Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “I am not so sure,” said he sturdily. “I loved you dearly; I could have made you happy.”

  “It is well you think so,” was the best answer she could think of for that; and she did not think of it at once. “Do you know who he is?” she added later.

  “Herbert told me. It seems you have tampered with a splendid chance.”

  “I have tampered with three. I shall jump at the next — if I get another.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  Involuntarily she drew a deep breath at the thought. Her head was lifted, and her blue eyes wandered over the yellow distance of the plains with the look of a prisoner coming back into the world.

  “Nobody could blame him,” she said at last, “and I should be rightly served.”

  Swift crouched in front of her, almost sitting on his heels to peer into her face.

  “Tiny,” he suddenly cried, “you don’t love him one bit!”

  “But I think he loves me,” she answered, hanging her head, for he held her hand.

  “Not as I do, Tiny! Never as I have done! I have loved you all the time, and never anyone but you. And you — you care for me best; I see it in your eyes; I feel it in your hand. Don’t you think that you, too, may have loved me all the time?”

  “If I have,” she murmured, “it has been without knowing it.”

  It was without knowing it that she trod upon the truth. Their voices were trembling.

  “Darling,” he whispered, “this would be home to you. It’s the same old Wallandoon. You love it, I know; and I think — you love — —”

  She snatched her hand from his, and sprang to her feet. He, too, rose astounded, gazing on every side to see who was coming. But the plain was flecked only with straggling sheep, bleating to the troughs. His gaze came back to the girl. Her straw hat sharply shadowed her face like a highwayman’s mask, her blue eyes flashing in the midst of it, and her lips below parted in passion.

  “You? I hate you! I do consider myself bound, and you would make me false — you would tempt me through my love for the bush, for this place — you coward!”

  Swift reddened, and there was roughness in his answer:

  “I can’t stand this, even from you. I have heard that all women are unfair; you are, certainly. What you say about my tempting you is nonsense. You have shown me that you love me, and that you don’t love the other man; you know you have. You have now to show whether you have the courage of your love — to give him up — to marry me.”

  This method must have had its attractions after another’s; but it hurt, because Tiny was sensitive, with all her sins.

  “You have spoken very cruelly,” she faltered, delightfully forgetting how she had spoken herself. “I could not marry anyone who spoke to me like that!”

  “Oh, forgive me!” he cried, covered with contrition in an instant. “I am a rough brute, but I promise — —” He stopped, for her head had drooped, and she seemed to be crying. He stood away from her in his shame. “Yes, I am a rough brute,” he repeated bitterly; “but, darling, you don’t know how it roughens one, bossing the men!”

  Still she hung her head, but within the widened shadow of her hat he saw her red mouth twitching at his clumsiness. Yet, when she raised her face, her smile astonished him, it was so timorous; and the wondrous shyness in her lovely eyes abashed him far more than her tears.

  “I dare say — I need that!” he heard her whisper in spurts. “I think I should like — you — to boss — me — too.”

  These things and others were tersely told in a letter written in the hot blast of a north wind at Wallandoon, and delivered in London six weeks later, damp with the rain of early April. The letter arrived by the last post, and Ruth read it on the sofa in her husband’s den, while Erskine paced up and down the room, listening to the sentences she read aloud, but saying little.

  “So you see,” said Ruth as she put the thin sheets together and replaced them in their envelope, “she accepted him before she knew of Lord Manister’s engagement. He knew of it, and had undertaken to tell her, but that was only to give himself a last chance. Had she heard of it first he would never have spoken again.”

  “I question that,” Erskine said thoughtfully. “He might not have spoken so soon; but his love would have proved stronger than his pride in the end. Yet I like him for his pride. That was what she needed, and what Manister lacked. It is very curious.”

  “I wonder if you really would like him,” said Ruth, who no longer cared for the sound of Lord Manister’s name. “I don’t remember much about him, except that we all thought a good deal of him; but somehow I don’t fancy he’s your sort.”

  “I wasn’t aware that I had a sort,” Erskine said, smiling.

  “Oh, but you have. I am not your sort. But Tiny was!”

  He laughed heartily.

  “Then we four have chosen sides most excellently! It is quite fatal to marry your own sort. Didn’t you know that, my dear?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Ruth, watching him from the sofa; “but I am very glad to hear it, and I quite agree. You and Tiny, for instance, would have jeered at everything in life until you were left jeering at one another. Don’t you think so?” she added wistfully, after a pause.

  “I think you’re an uncommonly shrewd little person,” Erskine remarked, smiling down upon her kindly, so that her face shone with pleasure.

  “Do you?” she said, as he helped her to rise. “You used to think me so dense when Tiny was here; and I dare say I was — beside Tiny.”

  “My dearest girl,” said Erskine, taking his wife in his arms, and speaking in a troubled tone, “you have never said that sort of thing before, and I hope you never will again. Tiny was Tiny — our Tiny — but surely wisdom was not her strongest point? She amused us all because she wasn’t quite like other people; but how often am I to tell you that I am thankful you are not like Tiny?”

  “Ah, if you really were!” Ruth whispered on his shoulder.

  “But I always was,” he answered, kissing her; and they smiled at one another until the door was shut and Ruth had gone, for there was now between them an exceeding tenderness.

  Ruth had left him her letter, so that he might read it for himself; but though he lit a pipe and sat down, it was some time before Erskine read anything. Had Ruth returned and asked him for his thoughts, he would have confessed that he was wondering whether Tiny’s husband would understand the girl he had managed to tame; and whether he had a fine ear for a joke. As wondering would not tell him, he at length turned to the letter; and that did not tell him either; but before he turned the first of the many leaves, it was as though the child herself was beside him in the room.

  The qualities she mentioned in her beloved were all of a serious character, and the praises she bestowed upon him, at her own expense, were a little tiresome to one who did not know the man. Erskine turned over with excusable impatience, and was rewarded on the next page by a sufficiently just summary of Lord Manister; even here, however, Tiny took occasion to be very hard on herself. She declared — possibly she would have said it in any case, but it happened to be true — that she had never loved Lord Manister. On the way she had ill-used him she harped no more; his own solution of his difficulties had, indeed, broken that string. But she spoke of her “temptation” (incidentally remarking that the hall windows haunted her still), and said she would perhaps have yielded to it outright but for her visit to Wallandoon before sailing for England; and that she would certainly have done so at the third asking had it not been for that stronger temptation to go back with Herbert to Australia. As it was, she had gone back fully determined to marry Lord Manister in the end. And if that decision had been furthered to the smallest extent by any sort of consideration for another, she did not say so; neither did she seek to defend her own behavior at any point, for this was not Tiny’s way. However, with Jack she had burned to justify herself, because love puts an end to one’s ways. She had longed to tell him everything with her own lips, and to hav
e him forgive and excuse her on the spot. This she admitted. But she denied having known what her unreasonable longing really was. Did Ruth remember the “burning of the boats” at Cintra? Well, she had spoken the truth about Jack then; she had never “known” until the night of her last arrival at the station; she had never been quite miserable until the succeeding days. Reverting to Manister, she supposed the discovery of her departure the day after their interview — in which she had studiously refrained from revealing its imminence — had proved the last straw with him; she added that such a result had been vaguely in her mind at the time, but that she had never really admitted it among her hopes. Yet it seemed she had cured him just when she gave him up for incurable — and how thankful she was! A well-felt word about Lord Manister’s future happiness and so on led her to her own; and Erskine slid his eye over that, but had it arrested by a loving little description of the old home to which she was coming back for good. It was a hot wind as she wrote, and the beginning of a word dried before she got to the end of it — so she affirmed. The roof was crackling, and the shadows in the yard were like tanks of ink. Out on the run the salt-bush still looked healthy after the rains. She had given up whim driving; the manager had put in his word. But she was taking long rides, all by herself; and the lonely grandeur of the bush appealed to her just as it had when she first came back to it nearly a year ago; and the deep sky and yellow distances and dull leaves were all her eyes required; and she thought this was the one place in the world where it would be easy to be good.

  The letter came rather suddenly to its end. There were some very kind words about himself, which Erskine read more than once. Then he sat staring into the fire, until, by some fancy’s trick, the red coals turned pale and took the shape of a girl’s sweet face with blemishes that only made it sweeter, with dark hair, and generous lips, and eyes like her own Australian sky. And the eyes lightened with fun and with mischief, with recklessness, and bitterness, and temper; and in each light they were more lovable than before; but last of all they beamed clear and tranquil as the blue sea becalmed; and in their depths there shone a soul.

  THE END

  THE BOSS OF TAROOMBA

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I THE LITTLE MUSICIAN

  CHAPTER II A FRIEND INDEED

  CHAPTER III “HARD TIMES”

  CHAPTER IV THE TREASURE IN THE STORE

  CHAPTER V MASTERLESS MEN

  CHAPTER VI £500

  CHAPTER VII THE RINGER OF THE SHED

  CHAPTER VIII “THREE SHADOWS”

  CHAPTER IX NO HOPE FOR HIM

  CHAPTER X MISSING

  CHAPTER XI LOST IN THE BUSH

  CHAPTER XII FALLEN AMONG THIEVES

  CHAPTER XIII A SMOKING CONCERT

  CHAPTER XIV THE RAID ON THE STATION

  CHAPTER XV THE NIGHT ATTACK

  CHAPTER XVI IN THE MIDST OF DEATH

  The original title page

  CHAPTER I THE LITTLE MUSICIAN

  They were terribly sentimental words, but the fellow sang them as though he meant every syllable. Altogether, the song was not the kind of thing to go down with a back-block audience, any more than the singer was the class of man.

  He was a little bit of a fellow, with long dark hair and dark glowing eyes, and he swayed on the music-stool, as he played and sang, in a manner most new to the young men of Taroomba. He had not much voice, but the sensitive lips took such pains with each word, and the long, nervous fingers fell so lightly upon the old piano, that every one of the egregious lines travelled whole and unmistakable to the farthest corner of the room. And that was an additional pity, because the piano was so placed that the performer was forced to turn his back upon his audience; and behind it the young men of Taroomba were making great game of him all the time.

  In the moderate light of two kerosene lamps, the room seemed full of cord breeches and leather belts and flannel collars and sunburnt throats. It was not a large room, however, and there were only four men present, not counting the singer. They were young fellows, in the main, though the one leaning his elbow on the piano had a bushy red beard, and his yellow hair was beginning to thin. Another was reading The Australasian on the sofa; and a sort of twist to his mustache, a certain rigor about his unshaven chin, if they betrayed no sympathy with the singer, suggested a measure of contempt for the dumb clownery going on behind the singer’s back. Over his very head, indeed, the red-bearded man was signalling maliciously to a youth who with coarse fat face and hands was mimicking the performer in the middle of the room; while the youngest man of the lot, who wore spectacles and a Home-bred look, giggled in a half-ashamed, half-anxious way, as though not a little concerned lest they should all be caught. And when the song ended, and the singer spun round on the stool, they had certainly a narrow escape.

  “Great song!” cried the mimic, pulling himself together in an instant, and clapping out a brutal burlesque of applause.

  “Shut up, Sandy,” said the man with the beard, dropping a yellow-fringed eyelid over a very blue eye. “Don’t you mind Mr. Sanderson, sir,” he added to the musician; “he’s not a bad chap, only he thinks he’s funny. We’ll show him what funniment really is in a minute or two. I’ve just found the very song! But what’s the price of the last pretty thing?”

  “Of ‘Love Flees before the Dawn?’” said the musician, simply.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the same as all the rest; you see — —”

  Here the mimic broke in with a bright, congenial joke.

  “Love how much?” cried he, winking with his whole heavy face. “I don’t, chaps, do you?”

  The sally was greeted with a roar, in which the musician joined timidly, while the man on the sofa smiled faintly without looking up from his paper.

  “Never mind him,” said the red-bearded man, who was for keeping up the fun as long as possible; “he’s too witty to live. What did you say the price was?”

  “Most of the songs are half a crown.”

  “Come, I say, that’s a stiffish price, isn’t it?”

  “Plucky stiff for fleas!” exclaimed the wit.

  The musician flushed, but tossed back his head of hair, and held out his hand for the song.

  “I can’t help it, gentlemen. I can’t afford to charge less. Every one of these songs has been sent out from Home, and I get them from a man in Melbourne, who makes me pay for them. You’re five hundred miles up country, where you can’t expect town prices.”

  “Keep your hair on, old man!” said the wit, soothingly.

  “My what? My hair is my own business!”

  The little musician had turned upon his tormentor like a knife. His dark eyes were glaring indignantly, and his nervous fingers had twitched themselves into a pair of absurdly unserviceable white fists. But now a freckled hand was laid upon his shoulder, and the man with the beard was saying, “Come, come, my good fellow, you’ve made a mistake; my friend Sanderson meant nothing personal. It’s our way up here, you know, to chi-ak each other and our visitors too.”

  “Then I don’t like your way,” said the little man, stoutly.

  “Well, Sandy meant no offence, I’ll swear to that.”

  “Of course I didn’t,” said Sanderson.

  The musician looked from one to the other, and the anger went out of him, making way for shame.

  “Then the offence is on my side,” said he, awkwardly, “and I beg your pardon.”

  He took a pile of new music from the piano, and was about to go.

  “No, no, we’re not going to let you off so easily,” said the bearded man, laughing.

  “You’ll have to sing us one more song to show there’s no ill feeling,” put in Sanderson.

  “And here’s the song,” added the other. “The very thing. I found it just now. There you are— ‘The World’s Creation!’”

  “Not that thing!” said the musician.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a comic song.”

  “The very thing we want.”
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  “We’ll buy up your whole stock of comic songs,” said Sanderson.

  “Hear, hear,” cried the silent youth who wore spectacles.

  “I wish you would,” the musician said, smiling.

  “But we must hear them first.”

  “I hate singing them.”

  “Well, give us this one as a favor! Only this one. Do.”

  The musician wavered. He was a very sensitive young man, with a constitutional desire to please, and an acute horror of making a fool of himself. Now the whole soul of him was aching with the conviction that he had done this already, in showing his teeth at what had evidently been meant as harmless and inoffensive badinage. And it was this feeling that engendered the desperate desire at once to expiate his late display of temper, and to win the good opinion of these men by fairly amusing them after all. Certainly the song in demand did not amuse himself, but then it was equally certain that his taste in humor differed from theirs. He could not decide in his mind. He longed to make these men laugh. To get on with older and rougher men was his great difficulty, and one of his ambitions.

  “We must have this,” said the man with the beard, who had been looking over the song. “The words are first chop!”

  “I can’t stand them,” the musician confessed.

  “Why, are they too profane?”

  “They are too silly.”

  “Well, they ain’t for us. Climb down to our level, and fire away.”

  With a sigh and a smile, and a full complement of those misgivings which were a part of his temperament, the little visitor sat down and played with much vivacity a banjo accompaniment which sounded far better than anything else had done on the antiquated, weather-beaten bush piano. The jingle struck fire with the audience, and the performer knew it, as he went on to describe himself as “straight from Old Virginia,” with his head “stuffed full of knowledge,” in spite of the fact that he had “never been to ‘Frisco or any other college;” the entertaining information that “this world it was created in the twinkling of two cracks” bringing the first verse to a conclusion. Then came the chorus — of which there can scarcely be two opinions. The young men caught it up with a howl, with the exception of the reader on the sofa, who put his fingers in his ears. This is how it went: