Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “You let an innocent man suffer for your crime!” said Nicholas Harding, with a shiver.

  “Did I? And do you suppose I would have let him hang? I was under the impression that I saved his neck. I would have saved it with my own had that been necessary. Only yesterday I risked my life to save his. Who took him away from the iron-gang? I had to commit a forgery and risk my liberty to do it, by God! Who would have treated him like a brother from that day? It was his own doing, mark you, that made him a menial! And he would hang me, would he, for ridding the earth of the crying rascal who picked his own pocket like a common thief? He shakes his head, but I know him better. And that’s his gratitude — after all I’ve done! Something like yours, you Harding! I save your daughter from a poisonous scoundrel, so I am not to marry her for my pains. A just pair — convict bushranger and fraudulent M.P. I — a precious pair to join forces against an honest man! Do your worst: I shall marry her against you both — I shall — I shall — I shall!”

  Tom knew this voice: he wondered he had not heard the madness in it from the first.

  “Never!” cried Harding. “I would rather see her in her coffin.”

  “You soon will if you prevent it!”

  “You would murder her too? I quite believe it — if you got the chance!”

  “You fool!” said Daintree, with a superior sneer. “Can’t you see that it would kill her not to marry me?”

  Mr. Harding shook his head.

  “She loves me as I love her!”

  “She does not love you at all.”

  At these words a feeling of pity crept over Tom: they rang so true, and they told so palpably upon that distorted heart which could bear up better against a charge of murder.

  “Does she not?” cried Daintree. “We shall see!” And he darted from them with an altered face, was first out of the room, first up the stairs and first into the ladies’ sitting-room; but Tom’s foot was in the door before he could bang it behind him; and Tom and Mr. Harding burst their way in together.

  On the threshold they stopped with one accord. Daintree had not turned to confront them; he had flung himself at the feet of Claire, who was seated on a sofa by her aunt’s side. Tom noticed that both ladies (in grim contrast to the wretched bridegroom) wore the dresses in which he had seen them the day before; and that Lady Starkie held Claire’s hand.

  “They say you do not love me,” whispered Daintree, in a voice that broke with very tenderness, and yet retained a confident ring. “I love you better than my own life and all the world. Tell them nothing can part us — nothing they can say — nothing I have done. Tell them you love me as I love you!”

  Tom’s eyes were fast to a sweet face white with terror: it flushed and fell, and then the nut-brown head was all he saw.

  “Ah, yes!” said that madly tender voice. “You may blush to see your lover so humbled on his wedding morning; but it was not your fault; you love me as you have always loved me, and as I love you. Tell them that! Tell them you would marry me if I had to go to prison to-morrow!”

  The brown curls moved slowly from side to side.

  “What! There is truth then in what they say?”

  “Forgive me — forgive me!” were Claire’s only words.

  “So it is true!”

  His tone would have been a marvel of restraint in any man; in this one it was a miracle. Still on his knees he besought her, as a last favour, to tell him whom she did love. Her eye flew to Tom’s: the cunning of the criminal lunatic shone through the tears in his. “So it is Erichsen — not Blaydes,” he said, getting up and standing harmlessly in their midst; next instant he had whipped out his pistol and fired it point-blank at Tom’s heart. The report was appalling; a white cloud filled the room; as it thinned away, there was Tom still standing, with the one calm face present. The charge had contained no ball. Next instant the pistol itself was hurled at his head, and Daintree was upon Tom with tooth and nail — cursing, raving, moaning — fighting Tom and Nicholas Harding both — fighting the constables and waiters who poured in like water — and still wailing, raving, cursing as he fought.

  It was a horrible sound — human no longer — though the fist of the sportsman still flew hard and true from the shoulder — though the tears of the lover were still wet upon the madman’s face. It was, nevertheless, but the husk of a man that was at last overpowered and carried to a distant bedroom. That complex heart still squirted liquid fire through every vein; but the brain was not; inherent mania had claimed its own.

  CHAPTER XLI

  “FOR LONDON DIRECT”

  THE Sydney papers of the year 1838 contain no reference to the extraordinary scenes enacted at the Pulteney Hotel on the first Saturday of the month of October. They do not report the removal of a magistrate of the Colony to its best and most private madhouse — some from a sense of journalistic charity — others for reasons which the late Nicholas Harding’s bankers might even now disclose. The curious, however, may still look up the advertisement which Lady Starkie read aloud from the Herald within an hour of the events described. It blew a trumpet for —

  THE FINE FAST-SAILING SHIP

  FLORENTIA,

  FOR LONDON DIRECT,

  and the call found a grateful echo in two young hearts, now so light, and now so heavy, that it was an act of mercy to stir them in this way. The Florentia was described as even then loading at the quay; it seemed as though they might all sail away from that beautiful and accursed land within a week. As a matter of history, however, the Florentia did not complete her cargo until the New Year; no other homeward-bound ship was ready before her; and much happened on shore meanwhile.

  Tom Erichsen, having voluntarily confessed the part he had borne in the Castle Sullivan outrage, fell ill as a man can be just as the road to joy and freedom lay smooth and clear before him: he was in a raging delirium when the free pardon arrived from Governor Gipps, together with an order for the convict’s absolute release. It seemed he was about to be released indeed. Long weeks he lingered, battling indomitably; and what hand coaxed him back to light and life, and whose prayers availed, but the loving hand and the passionate prayers of the girl who only lived now to make him forget the past? Meanwhile her father was not idle. Nicholas Harding was useless in a sick-room, and his money could not save Tom’s life. But there were other things that it could do, combined with the natural energy and the practical ability which were also his. Turn again to those old Sydney papers. They will not tell you who instigated the inquiry, found the witnesses, paid their expenses and indeed threw his money right and left in the good cause. But they do recount the ruin of the most glaring and atrocious slave-drivers the Colony contained; they do report the several litigations by which that most desirable end was achieved; nor, to their eternal credit, does a single sheet take the side of the Sullivans of Castle Sullivan. The name still lingers in Colonial annals; it is still strong in all humane and honest nostrils; but of Dr. Sullivan and his ruffianly son all traces have been lost.

  Not the least telling witness against them was one who certainly could not be accused of extravagant sympathy with the felonry. Major Honeybone enjoyed himself enormously in Sydney, both at the courthouse and elsewhere; he and Nicholas Harding became perfect cronies during the weary days of Tom’s convalescence.

  “Gadzooks, sir, he gave me more trouble than any three men in the gang,” the major would say; “but I knew him for a gentleman at bottom, and I might hare known him for an innocent man. They take it worst, gadzooks! Stockades like mine must be a living hell to ‘em, though I say it! I’d like to shake his hand and tell him I’m sorry for this and that.”

  But Major Honeybone was not permitted to see the invalid; and indeed he quitted Sydney rather precipitately in the end. The plucky veteran had asked a question of Lady Starkie, as her ladyship long afterwards confided to Claire, with an obviously pleasurable indignation, on the Florentins poop.

  Nor was it until the long and soothing homeward voyage was half over that the convales
cent was vouchsafed an answer to certain questions which he had tired of asking in his illness. What had brought Nicholas Harding to New South Wales? He must have sailed but a few days after Claire. What had he found out in those few days, since the discovery of Daintree’s crime still came as a surprise to him? Tom never forgot the night when at last he was told; the trade-wind sang steadily through the rigging; every sail was set and drawing; the motion was an imperceptible rhythm; and a monstrous moon made a shimmering path from the horizon to the vessel’s side.

  “You never saw the woman who took Claire’s jewellery?” said Nicholas Harding. “It is to her we owe it that my girl is not a madman’s wife! The woman was naturally a spy; she had spied upon her mistress, but on Daintree also; and to Claire she had cause to be grateful, as Claire will tell you if you ask her. The very night after she sailed in the Rosamund this woman came to my house. She had fallen very low; death seemed to me to have set its seal upon her; but she had information which she would only sell, until I told her where Claire had gone, and whom she was to marry. Then and there it all came out. I must say there was no huckstering then! The wretched woman seemed genuinely distressed. She told me” — Harding wiped his mouth, and his voice trembled—” she told me my daughter was gone to be a murderer’s wife!”

  “Yet you did not know of it?”

  “I did not know about Blaydes. That made the second!”

  “His second murder?” gasped Tom.

  “Or manslaughter — call it what you will. The first was the worst: it was — fratricide! There were two brothers; James was the younger. Out shooting, one day, when they were both mere lads, he shot a dog dead in his passion. The brother abused him; in an instant he also was shot through the heart. It was brought in an accident, but the family knew what it was. They drummed him out, they refused to see his face again; he was as much transported as any felon in New South Wales, with as good a cause. We never knew why his family would have nothing to do with him: why, for instance, the very flowers he laid upon his mother’s grave were summarily returned to him. It seemed inhuman, but I think it was very human now! God help me, I thought it was only the ordinary wild-oats, made too much of. But I was at fault, grievously at fault! Bitterly I regret it; bitterly I shall rue it till my dying day!”

  Nicholas Harding was deeply moved; he was indeed a different man. In a hoarse voice he described the horrors of the interminable outward voyage, the perpetual dread of being too late, the nightly nightmare of Claire married to a criminal lunatic, if not dead already by his hand.

  “Crime and madness,” said he, “are in their blood. I found that out too. The mother was a saint, but I discovered she had died in an asylum; the father is sane, but you know his reputation. He had denied me an interview before. I forced myself upon him now. And he admitted the perfect truth of the story I had heard. You ask how that woman came to know of it? Well, so did I. As I told you, she had sunk as low as possible; it seems she made a practice of asking her companions whether they knew aught of the Daintrees, because she suspected our guest of some shameful secret (but never of killing Blaydes), and she had always the thought of repaying Claire the good turn of which Claire must tell you. Well, at last — call it chance or fate, or what you will — but at last she hit upon a trail that led to the truth. She discovered an old gamekeeper who had actually seen the deed, and been pensioned to keep it secret, but blabbed it in his dotage. And then she came to Avenue Lodge.”

  Once his tongue was loosed, and it was seen that the subject excited the convalescent much less than had been feared, Mr. Harding would speak of it with apparent freedom. Yet the case had aspects which he sedulously shunned. And towards the end of the voyage he became visibly troubled and depressed; but at last one chilly northern night, when the Western Islands had been left astern, he took Tom by the arm, and his hand trembled.

  “Erichsen,” said he, “I was once your enemy. I am now your friend; in the near future I am to be something more; and I cannot face it a humbug and a hypocrite. You remember those letters you gave me back without a question? I have waited for that question all these months. That you have never asked it, that alone shows what you are! It makes it the harder to have to tell you the kind of man I was. But I have made up my mind that you shall know.” —

  And he confessed that he had been guilty enough of the bribery all but brought home to him, and yet not more guilty than a hundred others, many of them in higher places, as he said with perfect truth but little bitterness. The voyage out had purged him of selfesteem and arrogance; the homeward voyage was rearing better qualities in their place.

  “Yes, it was a true bill!” he sighed. “True also that my money had silenced the witness who refused to speak — true that I made it worth his while to go to prison. But letters had passed between us. Blaydes got hold of them. He was on his way to me with those letters in his pocket — to sell them to me for a fancy price — when he met his death. Do you recollect the first lawyer who came to see you about the defence?” Tom started, but said he did remember.

  “He came from me. And he not only assumed your guilt — as I fear we had all assumed it — but he wanted to know where you had put what you had taken out of the dead man’s pockets. You were only to tell him that to secure the best defence money could obtain; instead of telling him you threw him out of your cell. You were quite right! I was well served. After two years, Erichsen, I tell you that I am sorry — sorry!”

  Tom implored him to say no more. There was more, however, that must be said.

  “Before your trial,” continued Harding, “I was almost mad with anxiety. Every hour I expected those letters to be found. Daintree knew well enough what was the matter; the letters were in his own possession; but he obtained my confidence, wormed it out of me one night, and from that hour my soul was not my own. He began by dragging me to your trial—”

  “He told me you dragged him there!”

  “It was the other way about. I am ashamed to say it, but it was the other way about! I want to hang myself when I think of that time! I remember him taunting me by saying I ought to sympathise with you, because I deserved to stand in the dock myself. He who had done the murder for which he saw you condemned! I feel sure he only kept the receipt in order, if necessary, to use the letter that was written on the other side.”

  “No, no,” said Tom. “I prefer to believe he was always thinking of some way of proving my innocence, by means of the receipt, without incriminating himself. It would have been in keeping with his character. He had a kind heart in many things, and I wish we were leaving him in his quiet grave instead of in an asylum.

  I cannot help feeling grateful to him even now. He gave me back my manhood and my liberty, even if it was he who first took them away; above all, he gave me back Claire!”

  There was one addition to the homeward-bound party who must not be forgotten: this was a man-servant with a withered arm, who grew grey and ultimately died in Thomas Erichsen’s service. His was the second death among those passengers of the Florentia whose fate concerns this chronicle. Lady Starkie was the first to go.

  Nicholas Harding followed in the same year as his namesake of All the Russias. The next and last — it seems but the other day — was Claire, his daughter, a loving and beloved wife, and a mother whose children miss and mourn her daily, though most of them have children of their own. Peace to her white hairs and true and tender heart! It is beating somewhere for them still.

  But a little while ago, this story might have left them still together — the bent old man with the thoughtful eye and the many wrinkles — the white-haired, sweetfaced, motherly woman. Yet then their story had not been told, for there is that in it which Thomas Erichsen never would tell his wife. He never told how they tried to cut his heart out with the lash; he never told her how nearly they succeeded. And still, when he thinks of that, is he grateful to the long-dead maniac to whom he owed so various a debt.

  It is the old man’s pleasure to hear and read of the noble C
olony sprung miraculously from the cruel dust and ashes of sixty years ago; he has never revisited it. In the Old Country he has lived and he will die. Less fortunate than Claire, his lot is that harder one of the last to go. But his life has been always brave, and he neither fears nor courts his death.

  MY LORD DUKE

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER I

  THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY

  The Home Secretary leant his golf-clubs against a chair. His was the longest face of all.

  “I am only sorry it should have come now,” said Claude apologetically.

  “Just as we were starting for the links! Our first day, too!” muttered the Home Secretary.

  “I think of Claude,” remarked his wife. “I can never tell you, Claude, how much I feel for you! We shall miss you dreadfully, of course; but we couldn’t expect to enjoy ourselves after this; and I think, in the circumstances, that you are quite right to go up to town at once.”