“God forbid!” said Whitty loudly.
“Then ill?”
“He is not ill.”
There flashed across the woman a worse alternative still.
“Then he has—”
She could not get it out. She seemed about to drop the lamp. Seth took it hastily from her, and led her to a chair. She sank down, trembling violently. He dropped on one knee before her.
“Barbara,” he said very gently, “he is neither dead, nor ill, nor untrue to you. But you must prepare for a terrible surprise, a terrible shock.”
“Do not keep me in suspense!” she murmured piteously.
“Then here is a letter that he has sent me to hand to you. It will explain all.”
He took the envelope from his pocket. She snatched it from him, and was tearing it open; all at once her fingers closed upon it, and were still.
“I will read it alone.” There was new strength in her tones. “Leave me now, please. And thank you, Seth, from my breaking heart!”
Seth went back to the barracks, and strode up and down his verandah. The moon rose, and poured into the verandah in a gleaming flood. Seth marched to and fro, a black sentinel in the pale pure light. For hours the tread of his feet and the jingle of his spurs upon the boards were the only sounds in the sleeping township. Then there came another sound — the click of a latch. Seth heard it, stopped, and turned; and Barbara was coming up the path towards him, her white frock shining mystically in the moonlight. She paused some paces from the verandah, and her face was as ghostly as her dress, and stained with tears.
“He has done right,” she said in a low clear voice. “He has done his duty. I say so. Oh, tell me, Seth, that you think so too?”
There was the slightest pause; then, with extreme emphasis, Seth said after her:
“I think so too.”
“Thank you, Seth. More than for everything else, thank you for this!” She turned wearily away, and then sobs shook her frame. Seth followed her hastily, took her hand in his, placed it within his arm, and led her to her own door.
He came back and slammed the police-barrack, gate, midnight though it was.
“She has begun by making me a liar,” he swore savagely, “a mean, miserable, cowardly liar, if there is one in the Colony!”
V.
To follow Jack Lovatt to England.
The first week of the voyage he was wretched. Doubts grew upon him as to whether he had done the right thing after all. He became haunted by the thought that he had treated Barbara inexcusably, and that she was breaking her heart for him across the sea in lonely little Timber Town.
When there was more sea between them, Timber Town seemed still farther away. It seemed to exist in his brain only.
To cheer himself up he made friends with other passengers. He found one who knew his people at home — in fact, a neighbouring Norfolk squire out globetrotting. These two talked of the old country all day long: of London, of Oxford, of Norfolk, Scotland, and the shooting. Cold fires were rekindled in the young man. Of “pleasures and palaces” he had not seen much, or at all events the pleasures were belittled in looking back on them from the steamer, and home, in anticipation, was all the sweeter, Not only in point of distance did England come nearer and nearer every day, and Australia sink back, and back, and back. This went on in Jack Lovatt’s heart as well.
The five years out there compressed themselves into about as many months. The most recent events of those five years seemed to have happened five years ago. The brain-picture of the little township assumed more and more portable dimensions, and it was more often veiled than not. Barbara haunted him still, but less obtrusively.
Leaning over the rail at night and watching the wake reel out like a great, endless, creamy ribbon, the thoughts with which he had last beheld this sight came back to him, and with them the same faces, the same voices, the same regrets that had haunted him then. It was intoxicating to awake from these reveries and to realise that he was not fleeing from those faces now, but hastening towards them. There were, of course, sad circumstances in his return, and there had been cruel circumstances in his going away, which his return revived; but the sense of home-coming was overpowering; it out-balanced everything else.
In due course they steamed up Channel. By that time the five years in Australia were little better than a dream. And what Barbara was, Heaven knows.
Lovatt’s sister met him at the docks, with a male cousin. They were both in mourning. The news was broken almost without a word, and it made the meeting, at any rate, silent. But afterwards, in the train, they talked of other things. The sister, Ethel, had been in short frocks when Jack went out; she was now a handsome girl of twenty, and he was enchanted with her. She told him other news besides the family trouble and its phases before they got down to Norfolk — news of an entirely different order, à propos of which Jack was able to ask quite naturally:
“What of Laura Eliot — I mean Laura Brown, or Jones, or whatever it is?”
Ethel leant across the compartment. “Did you never hear of that?” she whispered.
“Of what?” Jack turned white. Was Laura dead too?
“Her engagement was broken off. Oh, it must have been directly after you sailed. They were never meant for each other, you know. No one could understand the engagement; and now I don’t think Laura will ever marry at all.”
For a minute Jack’s face was transfigured. It shone with a light that did not seem human, though it cannot have been divine. During that minute Australia was wiped clean from his mind. And it was a disastrous minute for poor Barbara over the seas in Timber Town.
VI.
THE antipodean winter of that year is still remembered for its excessive rainfall, and for the floods that resulted in certain districts. In Victoria the damage was widespread, but, mercifully, for the most part it was also “spread out thin”; and among scores of Victorian townships, which, without attracting popular sympathy by becoming the scene of any tragical disaster, still suffered sufficiently in an undistinguished way, Timber Town was one; its single street was for many days a running river, and for several weeks a festering bog. Business (what there was of it in Timber Town) was at a standstill, except at the bars. That sort of business received an impetus, until the casks ran dry; and then, the state of the roads entirely preventing the approach of wheels, the excellent township endured a short, bitter period of enforced sobriety. As a local wag put it (in chalk, on the verandah of the Royal Hotel), there was “WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A DROP OF DRINK!”
The feminine disadvantages were almost as serious. The women saw nothing of one another, save at a distance; and gossip, if shouted across gulfs of rushing water, quite ceases to be gossip. They tried it, and found this out, and waited patiently for the flood to dry up, themselves setting the example. Meanwhile, indeed, the fairest game for gossip was invisible. This was the schoolmistress, who was engaged to that young Lovatt, who had gone away on the coach one day in the autumn, and had never to Timber Town knowledge been heard of since. She was a complete prisoner in the schoolhouse, and very nearly a solitary prisoner. A few parents, however, did from time to time land their offspring on the schoolhouse verandah either from rafts or from the paternal shoulders. These children reported the teacher as being cross and irritable and feebly indulgent by turns; but, on being closely questioned, they also compared her wrists to pipe-stems and her face to a sheet Their mothers’ curiosity mounted to fever-heat. The moment the mud would bear them they called in person upon Barbara. Idle, gossiping women are not necessarily unfeeling; what they found made some of them shed tears on the walk home.
Barbara was the shadow of her former self — herself of a few weeks ago. Thin and pale and bright-eyed, irascible, listless, limp, she was indeed a proper object for compassion; and compassion was the last thing Barbara could stand. Yet, though the callers were sent away with their sympathy still on their hands, they did not toss it to the winds for that reason. It was impossible to resent the s
choolmistress’s incivility while the schoolmistress looked so. One or two of them felt for her all the more, and sent the children to school with little presents of butter and eggs and apples. These offerings Barbara accepted ungraciously enough from the inoffensive bearers, but afterwards grew ashamed, and sent those children home with courteous, grateful little letters. All such presents, however, were invariably the servant’s perquisites.
Barbara’s servant — a mere girl herself, no older than her mistress — had come with her from Kyneton. She knew very well that her mistress was eating her heart out, and she knew why, though not from Barbara, who, as we have seen, was by no means free from pride. The whole township was more or less in possession of this fact and its obvious reason. But Annie, the maid, knew one little circumstance which no one else guessed; this she longed to disclose to some sympathetic ear, and at last she did disclose it to the motherly soul that kept house for Sergeant Whitty.
They had been discussing poor Barbara rather freely, but very far from unkindly.
“Mrs. Waters,” Annie said, “shall I tell you a secret?”
“If you like, my dear. You know I can keep a secret. But I don’t ask you to tell me nothing.” Mrs. Waters was old and guarded.
“Well, but I must! It mustn’t go no further, and I know it won’t; but I can’t keep it to myself no longer. Did you ever guess that my mistress and your sergeant was acquainted before?”
“Are you sure?” cried Mrs. Waters.
“Positive. Two years ago.”
Mrs. Waters threw up her hands. “That accounts for everything!”
“For what?”
“For his pacing the room, or the verandy, one or t’other, till all hours, night after night — for a hundred other things — for goodness knows what all! You mean he was in love with her?”
Annie nodded.
“Mark my words, then, Annie: he’s in love with her still, but too honourable to speak it! And he as fine a man as ever walked: and she going throwing her heart away on a villain that’s cleared out and left her!” What Mrs. Waters went on to say there is no need to record. She inveighed vehemently against the idiocy of women generally, and that of Barbara in particular, and worked herself into such a temper that Barbara’s servant began to regret having said anything at all. And from that day the sergeant had the old woman’s eyes upon him. She noted his moodiness, his depression, the growing shortness of his temper. The latter failing only drew from her daintier dishes than the sergeant had ever before enjoyed at his housekeeper’s hands. But the sergeant was not to be comforted in this way. It would have been some comfort to him if the State school had been swept away by the floods, and he had had the rescuing of Barbara. It would have been an inexpressible consolation to the sergeant to have got at Jack Lovatt in some lonely place and torn him to pieces: he would have gone exultant to the gallows after that. But the floods did no important damage at Timber Town; and the scoundrel Lovatt was, no doubt, safe in England, though no one knew for certain; and nothing short of the heroic or the outrageous could have afforded the smallest satisfaction to Sergeant Seth now.
The sergeant saw Barbara often enough, but seldom said much to her, and, when he did, never mentioned Lovatt’s name — that is, never after Lovatt ceased writing; and he only wrote once on the voyage — never afterwards. But one day, when the floods were over, the sergeant came across her suddenly, and she asked him without preamble:
“Do you think he is dead?”
“No, I don’t,” said Seth bluntly.
“Your reason — ?”
“I am having the English papers searched, week by week, in Melbourne.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “How good you are! Will you keep on having them searched, please? And will you tell me the moment you hear anything?”
“I will.”
“Anything, mind!”
“I promise.”
The weeks went on — without one word.
Barbara began to live it down. Her expression became sweet, and sad, and gentle — but brave. Had you seen her now you never could have believed that this frail, meek woman had delighted but lately in cruel coquetry; and, indeed, the coquette was dead. The cross schoolmistress was dead, too. The scholars took home glowing accounts of the new Barbara: she never scolded them now; on the contrary, she was making school a far less odious thing than it had ever been before; she had even taken to reading story-books aloud, after lessons, to those who liked to stay. But one day one little boy went home with a sad tale, and cried in telling it. It was a Sunday afternoon; he had been out nesting, and, in striking down to the road, had chanced to cross Lovattes clearing; and there, seated upon an old, moss-covered, felled tree, he had found Miss Lyon, weeping as though her heart would break. She had called him to her, and kissed him, and made him promise not to tell a soul. But he couldn’t help telling his mother, and his mother chanced to be the kind soul who had been the first to send the eggs and things; she sent spring flowers the very next day; and promised her boy a thrashing and a half if he told another soul what he had told her.
That was in September. A week or two later Seth made a delightful discovery: Barbara had taken once more to practising the harmonium in the little church. She had never given up playing it at service, but she had given up practising, which would have been plain enough to a more musical audience. Of old she had practised very often indeed, for love of it. Many a time, during his first weeks at Timber Town, Seth had sat in his verandah and sadly listened to the sweet strains stealing across the broad, quiet road. He heard those strains, for the first time after an interval of months, one evening as he rode home from a neighbouring township. He cantered across to the church, and sat outside in his saddle until the music ceased and Barbara came out. Then Seth dismounted, and crossed the road by Barbara’s side, leading his horse. Barbara seemed cheerful, and Seth, who was never mirth-provoking, combed out his wits to amuse her, and to hear her sweet laughter once more. He almost succeeded: Barbara did smile; but before they separated her face changed, and sad eyes asked a question that was never spoken now.
Seth shook his head. There was no news yet. Barbara drooped, and went into her house with heavy steps.
And the very next day the news came.
The people in Melbourne who were searching the English papers for Whitty sent him a London evening paper with the following small paragraph framed in red ink:
“A marriage has been arranged to take place early next year between Mr. John A. Lovatt, of Darley Hall, near Norwich, and Castle Auchen, N.B., and Laura, daughter of Major-General Ralph Eliot, R.H.A.”
Seth read it in his verandah while the bell was ringing for afternoon school, and the school-children were straggling past. The news must have had some visible effect upon him, of which he was unconscious, for the children turned round and stared at him. Of this he did become conscious, and turned hastily into the house. But the paper had slipped from his fingers the moment the marked paragraph was read; the wind caught it (it was the first hot-wind day of that spring), and, as chance had it, the paper was whisked out of the verandah and fell at the feet of the most incorrigible little boy in the school. This small savage appropriated the paper, folded it small, and carried it into school for surreptitious perusal, while the sergeant played the caged tiger up and down the long-suffering carpet of his room. —
The news had come at last, and it was no worse than Seth had anticipated; indeed, he had looked with confidence to receiving sooner or later the announcement of Lovatt’s marriage. He knew all about Laura Eliot, you see; and five years ago he had told Lovatt — from what Lovatt told him — that he shouldn’t be surprised if that engagement with the curate never came to anything. Nor did Whitty think any worse of Lovatt because of this news than he had already thought of him for his heartless behaviour; that, indeed, would have been impossible. What troubled the sergeant now had no reference to Lovatt; it had all to do with Barbara. The news had come; the news must be broken. It was the second time Set
h had been compelled to break a blow to Barbara, but then last time Barbara had been a very different woman, one infinitely better able to bear bad tidings. He was seriously considering what use, if any, the motherly Waters might be to him in the present case, and whether the risk of ill consequences was sufficient to justify his taking a third party into Barbara’s affairs, when, in a blank moment, he missed the paper.
He hastened back into the verandah; but the paper was not there. He ran out into the road; not a sign of it was to be seen. It had been blown away, then, but how far? Where to? Just then Seth would have given his earthly possessions to have prevented that paper, with its flaming red-inked paragraph, from falling into other hands.
As he stood irresolute, and in despair, there was a sound of commotion in the schoolhouse hard by; the school poured out pell-mell; Seth was surrounded by white, frightened faces.
“Sergeant, make haste!” shrill voices screamed in his ears. “Teacher’s dead!”
Seth scattered them right and left, and was in the schoolroom in a twinkling. At the same moment Annie, the maid, burst in by another door.
The benches were empty — not a child had remained; and, on the raised platform at the end of the room, Barbara lay lifeless. Seth ran across the desks, sprang upon the platform, and knelt beside her. Annie stood shrieking at the door, until the sergeant looked up and reviled her.
“You idiot! She has only fainted. Fetch Mrs. Waters.” And he lowered her head gently upon the boards, so that it should lie no higher than the rest of her, and fanned her face with both hands.
The young woman returned with the old one.
“She is coming to,” said the sergeant quietly, still kneeling and fanning. “Which is her room? Lead the way, one of you.”
He lifted her tenderly in his arms, and followed Annie. A moment later he had laid poor Barbara on her own cool little bed, and left her to the women; but he had seen her eyes half open, and breath parting her pale lips: life was coming back.
On his way through the schoolroom he picked up what he had noticed the moment he saw Barbara lying senseless — his missing paper.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 411
