“Those weeks at Whittlesea; three or four months travelling about; three weeks billiard-marking in Queensland, when I’d travelled away all my money. That was the first half-year. Nine months store-keeping, Queensland station; eight months droving — fat wethers — Melbourne market; one month’s spree, Melbourne. First two years. Next two years on Riverina station, overseer; another month in Melbourne; rest of my time here. Rest of my days — here!”
“What, never going home again?”
“Never.”
“You still don’t write?”
“Not a line.”
“So they don’t know whether you’re dead or alive?”
“They know nothing about me: I know nothing about them.”
“Forgive us, Jack; but have you quite forgotten — her?”
Lovatt burst out laughing.
“Years ago, my good fellow. Why—” he hesitated.
“What?”
“I’m going to marry here! I’m engaged. That tent you saw is the site of my homestead; I’ve taken up two hundred acres.”
Trooper Whitty stopped short in his walk, and whistled. But he did not get a chance to say much; Jack Lovatt took care of that. Jack Lovatt opened his heart.
Whitty listened with very natural sympathy, seeing what his own condition was; but he did not speak of his own condition. He listened with great interest, but with an unpleasantly vivid remembrance of a previous occasion when Jack Lovatt had opened his heart to him about the girl in England who had engaged herself to some one else. Jack’s calm, reasonable, blissful state to-day did not contrast to Whitty’s liking with the wild hopeless, honest fervour of four or five years ago. But then Jack was so much older now, so much more sensible. There was no reason for supposing that he was less in love now than he had been then, simply because he showed it less. In any case, Seth, who was such an accomplished hand at concealing his own feelings, should have been the last person to suspect this; nor did he suspect it; it merely occurred to him.
Rather jauntily, perhaps, but with sufficient gusto, Jack told everything — everything except who and what the lady was. But these are really unimportant details when you are telling a fellow about a thing of this kind, if there is no chance of his having met the girl anywhere. Whitty only gathered that she lived in Timber Town, of which he was glad, for Barbara’s sake. Before Jack gave him time to edge in a question the road had become wide and level; the trees had parted; they were in the township.
Timber Town was unpretending in those days: it is now a respectable centre. Then most of the houses were public-houses, or at any rate gave that impression; and, of course, on that particular day the public-house verandahs were black with Christmas customers. But even then there were the State school and the police-barracks, cheek by jowl, with the little iron church (now neither little nor iron) opposite — all three at the north end of the single broad and straggling street. This was the end at which the two men entered the township. They stopped at the barracks and leant against the fence, to which Whitty tethered his horse. He was most interested, of course, in the State school; but Lovatt drew his attention to the church over the way.
“They’re in at service now, but they’ll be out directly; and then, Seth—”
“She’s there, of course?”
“Rather! She plays the harmonium for them. Hark! there it goes! That’s the last hymn,”
It was strange to hear the glad old Christmas hymn across that glaring road, in the breathless heat, under that sky of flawless sapphire; at least, it should have struck the Englishman as strange. As for Seth, his only ideas of English Christmases came from English Christmas cards; and as he stood listening he was wondering how it was that Barbara did not play the harmonium for the Timber Town folks. Barbara was so very musical. He was wondering also why Lovatt was not in church with his sweetheart on Christmas morning, as he himself would have been with Barbara, could he only have managed to reach Timber Town earlier. And as he wondered and speculated, and as his pulse quickened — his meeting with Barbara, who of course was in church, being so very near — the hymn ended. Then there was a short silence; then the voluntary sounded, and the small oddly-assorted congregation poured out.
“I’ll go and fetch her,” said Lovatt. “Stop where you are; you shall be introduced to her now at once.”
He hurried over.
Seth felt that he ought to go too — that he must go; yet he remained where he was. He could not move. He was trembling with excitement. He had no desire just then to see Lovatt’s sweetheart; he was straining his eyes to find his own. She did not come. Yet all the other people were now clear of the church — all but the organist. Was she a friend of the organist — of Lovatt’s intended? Was she waiting back for her? Stop. The voluntary is over at last. Here is Jack Lovatt —
“Ah!”
Seth Whitty started back against the picket fence. His hands clutched it. His eyes fastened themselves upon the pair who came so slowly towards him. A moment, an hour, a lifetime — and he was introduced to Lovatt’s fiancée.
Whitty laboured to pull himself together and uttered a grating laugh.
“You needn’t have troubled,” he got out at last indistinctly. “We’re old friends — quite old friends, eh, Miss Lyon?”
Barbara gave him her hand. In the shadow of her great bat her face seemed gray and bloodless; but her blue eyes never flinched, and her lips only slightly trembled, and her little head was proudly raised. Barbara was lovelier than ever.
II.
“SETH! Seth Whitty! What ails you, man?”
It was Lovatt’s voice. Whitty removed the hand he had pressed to his forehead, and stood stiffly erect.
“Forgive me, Miss Barbara; I feel silly like. It must be the sun. These felt things are no protection once you’re used to the helmet.”
No pretence could have been older, more decrepit; but, as it happened, it was the one pretence of all others that was absolutely certain to take folks in just then at Timber Town. Lovatt looked alarmed, and glanced involuntarily at the front windows of the barracks, where the blinds were drawn. At the same moment, raising his hat to Barbara, Whitty turned hastily away and went in at the barrack gate.
“Stop,” cried Lovatt, but softly. “Don’t go in there!”
Whitty faced about. “Why not? We receive each other with open arms, we fellows. Why shouldn’t I go in?”
“Because the sergeant’s lying dead there from sunstroke!”
Whitty had not known that sergeant even by name.
He had nothing to say to his death. But he returned to his horse, and unfastened the reins from the fence.
“Where shall you go?” asked Lovatt doubtfully.
“One of the publics.”
“Do you feel better?”
“All right again, thanks.”
“I feared it was our poor sergeant over again. You had such a jolly bad look a moment ago; hadn’t he, Barbara?”
Barbara said nothing.
“But look here; don’t be in such a hurry, if you’re all right!” Lovatt caught hold of the bridle. “We two are going to picnic at the selection. Join us. Since you know Barbara — a rum coincidence that — you won’t mind? And as for us, we shall be delighted; sha’n’t we, Barbara?”
Again Barbara did not speak.
“Come and make up a jolly party, and blow the proverb!” said Lovatt persuasively.
Whitty vaulted into the saddle, with another grating laugh, and rode off without so much as a thank-you.
Higher up the street, in the alcoholic region, he met one of his own kind, a trooper, but on foot, and in full uniform. He was the poor sergeant’s temporary substitute, and he and Whitty had met before. They stopped and conversed now. The man who was in uniform complained of the man who was not.
“If you’d got the togs on,” he said, “you might have been of some use, and seen me through, instead of playing the bloated civilian.”
“Then there aren’t two men stationed here? Townsh
ip duty must be pretty light duty if one’s enough.”
“It is; but not at Christmas,” grumbled the warpaint man. “You might have seen a fellow through.” Trooper Whitty regretted he couldn’t, and went on to say he was particularly anxious that no one there should know he was Trooper Whitty. Trooper Whitty had been ass enough to make himself notorious, but, oddly enough, had not the least wish to get drunk at the expense of Timber Town. The other trooper made promises accordingly, and claimed to be rendering good for evil.
Whitty rode on, and put up his horse at Burns’s Royal Hotel, one of the slightly less disreputable establishments. Already there was a good deal of advanced drunkenness there. Seth had never been a drinking man, but the sight of the men lying serenely senseless in the shade filled him with a sudden, passionate envy. They had forgotten their troubles, those happy wretches. The means lay handy for drowning his trouble too. A savage craving came over him, and held him one hellish minute. He conquered it, and strode alone into the breathless solitude of the surrounding forest.
First the township was left behind; then all its sounds, and there were no sounds at all save the chattering of parrots, the murmuring of leaves, and the swish of Whitty’s legs through the ferns and long rank grass. The latter sound was exchanged from time to time for a ringing tread on the dry bed of a creek or in odd spots where the ground was hard and flinty; but the swift restless footsteps never ceased. What was more peculiar, Whitty never raised his eyes from the ground — never directed his steps by one moment’s reflection. He was reflecting, indeed, but of the dead past that had died that day. The present was nothing to him; the future, which until to-day had been all in all to him, was less than nothing to him now. But what was all over now had never been so dear to him. When the body is newly dead, and even more beautiful than it seemed in life, it is sweet to linger by it, to muse upon it, to remember all: and it is sometimes thus with events and time.
The shadows of the tall trees, drawn out until there was no room for their full length on the ground, climbed the trunks of other trees and leapt the bodies of the fallen, overlapping and interlacing in labyrinthine complexity. Here and there the level sun-rays cut the forest like a flaming sword, and the high lights and deep shadows might have embarrassed any one who happened to be walking anywhere in particular. But any direction was Seth’s direction; he cared nothing where his wandering led him. If he thought of it at all no doubt he made up his mind that he could not lose himself, simply because for once he wasn’t anxious not to lose himself. But it is more probable that, during most of that long afternoon, he was mentally unconscious of the bodily exertions he was making. Yet his clothes were heavy with perspiration, and for some time before sundown he had been tramping steadily up-hill.
At last, quite late, when the sun was setting, Whitty stumbled across a blue-gum newly felled. He went on and came to another, at which he looked up, and there, straight in front of him, was Lovatt’s tent. He had come in a circle right round to Lovatt’s selection. The rough downward track ran twenty yards below.
Seth smiled bitterly. His unconsidered wandering seemed to show the guidance of a malignant fate, now that it had led him here. He stood still, and inspected the spot grimly. There were the traces of the lovers’ picnic, the white ashes of the fire still hot, and the air above it tremulous. Here they had sat, hand in hand, on this smooth round trunk. These nodding saplings had heard their whispers, their tender talk, their lovers’ sighs. Seth stepped over to the place, and sat down where they had sat, with a strange cold-blooded complacency. It did not move him to sit there, lonely and humiliated: so, then, nothing could move him any more, and the jangling of their wedding-bells would fall quite peacefully upon his ears.
His foot touched a book that lay in the long grass, a book they must have forgotten, with the nice, becoming forgetfulness of true lovers. He picked up the book and opened it: it was poetry; he did not look to see whose poetry. He shut the book and laid it on the trunk beside him; there was no poetry in Seth. He rested his elbows upon his knees, and his temples between his hands. The short sharp twilight set in. Seth did not move. Had his attitude been but a thought more comfortable, you would have said that the soft continuous rustling of the leaves all around him had lulled him to sleep; only in that case he would not have detected so instantly a rustle of a different kind — the rustle of a dress.
He did detect it instantly, and looked quickly up, and Barbara Lyon, in her cool white dress and wide straw sombrero, stood calmly before him; and, as if her calmness were not enough, a smile of friendliness and of sweet unconcern stole slowly over her face.
“My book,” said she.
He got up and gave it to her, and did not sit down again, nor walk away, but stood gravely peering into her blue eyes, until they flinched and fell, and Barbara blushed a lively crimson. She drew away from him; then hesitated; then, with an unconcern which this time was but imperfectly feigned, she sat deliberately down upon the felled tree, and looked him fearlessly in the face.
“If you have anything to say to me,” said Barbara, “say it here, and now. Of course I did not dream of finding you here; I came for the book I left But now that we have met, I sha’n’t run away.”
Nothing could have been colder than her tones. Seth stood before her, upright and grave — more grave than sad, Barbara was piqued to think.
“There is very little to be said, Barbara,” he answered her. “There is a good deal to think over, quite calmly; there is a good deal for me to grasp, a good deal for me to-”
There he hesitated.
“To judge?”
“Ay, to judge.”
“And you will judge so hardly!”
“That will not hurt you.”
Barbara’s heel went deep into the grass. She took off her great round hat and played nervously with the strings. The soft twilight fell on her with great purity, leaving neither line nor shadow from the undecided edge of her hair to the extremely decided curve of her chin. She raised her eyes.
“Now, Seth, be frank. Tell me candidly that you have not been thinking about me all these months — that you have not been counting upon me. You are hurt, you are mortified; frankly, admit that you are not heart-broken?”
“You really want an answer?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then I say that I have thought of you all these months, every day and every hour. As for counting, I am human; and until to-day I believed in things, so I have counted too. My feelings at the moment are beside the point; it is of no account whether I am hurt, or so on. But as for breaking my heart for you, it may seem unmannerly, but I shall not do it. I should also say that I shall not think about you much more.” Barbara winced. Her heel sunk deeper in the ground. Her eyes flashed.
“Is this all you have to say?”
“I said it wouldn’t be much.”
“Then I may go?”
“I never asked you to stop.”
Barbara turned white with anger, rose up, and went. Seth raised his wideawake; she took no notice. He stood watching her until she reached the road, and the trees and the gloaming hid her from him; she never looked round — he could scarcely have expected that. —
When he knew that she was quite gone, and that this was the last of her in his life, something seemed to strike and shake him to the core. A shiver went through his frame. He tottered to the felled tree, sat down there once more, and buried his face in his hands. It had been quite dark for some time when he got up. And the hard palms of his hands were wet.
His bearing in Barbara’s presence had been very different. —
It was seven in the morning when Trooper Whitty got back to the lonely little barracks in the ranges. The sergeant ran into the verandah with the soapsuds on his chin, razor in hand.
“What on earth brings you back at this hour? You must have heard!”
“Heard what?”
“Your own good luck. I congratulate you — Sergeant Seth Whitty!”
Whitty stared
like a fool.
“You’re promoted,” the other sergeant went on. “I told you they’d take the first opportunity, and they’ve taken it. You’re to be sergeant, and sole boss of the show — for they don’t need two there — at Timber Town. What’s wrong? Isn’t it good enough? You look like death, mate!”
Seth tumbled out of the saddle and stood just outside the verandah, shaking.
“I can’t go there!” he said in a low hollow voice. “Anywhere else, but not there. I’ll leave the force!”
Certainly his bearing before Barbara had been very, very different.
III.
OF course Seth Whitty did not leave the Mounted Police, and of course he went to Timber Town, as sergeant, in the end. He was the last man to obey on calm reflection the impulse of a craven moment. At the same time, the calmest reflection could not deny that Timber Town, in the circumstances, held out a prospect of personal discomfort such as a man might well be justified in shirking; and Whitty went there with set teeth and a heart of lead.
Timber Town made a fuss about him, but not the fuss it would have made at Christmas. It was a reactionary period: the New Year was just in; Timber Town had a headache: so Whitty got off cheaply. It was not the only respect in which he was to get off cheaply. For weeks and weeks he had nothing at all to do. Timber Town showed its high appreciation of his professional parts (as exemplified in the fate of Red Jim) by a temporary lapse into respectability; so that offences worth troubling about were unheard of, and even common assault became the most uncommon thing in the district. They were slack weeks at the barracks. With the schoolmistress’s love affair going on under his nose, the weeks were something worse than slack for Seth. Now, had the authorities only sent some one else to Timber Town, Seth would have been spared all this, while the other fellow might have filled up his odd half hours very agreeably with Lovatt and Barbara. If a student of human nature, he never need have been dull; the characters of this pair were so well worth looking into.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 409
