Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  Jack made no haste to reply. He was not at all astonished at the impression he had created the day before. But his old boss was still the one man before whom he was anxious to display a modicum of dignity, even at the expense of a pose. And it is noteworthy that he had neither confided in Dalrymple concerning his dilemma of the previous day, nor yet so much as mentioned in his hearing the model hut among the pines.

  “I don’t wonder,” he said at length; “it was the way I was likely to strike you just then. Don’t you see? I hadn’t got it out at the time!”

  “So it was only the girl that was on your nerves?” said Dalrymple in disgust.

  “And wasn’t that enough? If I’m a different man to-day, you know the reason why. As for being happy in my position, and all that, I’m simply in paradise at this moment. Think of it! Think of me as I was, and look at me as I am; think of my little hut on Carara, and look behind you at Maske Towers!”

  They were on the terrace now, leaning idly against the balustrade. Dalrymple turned and looked: like Melrose Abbey, the grand grey building was at its best in the “pale moonlight”; the lichened embrasures met the soft sky softly; the piercing spires were sheathed in darkness; and the mountainous pile wore one uniform tint, from which the lighted windows stood out like pictures on a wall. Dalrymple looked, and looked again; then his hard eyes fell upon the rude ecstasy of the face beside him; and they were less hard than before.

  “You may make yourself easy,” said the squatter. “I shan’t stay long.”

  “What the blazes do you mean?” cried Jack. “I want you to stay as long as ever you can.”

  “You may; your friends do not.”

  “Hang my friends!”

  “I should enjoy nothing better; but it isn’t practicable. Besides, they’re a good deal more than your friends now; they are — her people. And they don’t like the man who was once your boss; he offends their pride — —”

  “Mr. Dalrymple — —”

  “Enough said, my boy. I know my room, and I’m going to turn in. We’ll talk it over again in the morning; but my mind is made up. Good-night!”

  “I’ll come in with you.”

  “As you like.”

  They parted at the visitor’s door.

  “You’ll disappoint me cruel if you do go,” said Jack, shaking hands. “I’m quite sure you’re mistaken about my friends; Olivia, for one, thinks no end of you. However, as you say, we can talk it over in the morning — when you’ve got to see the pictures as well, and don’t you forget it! So long, sir, till then.”

  “So long, Jack. I’ll be your man in the morning, at all events. And I shall look forward to a great treat in your famous picture-gallery.”

  But Jack was engaged; and he realised it in the morning as he had not done before. Olivia lured him from the squatter’s side; she had every intention of so doing. The pair went for a little stroll. Neither wore a watch; the little stroll lengthened into miles; it carried them beyond the sound of the stable clock; they forgot the world, and were absurdly late for lunch. Lady Caroline Sellwood had taken it upon herself to conduct the meal without them. Dalrymple was in his place; his expression was grimly cynical; he had seen the pictures, under Claude Lafont’s skilled escort, and, with the ladies’ permission, he would now leave the table, as he had still to put in his things.

  His things! Was he going, then? Jack’s knife and fork fell with a clatter.

  “I thought you knew,” said Claude. “He is going up to town by the afternoon train. I have ordered the landau, as I thought you would like him to go as he came.”

  When Jack heard this he, too, left the table, and bounded upstairs. He found Dalrymple on the point of packing his dress-clothes, with the assistance of none other than Stebbings. Jack glared at the disrated butler, and ordered him out of the room.

  “I wouldn’t have done that,” remarked the squatter, pausing in his work. “The fellow came to know if he could do anything for me, with tears in his eyes, and he has made me a handsome apology. He didn’t ask me to beg him off, but I mean to try my luck in that way before I go.”

  “You mustn’t go!”

  “I must. Will you forgive the old man?”

  “Not if you clear.”

  “My good fellow, this is unreasonable — —”

  “So it is, Mr. Dalrymple, on your part,” rejoined Jack warmly. “It’s too bad of you. Bother Stebbings! I shan’t be hard on him, you may be sure; and you mustn’t be hard on me. Surely you can make allowances for a chap who’s engaged to a girl like mine? I did want to speak to you this morning; but she came first. I want to speak to you now — more than you suppose. Mr. Dalrymple, I wasn’t straight with you last night; not altogether. But I can’t suffer steering crooked; it gives me the hump; and as sure as I do it I’ve got to go over the ground again. You are the man I owe my all to; I can’t end up crooked with you!”

  Dalrymple sat on the bedside in his shirt-sleeves; he had turned up the cuffs; his strong and shapely wrists lay along his thighs; and his grey eyebrows, but not his lips, asked for more.

  “I mean,” continued Jack, “about what was bothering me that day I ran against you in Devenholme. It was only the day before yesterday, but Lord! it seems like the week before last.”

  And with that he unfolded, with much rapid detail, the whole episode of Matthew Hunt, from the morning in the stable-yard to the midnight at the hut. The story within that story was also told with particular care and circumstance; but long before the end was reached Dalrymple had emptied his bag upon the bed, and had himself rung to countermand the carriage. He was interested; he would stay another day.

  Downstairs in the drawing-room the Sellwood family and Claude Lafont were even then congratulating themselves upon the imminent departure of the unpopular guest. Their faces were so many sights when Jack entered in the highest spirits to tell them of his successful appeal to the better feelings of “good old Dalrymple,” who after all was not going to leave them just yet. Jack was out again in an instant; and they next saw him, from the drawing-room windows, going in the direction of the hut with his odious old friend at his side. Whereupon Claude Lafont said a strong thing, for him; and the most sensible of engaged young women retired in tears to her room.

  “There’s one thing you must let me do,” Dalrymple was saying; “if you don’t, I shall insist. You must let me have the privilege of sorting that scoundrel, Mark Hunt.”

  “Matthew,” said Jack.

  “Matthew, then. I knew it was one of you evangelists.”

  “What would you do?” asked the Duke.

  “See that he annoyed you no more. And I’ll guarantee that he doesn’t if you’ll leave him to me.”

  “I didn’t want to clear them out — —”

  “I think you must.”

  “Or to prosecute; it’s so public, and a bit revengeful too.”

  “There I agree with you. I’m not even sure that you’d get a conviction. It would be difficult, in any case, and would make a public scandal of it, as you say.”

  “Then I will leave him to you. You’re the smartest man I know, Mr. Dalrymple, and always have been. What you do will be right. I’ll bother my head no more about it. Besides, anything to keep you with us a few days longer!”

  Dalrymple shrugged his shoulders, but Jack did not see the gesture, for he was leading the way through the pines. A moment later they were at the hut.

  The hut amused the squatter. He called it a colourable imitation. But it did not delight him as it had delighted Jack; the master bushman failed to share his old hand’s sentimental regard for all that pertained to the bush. Dalrymple sat on the bunk and smoked a cigar, a cynical spectator of some simple passages between Jack and his cats. Livingstone was exhibited with great pride; he had put on flesh in the old country; at which the squatter remarked that had he stayed on Carara, he would have put on an ounce of lead.

  “You’re a wonderful man, Jack!” he exclaimed at length. “I wouldn’t have believed a fello
w could take a windfall as you have done, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I used to think of you a good deal after you had gone. I thought of you playing the deuce to any extent, but I must say I little dreamt of your building a bush hut to get back to your old way of life! I pictured the town crimson and the country carmine — both painted by you — but I never imagined this!”

  And he looked round the hut in his amused, sardonic way; but there was a ring — or perhaps it was only a suspicion — of disappointment in his tone. The next words were merely perplexed.

  “And yet,” added Dalrymple, “you profess yourself well pleased with your lot!”

  “So I am — now.”

  “I begin to wish I hadn’t changed my mind about going this afternoon.”

  “Why, on earth?”

  “Because I also begin — to envy you! Come, let’s make tracks for the house; I shall have huts enough to look at when I go back to the place that you need never see again.”

  “But I mean to see it again,” said Jack as he locked up. “I intend to take my wife out, one of these days; we shall expect to come on a long visit to Carara; and the greatest treat you could give me would be to let me ride my old boundaries and camp in my old hut for a week!”

  “Nonsense; you stay where you are,” was the squatter’s only comment. He seemed depressed; his cynical aplomb had quite deserted him. They returned in silence to the house.

  A shabby-looking vehicle stood in front of the porch; the man said that he had brought a gentleman from Devenholme, and was to wait. The Duke and Dalrymple mounted the steps together. The first person they encountered in the hall was Claude Lafont, looking strangely scared; but a new-comer was in the act of taking off his coat; and, as he turned his face, Dalrymple and Jack started simultaneously. Both knew the man. It was Cripps the lawyer. And he, too, looked pale, nervous, and alarmed.

  CHAPTER XX

  “LOVE THE DEBT”

  Olivia was not a little tired; this was the true explanation of the tears which had driven her upstairs. It was also the one excuse she saw for herself when she thought the matter over in her own room. Jack had devoted the whole morning to her; it was the squatter’s turn; and, of course, Jack must invite whom he liked to stay as long as he pleased. To think of limiting his freedom in any such matter at the very outset of their engagement! Yet she had been guilty of that thought; but she was tired; she would lie down for an hour.

  She lay down for two or three. Excitement had worn her out. It was after five when she awoke and went downstairs. As she did so Claude and Cripps crossed the hall and put on their hats. She hailed Claude.

  “What have you done with Jack?”

  “I think you’ll find him in the little study at the end of the library.”

  “Thanks.”

  Olivia glanced at Cripps. She had never met him. She wondered who he was, and why Claude did not introduce him to her, and what made both of them so glum. They hurried out of the house as though they were afraid of her. What could it mean? She would find out from Jack; she felt a renewed right to him now, and thought of hints, as she went, for Mr. Dalrymple, if they were still together. But Jack was alone; he was sitting in the dejected attitude engendered by a peculiarly long and low arm-chair.

  “Well?” said Olivia briskly.

  “Well?” responded Jack; but he looked at her without rising and without a smile; and both omissions were unlike the lover and the man.

  “I half expected to find Mr. Dalrymple with you. I’m so glad he isn’t! I — it’s my turn, I think!”

  “I haven’t seen Dalrymple for over an hour,” said Jack, with his heavy, absent eyes upon her all the time. “I wonder where he is?”

  Olivia would not ask him what the matter was; she preferred to find out for herself, and then tell him. She looked about her. On a salver were a decanter and three wine-glasses; one was unused; and on the floor there lay an end of pink tape. She picked and held it up between finger and thumb.

  “Lawyers!” she cried.

  “Yes, I’ve had a solicitor here.”

  “Not to make your will!”

  “No. On a — on a local matter. Don’t look at me like that! It’s nothing much: nothing new, at all events.”

  “But you are worried.”

  She knelt beside his chair, and rested her elbows on the arm, studying his pale set profile. His eyes met hers no longer.

  “I am,” he admitted; “but that’s my own fault. As I say — it’s nothing new!”

  “Who was the lawyer?”

  “You wouldn’t know him.”

  “I mean to know who he was. Mr. Cripps?”

  Jack did not answer. He rolled his head from side to side against the back of the chair. His eyes remained fast upon the opposite wall.

  “It is — the old trouble,” Olivia whispered. “The trouble of two nights ago!”

  His silence told her much. The drops upon his forehead added more. Yet her voice was calm and undismayed; it enabled him at last to use his own.

  “Yes!” he said hoarsely. “Claude made a mistake. It was true after all!”

  “Hunt’s story, darling?”

  “Hunt’s story. There was an English marriage as well as an Australian one. He had a wife at each side of the world! Claude made a mistake. He went to the wrong church at Chelsea — to a church by the river. He had always thought it was the parish church. It is not. St. Luke’s is the parish church, and there in the book they have the marriage down in black and white. Cripps found it; but he first found it somewhere else, where he says they have the records of every marriage in the country since 1850. He would have looked there the day Claude was up, but he left it too late. He looked yesterday, and found it, sure enough, on the date Hunt gave. October 22d, 1853. And he has been to Chelsea and seen it there. So there’s no mistake about it this time; and you see how we stand.”

  “I see. My poor boy!”

  “It’s Claude after all. Poor chap, he’s awfully cut up. He blames himself so for the mistake between the two churches; but Cripps tells me it was the most natural mistake in the world. Chelsea Old Church — that was where Claude went. And he says he’ll never forgive himself.”

  “But I forgive him,” said Olivia, with the first sign of emotion in her voice. She was holding one of his hands; her other was in his hair. Still he stared straight in front of him.

  “Of course you forgive him,” he said gently. “When you come to think of it, there’s nothing to forgive. Claude didn’t make the facts. He only failed to discover them.”

  “I am glad he did fail,” whispered Olivia.

  “Glad? You can’t be glad! Why do you say that?”

  And now he turned his face to her, in his astonishment; and suddenly it was she who could not meet his gaze.

  “How can you be glad?” he continued to demand.

  “Because — otherwise — you would never — have — spoken — —”

  “Spoken? Of course I shouldn’t! It’s a thousand pities I did. It makes it all the harder — now!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Surely you see?”

  They had risen with a common instinct. The ice was broken; there were no more shamefaced glances. The girl stood proudly at her full height.

  “I see nothing. You say our engagement makes this all the harder for you; it should be just the opposite.”

  “Will nothing make you see?” cried Jack. “Oh, how am I to say it? It — it can’t go on — our engagement!”

  “And why not?”

  “I am nothing — nobody — a nameless — —”

  “What does it matter?” interrupted Olivia passionately. “Do you really think it was the name I wanted after all? You pay me a high compliment! I know exactly what you mean — know exactly what this means to you. To me it makes no difference at all. You are the man you have always been; you are the man — I — love.”

  His eyes glistened.

  “God bless you for saying so! You are the one to love
a man the better when he’s down on his luck. I know that. Yet we must never — —”

  “Never what?”

  “Marry.”

  “Not — marry?” She stared at him in sheer amazement. “Not when we promised — only yesterday? You may break your word if you like. Mine I would never break!”

  “Then I must. It is not to be thought of any more. Surely you see? It’s not that I have lost the money and the title; oh! you must see what it is!”

  “Of course I see. But I don’t allow the objection.”

  “Your people would never hear of it now; and quite right too.”

  “My people! I am of age. I have a little money of my own, enough for us both. I can do exactly what I like. Besides, I’m not so sure about my people; you don’t know my father as I know him.”

  “He is a man of the world. He would not hear of it.”

  “Then I must act for myself.”

  “You must not!”

  “I must. Do you think I am only a fair-weather girl? I gave you my promise when all was different. I would rather die than break it now.”

  “But I release you! I set you free! Everything has altered. Oh, can’t you put yourself in my place? I should deserve shooting if I married you now. I release you because I must.”

  “And I refuse to be released.”

  They regarded one another with hopeless faces. Their eyes were dim with love — yet here they stood apart. This was the dead-lock. Nothing could come of this contest of honour against honour, of one unselfish love against another. It was like striking flint upon flint, and steel upon steel. A gong sounded in the distance; it was the signal to dress for dinner. Olivia beat the floor impatiently with one foot; her lips trembled; her eyes filled with tears.

  “If you cared for me,” she cried passionately, “half as much as you said you did, you wouldn’t be so ready to lose me now!”

  “If I cared less,” he answered, “I would take you at your word — God knows how you tempt me to! — and you should be my wife in spite of all. I would mind less how I dragged you down — what became of us in the end. But I love you too well to spoil your life. Don’t you know that, Olivia?”