Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  Any one but Seth would have begun by making friends with his little neighbour the schoolmistress — of whom Seth had made an enemy on Christmas Day. He would have admired her greatly, and without danger or reservation, seeing she was already engaged; he would have admired above all things her pluck and spirit in coming out into the world to work for her own living, though not more than Seth did, who knew the circumstances. He would have discovered in her all the sweetest attributes of woman, and some masculine little traits as well. Only — he would have found her a coquette. Any one but Seth, it is to be feared, would have found her a dire and a mischievous coquette — and the worst one in that she had fallen too desperately in love with Jack Lovatt to work off her coquetries any more upon him. To Sergeant Seth (though one would think he might have known by this time what Barbara was) this experience was denied at present for a very simple reason: he was barely on bowing terms with the schoolmistress.

  As for Jack Lovatt, he would have afforded a still more entertaining study, though one that required a key. The key to Lovatt’s character was his past life. You would not have thought it of the energetic young bushman, but he was a gilded youth, with the gilt gone. Eton had expelled this free-selector; Christ Church had sent him down; at twenty his character had been too bad to be permissible in any commoner. Jack was only the son of a successful public man, and not even his heir; in him such conduct was intolerable. You have no idea what a devil of a fellow he was at twenty. Yet at that very time the fellow was in love. A double crisis ensued. The girl gave up Jack for some one else, who was not going to the deuce, but in quite the contrary direction — got engaged, in fact, to her uncle’s curate; and, contemporaneously, Jack’s father cut him off with a thousand and closed the doors upon him.

  So Lovatt came out to Australia. On the voyage he saw his follies in the plain light of reflection, and brooded fiercely over what he had lost, but railed at his family. And the first thing he did in Melbourne was to take a few letters that were awaiting him, slip them unopened into a big envelope, and post them home with his initials. Then he went to Whittlesea (a fellow-passenger gave him the introduction), and was quiet there. He was quieter still in the far interior. Gradually he came to forget, more than to regret; but, before that, he had made up his mind never to return to England, and had dismissed that thought finally. So he did not hanker for home, as some exiles do. On the other hand, he fell in love with bush life. Moreover, he became a highly respectable member of bush society; in spite of those occasional months in Melbourne, his moral colour toned down to a decent drab; and ultimately young Lovatt saved some money and determined to “select.” His selection went rather farther than he had intended it to go; it so very soon included Barbara.

  Lovatt was five-and-twenty now, and sufficiently attractive still; his attractiveness had been the ruin of him in England. He had hair like Byron’s; nor was his hair the only point in which he plagiarised from that poet: one need not name them all; one need only mention that he was addicted by turns to infectious high spirits and a peculiarly winning form of melancholy. It was when the latter fit was on him that he met Barbara, and told her his story, omitting the love episode. Between them they substituted a new episode of a similar nature. There was plenty of intensity about this one too. Barbara, especially, was quite ridiculously in love; and Lovatt possessed the very qualities to keep her in love: thorough-going masculine selfishness, and a command of others which was as strong as his selfcommand had been weak.

  Sergeant Whitty, during his first weeks at Timber Town, saw a good deal of Lovatt, and, as has been indicated, next to nothing of Barbara. To the sergeant’s thinking, the Colonies, and the Colonies alone, had made a man of Lovatt; and, allowing for Colonial bias, there is no doubt that the sergeant was mainly right. Certainly Lovatt had roughed it a good deal, and that is always improving. His English conceit (Seth called it “English”) was, at least, no longer conspicuous: those English mannerisms which, in the new chum, had been so very offensive to Colonial Seth, were invisible in the energetic selector. Yet the young fellow’s charm of manner remained, and this was considerable; it had made even the new chum popular, and popular even in the bush. It was not difficult to conceive how Barbara had been fascinated by this young man; Seth was fascinated himself. Seth should have hated him; but it was impossible to hate the fellow. Seth came nearest to hating him when he fancied (as he sometimes did fancy, from little things) that Lovatt did not value Barbara quite as he ought.

  Theoretically, it is better that you should not think a girl perfection just because you are in love with her, but there is generally something wrong somewhere if you don’t. Perfection had once been too weak a word for Seth’s estimation of Barbara. Unfortunately it was so still. But it was not a word that would have occurred to Lovatt. There was something wrong somewhere.

  Lovatt worked hard and heartily on his selection, clearing the ground and preparing the site for the homestead; Barbara was happily at work in school; their spare hours they spent together. It was only the sergeant who was idle, and lonely, and sad.

  Seth was no reader, so books could not help him through. Nor had he ever been a particularly sociable fellow; so the verandah of the Royal Hotel had no attractions for him. He occupied himself during the first week or two by setting his house and garden in order; but the garden, unfortunately, had been very well cared for by his predecessor, so there was no lasting labour there: and crime was still scarce. At length came a regular inspiration. Whitty offered to lend a hand at the selection, and the offer was accepted. Here he toiled the harder of the two. A craving for Barbara’s good opinion lent him feverish energy, for it was an odd fact that what had principally troubled Seth of late weeks was the haunting recollection of that uncomfortable interview with Barbara on Christmas Day. He was ashamed of his part in it. Not only did the memory of it prey upon him, but Barbara’s cold looks reminded him of it whenever he saw her. If he had only kept her for his friend! As it was, she let him slave out there at her future home without rewarding him by so much as a smile. So at last he gave that up too, and sank into deeper dejection than ever. He gnashed his teeth over the continued law-abiding character of Timber Town, and yearned for another Red Jim to rise up and depredate the neighbourhood.

  No such luck was in store; but an exciting thing did happen one evening in February. It was late, and the sergeant was smoking gloomily in his front verandah, when it all came about very suddenly. It began with a single sound: the sergeant just heard it, and it tightened every constabulary nerve; it was a woman’s short, stifled cry of alarm.

  The sergeant bounded out of the verandah, and crouched an instant to listen and to draw his revolver. In that instant the cry was repeated, still more faintly, but he knew now that it came from a back room in the school-house, and from Barbara’s lips. He leapt two fences and was in the school verandah in three seconds. The door was locked. He tried it with his shoulder; it would not yield. Barbara’s cry came again. Then Seth stood back a yard and brought his flat foot with full force against the door right over the keyhole. The door flew in. Seth followed. A light came from under a door at the far end of the passage. Seth ran down the passage and opened this door upon a curious scene.

  The room was a sitting-room — Barbara’s sanctum, in fact; and at the far side of it, under the window, Barbara was sitting at a little round work-table, with her work-basket not twenty inches from her dilated eyes, and a brown snake rearing itself out of the work-basket.

  Barbara never took her eyes from the snake when the door opened. The sergeant saw that she was paralysed with fright. Therefore the first thing he did was to say three words in a confident whisper:

  “He’s not deadly!” —

  But Barbara did not seem to hear.

  Whitty was a fine shot with a revolver. But the snake was in a dead straight line between his hand and Barbara’s bosom, picked out sharply against her loose white blouse, like a shadow on a screen. Whitty shifted his revolver to the left hand, crept
forward with his right extended, and forefinger and thumb forming the capital letter C — pinched the snake just below the head in this forceps, and whisked it like lightning through the window.

  Barbara glanced up in his face one instant; then she lay back in her chair and burst out sobbing.

  The sergeant went away and conscientiously despatched the snake. When he had killed it to his entire satisfaction, having smashed the vertebrae in seven different places, he stood for a moment in indecision. A faint voice came to his rescue, calling him to the window.

  “Sergeant Whitty!”

  Barbara leant in silhouette across the sill. Seth went up to the window.

  “You are very, very brave — and foolish,” she murmured. “I don’t know what to say to you. Thanks will not do.”

  “There’s no need to say anything,” said Whitty awkwardly. “There was no danger.”

  Barbara took him up sharply.

  “You know that there was. You know as well as I do those brown snakes are deadly. I do detest humbug! Yet — I must thank you.”

  Her tone turned to honey. She held out her hand to him; he gave her his; she turned, and drew it through the window to the light, and critically examined it, her little head on one side. No, there was no bite there.

  “If you had been bitten,” said Barbara, dropping his hand, “do you know that it would have made me the most miserable woman in the Colony?”

  Seth was staggered.

  “Because, you see, I should have felt I had killed you! Imagine it. Who could have been happy after that? But, do you know,” — here the coquetry in her voice became sad to hear, “I rather wish it had been not quite a deadly snake, and that it had bitten you, not quite mortally. Can you guess why?”

  Seth hung his head.

  “You might have been less rude, and less cruel, the last time we talked together, Sergeant Seth!”

  He could contain himself no longer.

  “Oh, Barbara,” he cried, with an effort, raising his face to her, “please, please, forgive me! Let us be friends. You don’t know how I have hated myself ever since for that evening’s words. I was beside myself that night. If you will only forgive me — if you will only make friends—”

  Barbara raised her hands to the sash.

  “Of course I forgive you. There, it is all forgotten!”

  She shut down the window. A minute later all was in darkness, and Seth went back to the barracks in a tumult of honest emotions — not suspecting for a moment that he had stultified himself and utterly undone the wholesome effect of his admirable attitude on Christmas Day.

  As for Barbara, her vanity had been liberally gratified. Moreover, a sore point, dating from Christmas, was now healed. And lastly, she had played the rôle she revelled in — the rôle that was out of the question with the man she really loved. So altogether she may have gone to bed an extremely happy woman. But I try to think that she came to feel slightly ashamed of herself before falling asleep.

  IV.

  SERGEANT SETH and the schoolmistress were now good neighbours; and as she did not again treat him so reprehensibly as at their reconciliation (which makes one really think she was ashamed of herself, that time), the sergeant had at least a less bad time than before. Indeed, a nice little larceny in the township, and a pretty case of horse-stealing on a neighbouring run, made it, in part, quite a good time. So some weeks passed. Then fell a thunderbolt Lovatt came to the barracks one morning in a state of mild excitement, and got up in his best available clothes. His fingers fidgeted with a letter.

  “A solicitor fellow has smelt me out, Heaven knows how,” he said. “He is in possession of important documents from home, so he says, and he will only deliver them personally into my hands. So I am off to Melbourne by the coach, to see what they are; it’s just as well, you know; and Barbara advises it. I’ve just said good-bye to her, and she’s gone into school. You see, Seth, it may mean money — and money, I suppose,” Lovatt added, after a moment’s pause, “means marriage.”

  He said this thoughtfully, and his manner, at the moment, was not sprightly. It was his manner, in fact, that made Whitty look up quickly and scrutinise the young fellow’s face. Jack Lovatt was soothing his moustache. Whitty might have remembered that the one defect in Jack Lovatt’s good looks, before his moustache grew, was his weak, irresolute mouth.

  Whitty went down to the Royal and saw the coach start with Jack Lovatt in the best place (trust him for that) by the driver; and he did not think very much more about Jack Lovatt until three days later; and then, in the evening, the sergeant received a letter which fairly electrified him.

  The letter was from Jack Lovatt in Melbourne, and it read thus:

  “SCOTT’S HOTEL, COLLINS STREET, W.

  “7 th March, —

  “DEAR SETH — I want you to give the enclosed to Barbara, but first to break to her some news which will, I fear, just at first, distress her greatly. Before this reaches you I shall have sailed for London! Think what you will of me; but do take the trouble to read the circumstances first.

  “You are already aware that I have not been in communication with my people for nearly five years — never, in fact, since I left home. I learnt last night that my brother — I had only one — who was heir to everything, has been dead these two years, and that my father was at death’s door two months ago. I cabled at once to learn his condition. The reply is just to hand. He is still lingering on; he desires to see me. What can I do but sail at once? The steamer leaves to-morrow; there is no time to go back to Timber Town and bid Barbara good-bye, and I dare not put off starting for a week. As it is, I do not expect to find my poor father alive; and in that case I should return at once — well, long before the end of the year — to marry Barbara. I have a mother and a sister, you know: there will be matters to arrange for them; but they shall not keep me from Barbara one day longer than I can help. My first thought shall be of her. My first thought now is of her; and I am downright cut up on her account. She will feel it sorely; but the letter I enclose is far more explicit than this one; and she is so sensible, she will understand. And she will trust me, and wait patiently, and confidently, till I come back and carry her off. And then, instead of going to two hundred acres and a hut, she will go one day to an estate in Norfolk and another in Scotland! I don’t say I relish the idea of all this; I have got so used to the bush, and so content with it; but, as we should have been happy with less than our needs, so we ought to be happy with more than our wishes. At present, however, I can’t realise it at all; I only realise that I sail to-morrow in the Orient liner.

  “Only one word more. Seth, I know something of your old relations with Barbara. She told me. She was terribly at fault, and she knows it. But you will forget all about this now, won’t you? No, I believe you have forgotten about it. Fellows always do get over these things: you know I did. But even if you hadn’t got over it, I believe you would do what I’m now going to ask of you without my ever asking at all. Yet I do ask — I implore it. I implore you, Seth, to look after her, to watch over her, to be good to her. She is sensible; she will listen to reason. So yours will only be a difficult task in the beginning. The breaking of the news will of course be worse than difficult. But you will do it as nicely as anybody could; and so we two shall be grateful to you for the term of our natural lives; and one day the three of us (I hope) will smile over the memory of this rather ugly dawn of more booming days than ever we dreamt of. Good-bye. To you I commend her. — Yours ever, “J. A. LOVATT.”

  Now there was not a little sincerity in this letter, in spite of its conspicuous egotism and its frequent jauntiness of expression. Moreover, there was a touch or two of genuine feeling, and one questions whether Lovatt wrote the whole letter with dry eyes. Yet, when the letter was written, and the emotion of the moment over, it is very possible that his confidence in himself was as shaky as his confidence in Barbara was profound. He may have trusted to Barbara’s great love, and hoped for the best with regard to himself. But th
e chances are that he had not the pluck conscientiously to investigate his own feelings.

  When Sergeant Whitty had read to the end of the letter, he delivered himself first of a round oath, and then of the following peculiar sentiment:

  “If my father had turned me adrift as his turned him — well, I’d have let him die first before I’d have left my girl without saying good-bye! No, by Heaven! before I’d have gone at all — without her!”

  He looked at the letter again.

  “Curse his good spirits!” he cried, and tore it to pieces. Then he fumed up and down the room until his eye fell upon the enclosure, a swollen envelope; and at that he ran his hands through his hair and ground his teeth.

  Barbara was seated sewing, alone, and in the same little room where the snake had frozen her blood. She was making — is it difficult to guess? — something or other for her house. But she was not in her usual spirits: Jack was away in Melbourne.

  There came an unexpected knock at the outer door. Barbara dropped her work, jumped up, and stood for a moment in alarmed surmise. Then a great thought struck her; it was Jack!

  She flew down the passage; it was not Jack; of all people, it was the sergeant.

  “Barbara, I want a word with you.”

  His tone was as extraordinary as the words. She drew back coldly.

  “It is a queer time to choose, Sergeant Whitty. Say your word by all means, however.” Her attitude plainly added, “Say it here.”

  The perspiration broke out over the sergeant’s face.

  “It’s news!” he gasped desperately.

  “News?” —

  “Yes, news.”

  She stood one instant, straining her eyes at him through the dark, then seized his arm, dragged him to the sitting-room, caught up the lamp, and held it to his face.

  “It is bad news!” she cried in a hard, hollow tone. “He is dead! Oh, is he dead?”