“I believe,” said Dick, “that you were justified in what you did, only — I’m sorry you did it.”
Mr. Biggs was in close conversation with Colonel Bristo. Sergeant Compton stood aloof, silent and brooding; in the hour of triumph Death had baulked him of his quarry; his dark face presented a study in fierce melancholy.
“If only,” the Colonel was saying piteously, “the tragedy could stop at the name of Miles! The scandal that will attach to us when the whole sensation comes to light is difficult to face. For my part, I would face it cheerfully if it were not — if it were not for my daughter Alice. And, after all, it may not annoy her. She may not live to hear it.”
The last words were broken and hardly intelligible.
The rugged face of Stephen Biggs showed honest concern, and honest sympathy too. It did not take him long to see the case from the Colonel’s point of view, and he declared very bluntly that, for his part, he would be glad enough to hush the thing up, so far as the dead man’s past life was concerned (and here Mr. Biggs jingled handfuls of coins in his pockets), but that, unfortunately, it did not rest with him.
“You see, Colonel,” he explained, “my mate here he’s been on Ned Ryan’s trail, off and on, these four years. Look at him now. He’s just mad at being cheated in the end. But he’s one of the warmest traps in this Colony — I mean out in Vic.; and, mark me, he’ll take care to let the whole Colony know that, if he warn’t in at Sundown’s death, he was nearer it than any other blessed ‘trap.’ There’s some personal feeling in it, Colonel,” said Biggs, lowering his voice. “Frank Compton has sworn some mighty oath or other to take Ned Ryan alive or dead.”
“Suppose,” said the Colonel, “we induce your friend here to hold his tongue, do you think it would be possible for us to let this poor fellow pass out of the world as Miles, a squatter, or, at worst, an unknown adventurer?”
“How many are there of you, Colonel, up here who know?”
“Four.”
“And there are two of us. Total six men in the world who know that Ned Ryan, the bushranger, died yesterday. The rest of the world believes that he was drowned in the Channel three months ago. Yes, I think it would be quite possible. Moreover, I don’t see that it would do the least good to any one to undeceive the rest of the world; but Frank Compton—”
“Is he the only detective after Miles in this country?”
“The only one left. The others went back to Australia, satisfied that their man was drowned.”
“But our police—”
“Oh, your police are all right, Colonel. They’ve never so much as heard of Sundown. They’re easily pleased, are your police!”
It was at this point that Dr. Mowbray reappeared on the steps. Colonel Bristo went at once to learn his report, which must have been no worse than that of the early morning, for it was to speak of the inquest that the Colonel hurried back the moment the doctor drove away.
“Dick,” said he, in a voice that all could hear (Edmonstone was still talking to Robson — Compton still standing aloof), “you never told me the result. The inquest is adjourned; but there is a strong impression it seems that it is not a case of suicide after all, gentlemen — but one of wilful murder.”
The personal bias mentioned by Biggs had not altogether extinguished ordinary professional instincts in the breast of Sergeant Compton; for, at this, his black eyes glittered, and he pulled his patron aside.
Biggs, in his turn, sought a private word with the Colonel.
“Compton,” he said, “is bent on at once seeing the spot where Ryan was shot. Will you send some one with us? I’ll bring my man back this evening, and we’ll try to talk him over between us; but I fear it’s hopeless.”
Between three and four that afternoon the body of Jem Pound was found at the bottom of the cliff, a mile from Melmerbridge, among the fir-trees.
Between eight and nine that evening, in the little gun-room at the shooting-box, Biggs — in the presence of Colonel Bristo — made a last effort to induce Sergeant Compton to join the conspiracy of silence regarding the identity of Miles, the Australian adventurer, now lying dead at Melmerbridge, with Sundown, the Australian bushranger, supposed to have been drowned in the Channel in the previous April. All to no purpose. The Sergeant remained obdurate.
“Mr. Biggs,” said he, “and you, sir, I must declare to you firmly and finally that it is impossible for me to hold my tongue in a case like this. I will not speak of fairness and justice, for I agree that no one will be a bit the better off for knowing that Ned Ryan died yesterday instead of last spring. I will be perfectly candid. I will ask you to think for a moment what this means to me. It means this: when I get back to Melbourne I will be worth twice what I was before I sailed. The fact of having been the only man to disbelieve in Ryan’s drowning, and the fact of having as near as a touch taken both Ryan and Pound alive, will make my fortune for me out there.”
Honest Biggs rattled the coins in his pockets, and seemed about to speak.
“No, sir,” said Compton, turning to his patron. “My silence won’t be given — it cannot be bought. I have another reason for telling everything: my hatred for Ned Ryan — that death cannot cool!”
These words Compton hissed out in a voice of low, concentrated passion.
“I have not dogged him all these years for mere love of the work. No! He brought disgrace upon me and mine, and I swore to take him alive or dead. I keep my oath — I take him dead! All who know me shall know that I have kept my oath! As for Jem Pound, his mate and his murderer—”
The door opened, and the nurse stood panting on the threshold. Even in her intense excitement she remembered that she had left her charge sleeping lightly, and her words were low:
“What is it you say? Do you say that Jem Pound murdered my husband?” Colonel Bristo and the Sergeant started simultaneously. “Well, I might have known that — I might have told you that. But upstairs — I have been forgetting! I have been forgetting — forgetting! Yet when I heard you gentlemen come in here I remembered, and it was to tell you what I knew about Jem Pound that I came down.”
Sergeant Compton had turned an ashen grey; his eyes never moved from the face of the woman from the moment she entered the room. Elizabeth Ryan crossed the room and stood in front of him. His face was in shadow.
“You, sir — I heard your voice as my hand was on the door-handle; and I seemed to know your voice; and, while I stood trying to remember whose voice it was, I heard what you said. So you will not let the dead man rest! So, since he escaped you by his death, you would bring all the world to hoot over his grave! Oh, sir, if the prayers of his wife — his widow—”
She stopped. The man had risen unsteadily from his chair. His face was close to hers. She sprang back as though shot.
Sergeant Compton whispered one word: “Liz!”
Biggs and the Colonel watched the pale dark woman and the dark pale man in silent wonder. There was a likeness between man and woman.
“Liz!” repeated the Sergeant in a low, hoarse voice.
“Who — who are you? Are you — are you—”
“I am Frank!”
“Frank!” she whispered to herself, unable to realise all at once who Frank had been — it was so long since there had been a Frank in her life. “What!” she exclaimed in a whisper; “not my brother Frank?”
“Yes, your brother Frank. But — but I thought you were out there, Liz. I thought he had long ago deserted you; and that made me thirst all the more—”
His sister flung herself at his feet.
“Oh, Frank! Frank!” she wailed. “Since the day I married I have spoken to none of my own kith and kin until this night. And this is how we meet! Frank! — Frank!” — her voice fell to a tremulous whisper— “do one thing for me, and then, if you are still so bitter against me, go away again. Only one thing I ask — a promise. Promise, for your part, to keep silence! Let the dead man — let the dead man sleep peacefully. If the whole truth will come out, come out it m
ust; but don’t let it be through you, Frank — never let it be through you! Speak. Do you promise?”
The low, tearful, plaintive tones ceased, and there was silence in the room. Then Francis Compton bent down, and lifted his sister Elizabeth in his arms.
“I promise,” he whispered in a broken voice. “God knows you have suffered enough!”
XXXII
SUSPENSE: REACTION
Days of suspense followed, while Alice’s life trembled in the balance. In what way these days were passed the watchers themselves scarcely knew: for it is among the offices of suspense to make word and deed mechanical, and life a dream. The senses are dulled; nothing is realised — not even death itself, when death comes. Afterwards you remember with horror your callousness: when all the time your senses have been dulled by the most merciful of Nature’s laws. Afterwards you find that you received many an impression without knowing it. Thus Dick Edmonstone, for one, recalled a few things that he had quite forgotten, on his way south in the train afterwards.
He could feel again the wind lifting the hair from his head on the dark hilltop. He saw the crescent moon racing through foamy billows of clouds, like a dismasted ship before the wind. He felt the rushing air as he sped back to the post in the lonely road from which he watched all night that square of yellow light — the light through her window-blind. This faint yellow light shot beams of hope into his heart through the long nights; he watched it till dawn, and then crept wearily to his bed in the inn. When he roamed away from it, a superstitious dread seized him that he would return to find the light gone out for ever. The pale, faint light became to him an emblem of the faint, flickering life that had burnt so low. He would wildly hurry back, with death at his heart. Thank God! the light still burned.
In memory he could hear his own voice treating with a carter for a load of straw. He was again laying down with his own hands the narrow road with this straw; he was sitting half the day at his post in the gap of the hedge, watching her window; he was tasting again of the delight with which he watched the first vehicle crawl noiselessly across that straw.
These were among his most vivid recollections; but voices came back to him plainest of all.
The voices of the professional nurses, whispering where they little dreamt there was a listener; foreboding the worst; comparing notes with their last fatal cases; throwing into their tones a kind of pity worse than open indifference — perfunctory and cold. Or, again, these same voices telling how a certain name was always on the feverish lips upstairs.
“Ah, poor soul!” said they; “she thinks of nothing but him!”
Of whom? Whose name was for ever on her lips? The name of him to whom she had breathed her last conscious words?
Even so; for another voice had echoed through the silent house more than once, and could never be forgotten by those who heard it; the piercing, heart-rending, delirious voice of Alice herself, reiterating those last conscious words of hers:
“Hear what it was he said to me, and my answer — which is my answer still!”
What had Miles said? What had been Alice’s answer? Who would ever know? Not Dick; and these words came back to him more often than any others, and they tortured him.
But there were other words — words that had been spoken but yesterday, and as yet seemed too good to be true; the words of the kind old country doctor:
“She is out of danger!”
And now Dick Edmonstone was being whirled back to London. Alice was declared out of danger, so he had come away. Alice was not going to die. Her young life was spared. Then why was Dick’s heart not filled with joy and thanksgiving? Perhaps it was; but why did he not show it? He who had been frenzied by her peril, should have leapt or wept for joy at her safety. He did neither. He could show no joy. Why not?
Edmonstone arrived in town, and broke his fast at an hotel — he had travelled all night. After breakfast he drove, with his luggage, first to the offices of the P. and O. Company in Leadenhall Street. He stepped from that office with a brisker air; something was off his mind; something was definitely settled. On his way thence to Waterloo he whistled lively tunes in the cab. By the time he reached Teddington and Iris Lodge, the jauntiness of his manner was complete. In fact, his manner was so entirely different from what his mother and Fanny had been prepared for, that the good ladies were relieved and delighted beyond measure for the first few minutes, until a something in his tone pained them both.
“Oh yes,” he said, carelessly, in answer to their hushed inquiry, “she is out of danger now, safe enough. It has been touch and go, though.”
He might have been speaking of a horse or dog, and yet have given people the impression that he was a young man without much feeling.
“But — my boy,” cried Mrs. Edmonstone, “what has been the matter with you? We never heard that you were ill; and you look like a ghost, my poor Dick!”
Dick was standing in rather a swaggering attitude on the hearthrug. He wheeled round, and looked at himself in the large glass over the chimneypiece. His face was haggard and lined, and his expression just then was not a nice one.
“Why,” he owned, with a grating laugh, “I certainly don’t look very fit, now you mention it, do I? But it’s all on the surface. I’m all right, bless you! I’m not on speaking terms with the sexton yet, anyway!”
A tear stood in each of Mrs. Edmonstone’s dark eyes. Fanny frowned, and beat her foot impatiently upon the carpet. What had come over Dick?
He must have known perfectly well the utter falsity of the mask he was wearing; if not, self-deception was one of his accomplishments. Or perhaps those tears in his mother’s eyes caused a pang of shame to shoot through him. In any case, he made a hasty effort to change his tone.
“How are you two? That is the main point with me. Bother my seediness!”
“We are always well,” sighed Mrs. Edmonstone.
“And Maurice?”
“Maurice was never brisker.”
“Lucky dog!” said Dick, involuntarily; and the bitterness was back in his tone before he knew it.
“Your friend Mr. Flint,” said Mrs. Edmonstone, “is Maurice’s friend now, and Mr. Flint finds all his friends in good spirits.”
“Do you mean to say old Jack is doing the absentee landlord altogether? Did he never go back?”
“Yes. But he is over again — he is in town just now,” said Mrs. Edmonstone.
“He’s fast qualifying for buckshot, that fellow,” said Dick, with light irony.
“I rather fancy,” observed Fanny, with much indifference, “that you will see him this evening. I half think he is coming back with Maurice.” And Miss Fanny became profoundly interested in the world out of the window.
“Good!” cried Dick; and there was a ring of sincerity in that monosyllable which ought to have made it appreciated — as much as a diamond in a dustheap!
In a little while Dick went up to his room. He had letters to write, he said; but he was heard whistling and singing as he unpacked his portmanteau. Neither of the ladies saw much more of him that day. They sat together in wretched silence; there was some constraint between them; they felt hurt, but were too proud to express the feeling even to each other. The fact was, they did not quite know why they felt hurt. Dick had greeted them kindly enough — it was only that there was a something in his manner which they didn’t like and could not understand. And so both these women longed heartily for evening, and the coming of Maurice and merry Mr. Flint — Fanny, however, the more heartily of the two.
Maurice and Flint did come — in excellent time, too; and it so happened that when the little table-gong rang out its silvery call, Mr. Flint and Miss Edmonstone were still perambulating the dewy, twilit tennis-court. It further happened, in spite of the last-mentioned fact, that Miss Fanny contrived to reach the drawing-room before her mother was finally disentangled from the wools and needles that beset her at most hours of the day; that mother and daughter were the last to enter the little dining-room, hand in hand;
that Miss Fanny looked uncommonly radiant, and that the usual stupid tears were standing in gentle Mrs. Edmonstone’s soft, loving eyes.
Dick was unusually brilliant in his old place at the head of the table — so brilliant that his friend Flint was taken by surprise, and, for his own part, silenced; though it is true that the latter had something on his mind which would have made him, in any case, worse company than usual. Dick rattled on incessantly, about the dales, and the moors, and the grouse, as though his stay in Yorkshire was associated with no tragedy, and no sickness nigh unto death. His mood, indeed, was not taken up by the others, but he did not seem to notice or to mind that; only when he was quiet, all were quiet, and the sudden silences were embarrassing to all save their prime author.
The longest and most awkward of these pauses occurred while the crumbs were being removed. When the maid had withdrawn, Dick drank of his wine, refilled his glass, held it daintily by the stem between finger and thumb, leant back in his chair, and proceeded deliberately to break the spell.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, speaking the trite words in the same disagreeable tone that had pained the ladies that morning, “I am going to make you a little speech; a very little one, mind, so don’t look uncomfortable — you needn’t even feel it.”
He glanced from one to another of them. They did look uncomfortable; they felt that somehow Dick was not himself; they heartily wished he would be quiet. His manner was not the manner to carry off a sneer as so much pleasantry.
Dick continued:
“All good things must come to an end, you know — and, in fact, that’s my very original text. Now look at me, please — mother, look at your sheep that was lost: thanks. You will, perhaps, agree with me that I’m hardly the fellow I was when I landed; the fact being that this beautiful British climate is playing old Harry with me, and — all good things come to an end. If I may class myself among the good things for a moment — for argument’s sake — it seems to me that one good thing will come to an end pretty soon. Look at me — don’t you think so?”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 237
