Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  The father had not stirred, but he looked up as Harry burst in, breathless and ashamed.

  “What, have you been out?”

  “Yes, father,” with deep humility.

  “And where is Lowndes?”

  “I have been seeing him off.”

  “I never heard him go,” said Mr. Ringrose, with a deep sigh. “The old things about me — they carried me back into the past. One question, Harry, and then you shall hear all you care to know. We found out from the commissionaire that your mother is at Eastbourne. What is she doing there?”

  “I thought it would set her up for the winter.”

  “Is she not well?”

  “Perfectly, father; but — she likes it, and — we were able to do it last year.”

  “She is in lodgings, then, and alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “When does the next train leave?”

  “Eight-ten,” said Harry, a minute later.

  Mr. Ringrose had shaded his eyes once more. They shone like a young man’s as with a sudden gesture he whisked his hand away and snatched at his watch.

  “Only five hours more! Thank God — thank God — that I can look her in the face to-day!”

  “Do you remember how I taught you to swim when you were a tiny shrimp? It was my one accomplishment in my own boyhood, my one love among outdoor sports, and I sometimes think it must have been implanted in me for the express purpose of saving my life when the time came. Certainly nothing else could have saved it; and I cannot think that I was spared by mere chance, Harry, but intentionally, for better things. Mine had been an easy life up to that time; even in my difficulties it had been an easy life. Well, it has not been easy since!

  “He stunned me first — that’s how it happened. He struck me a murderous blow as I was leaving him to go in search of Lowndes. I knew no more until I was in the water. Then, before my head was clear, my limbs were doing their work. I was keeping myself afloat. I kept myself afloat until close upon daylight, when a French fisherman picked me up. He carried me to his cottage on the coast, and treated me from first to last with a kindness which I hope still to reward. At the time I bought his silence, with but little faith in his sticking to his bargain; now I know how loyally he must have done so. When I left him it was to find my way to Havre, and at Havre I took ship for Naples. I had still a little paper-money which had not come to me from Lowndes, and which I did not think likely to leave traces. With this money I transhipped at Naples, after reading of my own mysterious disappearance from Dieppe. Yes, that puzzled me; but I thought and thought, and hit at last upon something not altogether unlike the actual explanation. No, I never contemplated returning to unmask the villain who had attempted my murder. I was beginning to feel almost grateful to him. It was to him I owed such a fresh start as no ruined man ever had before.... Harry, Harry, don’t look like that! My ruin was complete in any case. How could I come back and say I had been running away with the money, but had thought better of it? I could have come back in the beginning, and met my creditors without telling them what I had been tempted to do. This was impossible now. It was too late to undo the immediate effects of my disappearance; it was not too late to begin life afresh under another name and in another land. Rightly or wrongly, that is what I resolved to do — for my family’s sake as much as for my own. They must forgive me, or my heart will break!”

  It was to Durban that the fugitive had taken ship at Naples. He had landed on those shores within a month of the day on which his son had quitted them. And the first man he met there was one who recognised him on the spot. But good came of it; the man was an old friend, and proved a true one; he was down from Johannesburg on business, and when he returned Mr. Ringrose accompanied him. With this staunch friend the ironmaster’s secret was safe; and partly through him, and partly with him — for within the year the pair were partners — the man who had lost a fortune bit by bit in the old country had made another by leaps and bounds in the new. Which was a sufficiently romantic story when Harry came to hear it in detail at a later date. At the time it was but the bare fact that the father cared to chronicle or the son to hear. It was the result on which Mr. Ringrose preferred to dwell. That very day he had returned with interest (before he knew that his wife had been paying it all these years) the money those four old friends had lent him through Gordon Lowndes. He had barely touched it, and would have returned it long ago, only he did not want his wife and son to know that he was alive until he could come back to them a rich enough man to atone in some degree for the wrong that he had done them — for the poverty and the shame they had endured for his sake.

  Harry said that Lowndes had spoken as though his father was a millionaire. Mr. Ringrose smiled slightly as he shook his head.

  “That’s entirely his own idea,” said he. “There might have been some truth in it in a few more years; but, as it is, it was no great pile I set myself to make, and I am more than content in having made it. In point of fact I am a poorer man than I was when you were born, but I am a free man for the first time for many years. This very day I have paid every penny that I owed here in town. A cheque is also on its way to the old firm, with which they can settle to-morrow any outstanding liabilities, and put the rest into the works in my name. And now I can face your mother. I could not do it until I could tell her this.”

  Yet he had not been a dozen hours in England; the cheques had been written on board, and posted the moment he landed. On reaching London he had gone straight to Gordon Lowndes, and it was only the almost simultaneous arrival of Scrafton which had kept him so long from seeking his own. Scrafton, who had latterly taken to pestering his victim almost daily, had ultimately left him (to the delight of Lowndes) with the avowed intention of carrying out his old threat and going straight to Harry Ringrose. In what followed Harry’s father had once more yielded, against his better judgment, to Gordon Lowndes.

  “It was his frankness that did it,” said Mr. Ringrose; “he told me everything, before he need have told me anything at all, in his sheer joy at seeing me alive. He told me everything that he has since told you, and upon my word I am not sure that you or I would have acted very differently in his place. It was while we were talking that Scrafton called, and I learned for myself how Lowndes had suffered at his hands. I could not refuse to give him his revenge, though I should have vastly preferred to give it him there. Scrafton had gone, however, and Lowndes seemed almost equally anxious that you should judge between them, as it were, on their merits. So he had his way ... I am glad you have made it up with him, Harry. He is a strange mixture of good and bad, but which of us is not? And which of us does not need forgiveness from the other? I — most of all — need it from you!”

  “And I from you,” said Harry in a low voice.

  “You? Why?”

  “Four years ago I suspected foul play. I was sure of it. Some other time I will tell you why.”

  “I rather think Lowndes has told me already. Well?”

  “I held my tongue! I found out most on the promise of not trying to find out any more. I shall never forgive myself for making that promise — and keeping it.”

  “Nay; thank God you did that!”

  “You don’t know what I mean.”

  “I think I do.”

  “Every day I have felt a traitor to you!”

  “I think there has been a little morbid exaggeration,” said Mr. Ringrose, with his worn smile. “What good could you have done? And to whom did you make this promise?”

  Harry told him with a red face.

  The night was at an end. Milk-carts clattered in the streets; milkmen clattered on the stairs. Harry put out the single light that had been burning all night in the sober front of the many-windowed mansions; and in the early morning he took his father over the flat. The rooms had never seemed so few — so tiny. Mr. Ringrose made no remark until he was back in the only good one that the flat contained.

  “And your mother has made shift here all these years!” he exclaimed
then, and the remorse in his voice had never sounded so acute.

  “Oh, no; we have only been here a year.”

  “Where were you before?”

  “In a smaller flat downstairs.”

  “A smaller one than this? God forgive me! I was not prepared for much; but from what I read I did expect more than this!”

  “From what you read?” cried Harry. “Read where?”

  A new light shone in the father’s face. “In some paragraphs I once stumbled across in some paper — I have them in my pocket at this moment!” said he. “Did you suppose I never saw your name in the papers, Harry? It has been my one link with you both. I saw it first by accident, and ever since I have searched for it, and sent for everything I could hear of that had your name to it. So I have always had good news of you; and sometimes between the lines I have thought I read good news of your mother too. God bless you ... God bless you ... for working for her ... and taking my place.”

  The old servant wept over her old master as though her heart would break with gladness. Her breakfast was a sorry thing, but no sooner was it on the table than she was sent down for a hansom, and she was still whistling when the gentlemen rushed after her and flew to find one for themselves. It was ten minutes to eight, and their train left Victoria at ten minutes past.

  Mrs. Ringrose was reading quietly in her room — reading some proof-sheets which Harry had posted to her the day before — when she heard the bell ring and her boy’s own step upon the stairs. “You have news!” she cried as he entered; then at his face— “He has come back!”

  “Mother, did you expect it?”

  “I have expected it every morning of all these years. I have prayed for it every night.”

  “Your prayer is answered!”

  “Where is he?”

  “I left him in the cab — —”

  “But he could not wait!” cried a broken voice; and as Harry stood aside to let his father pass, he could see nothing through his own tears, but he never forgot the next words he heard.

  “I have paid them all — all — all!” his father cried. “I can look the world in the face once more!”

  “I care nothing about that,” his mother answered. “You have come back to me. Oh! you have come back!”

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  A TALE APART.

  Harry Ringrose used sometimes to complain of his life from a literary point of view. This piece of ingratitude he was wont to couch in the technical terminology with which his conversation was rather freely garnished. He acknowledged that his “African horse had good legs,” as Gordon Lowndes would remind him; it was the later years that set him grumbling. In Harry’s opinion they were full of “good stuff,” which he longed to “handle”; but the facts were so badly “constructed” (as facts will be) that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not pull them to pieces and put them together again without spoiling them. Then there were the “unities”: our author was not quite clear as to their meaning, but he had an uncomfortable presentiment that they would prove another difficulty. And the “dramatic interest” lacked continuity. It was also of too many different kinds. The play began in one theatre, went on in another, and finished across the river. Worst of all was the “love story:” it disappeared for years, and then came altogether in a lump.

  This was true. It did. And if Harry Ringrose had essayed the task to which his innate subjectivity and the want of better ideas often drew him, there is no saying how much he would have made of scenes which the impersonal historian is content simply to mention. Of such was the meeting which took place within a few hours of that other meeting in the Eastbourne lodgings. Yet this proved to be the beginning of a new story rather than the end of an old one, which poor Harry meant it to be, as he returned alone to town the same afternoon, and drove straight to Berkeley Square.

  His excitement is not to be described. It seemed but a day since the leave-taking in the little shabby drawing-room on Richmond Hill. He remembered his own words so clearly. He remembered her replies. There were no more mysteries now; there were no more quarrels; and he cared still, as he had always done, Heaven knew! If only she still cared for him — if only there was nobody else — what was there to hinder it for another minute?

  Nothing, one would have thought: yet it was dusk when Harry rang the bell in a shivering glow of hope and fear, and nearly midnight when he came away downcast and disheartened: and during all those hours but one he had been pressing an unsuccessful suit: though he had her word for it that there was nobody else.

  What was there, then?

  Those six years which had once given Harry Ringrose a misleading sense of safety.

  And literally nothing else!

  He called again next day. He hindered the removal on the plea of making himself useful. And in season and out of season he tried his luck in vain.

  In the broad light of day he was met by a new and awful argument: his beloved showed him what she declared to be a genuine and flagrant crow’s-foot; and he only a boy of twenty-five!

  The removal was soon over, and for Harry the town emptied itself just as it was filling for everybody else; so then he took to writing tremendous letters; and an answer was never wanting in the course of a day or so; only it was never the answer he besought.

  Her fondness for him was obvious and not denied; only she had got it into her head that those six years between them were an insuperable bar, that a boy like Harry could not possibly know his own mind, and, therefore, that it would be manifestly unfair to take him at his word.

  So the thing resolved itself into a question of time; and, in the midst of other changes in his life, Harry did his best to bury himself in his work; but his comic verses were as much as he could manage, and for several weeks in succession these were the feeblest feature in Tommy Tiddler.

  Then he went to her in despair.

  “I can’t stand it any longer!”

  “Then give it up.”

  “I’ve waited five months!”

  “I said six.”

  “Surely five is enough to show whether a fellow knows his own mind?”

  “Some of it may be mere obstinacy.”

  “Well, then, it’s playing the very mischief with my work.”

  “Then what will it be when we are married?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean to say if we ever are.”

  “Fanny, you said when!”

  “I meant if.”

  “But you said when!!”

  It was the thin edge of the wedge.

  This protracted siege had other sides. It was not a joke to either party. Yet each tried to treat it as one. The man tried to conceal his disappointment, his inevitable chagrin; the woman, her deep and selfless anxiety as to whether, in all the years before them, he would be happy always — truly happy — happy as a man could be. She looked so far ahead, and he such a little way. Sometimes they told each other their thoughts; sometimes they were less happy than lovers ought to be; but all these months their inner lives were very full. They did not stagnate in each other’s love. They lived intensely and they felt acutely. And that is why, if Harry Ringrose were to tell his own love story, and tell it honestly, it would be a tale apart.

  When the time came there was some little heart-burning as to who should perform the ceremony. Harry had set his heart on being married by his dear Mr. Innes. This man still filled a unique place in his life. Indeed the many friendships that he had struck up in the last year or two only emphasised the value of that friend of friends: there was no one like Mr. Innes. They had not seen a great deal of each other during these last years; but they had never quite lost touch; and of the many influences to which the younger man’s nature responded only too readily, as strings to every wind, there was none so constant or so helpful as that of the old master to whom he was now content to be as a boy all his days. It was not that he had paid very many visits to the school at Guildford: it was that each had left its own indelible impr
ess on his mind, its own high resolves and noble yearnings in his heart. So it was natural enough that Harry Ringrose should want that man to marry him to whom he vowed that he owed such shreds of virtue as he possessed. And Fanny wished it too, for she had been with Harry to Guildford, and caught his enthusiasm, and knelt by his side one summer evening in the chapel where he had knelt as a boy. But it was not to be; there was a clergy-man in the family; it would be impossible to pass him over.

  Harry thought it would be not only possible but highly desirable, since his Uncle Spencer disapproved so cordially of Gordon Lowndes; but Mrs. Ringrose (with whom her son had warm words on the subject) very justly observed that such disapproval had not once been expressed since the engagement was announced; nor had her brother uttered one syllable to mar her own great happiness in her husband’s return, but had shown a more tender sympathy in her joy than in her trouble; after which he must marry them, or they could be married without their mother. The matter was settled by a private appeal to Innes himself, who sided against Harry, and by a note from Mr. Walthew, in which that gentleman accepted the responsibility with fewer reservations than Harry had ever known him make before.

  “To tell you the truth,” wrote Uncle Spencer, “it is against all my principles to make engagements so many weeks ahead; but every rule has its exception, and I shall be very happy to officiate on December 1st, if I am spared, and if it has not seemed good to you meanwhile to postpone the event. I must say that in my poor judgment a longer engagement would have shown greater wisdom: your Aunt and I waited some five years and a quarter! As you say that you are determined to depend (almost entirely) on your own efforts, it would have been well, in our opinion, to follow our example, and to wait until your literary position is more established than your warmest admirer can consider it to be at present. At the same time, my dear Henry, if marriage leads you into a less frivolous vein of writing (such as I once hoped you were about to adopt), I for one shall be thankful — if only you are also able to make both ends meet.”