Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “I had things on my mind,” she now confessed; “but Mr. Daintree wasn’t one of them.”

  “Then it’s somebody else,” reflected Lady Starkie, with half-shut eyes upon the girl’s dry lips and burning cheeks. “Who is this Captain Blaydes I hear so much about?” she asked aloud.

  “Another friend of papa’s.”

  “Another new friend?”

  “Newer than Mr. Daintree. He comes to see papa on business. But I have had him a good deal on my hands; too much, for my taste.”

  “You don’t like him, then?”

  “Hate him!” said the girl, with sudden vehemence, her mind for once detaching itself from Tom. “There, it’s out: I never said it to anybody else, but it’s what I feel. Last week when Mr. Daintree wasn’t with us, Captain Blaydes was, and had his room. Aunt Emily, I want you to know about him; he was a horrid guest — insolent to the servants — forward with me — and more presuming with papa than any man I have ever seen. Yet papa vowed he was the best of fellows — and looked miserable all the week! And I was told to be civil to him or to leave the house myself. I want to know what it all means: no good, I’ll be bound. What should you say, Aunt Emily? We have had trouble enough lately; heaven knows, we want no more. And yet I had the strongest instinct about this man — that he was here for no good!”

  “He is not coming to-night, I hope?”

  “Yes, he is; but luckily not until after dinner. He could not get here in time. The Bury St. Edmunds coach—”

  “He is coming from there!” cried Lady Starkie. “Then, my dear, you may be sure he has had some hand in that wretched election business! It is not over yet, Claire; you must endure such people until it is. But why have him to-night?” —

  “You may well ask! Papa expects him.”

  “Well, it is a pity. Indeed, in my opinion, this dinner-party is a little premature — considering everything. However, let us only make it a success!”

  CHAPTER III

  THE NEW LOVER

  A SUCCESS it proved to be — the dinner-party — but it was neither Claire nor yet Lady Starkie who made it one. It was Nicholas Harding himself. His laugh was louder and more infectious than ever, his face an even healthier pink, and his little jokes were both felicitous and incessant, even when he was busy carving the haunch. He cracked several at the expense of Ministers, and two or three at his own.

  “I only hope one thing,” said he, pausing in those obsolete labours. “I only hope they send me to Botany Bay! My friend Daintree has promised to give me another chance there as chief butler in his establishment. And so I may hope — ha! ha! — to carve my way back to decent society — ha! ha! ha!”

  The spirit of such jests made up for the letter. The party had been so carefully chosen that nothing offended or fell flat, and the general good-humour never flagged. Even Claire had light-hearted moments during dinner. Daintree had taken her in, and he talked to her so much about his lovely, lonely home on Port Jackson’s shores (once the subject was started) that he quite forgot to carve the fowls which had been placed in front of him, and a reprimand from the head of the table set everybody laughing. Daintree joined in with what grace he might; he was too self-conscious to enter into the spirit of such chaff, and very soon he was once more edifying Claire by talking entirely about himself in his deep, confidential, serious voice. The girl struck him as less sympathetic than he had ever known her. Of course, her wits were all at nine o’clock and the meadow gate. But Daintree put his own construction upon her altered manner, and tore his nails beneath the table-cloth, and made up his sombre mind to a bold, immediate course.

  So when Claire had left a drawing-roomful of ladies under her aunt’s providential wing, and had set a first trembling foot upon the lawn behind the house, a long swift stride overtook her, and there was Daintree at her side — with the night’s wine-bibbing but just begun.

  “Mr. Daintree!” she exclaimed aghast.

  “Yes! I also have escaped,” he said. “I made my excuses. The room was hot, but your father understood. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “To me? Why, you have been talking to me for the last two hours!”

  And, emboldened by very nervousness, she looked up at him with a shake of her ringlets unwittingly coquettish; and he down on her with all the devouring desire of his gloomy, passionate soul. Upon the lawn there was no light save that from a dozen of brilliant windows; and Claire’s face was to it, and Daintree’s back. Yet it might have been the other way about, for her emotion he never saw, while his was but too apparent to her keener woman’s eye.

  “You came out for a breath of air,” said he. “Let me come with you.”

  “I was going to the arbour,” she replied. “I left a book there this afternoon.”

  It was true enough; but the arbour was on the way to the paddock gate; she had left her book there for a cunning excuse against some such need as this. And now he was coming with her; she could not prevent it; and Tom already at the gate!

  They walked in silence across the smooth damp grass.

  It was a summer night come a month too soon, and with the greater fragrance from the porous earth. The stars were white and bright, and the air so mild and sweet that the Southern Cross might have twinkled with the rest. Daintree stood aside at the arbour steps, then followed Claire and filled the doorway with his powerful frame.

  “I wanted to speak to you,” he repeated pointedly, as she found her book. “I say your father understood.

  I had spoken to him already. Claire — Claire — will you be my wife?”

  The book dropped.

  “Mr. Daintree!” she gasped, and took a terrified step towards the obstructed doorway.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, entering immediately.

  “There, you are free to run away. Yet I think you will hear me out. Your attention, at all events, I may claim without presumption!”

  “Oh, yes,” said Claire. “I will listen — I will listen.” She knew that touchy tone of his so well; but it was dropped now in a moment.

  “God bless you for that,” he broke out, hoarsely —

  “even for that! Only listen to me; that is all I ask.

  I know I am not a likely sort of man for a young girl like you. I am years older than you are. I look older still — I’m a hundred at heart — but you would make a new man of me. I should be born again. Oh, listen, for pity’s sake, and let me speak my heart! It has been bursting with love of you so long! Whatever your answer, you must hear me out. Claire, I am not a bad man — I really am not; but I have never been myself all these years. My life has been all bitterness, my very soul is steeped in it. Everything has been disappointment, disillusion, disgust, and distrust! You know the sort of life I have led — a wanderer, an exile like Byron, an outcast from my own home. It has spoiled me. I know that well enough. I have never had a chance; but you would give me one. You would make the man I might have been before this. I have talent — perhaps something more — I may say so freely to you. I spoke of Byron. I am nearer him than any man alive. There are those who do not put me second. But all my powers have been wasted, like my life; how that had been wasted I never knew until I met you. Claire — my darling! — you have made a new man of me as it is. I am no longer the bitter fellow I was when first God brought you into my life. You have changed me; you have changed all life and all the world. You are the one thing left in either that is all good, all pure, all noble; and I want you, I want you, I want you with all my heart and soul and being! Come to me, and by your help I may still leave the world the better and the richer for my presence; leave me lonely, and I am lost and ruined both here and in the world to come!”

  He ceased; and Claire heard him shaking all over in a palsy of passionate desire. His passion frightened her, and yet won somewhat of her respect without for a moment blinding her to its glaring egotism. It was none the less genuine on that account; on the contrary, there was a convincing honesty in the utter absence of altruistic pretensions; and, for
the rest, Claire did feel herself the possessor of a certain power for good over this man. But that power could only go out from her with her love.

  And that love belonged already to a spirit as wild as Daintree’s, but lighter, brighter, and if not incomparably braver and manlier, then changed indeed.

  She rose and laid a hand upon the trembling arm, and very gently said: “You have paid me the greatest compliment, Mr. Daintree, which they say a man can pay a woman. You know that I like you. Indeed there is no one for whom I feel a heartier sympathy. But love you I do not — it is best to be perfectly frank.”

  “You do not!” he only said.

  “And I never can.” —

  “Why never?” he cried irritably. “What do you mean by saying that? Is my family not good enough for you? Am I not clever enough?” In the midst of his love-making he had lost his temper, but Claire was at once too proud and too kind to rebuke this ebullition; and presently he continued in a merely injured tone, “It isn’t as if I was obliged to go back to New South Wales. Why should I? It would be a wretched place for you, and I am sick of it. I thought I could never bear this cruel old country again; but I could — I can — with you!” He would not see that he had got his answer. An overweening vanity was among his salient faults.

  “It can never be,” repeated Claire, decidedly.

  “But why never? That’s what I can’t fathom. There is no one else, is there?”

  “There — is.”

  In an instant he dropped the hand which he had just taken, and which she had not the heart to withdraw. His trembling ceased. She heard him breathing hard and through his teeth.

  “I might have known it!” he said bitterly at length; and that was all.

  “You could not—” she was beginning penitently, but he cut her short.

  “I could!” he cried. “It has been so all my life; disappointment has been my daily bread. No doubt it was ordained and is all for the best! Anything else might turn my brain!”

  “I am very sorry,” murmured poor Claire. “I am more sorry than I can ever say.”

  “You may be,” was the quick retort. “You had this and that to gain.”

  The girl’s blood was up at last; her lips parted and her eyes flashed; but she could not condescend to his weapons. “I am going back to the house,” was all she said, as she caught up her rustling skirts. “Excuse me, Mr. Daintree.”

  “No, I shall not excuse you!” he answered, barring her way. “It is you who must excuse me first. God forgive me, I never meant to say such things! I hardly know what I am saying. I am wild and mad for love of you, Claire. And I shall win you yet — I shall win you yet — even if I have to wait a lifetime! You were made for me. I refuse to do without you. He shall not have you, whoever he is! And you must forgive me for that, too,” he added, with sudden humility, and he stood aside. “But it is none the less a fact!” he hissed as suddenly through his teeth.

  They were his last words; she did not heed them, but gave him her warm soft hand in the kindest manner imaginable.

  “We will forgive each other,” she said gently, “as we pray to be forgiven ourselves!”

  And so she left him on the arbour steps — a pillar of vain and gloomy passion — indistinct in the starlight, but quivering again — all six feet and fifteen stone of him — with the grievous burden of his stubborn love.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE OLD LOVE

  THE garden was the ordinary narrow one, but with top-heavy additions beyond and behind its neighbour on either side. And the arbour was (so to speak) in the bottle’s neck: there was no getting to the meadow without passing within a yard or two of its rustic portal.

  There was, however, a shallow shrubbery down either wall of the original garden; and when Daintree had been alone about a minute, the laurels on his left began a risky rustle in the still evening air. Luckily, he was already in too deep a contemplation of his last and angriest wound to hear aught but the girl’s voice and his own still ringing through the arbour. But as for Claire, one moment she held her breath in horrid certainty that he had heard; in another she was satisfied that he had not; and had forgotten his existence the next. Indeed, by the time she looked upon the meadow, asleep beneath its soft grey coverlet of dew, the wide world contained but one live man, and he was at the gate upon the farther side.

  Yet was he? Round the meadow ran a gravel path, upon which she thought her feet pattered loud enough for all the world to hear. Then she dropped the key in reaching it from its accustomed crevice and it rang upon the gravel, and in her nervousness she was an age fumbling at the lock. Yet no sound of hers brought a word of greeting from the other side. He had not come! As she pulled the gate open she felt certain of it; and then beheld and heard him, advancing shyly through the sibilant grass, with some white thing in his hand, and a young moon just risen over Primrose Hill.

  “Tom!” she cried softly. “You are come! Oh, thank God! I have kept you—”

  The words failed upon her parted lips. He stood askance before her, shamefaced and never noticing her tremulous, outstretched hands. His own held out to her a folded note.

  “Read that,” he said hoarsely. “I am only here because I had not money for the stamp!”

  A great chill struck to the girl’s loyal heart. It was the doubt that had kept her awake; now a doubt no more. Her trembling ceased; she turned her back on Erichsen, and read by the moonlight the candid words that he had written in St. James’s Park.

  He watched her with scarce a breath. His eyes lived upon her while they might. Her face had been turned away before he had the courage to raise his; but there was the white neck tapering to the nut-brown hair, the little ears half-hidden by ringlets, the thoughtful poise of the lithe, light body, all just as he had them by heart. The white arms struck him as a little thin, but then he had never before seen her in full evening dress. She was wearing pink crêpe over white satin, high Venetian sleeves, and feathery fringes of pink and white satin rouleau; it was one more picture of her, and he thought the sweetest of all, to hang with the many already in his mind.

  Meanwhile she had never turned her head; but now it drooped a little; and those snowy shoulders were heaving with suppressed sobs.

  In an instant he was at her side; the next, she had turned to him with shining eyes and yearning arms.

  “My own poor boy!” she whispered through her tears. “Oh, thank heaven you had no money for those stamps!”

  “Claire!” he gasped, falling back; “do not speak to me like that. I am not worthy — you don’t understand. You should go your way and never think of me again.”

  “There is somebody else,” said the girl, calmly.

  “That I love? No, indeed!”

  “You are not married?”

  “God forbid.”

  “Then you have changed your mind. Well, if it makes you happier, dear, I can bear that too. I love you well enough—”

  “Hush!” he said hoarsely, “it is not that. I love you, too, my darling — ah! God knows how truly now! Yet I have come to contemptible grief; I have been everything that’s bad. What value can there be in such a love?”

  “I don’t know — still less care! It is all the love I want — it’s good enough for me!” she whispered; and with a deep, sweet sigh she hid her face against his shabby shoulder. He touched the dainty head with his hand, but not his lips. His eyes were fixed upon the moon, that was like a golden curl astray in night’s tresses; and his handsome, haggard face was discoloured and deformed with this the quintessence of his discreditable woes.

  “Good enough for you — of all women!” he bitterly repeated. “MY love for YOU! Didn’t I tell you I was no longer worthy of even your friendship? That was the truth; every word in my letter is the literal truth. I have never looked at anybody else — to love them — but oh! oh! my love for you has been a poor thing. It didn’t prevent me from going to the bad. You loved me; and yet I came to this!”

  He groaned again. She said nothing, but
caught his hand and pressed it. The pressure he returned.

  “Oh, Claire,” he cried, “it was madness, I think! I was mad at leaving you and Old England, perhaps for ever. And the ship wouldn’t sail, Claire, the ship wouldn’t sail! When I went to the office, thinking I had about three days, they told me she would be three weeks. I walked out of that office swearing I’d find some other; but all I found was the road to the bad. Drink and dice and cards! You asked me to tell you all. I tell you all I can. I tell it you to set you against me and make you hate me for ever. That is the kindest thing.... Claire, Claire, why don’t you strike me? Why don’t you scorn me and leave me to my fate? Oh, oh, I could bear it better than this!”

  Her warm arms were about him. They clasped him tight. He could hear her heart and his own beating close together.

  Suddenly she stood apart from him, with small clenched fists glittering with rings. He held his breath.

  “The man who is at the bottom of all this,” said she: “who is he? How was it? You speak of him in your letter: tell me more.”

  Tom shrugged his shoulders.

  “What is the use? The thing is done; it’s past mending; and it was my own miserable fault. Most of my money went in fair play and — riot! He only relieved me of the residue. Yet I tell you, Claire” (with sudden fury), “I’d go contentedly to my account if I could only kick him along in front of me the whole way! Yes, I’d hang for the hound, and think the satisfaction cheap at the price!”

  “What is his name?” demanded Claire.

  “Blaydes!” said Tom; “B-l-a-y-d-e-s. Captain Blaydes, forsooth, on half-pay! Blaydes of the Guards, who disgraced themselves for all time by not—”

  He broke off and stood looking at the girl.

  “By not what?” whispered Claire, who had glanced involuntarily through the gate towards the distant lighted windows, and who was now trembling again, with a new and dreadful agitation.