“But why did it happen?” he asked indignantly. “What could you have done to deserve such treatment?”
She hesitated, and squeezed his arm.
“Nat Sullivan came—”
“Nat Sullivan!”
“An’ I was to swear whether or not you were one of the bushrangers; so you may think what I swore; an’ he said I was a liar, an’ I struck’m in the face wid me open hand; an’ they shaved me for that!”
Tom felt miserable; she had suffered for him all along; how could he tell her he was deceiving her now, and had no intention of marrying her at all? Not one word of that had passed her modest lips, yet the pressure of her homely hand was eloquent with love and joy. What could he do? What could he say? For miles he never opened his lips: they were tight-shut when she glanced at him, and his face so wretched, that at last she could bear it no longer.
“What is it, dear?” she asked him tenderly. “Is it how ye can make such as me your wedded wife? Because ye needn’t, Tom dear, if ye think betther not. ’Twouldn’t take all that to make me happy!”
Then, in a burst, he told her of his master’s plan, and how he had entered into it against his own better judgment, because that master had plucked him from the jaws of death and from the gates of hell; and how, from the moment he saw Peggy, his only thought was to do for her what his master had done for him.
“My one idea,” he said, “was to get you out of that horrible place. I give you my word I never thought of anything else. But—”
Her sweet eyes had fallen. There were tears on her lashes. Claire was dead to him, so what else mattered? Better be true to the living than to the dead!
“ — but I do now!” he cried through his teeth.
“Yes, Peggy, I mean it now! I hate such trickery, I’ll have no hand in it. I applied for a wife, and by the Lord I’ll marry her too — if — why—”
She had withdrawn her arm, and was shaking her bent black head.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE SHIP COMES IN
SEPTEMBER finished on its sweetest note: a mild breeze blowing off the South Pacific, a temperate sun in a spotless sky, a harbour fretted with waves like azure shells, and winding among shores still green and wholesome from a winter’s rains. It was a Sunday, too, and round the woody headlands, and across the dark-blue inlets, came the sound of bells for afternoon church. Tom lay on his back, his head beneath a Norfolk Island pine, his heels in the warm sand at the water’s edge. His eyes were closed; but he was listening to the bells.
He fancied the sound as fourteen thousand miles away: for so had he lain and listened amid the Suffolk rabbit-warrens on summer Sundays when his place was in the cool dark rectory pew. His spirit was in Suffolk now. Then the bells stopped. Then he lay very still; and when he turned he half expected his back to smart and his legs to jingle. Once more he was a felon in a felon’s country; it was that despite sun and waves and soft white sand; and felon was his name no less for this his unmerited ease. As he looked across the bay a black fin broke the blue and made an allegory with a single smudge: even as those sweet waters teemed with sharks, so the fair land that locked them was rank and rotten with intestine horror and cruelty and corruption.
Fourteen thousand miles! The distance was brought home to Tom by being printed on the chart, beneath an ideal course, in small type which the little Rosamund was sailing over at that moment. It set him thinking of Claire, but the thoughts had no form and little sting. Not even yet could he think or feel acutely: a bundle of dead nerves and clouded brains, he could but ache and work, or ache and bask as he was doing now.
An odd number of “The Pickwick Papers” had found its way to the bungalow, and now lay in the sand beside Tom; he had finished it, to his sorrow, before the bells began. Presently up came Daintree with the dog that still followed him to every haunt but his study. He carried his camp-stool and an armful of books; and Tom’s heart sank; their taste in literature differing terribly, though, of the two, only one held himself qualified to judge. The judge glanced at the green cover in the sand, much as he would have favoured a mountebank at a fair, with insolent nostrils and a pitying eye for those who smiled. He opened his Byron and read a canto of “Lara,” aloud and admirably, but Tom nearly fell asleep, and was accused of having no soul for poetry. “Or for anything else,” Tom reminded the reader, who shut the book with an offended snap, but opened another next minute.
“Perhaps,” said Daintree, “you prefer this sort of thing. I shouldn’t wonder!”
And he read: —
“Oh! that ‘twere possible,
After long grief and pain;
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!
“When I was wont to meet her
In the silent woody places
Of the land that gave me birth,
We stood tranced in long embraces.
Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter,
Than anything on earth.
“A shadow flits before me —
Not thou, but like to thee,
Ah God! that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be.”
When Daintree began, Tom’s eyes had been swimming lazily about the bay; but the first quatrain brought them at a bound to the reader’s face, and now he was hanging upon every word. Line after line rang through him like a trumpet-call — waking old echoes — stirring and stabbing him — until the whole man tingled with the rushing of long-stagnant blood. And now came stanzas that went no deeper than the ear, while those three ran their course through every vein. Yet when he next caught up the thread it was his own soul still speaking — the very story was now his own.
“Alas! for her that met me,
That heard me softly call —
Came glimmering thro’ the laurels
At the quiet even fall,
In the garden by the turrets
Of the old manorial hall.”
He had turned his head: a blue mist hid the world, but through it shone a poignant vision of Claire Harding — among the Winwood fir-trees — in the autumn evenings long ago.... And this is how the tears came back into Tom Erichsen’s eyes, to show him that his soul had lived through a night’s bushranging and four months of Major Honeybone’s iron-gang, Daintree looked on with a jealous scorn. That a few stray verses in the “Annual Register” should put fire and water in eyes which the combined Hours of Exile and of Idleness sometimes left in such a very different state! It was a galling thought, and it showed itself in such black looks that Tom was constrained to cut his first heartfelt outburst very short indeed. So he hastily added that the poem appealed to him particularly — he need not explain why.
“I see,” said Daintree. “Not altogether on its merits, eh? I’m glad to hear it;” and his face lightened a little.
“I don’t know,” said Tom humbly; “it was on its merits, I think. Surely it must appeal to every miserable man. Oh, it’s all, all there — in such words! Come, sir, don’t you think it fine yourself?”
“Fine,” said Daintree, “is a word which the critic does not employ unadvisedly. Your fine poem is not spasmodic: it takes a metre and sticks to it — as I do, for example, and as Byron did. You don’t catch me — or Byron — writing poems with no two stanzas alike in form! No, Thomas, the verdict is not ‘fine’; but that the lines have a certain merit I don’t deny.”
“Who wrote them?” asked Tom after a pause.
“His name is Tennyson,” replied the poet. “You have never heard it before, I daresay, and I shouldn’t be surprised if you were never to hear it again. There were fair things in his last book, but, upon the whole, I am afraid the production you so admire may be taken as representing his high-water mark — which is a sufficient commentary upon the rest. I understand, however, that he is a very young man, so we must give him a chance. When he is my age he may do very much better, if he perseveres,
as I have done. Now, my notion of treating such a theme,” said Daintree, “you have heard before, but you shall hear it again.”
And with that he drew “Hours of Exile” from his pocket, and read with ineffable unction one of the longest sets of “Stanzas to Clarinda”; while the terrier gazed up at him with eyes of devoted sympathy and admiration; and Tom fed his upon feathery emerald branches and a turquoise sky, as he reluctantly decided that the kindest of men was in some respects the most egregious also. Suddenly — to his horror — the reading stopped. He had been caught not attending! He lowered his eyes, and they fell upon the snowy wings of a full-rigged ship just clearing the woody eastern point of the bay, and sailing slowly and majestically on.
Both men sprang to the water’s edge. Daintree’s book lay in the sand. The ship was now clear of the point — standing to the north of Shark Island, with the light sea-breeze upon her counter — a noble vessel of six hundred tons, flying the red ensign at her peak.
Not a word passed at the water’s edge; but it was Tom who led the rush to the bungalow, who fetched Daintree’s immense spy-glass, with the flags of all nations let into the leather, and who bared the lenses before putting it in his master’s shaking hands.
“How many days are they out?” asked Daintree, aiming wildly with the glass “Ninety-nine.”
“She could never do it!”
“It’s been done before.”
“Oh, no, no; this must be some other ship. Steady the glass for me. I can’t get focus. There — now! Yes! I can see her people, but I can’t read her name!”
“Let me try, sir.”
“Here, then.”
Tom tried and gave it up.
“To Piper’s Point!” he cried. “She’ll pass there much closer!” And again he led the way, with Daintree thundering close behind, and the terrier barking happily at their heels.
Along the shore they raced, the little bay on their right, then across the promontory diagonally, and out at its western point, panting, trembling, streaming with perspiration, but in time: her bowsprit was sticking out behind the island, and they were there to see her nose follow, with the foam curling under it like a white moustache.
Tom had the telescope, focussed still, and he handed it to Daintree without a word; but the one concerned was trembling so violently, the ship jumped right and left, and Tom had to try again. He was steady enough. What was it to him? She was only half a mile off now, and the first thing he saw was a frock fluttering on the poop.
“Now I have it!” he muttered. “The sun’s on the letters: one, two, three — yes, there are eight! R — o—”
He lowered the glass and held out his hand.
“I congratulate you from my heart: the Rosamund it is, and I think that with the glass you may find the young lady herself upon the poop.”
It was Tom who led the cheers a moment later.
“I sha’n’t be there to meet them,” moaned Daintree as they were running back. “Ninety-nine days — ninety-nine days!”
“They’re not doing four knots; they’re shortening sail; you’ll see the Cove as soon as they do. Even if you don’t, they won’t land at once.”
“Suppose they did!”
“They won’t; we’ll put to in five minutes.”
Tom was the cheery one, the one with his wits about him; but then it was nothing to Tom. He would not go in with the curricle, though Daintree was as bent as a flurried man could be upon having the livery and the cockade in waiting on the quay. Tom, however, pointed out that the two ladies, their maid, and the driver were all the curricle could possibly hold; also that there was more to do at the bungalow than the other realised; but he promised to receive them in all his buttons, and in less than ten minutes the dazed man started both horses at a gallop down the Point Piper Road.
Tom heard him rattle out of earshot among the trees without audible mishap. He then ran back to the house, where Mrs. Fawcett was already beside herself in the kitchen; but Peggy had paused on the verandah with an anxious face.
“’Tis you should be wid’m, Tom,” said she reproachfully.
“There wasn’t room, Peggy.”
“Room enough the one way. I take shame o’ ye for lettin’ the masther go alone in his haste.”
“Why?”
“’Tis thrown out an’ kilt he may be, on the way to meet his lady!”
“God forbid!” cried Tom — and the words came back to him next day.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE BRIDE-ELECT
TOM had done well to stay behind: there was so much to make ready that none of the others knew where to begin until he showed them. At his best in most emergencies, he was resolved to strain every nerve in this one, and so perhaps show some little gratitude at last. The opportunity was unique. Tom seized it with characteristic ardour.
He began by putting Mrs. Fawcett on her mettle; invented the dinner for her, and got old Fawcett out of his wife’s way by sending him to a neighbouring nursery for the asparagus and the green peas. Peggy he set to work to make the beds, while he himself gathered flowers for the table, flowers for the ladies’ rooms, flowers for the verandah upon which’ the bride must tread. The new flag, bought for this day, had never been unpacked. It was soon flying bravely from the flag-staff on the lawn. And by five o’clock Tom had his table exquisitely laid. But it was nearly seven before the curricle lamps shone through the open gate, and the horses swept up to the verandah, where Tom stood in ardent readiness.
He had spent the interim in arraying himself most carefully in all his menial finery — in shaving for the second time that day — in laying out his master’s evening clothes — in gathering the books which had been left upon the shore — in reading and re-reading the poem that expressed his case — in talking to Peggy, and in thinking of Claire.
The whole situation put him sadly in mind of Claire; but he was not thinking of her as the horses trotted up — he had forgotten all about her when he heard her voice. Next moment the curricle bridged the stream of lamp-light issuing from the hall. And Tom stood among the roses he had strewn, silhouetted against the doorway, without moving hand or foot, or once lifting his unseen gaze from Claire Harding’s face.
What followed seemed to be happening to another man. Daintree cried to him, and he helped the ladies to get down — he touched her hand. Their eyes never met. Daintree jumped down and led Claire on his arm through the roses. Fawcett came up, the curricle was gone, and Tom stood alone in the drive, watching the ladies go upstairs within, followed by their maid and Daintree; and after that he stood watching the staircase until Daintree ran down it and had him by both hands.
“You dear good fellow — you have thought of everything!” he cried. “You couldn’t have done more if you’d been the happy man yourself; and I shall never forget it — especially the flowers!”
“Nor I,” cried Tom bitterly.
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“You might have told me who it was, sir! I recognised Miss Harding at once; her family used to come to our village for the shooting, and her father was my father’s enemy. It’s hard for me to meet her like this after that! I’d have run away if I’d known!”
“Precisely why I didn’t tell you,” rejoined Daintree triumphantly. “Come, come, my good fellow, I know all about the relations between the two families, and you mustn’t flatter yourself that Miss Harding will remember you. You’ve altered considerably, for one thing; and I dropped your surname on purpose to spare you any such recognition. Miss Harding won’t know you from Adam.”
“I would rather not wait upon her, all the same.”
Daintree showed his teeth.
“Not wait upon the lady who is to be my wife and your mistress? You dare to say that to my face? Let me find you at your post when I come downstairs — or take care!”
And he stood a moment at the door, with the most significant and malignant expression; after which he went upstairs to dress, leaving Tom to regret, for the first time, his i
mpulsive confession of complicity in the Castle Sullivan outrage, and to reflect upon the many sides of the man whom Claire Harding had come out from England to marry. Memories lashed him by the score. He had seen how the tyrant could treat his servants and his dog; he had pitied the bride in the abstract; and was it to be Claire Harding, and was he to stand there and see them married?
His head was in a whirl of conflicting emotions and anxieties. Still stunned by the mere shock of seeing her whom he had never thought to see again, in that outlandish place, and all but another man’s bride, he was faced by an immediate dilemma which called for instantaneous decision. If Claire were to recognise him at dinner, then she was pretty certain to betray a secret which Daintree, on the other hand, was almost as certain to guess if his servant absented himself after what had just passed. Well, Claire knew best why she had made a secret where none was necessary; but if more trouble was to come of it, let him be there to take her part.
Let him be there for ever, to watch over her in those passionate hands! And Tom found himself mechanically lighting the candles on the dinner-table, and lowering the shades to lessen the chance of his face being seen.
While he was so engaged the inner door opened, and Tom and Claire stood face to face.
Her eyes were great with horror: she shut the door behind her, and then stood close against it, shrinking from him to whom she once had clung.
“I can’t bear it,” she gasped. “I must either speak to you or go mad! Yes, yes, I know we may be caught — I can’t help that! Tell me quickly: did you know who I was before I came?”
“No, indeed!”
“Is it by accident that you are his servant?”
“No; he sought me out. So you knew me again, Claire!”
“What did you say? Never call me that again. Of course I knew you! How could I forget you, after all you have made me suffer? If I only could!”
The cruelty of this speech struck him dumb: he drew himself up and grimly challenged her with his eye. Her sufferings, indeed! What had she suffered? She was on the point of marrying a rich man; no doubt it was distressing to her to encounter him again at that juncture; his lip curled at such distress.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 104
