There were two doors to the school-room. The one at which Irralie stood, led without porch or passage into the open air, and from it she could see no other building. But an inner door opened into a tiny lobby, which let one in or out through à shallow veranda abutting the yard. From this veranda one had all the homestead buildings under one’s eye: the kitchen opposite, the long main building to the left, and to the right the blacksmith’s forge and the iron-store. The two last were twin structures entirely composed of sheets of corrugated iron either nailed to uprights or clamped together with bolts and nuts. The store was the nearer to the school-room block, and in front of it, with a pipe in his mouth and a repeating-rifle under his arm, stood George Young on guard in the moonlight.
Irralie watched him from the shallow veranda, for which she presently forsook her school - room door. The veranda was in deep shadow, and she stood unobserved within ten paces of Young. His head was bent and his shoulders rounded. He looked a man dejected rather than alert, and the girl wondered whether he was thinking of the previous night, and of her hard words to him then. To think of them herself meant instantaneous action on the part of Irralie. She had not to think twice, but stepped forward there and then, with her right arm held out in front of her.
“Shake hands — if you will,” she said. “I don’t deserve it. But try!”
It was done without a word, and the pipe was put away.
“I am honestly sorry for every word I said,” continued Irralie, warmly. “I thought you foolishly and wickedly suspicious, but now we see who was the wicked fool! Heaven knows I had my own doubts in the beginning. But I let him see it; he set to work to remove them, and succeeded — you may know how. It was a clever trick, though; I will say that.” And Irralie sighed.
“You mean about the tennis-racket?”
“Yes. You said it was simple?”
“It was the simplest dodge of all, Irralie! Fullarton stopped in Melbourne to play in a tournament. It was in all the papers. He was bound to have a racket with him, and that trunk was the only one long enough.” Irralie said nothing; it was as though, in the face of even his self-confessed guilt, she had yet retained a sneaking regard for the one positive point made by the villain in his own favor. She looked at the prison-door. It was corrugated iron like the walls and roof, and heavily padlocked on the outside. They were standing a few yards from it, and talking in undertones. A change of subject was obtained by a request for George Young’s opinion of “the real man.”
Given with alacrity, this was golden indeed; in fact, in her mother and the overseer Irralie had encountered the only two persons with whom the ill-mannered Englishman had made himself a favorite, though all admired him. And even the enthusiasm of George Young was tempered with one or two admissions.
“He is a masterful man, and a fine general, but certainly a cool hand. For instance, about the men’s hut. Haven’t you heard? There’s not a man up there that has any idea what’s happened. We gave them a supper, you know, and they were at it when this thing occurred. Mr. Fullarton had orders given which have resulted in their not getting wind of it yet.”
“Orders!” said Irralie, with her black eyebrows arched. “Yes, that was cool. And what was the object?”
“To avoid any display of sympathy with Stingaree. There’s something in it, too. We have some rough customers up at the hut just now; and it’s not at all an uncommon thing to find an ordinary pound-a-week hand ready on principle to back a bushranger for all he’s worth. At least, it wasn’t in the Kelly country; and I hear Stingaree is just as much of a hero in their eyes as ever Ned Kelly was.”
“Has anybody gone for the police?”
“No; we said we’d leave it till morning, since he’s absolutely safe where he is. The fact is, however, that we don’t want people to sit up for it and make a scene. They’re all going to turn in after supper, with the exception of a very few of us, who will keep watch and watch about.”
“By order of the new owner again?” asked Irralie, with the least possible sneer.
“Well, at his suggestion.”
“He seems to have taken command of the place!”
“In a way he has; but it’s a way I don’t object to myself. You want a strong man to say what should and should not be done in a case like this. There would certainly have been a panic and a general clearance if it hadn’t been for Mr. Fullarton. You should have heard Mrs. Browne going on about her diamonds! So all the ladies are going to hand over their valuables to be put in the safe, and one of us will keep the key. And you mustn’t think ill of Fullarton, Irralie. I own he’s a cool hand, and bosses us all about perhaps a bit too much; but your father himself said he was thankful he had turned up in time to relieve him of the greatest responsibility that has ever come his way.”
“That may be so,” began Irralie, as if she were about to say a good deal more. But she thought of the night before, and of her great mistake; and she held her peace.
“Aren’t you going to supper at all?” asked Young, suddenly.
“No. I couldn’t! I’ve been too much mixed up in this, and I came out for a little air instead. I think I must just put my nose inside the pines.”
“Don’t go far, Irralie!”
“Very well, George. So long!”
She left him, passing through the narrow cut between the forge and the iron-store: partly because that was her bee-line for the beloved pines, and partly she knew not why. There was a small window high up at the back of the store. A human head would hardly have passed through; but when Irralie glanced up at the aperture her heart leapt to her throat. A white shirt-sleeve hung out in the moonlight, and a hand was struggling to unscrew one of the nuts with which the sheets of iron were bolted together.
“Here — George!” cried Irralie, without a thought.
He came running up; but, ere he reached her, the shirt-sleeve had been whipped in, and something else had happened too. The girl was sorry she had called him.
“He’ll escape!” she cried. “I will tell you how.”
She lowered her voice and pointed to the aperture. It was open. Could he not escape by that.
“Never!” he whispered. “Your young brothers couldn’t.”
“No? Yes, I see you’re right. I must be nervous: I won’t tackle the pines after all.”
She followed him back through the cut, and as she did so a voice, low and bitter, came through the iron walls.
“Thank you, Miss Villiers!” it said. “I call that kind!”
CHAPTER IX
TO SLOW MUSIC
“Thank you, Miss Villiers! I call that kind!”
The words followed Irralie to her room, and kept her from her bed. They sang in her ears and were written in her brain. They were the words of a villain, and yet they cut her to the heart. They cut her so cruelly, and in such open and prolonged defiance of her reason, that the shameful truth came home to her at last. They were the words of a villain whom she loved.
Yes, she had loved, as she had distrusted him, from the very first. That was why she had said nothing about the pistol. That was why she had suggested the lost overcoat. She had done this, and left that undone, on instinct simply. And instinctively she had loved him from the first.
Her thoughts had been of him and him alone from the very moment of their meeting on the box-clump edge. In all her life she had known no such anguish as her doubts of him, and no such happiness as that brief spell of confidence restored. But trust and doubt were now two things of the past. Certainty took their place; and yet the love remained.
It was monstrous, it was grotesque, but it was nevertheless a fact to be faced. She had made so dire a fool of herself that she could laugh outright; and did so, once, at a sudden sight of her own image in the glass. She had never taken off her dress; the muslin was no longer crisp; the rowans drooped upon their stalks; and at the thought of the mad folly underneath, she laughed in her own white face and burning eyes. But the laugh rang false and ended in a groan; it did not help h
er to face the fact; nor did she try to do so much longer, but resigned herself to her fate once and for all.
She found it less easy, however, to resign herself to the fate of the man she loved. He lay captive within thirty yards of her room. In the morning he would be taken away; then tried; then put in prison for the rest of his life; and he so young! It was terrible — unthinkable — but it should not be. But for her he would have broken prison already. She had not known her heart when she cried out to George Young; but that cry had made her know it; and now, if escape were possible, she would undo what she had then done by helping him to escape.
So Irralie decided, with a trembling but a lightened heart. The difficulty and the danger removed the lens from her own feelings, turned her eyes outwards, and gave a new tone to her nerves. Her practical side reasserted itself, and in an instant she was thinking how the thing could be done. And as she thought, the even breathing of a houseful of sleepers came through the thin wooden walls to encourage her.
So the other women were all asleep!
Then surely there was little to be feared from the male encampment so much farther away; and she would have to pit her wits against those of the established guard alone. She would outwit them, never fear! She would give them a false alarm, and then tear open the door the moment their backs were turned. Thoughts wild as these darted through her brain in the first excitement of resolve; but her preparations were no less swiftly and cunningly made.
She changed her ball-slippers for a bedroom pair that would make no noise on the veranda. She enveloped herself from head to heel in an old, black waterproof cloak, which would never be seen in the shadow of a veranda or through the fronds of a pine. She put matches and a candle-end in her pocket; and thus accoutred she crept out, shutting the door very softly behind her.
The moon was setting in a blur of clouds; that was one thing already in Irralie’s favor. She stole to the corner of the front veranda, and peeped round very cautiously for fear of rousing sleepy watchers from their chairs. There were none. The veranda was deserted; so was the yard. The very sentinel had been withdrawn from the iron-store door.
Irralie could scarce believe her eyes. Her heart beat high; and yet the seeming safety had in ways a greater terror for her than danger seen and realized. She bent her head and listened intently. At first nothing; then a clink, then a laugh, in the middle distance, through closed doors; and then a snatch of Mendelssohn, wonderfully played on the harsh old school-room piano, but with the soft pedal down all the time. Irralie listened with raised eyebrows and a hostile heart for the accomplished exquisite to whom she had not yet spoken a word. But a moment later she had her second glimpse of him. The lieder ended, a door opened, and out came the pianist with the strut of a game-cock and the carriage of a guardsman. One glance through his eyeglass at the iron-store, and he was gone as he had come; and a comic song of Jevons’s, struck up that moment to his own vile accompaniment, was cut short in the very first bar.
Irralie now knew where the watchers were spending the night; but she was curious to discover of whom exactly the guard consisted, and whether music was its only joy. To peer through the passage and door by which the Englishman had come out and gone in again would, however, be rash, since the yard afforded no sort of cover. But there was the door at which Irralie herself had stood and looked upon the pines; she could therefore stand among the pines and look in at this door. And in two minutes’ time she was actually doing so; nor had a twig cracked or a wire jingled on the way.
The door was wide open, but Irralie was too far from it to see very much of the lamp-lit room within; but she saw young Hodding, sprawled across a desk and fast asleep, and that half of the piano on the top of which stood bottles, glasses, and a bedroom ewer. This at first was all that was visible to Irralie through the door. Then Jevons came upon the narrow scene to help himself freely from a bottle and sparingly from the ewer; and the Englishman joined him, looking keenly in his flushed face, and as keenly at the prostrate tutor, before he himself opened a bottle of soda-water, and poured it ostentatiously into a glass containing no whiskey at all.
All this time but little had been said, and still less had the girl been able to overhear. The first words she could distinguish were addressed by George Young (who was invisible) to Jevons the storekeeper.
“Hodding’s drunk,” said he (in a voice which certified the speaker, at any rate, as beyond reproach); “and you mean to get drunker because you can stand more! If I was Mr. Fullarton — well, I wish I was!”
The owner’s reply sounded tolerant, for him; it was, however, inaudible; and as he spoke he went out once more by the other door, and returned briskly next moment.
“All well?” asked Young.
“Right as rain! We might as well turn in.”
“I sha’ n’ t. One never knows. Besides, there’s the police to fetch some time, and a horse ready saddled in the stable. If I had my way I’d fetch ‘em now.”
“My dear, good fellow, where’s the point?” asked the Englishman, screwing round on the music-stool with his eye-glass flaming in the lamp-light. “That chap’s all right! We’ve tied him too tight to move. In any case, when there’s the least occasion for anybody to go, Mr. Young, you may rely upon due notice to that effect from me.”
So saying, he turned abruptly to the piano; and Irralie, turning also, stole in deeper among the trees, with the first notes of Chopin’s funeral march in her ears, and clear in her brain the image of a very formidable opponent indeed. He was brisk, alert, resolute, educated, masterful, indeed all one could wish one’s opponent not to be; and the mannerisms of a coxcomb made him, even in the girl’s eyes, all the more dangerous a man. This she realized while making a considerable détour among the pines. But her determination was unshaken and her nerve only tuned to a higher pitch when she emerged from the plantation at the back of the iron-store.
It was darker than ever, so that the angle of the prison roof was lost against the clouded blackness of the sky. And Irralie could touch the iron before she was sure that no face looked out upon her from the small square window. Yet the window was open, as it had been before.
She stood on tip-toe to put her mouth to the wooden sill and whisper, “Are you awake?”
“Miss Villiers! Can that be you?”
The voice came from the level of Irralie’s knees. “I want to speak to you,” she said. “Stand up, or we shall be heard.”
“I can’t. They’ve tied me down by the hand. They handcuffed me down before, but I slipped the handcuff.”
“Well! I want to get you out altogether.”
“What, after giving me away as you did to Young?”
“I didn’t give you away at all. But I’ll have no more words about anything that’s past. I know what you are, and what you deserve. Another word about that and I leave you to your fate!”
“Very well; let it rest. Have they sent for the police?”
“Not yet. I don’t know why not. They’re having quite a musical evening. I believe there’s a horse all ready in the stables. I mean that horse for you. Did you manage to move any of these nuts?”
“Not one.”
“No more can I. I’m going to look for a screw-hammer. Oh, I don’t care what you’ve done! I want you to have this one more chance, and not be taken here!”
She was gone before he could reply. She went as she had come, and heard on the way the finish of the funeral march. Then came a difficulty. The screw-hammer was in the tool-box — the tool-box in the store. The store was locked, and the key, no doubt, in Jevons’s or George Young’s or the new owner’s pocket.
She went to her room and racked her brains; all she could think of was a box of boys’ tools in her brothers’ room. There might be a pair of pincers in that box, and a pair of pincers might do. In any case she would go and look.
The boys were sleeping heavily: they did not hear her open the door, but one of them moved in his sleep as she struck a match and then shaded it with her hand.
The toolbox was under their dressing-table. She carried it bodily to her room; there were pincers, and strong ones too. But would they answer?
She crept round the veranda once more, and was about to dart across to the pines at their nearest point when once again the spruce, straight figure in the gaiters and riding-breeches strode out into the yard. He stood there a moment whistling Chopin to himself, and looking about him smartly. The girl crouched down behind a chair. Then, to her horror, he walked in the direction of the iron-store. If his step should be taken for hers!
She saw him look at the padlock, and disappear between the two iron buildings. If he had done so five minutes before! He was an age away; indeed, she saw him no more; for, from where she crouched, the school-room building overlapped the iron-store; and when she could stay there no longer for suspense, and made a dash of it for the pines, she heard him talking to Young just as when she passed before. He had returned to the school-room by the other door, and precious minutes had been lost.
“I’d given you up!”
“That man frightened me. Did you speak to him?”
“No.”
“Nor he to you?”
“Only a word or two.”
“I didn’t hear: so they wouldn’t hear us: but you must listen while I work. Listen hardest when he’s not playing! If they come you must make a noise, and I’ll get away while they’re opening the door.”
“You are very good.”
“Not a word about that — or anything else. Now let me try. Ah, how difficult to do it quietly!”
For the pincers were large enough to bite the nuts, but first they snapped together, and then they banged heavily against the iron. Irralie desisted and held her breath in despair. The music had not recommenced, and sure enough there came footsteps; but the prisoner instantly began beating with his head or his knee against the corrugated iron.
“Stop that row!”
“What! mayn’t I be musical, too?”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 72