The whole school, to a child, were huddled together at the gate, with white expectant faces. Their uniform expression changed when they saw the sergeant. There was a look in his eyes that frightened them; besides, he was the police-sergeant. Not one of them dared to run. Seth shook the paper in their faces, and inquired — in the voice of an ogre — how it had come into Miss Lyon’s hands. I regret to say that the Incorrigible was pushed forward with the utmost promptitude; and that the others, who all spoke at once, made unbecoming haste to explain how “teacher” had caught him reading the paper, confiscated it, put it on her own desk, and immediately — without a word — fallen flat upon the floor.
Seth looked more the ogre than ever, but held the culprit with his eye only.
“You stole the paper from my verandah — eh?”
“It b-b-blew out, sir!”
“Why didn’t you blow it in again?”
No answer; tears; on the part of the others, preparations for fun — but not, most likely, for what took place. For the sergeant marched off that brat to the barracks, and clapped him into the prisoners’ cell; and his schoolfellows heard the bolts drawn with horrible clangs, and slunk away in terror. It was a sufficiently high-handed proceeding, no doubt; though the incarceration lasted only an hour; and though it was from this hour that the young savage’s parents (who thanked Seth with tears in their eyes) afterwards came (one hopes not prematurely) to date his reformation.
But Barbara was lying like death upon her bed.
VII.
WHILE Barbara Lyon lay senseless in the schoolroom at Timber Town, Australia, Jack Lovatt, in his bed at Castle Auchen, N.B., dreamed a disquieting dream. It must be remembered that, though the Australian time was between two and three in the afternoon, in Scotland it was about five o’clock in the early morning.
It was an emphatically bad dream. The Laird (Jack was the Laird at Auchen, and the Squire in Norfolk) came downstairs looking haggard and even haunted. This was the more annoying because the Laird’s fiancée had arrived from London the previous evening. To add to the annoyance (though here one adds effect to cause), he shot execrably all day, and caught the gillies smiling. Up on the moors that day they had a champagne luncheon (planned overnight), the ladies joining the shooters; but Jack was not Jack at all. His mother and sister, and some others of the party (mostly a family party), studied Laura’s manner towards him for an explanation; but her manner was all that they, in Jack’s place, could have desired. In point of fact, Laura was as deeply mystified as they were, and her grievance was infinitely greater.
That evening Laura’s grievance became really grave; for after dinner she took her banjo and gently fingered it on the gray shingly drive; but Jack never strolled out with his cigarette, as he had done the previous evening — as she quite thought he would do every evening; yet he must have heard. Laura stole at last to the billiard-room window; and Jack was there, playing pool with the other men. He played pool with the horrid men until long after she had gone to bed and cried herself to sleep. Then at last Jack crept up to bed himself, but never slept a wink; billiards and brandy-and-soda had done simply nothing for him.
Next morning he looked a wreck, but in Laura’s face there was calm determination. Hers was a pale, pretty, delicate face; but there was plenty of character in it, The eyes were dark and frank, the hair black and swept up clear of the forehead, the head most shapely, fitly crowning a slim, firm, graceful figure. And all that day Laura was even more erect than usual, and her head was held higher, and the glance of her eyes was braver and bolder than ever. But in the evening she took her banjo out into the night as before.
It was a warm night for October in Scotland, and there was a luminous moon. Laura wrapped a knitted nothing over her little head and around her shoulders, and felt perfectly prudent. She stole once more to the billiard-room window. The men were behaving themselves better to-night; more had gone to the drawing-room; there was no pool. Only two men were playing a common hundred, and Jack was sitting in an opposite corner by another window, looking gloomily on.
Laura tripped round to that window, and struck up a nigger melody — the silliest, prettiest little thing in the world. Jack, taken by surprise, looked out.
“It’s a heavenly night,” Laura whispered. “Come out quickly, you queer, melancholy Jack!”
He hesitated a moment, and then did go out — by the window.
“Play me something,” he said, and stuck his hands deep into his trousers pockets. She complied sweetly.
The moon shone, the banjo tinkled, the soft wind sighed through the firs. The pair strolled slowly side by side, Laura playing softly. Suddenly and unexpectedly, when they were far down the drive, she whipped the banjo under her arm, half turned, and stood still.
“Jack!”
“Well?”
“Tell me what it is.”
“What what is?”
“Oh, you must know! Your trouble, your wretched looks, your silence — the way you have avoided me these two days. Jack, darling, tell me what it is: tell me what it all means!”
She pressed forward and clung to his arm. His face was raised to the moon, the curly hair thrown back from the forehead; face and forehead were wrung and wrinkled with pain.
“I cannot!” he groaned— “I cannot!”
She drew back. “Jack, if it has to do with me — with your love for me—”
“It has not! No — do not touch me again. I am not fit for you to touch. Oh, Laura! I am a liar and a villain!”
“I shall never, never believe it!”
“Then I must tell you everything. Can you bear it?”
“I can bear anything but your silence, Jack.”
They walked side by side in the moonlight, very, very slowly; but their shadows on the shingly drive went wider and wider apart. Often he paused; but she put in no word, no syllable, until the whole shameful tale was told.
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“You have kept back nothing?”
“I swear I have told you the worst.”
“Ah!” — a deep sad sigh— “well, I was hasty to say I never could believe you a coward or a villain; for I am afraid you have been both.”
Her voice was very sad, but equally firm.
“I know it! I own it!” said Lovatt in a low, husky tone. “No one knows except myself the mean despicable cur I have been. Yet it seems hard to hear it from your lips — you that have bewitched me so! I swear, until two nights ago, I was bewitched! I seemed to have forgotten her, and my life out there, completely, utterly. But then I dreamt of her — dreamt I saw her dead! And now she haunts me, now that it is too late. For what can one do after so long?”
“Leave me a little; then I will try to tell you. I cannot think — in your presence.”
He moved on, bowed and broken, and leaned over the plain wooden gate at the entrance to the drive. It might have been a moment later or an hour — he never knew — when she touched him on the shoulder.
“Will you do what I tell you?”
He bowed submissively. It touched her to see him so sadly humbled, and all at once, before her stronger will. Her own power rose up before her, and frightened her. With a calm, strong, spiritual effort she nerved herself to use this will of hers for once as her conscience ordered and her heart forbade.
“Will you go back to her?” The words came in a tremulous whisper; but the tremor was only the vibration of taut, resolute nerves.
When he had bowed his promise (for though his lips moved, no words left them), and when thus it was all over, a greater calmness, and with it a chill dread feeling, came over this strong-minded girl.
“I tell you to go back to her,” she said, speaking quite steadily now. “Go back to her at once. Leave England within a fortnight, at latest, from now. This will be easy; we are all in our last week here; and you and I must act a part until my father telegraphs for me, which must be to-morrow. Then you go back to her, and all is over for ever between y
ou and me. You may find her dead; but between us two all, all is over. All is over!”
Her dress whispered as she turned and went. The tall trees on either side the drive whispered too; and their dewy leaves, quivering in the moonlight, shimmered like phosphorus on a dark and tranquil sea. Over the gate the black hills cut into the moonlit sky as though heaven and hell touched one another; above, the stars were shining like the eyes of angels; below, the fir-trees sighed and sobbed like the spirits of the lost.
VIII.
ONE night some two months later, a night of intense darkness and of intolerable heat, a young man tramped into Timber Town from the south. He did not carry the “swag” of the common traveller, nor were his clothes bushman’s clothes. He wore a suit of some thin light material, and a pith helmet; yet, for all this, he seemed to know every inch of the way.
His tactics indicated a desire to glide swiftly through the township without either stopping or being stopped, if possible without being seen. He took the very ceptre of the broad straggling street, and showed in this a nice judgment, for the night was so thick that from neither side of the street could one see half-way across it. But the flaring hotel verandahs on either side were plain enough from the middle of the road, and not only could the traveller hear the sounds of revelry issuing from them — for these had been audible for the last half-mile — but he distinguished some of the voices, and caught scraps of the high-toned conversations. In what was generally known (though not from its sign-board) as the “opposition shanty,” they were talking politics — Colonial politics, and in that instance tipsy ones. In the verandah of the Royal, however, a more practical discussion was on foot — on the ringing of the Timber Town church-bells. One roysterer wanted to ring them at twelve o’clock — it was then 11.40 — while another objected on traditional grounds. The latter said the good old English custom was to ring in the New Year, but not Christmas; the former ridiculed the notion that old English customs should obtain, unchallenged, in the bush; and this one, who was the more fluent swearer of the two, and had all the popular arguments on his side, seemed to have a majority of roysterers with him.
“The ringers win — it’s odds on them,” said the new arrival; and he hurried noiselessly on.
He was soon in the region of the little iron church for whose bell-ropes those roysterers’ fingers were itching. The church was invisible in the opaque darkness; but the traveller knew well enough where it was. The State school and the police barracks, on the other side of the road, were also invisible, at least their outlines were; but faint lights revealed their whereabouts.
The mysterious visitor now left the middle of the road, skirted the police-barrack fence, and came — with steps that all at once became halting and unsteady — to the school gate; and there he paused, and started backward with his hand upon the latch.
Barbara was seated in the verandah, leaning forward, her head bowed and her hands clasped. Seth Whitty bent over her.
“You know how I have waited,” he was pleading — and dignity and humility jostled each other in his deep manly tones; “how long I have loved you, how hopelessly once, how deeply all through. You must know that what I profess is at least true.”
“I know that. Oh, I know that so well!”
“Yet you still refuse me.”
“No, no. I say, give me time. Do not count upon me; never again count upon a woman.”
“And I have said I will give you until we both are gray!”
“It shall not be so long as that, if it is to be at all,” said Barbara gently; “only do not count.”
They were both silent. Seth disturbed the eloquent silence most rudely by flying incontinently to the gate, where he stood motionless in a listening attitude.
“What was it?” Barbara called to him.
“I heard something.”
“Can you see anything?”
“Nothing. The night is like pitch. But I feel certain—”
At that moment the bells rang forth, and unholy shouts came with the clangour from the iron church over the way. Seth came back to the verandah.
“It was those men that you heard,” said Barbara, “I don’t think it was; it seemed, like footsteps quite near, and I thought some one touched the latch. But it doesn’t matter now; for it’s Christmas morning — Christmas again, Barbara! And I wish you a very happy Christmas, and — and I will wait as long as you like!”
He pressed her hand and dropped it: he took her hand again, and raised it reverently to his lips.
Those merry souls tugged at the bell-ropes until they were tired, and that was not immediately. But before the wild ringing ceased the solitary mysterious pedestrian had retraced his steps rather better than a mile. None knew his coming nor his going; and the single street of Timber Town never saw him more.
SOME PERSONS UNKNOWN
CONTENTS
KENYON’S INNINGS
A LITERARY COINCIDENCE
AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
THE WIDOW OF PIPER’S POINT
AFTER THE FACT
THE VOICE OF GUNBAR
THE MAGIC CIGAR
THE GOVERNESS AT GREENBUSH
A FAREWELL PERFORMANCE
A SPIN OF THE COIN
THE STAR OF THE GRASMERE
KENYON’S INNINGS
I
Kenyon had been more unmanageable than usual. Unsettled and excitable from the moment he awoke and remembered who was coming in the evening, he had remained in an unsafe state all day. That evening found him with unbroken bones was a miracle to Ethel his sister, and to his great friend John, the under-gardener. Poor Ethel was in charge; and sole charge of Kenyon, who was eleven, was no light matter for a girl with her hair still down. Her brother was a handful at most times; to-day he would have filled some pairs of stronger hands than Ethel’s. They had begun the morning together, with snob-cricket, as the small boy called it; but Kenyon had been rather rude over it, and Ethel had retired. She soon regretted this step; it had made him reckless; he had spent the most dangerous day. Kenyon delighted in danger. He had a mania for walking round the entire premises on the garden wall, which was high enough to kill him if he fell, and for clambering over the greenhouses, which offered a still more fascinating risk. Not only had he done both this morning, he had gone so far as to straddle a gable of the house itself, shrieking good-tempered insults at Ethel, who appealed to him with tears and entreaties from the lawn below. Ethel had been quite disabled from sitting at meat with him; and in the afternoon he had bothered the gardeners, in the potting-shed, to such an extent that his friend John had subsequently refused to bowl to him. In John’s words Master Kenyon had been a public nuisance all day — though a lovable one — at his very worst he was that. He had lovable looks, for one thing. It was not the only thing. The boy had run wild since his young mother’s death. There were reasons why he should not go to school at present. There were reasons why he should spend the long summer days in the sunshine, and open only the books he cared about, despite the oddity of his taste in books. He had dark, laughing eyes, and a face of astonishing brightness and health: astonishing because (as he said) his legs and arms were as thin as pipe-stems, and certainly looked as brittle. Kenyon was indeed a delicate boy. He was small and delicate and weak in everything but spirit. “He has the spirit,” said John, his friend, “of the deuce and all!”
Ethel forgave easily, perhaps too easily, but then she was Kenyon’s devoted slave, who cried about him half the night, and lived for him, and longed to die for him. Kenyon had toned himself down by tea-time, and when he sought her then as though nothing had happened, she was only too thankful to catch his spirit. Had she reminded him of his behaviour on the roof and elsewhere, he would have been very sorry and affectionate; but it was not her way to make him sorry, it was her way to show an interest in all he had to say, and at tea-time Kenyon was still full of the thing that had excited and unsettled him in the morning. Only now he was beginning to feel in awe, and the schoolroom tea had never been a
seemlier ceremony.
These children seldom sat at table with their father, and very, very seldom listened for the wheels of his brougham as they were listening to-night. In the boy’s mind the sound was associated with guilty apprehensions and a cessation of all festivities. But to-night Mr. Harwood was to bring back with him one of Kenyon’s own heroes, one of the heroes of his favourite book, which was not a storybook. It has been said that Kenyon’s literary taste was peculiar; his favourite book was Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Guide; the name of the great young man who was coming this evening had figured prominently in recent volumes of Lillywhite, and Kenyon knew every score he had ever made.
“Do you think he’ll talk to us?” was one of the thousand questions which Ethel had to answer. “I’d give my nut to talk to him! Fancy having C. J. Forrester to stay here! I’ve a sort of idea the governor asked him partly to please me, though he says he’s a sort of relation. I only wish we’d known it before. Anyhow, it’s the jolliest thing the governor ever did in his life, and a wonder he did it, seeing he only laughs at cricket. I wish he’d been a cricketer himself, then he’d kick up less row about the glass; thank goodness I haven’t broken any to-day! I say, I wish C. J. Forrester’d made more runs yesterday; he’s certain to have the hump.”
Kenyon had not picked up all his pretty expressions in the potting-shed; he was intimate with a boy who went to a public school.
“How many did he make?” Ethel asked.
“Duck and seven. He must be sick!”
“I shouldn’t be surprised if he thinks far less about it than you do, Ken. It’s only a game; I don’t suppose he’ll mind so very much.”
“Oh, no, not at all; it’s only about the swaggerest county match of the season,” scathed Kenyon, “and they only went and let Notts lick! Besides, the Sportsman says he was out to a miserable stroke second innings. Where did I see the Sportsman? Oh, John and I are getting it from the town every day; we’re going halves; it comes to John, though, so you needn’t say anything. What are you grinning at, Ethel? Ah, you’re not up in real cricket. You only understand snob.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 412
