothing of the kind.”

  “For obvious reasons!” sneered the girl; “for reasons that are so worthy of you! Ingenious is not the word for your theory — nor for you — nor for every single thing you’ve said to - night! I leave the word to your imagination. But it only needed this to complete my opinion — of you!”

  And so she left him — with a sudden catch at her skirt, as though the very sand he stood in were malignant ground.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE SKELETON AT THE DANCE

  The affair of the following evening was evidently far from proving the formidable rite which Fullarton had appeared to dread. He took a mild interest in the preparations, and made a favorable impression upon the guests. Active help he certainly could not give; but Irralie felt that he would have been of but little use in any case; and sadly admitted to herself (though not to another soul) that her friend was not and could never have been a dancing man. She felt it only less than his dreadful singing. But there were no more absurd suspicions. He was with her all the day; and if he had not a single suggestion for the floor, or for the arrangement of chairs and lights, he had plenty to tell Irralie about Harrow, Oxford, and California. He had been superannuated from the first, sent down from the second, and had bade the last farewell in a red shirt and no boots. Luckily the overseer was out of the way. He was superintending the pitching of the tents. Irralie and he had not spoken again.