Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  The township boasted its score of dwellings, but few of them showed a light that evening; not less than ninety of the round hundred of inhabitants clapped their hands and mopped their foreheads in Gulland’s new store. It might have been run up for its present purpose. There was an entrance at one end for the performers, and that on the platform level, since the ground sloped a little; at the other end was the only other entrance, by which the audience were admitted. A makeshift lobby had been arranged behind the platform, and thither Mrs. Clarkson retired to await her earlier encores; when the compliment became a recognized matter of course, she abandoned the mere form of a momentary retirement, and stood patiently smiling in the satin ball-dress brought from Melbourne for the nonce. And for the brief intervals between her efforts she descended to a throne specially reserved on the great musician’s right.

  The other performers did not dim her brilliance by reason of their own. There was her own dear husband, whose serious recitation was the one entertaining number. There was a Rabbit Inspector who rapped out “The Scout” in a defiant barytone, and a publican whose somewhat uneven tenor was shaken to its depths by the simple pathos of “When Sparrows Build.” Mrs. Clarkson could afford to encourage such tyros with marked applause. The only danger was that Sir Julian might think she really admired their untutored attempts.

  “One must do it,” she therefore took occasion to explain as she clapped. “They are so nervous. The hard thing is to put oneself in their place; it’s nothing to me to sing a song, Sir Julian.”

  “So I can see, madam,” said he.

  At the extreme end of the same row Miss Bouverie passed her unemployed moments between Mr. Radford and the wall, and was not easy until she had signalled to little Mr. Hack to occupy the seat behind her. With the two together she felt comparatively comfortable. Mr. Radford’s running criticism on the performers, always pungent, was often amusing, while Mr. Hack lost no opportunity of advancing his own ideals in the matter of musical entertainment.

  “A song and dance,” said he, again and again, with a more and more sepulchral deviltry— “a song and dance is what you want. You should have heard the Sisters Belton in their palmy days at the Pav! You don’t get the best of everything out here, you know, Ted!”

  “No; let’s hope they’ve got some better men than you,” returned Radford, inspired by the quorum of three to make mince-meat of his friend.

  It was the interval between parts one and two. The platform was unoccupied. A cool draught blew through the iron building from open door to open door; there was no occasion to go outside. They had done so, however, at the lower end; there was a sudden stampede of returning feet. A something in the scuffling steps, a certain outcry that accompanied them, caused Miss Bouverie and her companions to turn their heads; they turned again at as sudden a jingle on the platform, and the girl caught her breath. There stood her missing hero, smiling on the people, dapper, swarthy, booted, spurred, and for one moment the man she had reason to remember, exactly as she remembered him. The next his folded arms sprang out from the shoulders, and a brace of long-barrelled revolvers covered the assembly.

  “Up with your hands, every man of you!” he cried. “No, not the ladies, but every man and boy who doesn’t want a bullet in his brain!”

  The command was echoed in uncouth accents at the lower door, where, in fact, a bearded savage had driven in all and sundry at his pistol’s point. And in a few seconds the meeting was one which had carried by overwhelming show of hands a proposition from which the ladies alone saw occasion to dissent.

  “You may have heard of me before,” said the man on the platform, sweeping the forest of hands with his eye-glass. “My name’s Stingaree.”

  It was the word which Hilda Bouverie had heard on the veranda and taken for some strange expletive.

  “Who is he?” she asked, in a whisper that bespoke excitement, agitation, but not alarm.

  “The fancy bushranger — the dandy outlaw!” drawled Radford, in cool reply. “I’ve been expecting him. He was seen on our run the day Mrs. Clarkson went down to Melbourne.”

  That memorable day for Hilda Bouverie! And it was this manner of man who had been her hero ever since: a bushranger, an outlaw, a common robber under arms!

  “And you never told me!” she cried, in an indignant whisper.

  “We never told Mrs. Clarkson either. You must blame the boss.”

  Hilda snatched her eyes from Stingaree, and was sorry for Mrs. Clarkson for the first time in their acquaintance. The new ball-dress of bridal satin was no whiter than its wearer’s face, which had aged several years in as many seconds. The squatter leant toward her with uplifted hands, loyally concerned for no one and for nothing else. Between the couple Sir Julian might have been conducting without his bâton, but with both arms. Meanwhile, the flashing eye-glass had fixed itself on Miss Bouverie’s companion, without resting for an instant on Miss Bouverie.

  “Silence over there!” cried Stingaree, sternly. “I’m here on a perfectly harmless errand. If you know anything about me at all, you may know that I have a weakness for music of any kind, so long as it’s good of its kind.”

  The eye-glass dropped for a moment upon Mrs. Clarkson in the front row, and the irrepressible Radford was enabled to continue his say.

  “He has, too, from a mouth-organ to a full orchestra, from all accounts, Miss Bouverie. My revolver’s in the coat-pocket next you!”

  “It is the music,” continued Stingaree, looking harder than before in their direction, “which has brought me here to-night. I’ve come to listen, and for no other reason in the world. Unfortunately, when one has a price upon one’s head, one has to take certain precautions before venturing among one’s fellow-men. And, though I’m not here for gain or bloodshed, if any man of you gives me trouble I shall shoot him like a dog!”

  “That’s one for me,” whispered the intrepid overseer, in lower key. “Never mind. He’s not looking at us now. I believe Mrs. Clarkson’s going to faint. You take what I told you and slip it under your shawl, and you’ll save a second by passing it up to me the instant you see her sway!”

  Hilda hesitated. A dead silence had fallen on the crowded and heated store, and in the silence Stingaree was already taking an unguarded interest in Mrs. Clarkson’s appearance, which as certainly betokened imminent collapse. “Now!” whispered Radford, and Hilda hesitated no more. She was wearing a black lace shawl between her appearances at the piano; she had the revolver under it in a twinkling, and pressed it to her bosom with both hands, one outside the shawl and one underneath, as who should hug a beating heart.

  “Mrs. Clarkson,” said Stingaree, “you have been singing too much, and the quality of your song has not been equal to the quantity.”

  It sounded a brutal speech enough; and to do justice to a portion of the audience not hitherto remarkable for its spirit, the ungallant criticism was audibly resented in the back rows. The maudlin stockman had indeed to be restrained by his neighbors from precipitating himself upon the barrels of Stingaree. But the effect upon Mrs. Clarkson herself was still more remarkable, and revealed a subtle kindness in the desperado’s cruelty. Her pale face flushed; her lack-lustre eyes blazed forth their indignation; her very clay was on fire for all the room to see.

  “I don’t sing for criminals and cut-throats!” the indignant lady cried out. She glanced at Sir Julian as one for whom she did sing. And Sir Julian’s eyes twinkled under the bushranger’s guns.

  “To be sure you don’t,” said Stingaree, with as much sweetness as his character would permit. “You sing for charity, and spend three times as much as you are ever likely to make in arraying yourself for the occasion. Well, we must put up with some song-bird without fine feathers, for I mean to hear the programme out.” His eyes ranged the front rows till they fell on Hilda Bouverie in her corner. “You young lady over there! You’ve been talking since I called for silence. You deserve to pay a penalty; be good enough to step this way.”

  Hilda’s excitement
may be supposed; it made her scandalously radiant in that company of humiliated men and women, but it did not rob her of her resource. Removing her shawl with apparent haste, but with calculated deliberation, she laid it in a bunch upon the seat which she had occupied, and stepped forward with a courage that won a cheer from the back rows. Stingaree stooped to hand her up to the platform; and his warm grip told a tale. This was what he had come for, to make her sing, to make her sing before Sir Julian Crum, to give her a start unique in the history of the platform and the stage. Criminal, was he? Then the dearest, kindest, most enchanting, most romantic criminal the world had ever seen! But she must be worthy of his chivalry and her chance; and, from the first, her artistic egoism insisted that she was.

  Stingaree had picked up a programme, and dexterously mounted it between hammer and cartridge of the revolver which he had momentarily relinquished, much as a cornet-player mounts his music under his nose. With both weapons once more levelled, he consulted the programme now.

  “The next item, ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “is another pianoforte solo by this young lady. We’ll let you off that, Miss Bouverie, since you’ve got to sing. The next song on the programme is called ‘The Unrealized Ideal,’ and the music is by our distinguished visitor and patron, Sir Julian Crum. In happier circumstances it would have been sung to you by Mrs. Montgomery Clarkson; as it is, I call upon Miss Bouverie to realize her ideal and ours, and on Sir Julian Crum to accompany her, if he will.”

  At Mrs. Clarkson’s stony side the great man dropped both arms at the superb impudence of the invitation.

  “Quite right, Sir Julian; let the blood run into them,” said Stingaree. “It is a pure oversight that you were not exempted in the beginning. Comply with my entreaty and I guarantee that you shall suffer no further inconvenience.”

  Sir Julian wavered. In London he was a club-man and a diner-out; and what a tale for the Athenæum — what a short cut to every ear at a Kensington dinner-table! In the end it would get into the papers. That was the worst of it. But in the midst of Sir Julian’s hesitation his pondering eyes met those of Miss Bouverie — on fire to sing him his own song — alight with the ability to do it justice. And Sir Julian was lost.

  How she sang it may be guessed. Sir Julian bowed and swayed upon his stool. Stingaree stood by with a smile of personal pride and responsibility, but with both revolvers still levelled, and one of them cocked. It was a better song than he had supposed. It gained enormously from the composer’s accompaniment. The last verse was softer than another would have made it, and yet the singer obeyed inaudible instructions as though she had never sung it otherwise. It was more in a tuneful whisper than in hushed notes that the last words left her lips: —

  “Lightly I sped when hope was high, And youth beguiled the chase; I follow — follow still; but I Shall never see her Face.”

  The applause, when it came, was almost overwhelming. The bushranger watched and smiled, but cocked his second pistol, and let the programme flutter to the floor. As for Sir Julian Crum, the self-contained, the cynical, he was seen for an instant, wheeled about on the music-stool, grasping the singer by both hands. But there was no hearing what he said; the girl herself heard nothing until he bellowed in her ear:

  “They’ll have their encore. What can you give them? It must be something they know. ‘Home, Sweet Home’? ‘The Last Rose’? ‘Within a Mile’? The first, eh? Very well; it’s a leaf out of Patti’s book; but so are they all.”

  And he struck the opening bars in the key of his own song, but for some moments Hilda Bouverie stood bereft of her great voice. A leaf out of Patti’s book, in that up-country township, before a roomful held in terror — and yet unmindful — of the loaded pistols of two bloodthirsty bushrangers! The singer prayed for power to live up to those golden words. A leaf out of Patti’s book!

  It was over. The last poignant note trembled into nothingness. The silence, absolutely dead for some seconds, was then only broken by a spirituous sob from the incorrigible stockman. There was never any applause at all. Ere it came, even as it was coming, the overseer Radford leapt to his feet with a raucous shout.

  The bushranger had vanished from the platform. The other bushranger had disappeared through the other door. The precious pair of them had melted from the room unseen, unheard, what time every eye doted on handsome Hilda Bouverie, and every ear on the simple words and moving cadences of “Home, Sweet Home.”

  Ted Radford was the first to see it; for by the end of the brief song he had his revolver uncovered and cocked at last, and no quarry left for him to shoot. With a bound he was on the platform; another carried him into the canvas anteroom, a third and a fourth out into the moonlight. It was as bright as noon in a conservatory of smoked glass. And in the tinted brightness one man was already galloping away; but it was Stingaree who danced with one foot only in the stirrup of a milk-white mare.

  Radford rushed up to him and fired point-blank again and again. A series of metallic clicks was all the harm he did, for Stingaree was in the saddle before the hurled revolver struck the mare on the ribs, and sent the pair flying through the moonlight with a shout of laughter, a cloud of sand, and a dull volley of thunderous hoofs. The overseer picked up his revolver and returned crestfallen to examine it in the lights of the emptying room.

  “I could have sworn I loaded it,” said he. “If I had, he’d have been a dead man six times over.”

  Miss Bouverie had been talking to Sir Julian Crum. On Radford’s entry she had grown distraite, but at Radford’s speech she turned back to Sir Julian with shining eyes.

  “My wife wants a companion for the voyage,” he was saying. “So that will cost you nothing, but if anything the other way, and once in London, I’ll be answerable. I’ve adjudicated these things for years to voices not in the same class as yours. But the worst of it is you won’t stay with us.”

  “I will.”

  “No; they’ll want you at Covent Garden before we know where we are. And when you are ready to go to them, go you must.”

  “I shall do what you tell me.”

  “Then speak to Mrs. Clarkson at once.”

  Hilda Bouverie glanced over her shoulder, but her employers had left the building. Her smile was less roguish than demure.

  “There is no need, Sir Julian. Mrs. Clarkson has already spoken to me, though only in a whisper. But I am to take myself off by the next coach.”

  The Black Hole of Glenranald

  It was coming up the Murrumbidgee that Fergus Carrick first heard the name of Stingaree. With the cautious enterprise of his race, the young gentleman had booked steerage on a river steamer whose solitary passenger he proved to be; accordingly he was not only permitted to sleep on the saloon settee at nights, but graciously bidden to the captain’s board by day. It was there that Fergus Carrick encouraged tales of the bushrangers as the one cleanly topic familiar in the mouth of the elderly engineer who completed the party. And it seemed that the knighthood of the up-country road had been an extinct order from the extirpation of the Kellys to the appearance of this same Stingaree, who was reported a man of birth and mystery, with an ostentatious passion for music and as romantic a method as that of any highwayman of the Old World from which he hailed. But the callow Fergus had been spared the romantic temperament, and was less impressed than entertained with what he heard.

  On his arrival at Glenranald, however, he found that substantial township shaking with laughter over the outlaw’s latest and least discreditable exploit, at the back-block hamlet of Yallarook; and then it was that young Carrick first conceived an ambition to open his Colonial career with the capture of Stingaree; for he was a serious immigrant, who had come out in his teens, to stay out, if necessary, for the term of his natural life.

  The idea had birth under one of the many pine trees which shaded the skeleton streets of budding Glenranald. On this tree was nailed a placard offering high reward for the bushranger’s person alive or dead. Fergus was making an immediate note in his pocketb
ook when a hand fell on his shoulder.

  “Would ye like the half o’ yon?” inquired a voice in his own tongue; and there at his elbow stood an elderly gentleman, whose patriarchal beard hid half the buttons of his alpaca coat, while a black skull-cap sat somewhat jauntily on his head.

  “What do you mean?” said Fergus, bluntly, for the old gentleman stood chuckling gently in his venerable beard.

  “To lay a hold of him,” replied the other, “with the help o’ some younger and abler-bodied man; and you’re the very one I want.”

  The raw youth stared ingenuously.

  “But what can you know about me?”

  “I saw ye land at the wharf,” said the old gentleman, nodding his approval of the question, “and says I, ‘That’s my man,’ as soon as ever I clapped eyes on ye. So I had a crack wi’ the captain o’ yon steamer; he told me you hadna a billet, but were just on the lookout for the best ye could get, an’ that’s all he’d been able to get out o’ ye in a five days’ voyage. That was enough for me. I want a man who can keep his tongue behind his teeth, and I wanted you before I knew you were a brither Scot!”

  “Are you a squatter, sir?” the young man asked, a little overwhelmed.

  “No, sir, I’m branch manager o’ the Bank o’ New South Wales, the only bank within a hunder miles o’ where we stand; and I can offer ye a better billet than any squatter in the Colony.”

  “Indeed? I’m sure you’re very kind, sir, but I’m wanting to get on a station,” protested Fergus with all his tact. “And as a matter of fact, I have introductions to one or two stations further back, though I saw no reason to tell our friend the skipper so.”