Complete Works of E W Hornung
Page 259
“I know you,” said Langholm, when he paused. “You’re the man I saw ‘knocking down your check,’ as you called it, at an inn near here called the Packhorse.”
“I am so!” cried the fellow, with sudden savagery. “And do you know where I got the check to knock down? I believe he’s a friend of yours; it’s him I’ve come to talk to you about to-night, and he calls himself Steel!”
“Isn’t it his real name?” asked Langholm, quickly.
“Well, for all I know, it is. If it isn’t, it ought to be!” added Abel, bitterly.
“You knew him in Australia, then?”
“Knew him? I should think I did know him! But who told you he was ever out there? Not him, I’ll warrant!”
“I happen to know it,” said Langholm, “that’s all. But do you mean to tell me that it was Mr. Steel to whom you referred in your letter?”
“I do so!” cried Abel, and clinched it with an oath.
“You said ‘they.’”
“But I didn’t mean anybody else.”
Langholm lowered his voice. Neither foot nor hoof had passed or even sounded in the distance. There was scarcely a whisper of the trees; an ordinary approach could have been heard for hundreds of yards, a stealthy one for tens. Langholm had heard nothing, though his ears were pricked. And yet he lowered his voice.
“Do you actually hint that Mr. Steel has or could have been a gainer by Mr. Minchin’s death?”
Abel pondered his reply.
“What I will say,” he declared at length, “is that he might have been a loser by his life!”
“You mean if Mr. Minchin had gone on living?”
“Yes — amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
“You are not thinking of — of Mrs. Steel?” queried Langholm, after pausing in his turn.
“Bless you, no! She wasn’t born or thought of, so far as we was concerned, when we were all three mates up the bush.”
“Ah, all three!”
“Steel, Minchin, and me,” nodded Abel, as his cutty glowed.
“And you were mates!”
“Well, we were and we weren’t: that’s just it,” said Abel, resentfully. “It would be better for some coves now, if we’d all been on the same footin’ then. But that we never were. I was overseer at the principal out-station — a good enough billet in its way — and Minchin was overseer in at the homestead. But Steel was the boss, damn him, trust Steel to be the boss!”
“But if the station was his?” queried Langholm. “I suppose it was a station?” he added, as a furious shower of sparks came from the cutty.
“Was it a station?” the ex-overseer echoed. “Only about the biggest and the best in the blessed back-blocks — that’s all! Only about half the size of your blessed little old country cut out square! Oh, yes, it was his all right; bought it for a song after the bad seasons fifteen year ago, and sold it in the end for a quarter of a million, after making a fortune off of his clips alone. And what did I get out of it?” demanded Abel, furiously. “What was my share? A beggarly check same as he give me the other day, and not a penny more!”
“I don’t know how much that was,” remarked Langholm; “but if you weren’t a partner, what claim had you on the profits?”
“Aha! that’s tellings,” said Abel, with a sudden change both of tone and humor; “that’s what I’m here to tell you, if you really want to know! Rum thing, wasn’t it? One night I turn up, like any other swaggy, humping bluey, and next week I’m overseer on a good screw (I will say that) and my own boss out at the out-station. Same way, one morning I turn up at his grand homestead here — and you know what! It was a check for three figures. I don’t mind telling you. It ought to have been four. But why do you suppose he made it even three? Not for charity, you bet your boots! I leave it to you to guess what for.”
The riddle was perhaps more easily solvable by an inveterate novelist than by the average member of the community. It was of a kind which Langholm had been concocting for many years.
“I suppose there is some secret,” said he, taking a fresh grip of his stick, in sudden loathing of the living type which he had only imagined hitherto.
“Ah! You’ve hit it,” purred the wretch.
“It is evident enough, and always has been, for that matter,” said Langholm, coldly. “And so you know what his secret is!”
“I do, mister.”
“And did Mr. Minchin?”
“He did.”
“You would tell him, of course?”
The sort of scorn was too delicate for John William Abel, yet even he seemed to realize that an admission must be accompanied by some form of excuse.
“I did tell him,” he said, “for I felt I owed it to him. He was a good friend to me, was Mr. Minchin; and neither of us was getting enough for all we did. That was what I felt; to have his own way, the boss’d ride roughshod over us both, and he himself only — but that’s tellings again. You must wait a bit, mister! Mr. Minchin hadn’t to wait so very long, because I thought we could make him listen to two of us, so one night I told him what I knew. You could ha’ knocked him down with a feather. Nobody dreamt of it in New South Wales. No, there wasn’t a hand on the place who would have thought it o’ the boss! Well, he was fond of Minchin, treated him like a son, and perhaps he wasn’t such a good son as he might have been. But when he told the boss what I told him, and made the suggestion that I thought would come best from a gent like him—”
“That you should both be taken into partnership on the spot, I suppose?” interrupted Langholm.
“Well, yes, it came to something like that.”
“Go on, Abel. I won’t interrupt again. What happened then?”
“Well, he’d got to go, had Mr. Minchin! The boss told him he could tell who he liked, but go he’d have to; and go he did, with his tail between his legs, and not another word to anybody. I believe it was the boss who started him in Western Australia.”
“Not such a bad boss,” remarked Langholm, dryly; and the words set him thinking a moment on his own account. “And what happened to you?” he added, abandoning reflection by an effort.
“I stayed on.”
“Forgiven?”
“If you like to put it that way.”
“And you both filed the secret for future use!”
“Don’t talk through your neck, mister,” said Abel, huffily. “What are you drivin’ at?”
“You kept this secret up your sleeve to play it for all it was worth in a country where it would be worth more than it was in the back-blocks? That’s all I mean.”
“Well, if I did, that’s my own affair.”
“Oh, certainly. Only you came here at your own proposal in order, I suppose, to sell this secret to me?”
“Yes, to sell it.”
“Then, you see, it is more or less my affair as well.”
“It may be,” said Abel, doggedly. And his face was very evil as he struck a match to relight his pipe; but before the flame Langholm had stepped backward, with his stick, that no superfluous light might fall upon his thin wrists and half-filled sleeves.
“You are sure,” he pursued, “that Mr. Minchin was in possession of this precious secret at the time of his death?”
“I told it him myself. It isn’t one you would forget.”
“Was it one that he could prove?”
“Easily.”
“Could I?”
“Anybody could.”
“Well, and what’s your price?”
“Fifty pounds.”
“Nonsense! I’m not a rich man like Mr. Steel.”
“I don’t take less from anybody — not much less, anyhow!”
“Not twenty in hard cash?”
“Not me; but look here, mister, you show me thirty and we’ll see.”
The voice drew uncomfortably close. And there were steps upon the cross-roads at last; they were those of one advancing with lumbering gait and of another stepping nimbly backward. The latter laughed aloud.
“I’m not coming in!”
“To the gate, then. It isn’t three hundred yards from this. I’ll lead the way.”
Langholm set off at a brisk walk, his heart in his mouth. But the lumbering steps did not gain upon him; a muttered grumbling was their only accompaniment; and in minute they saw the lights. In another minute they were at the wicket.
“You really prefer not to come in?”
There was a sly restrained humor in Langholm’s tone.
“I do — and don’t be long.”
“Oh, no, I shan’t be a minute.”
There were other lights in the other cottage. It was not at all late. A warm parallelogram appeared and disappeared as Langholm opened his door and went in. Was it a sound of bolts and bars that followed? Abel was still wondering when his prospective paymaster threw up the window and reappeared across the sill.
“It was a three-figured check you had from Mr. Steel, was it?”
“Yes — yes — but not so loud!”
“And then he sent you to the devil to do your worst?”
“That’s your way of putting it.”
“I do the same — without the check.”
And the window shut with a slam, the hasp was fastened, and the blind pulled down.
CHAPTER XXVI
A CARDINAL POINT
The irresistible discomfiture of this ruffian did not affect the value of the evidence which he had volunteered. Langholm was glad to remember that he had volunteered it; the creature was well served for his spite and his cupidity; and the man of peace and letters, whose temperament shrank from contention of any kind, could not but congratulate himself upon an incidental triumph for which it was impossible to feel the smallest compunction. Moreover, he had gained his point. It was enough for him to know that there was a certain secret in Steel’s life, upon which the wretch Abel had admittedly traded, even as his superior Minchin had apparently intended to do before him. Only those two seemed to have been in this secret, and one of them still lived to reveal it when called upon with authority. The nature of the secret mattered nothing in the meanwhile. Here was the motive, without which the case against John Buchanan Steel must have remained incomplete. Langholm added it to his notes — and trembled!
He had compunction enough about the major triumph which now seemed in certain store for him; the larger it loomed, the less triumphant and the more tragic was its promise. And, with all human perversity, an unforeseen and quite involuntary sympathy with Steel was the last complication in Langholm’s mind.
He had to think of Rachel in order to harden his heart against her husband; and that ground was the most dangerous of all. It was strange to Langholm to battle against that by the bedside of a weaker brother fallen in the same fight. Yet it was there he spent the night. He had scarcely slept all the week. It was a comfort to think that this vigil was a useful one.
Severino slept fitfully, and Langholm had never a long stretch of uninterrupted thought.
But before morning he had decided to give Steel a chance. It was a vague decision, dependent on the chance that Steel gave him when they met, as meet they must. Meanwhile Langholm had some cause for satisfaction with the mere resolve; it defined the line that he took with a somewhat absurd but equally startling visitor, who waited upon him early in the forenoon, in the person of the Chief Constable of Northborough.
This worthy had heard of Langholm’s quest, and desired to be informed of what success, if any, he had met with up to the present. Langholm opened his eyes.
“It’s my own show,” he protested.
“Would you say that if you had got the man? I doubt it would be our show then!” wheezed the Chief Constable, who was enormously fat.
“It would be Scotland Yard’s,” admitted Langholm, “perhaps.”
“Unless you got him up here,” suggested the fat official. “In that case you would naturally come to me.”
Langholm met his eyes. They were very small and bright, as the eyes of the obese often are, or as they seem by contrast with a large crass face. Langholm fancied he perceived a glimmer of his own enlightenment, and instinctively he lied.
“We are not likely to get him up here,” he said. “This is about the last place where I should look!”
The Chief Constable took his departure with a curious smile. Langholm began to feel uneasy; his unforeseen sympathy with Steel assumed the form of an actual fear on his behalf. Severino was another thorn in his side. He knew that Rachel had been written to, and fell into a fever of impatience and despair because the morning did not bring her to his bedside. She was not coming at all. She had refused to come — or her husband would not allow it. So he must die without seeing her again! The man was as unreasonable as sick men will be; nothing would console him but Langholm’s undertaking to go to Normanthorpe himself after lunch and plead in person with the stony-hearted lady or her tyrannical lord. This plan suited Langholm well enough. It would pave the way to the “chance” which he had resolved to give to Rachel’s husband.
That resolve was not weakened by successive encounters, first with a policeman near the entrance gates, next with a trespasser whom Langholm rightly took for another policeman in plain clothes, and finally with the Woodgates on their way from the house. The good couple welcomed him with a warmth beyond his merits.
“Oh, what a blessing you have come!” cried Morna, whose kind eyes discovered a tell-tale moisture. “Do please go up and convince Mrs. Steel that you can’t be rearrested on a charge on which you have already been tried and acquitted!”
“But of course you can’t,” said Langholm. “Who has put that into her head, Mrs. Woodgate?”
“The place is hemmed in by police.”
“Since when?” asked Langholm, quickly.
“Only this morning.”
Langholm held his tongue. So the extortioner Abel, outwitted by the amateur policeman, had gone straight to the professional force! The amateur had not suspected him of such resource.
“I don’t think this has anything to do with Mrs. Steel,” he said at last; “in fact, I think I know what it means, and I shall be only too glad to reassure her, if I can.”
But his own face was not reassuring, as Hugh Woodgate plainly told him in the first words which the vicar contributed to the discussion.
“I have been finding out things — I have not been altogether unsuccessful — but the things are rather on my mind,” the author explained. “How does Steel take the development, by the way?”
“As a joke!” cried Morna, with indignation; her husband was her echo both as to words and tone; but Langholm could only stare.
“I must see him,” he exclaimed, decisively. “By the way, once more, do you happen to know whether Mrs. Steel got a letter from me this morning, Mrs. Woodgate?”
“Yes, she did,” answered Morna at once. Her manner declared her to be not unacquainted with the contents of the letter, and Langholm treated the declaration as though spoken.
“And is she not going to see that poor fellow?” he asked.
“At once,” said Morna, “and I am going with her. She is to call for me with the phaeton at three.”
“Do you know anything about him, Mrs. Woodgate?”
“All.”
“Then I can only commend him to the sympathy which I know he has already. And I will talk to Mr. Steel while you are gone.”
The first sentence was almost mechanical. That matter was off Langholm’s mind, and in a flash it was fully occupied with the prospect before himself. He lifted the peak of his cap, but, instead of remounting his bicycle, he wheeled it very slowly up the drive. The phaeton was at the door when Langholm also arrived, and Rachel herself ran out to greet him on the steps — tall and lissome, in a light-colored driving cloak down to her heels, and a charming hat �
� yet under it a face still years older than the one he wore in his heart, though no less beautiful in its distress.
“I hardly dare ask you!” she gasped, her hand trembling in his. “Have you found out — anything at all?”
“A little.”
And he opened his hand so that hers must drop.
“Oh, but anything is better than nothing! Come in and tell me — quick!”
“Bravo!” added an amused voice from the porch.
It was Steel, spruce and serene as ever, a pink glow upon his mobile face, a pink flower in his reefer jacket, a jaunty Panama straw covering his white hairs, and buckskin shoes of kindred purity upon his small and well-shaped feet. Langholm greeted him in turn, only trusting that the tremors which had been instantly communicated to his own right hand might not be detected by the one it was now compelled to meet.
“I came to tell Mr. Steel,” said Langholm, a little lamely.
“Excellent!” murmured that gentleman, with his self-complacent smile.
“But am I not to hear also?” demanded Rachel.
“My dear Mrs. Steel, there is very little to tell you as yet. I only wish there were more. But one or two little points there are — if you would not mind my first mentioning them to your husband?”
“Oh, of course.”
There was no pique in the tone. There was only disappointment — and despair.
“You manage a woman very prettily,” remarked Steel, as they watched the phaeton diminish down the drive like a narrow Roman road.
“You are the first who ever said so,” rejoined the novelist, with a rather heavy sigh.
“Well, let us have a cigar and your news. I confess I am interested. A stroll, too, would be pleasanter than sitting indoors, don’t you think? The thickest walls have long ears, Langholm, when every servant in the place is under notice. The whole lot? Oh, dear, yes — every mother’s son and daughter of them. It is most amusing; every one of them wants to stay and be forgiven. The neighbors are little better. The excuses they have stooped to make, some of them! I suppose they thought that we should either flee the country or give them the sanguinary satisfaction of a double suicide. Well, we are not going to do either one or the other; we are agreed about that, if about nothing else. And my wife has behaved like a trump, though she wouldn’t like to hear me say so; it is her wish that we should sit tighter than if nothing had happened, and not even go to Switzerland as we intended. So we are advertising for a fresh domestic crew, and we dine at Ireby the week after next. It is true that we got the invitation before the fat fell into the fire, but I fancy we may trust the Invernesses not to do anything startling. I am interested, however, to see what they will do. It is pretty safe to be an object-lesson to the countryside, one way or the other.”