Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  He sprang up, thrust his head and shoulders in the window-socket, and hung there, face to face with the moon. The window was open, for the night was warm. What was it that he heard? The lowing and bleating of frightened animals — at Smithfield, doubtless — being penned for the killing like himself! But that was not all. There was something more insistent, something nearer at hand and unceasing; nay, increasing too. The pulse of a multitude — the murmur of a mob. A street song at dead of night — to while away the hours — his last hours on earth. Street cries! “Life and trial of Thomas Erichsen,” as like as not; but they should not add “execution.” Not yet at all events. He would do something to die for first!

  A tug at the bars — they yielded nothing. Another, with all his might, and his knees drawn up against the sill; not an inch, not the sixteenth part of one! The bars were hopeless. He sprang back into the cell, and stood there with the full moon laughing in his white face and blazing eyes. Very well! He would brain the next turnkey who came near him, and so at least deserve his death, even if he could not slip into the dead man’s clothes and thus away. So the hot fit had followed the cool; so madness trod upon the heels of rational thought.

  The murmur of the crowd had done it; it had left him a wounded lion, and his maddened eyes were now roving round the cell in search of that with which to shed blood for blood. They lit upon the metal wash-stand fixed (like the iron candlestick) to the wall. In an instant the washstand was torn out by the roots, and poised over the cropped yellow head, while the loose tin things rang like cymbals on the floor. The clatter was slow to cease. It was followed inevitably by hurried footsteps in the corridor. So much the better. The time was come.

  Tom raised the washstand on high in both hands, and himself on tip-toes to give the greater force to his blow as the door was flung hurriedly open; he was bringing it down upon grey hairs, when he saw their colour, and swerving, swung the apparatus with a crash against the wall.

  “Lucky for you it was you!” he cried as the chaplain threw up his hands. “Unlucky for me: I’d have killed any other man in the place. Now you see what they’ve made of me! Better send them to tie me up; it’s no good your wasting your breath.”

  The Ordinary wrung his hands, and gazed in the frenzied face with unspeakable anguish in his own; while louder and louder through the cell window came the clamour of the growing mob.

  “Have you so utterly forgotten your God?” began the poor man, with the tears in his eyes. “He has never forgotten you!”

  “He has,” said Tom, doggedly, “or He wouldn’t let me suffer for another man’s crime.”

  “He has not!” shouted the chaplain, flourishing a paper from his pocket. “He has moved the hearts of those in authority over us! On your knees, sir, and give Him thanks; for your life has been spared at the eleventh hour!”

  CHAPTER XX

  SEALED LIPS

  THE good news was broken to Claire by her father in the dead of night; she had thus some hours in which to prepare for what she was resolved should be her last conversation with Daintree on the subject of Tom. And she anticipated not only the last, but the riskiest of so many risky interviews. She felt that ineffable relief might prove harder to conceal than intolerable anxiety; and so no sooner were her worse fears dissipated than new fears took their place.

  For days and weeks her one absorbing anxiety had been the preservation of poor Tom’s life by hook or crook. Now that at the very last this miracle had been performed, her heart did indeed teem with praise and thanksgiving; but it also sank beneath the burden of a new solicitude, never to let Daintree dream what she had done, never to spoil his ideal of her, but to repay his disinterested generosity by all the unremitting kindness of heart, sympathy of brain, and pith and marrow of faithful friendship in her woman’s power. Claire did not now carry the last aspiration to its logical conclusion; but her gratitude to Daintree was such that it rose in great waves which drowned even the thought of Tom; and of the two men, if her heart was still with her first love, her admiration and gratitude were all for his preserver. Such was her feeling when she espied Daintree in the garden next morning early, and joined him on an impulse, without having decided upon a word to say.

  “I think you are the best of men,” was what she heard herself saying; “and you have proved it on behalf of one of the worst!”

  It was not quite sincere; it was not quite insincere. The unconsidered words themselves were a self-revelation to Claire. She would not have unsaid them; yet to feel them less she would have given her moral and material all.

  Daintree, as usual, stood to his guns regarding Erichsen, whose innocence he had lately maintained with unreasonable fervour. Culliford’s speech, he declared, had convinced him; it should have convinced the jury too, he vowed, had he been one of them. But he took with greedy eyes all the good things the girl now said to him. And in his account of final matters his conceit and his pomposity bubbled out as heretofore.

  “I saw Lord John,” said he. “Lord John was obliged to see me. Our name is one he cannot afford to despise; and then he knows my position in New South Wales. I told him (in confidence) how this case had interested me, and how I had spent my money upon it. Lord John was very much impressed. I argued for innocence, and (for argument’s sake) for manslaughter too. But cold-blooded murder I said it could not be. And there is not the slightest doubt that my arguments converted Lord John.”

  “You still think it may have been manslaughter?”

  “You know what I think,” was the reply. “As sure as I stand here, Miss Harding, we have saved an innocent man!”

  Mr. Harding was coming towards them across the spangled grass. Claire held out her hand.

  “At any rate,” said she, “there is some one of whom I shall always think all the more — oh! a hundredfold the more! — for what has happened. There are two others whose very names I want you to promise never to mention again: the one who died, and” — in a voice both wistful and bitter—” your innocent man!”

  Daintree promised.

  And he kept his word.

  Meanwhile, a minor result of the reprieve was the speedy departure of Claire’s wicked maid. She watched a day or two, and then decided that her hold upon her mistress was gone.

  The fact was that, though Claire was resolved to atone to Daintree for her long duplicity, the atonement itself came less easily than she had hoped. His mission accomplished, the man of action was sunk once more in the invertebrate poet; and the latter took such advantage of the kind ear now lent him, that Claire was wearied to distraction, and soon forgot the philanthropist in the bore. The poetry got upon her slackened nerves, and an afternoon of the poet would leave her utterly tired out. This Hannah saw: also that her lady’s heart was still in Newgate, whether she knew it or not: therefore that to open Daintree’s eyes would be to do her no very bad turn, however she might feel it at the time. In a word, this clever woman read her mistress better than her mistress read herself. She gave notice on the spot.

  “And I’ll forfeit my month’s wages, miss, and go this morning — in case you change your mind about them presents!”

  “I am not likely to do that,” replied Claire, dispassionately. “You held your tongue when I wanted it held: his life is saved, and that’s all I care about in this world.”

  She went for a ride with Daintree that morning, and he wearied her more than ever. It was a heavenly June day, but luscious fields and a gorgeous sky were nothing to the poetaster; his own rhymes thereon at once usurped and exhausted the subject. A volume of his verse was in the press: every sight, sound or word suggested a quotation. Claire tried hard to think of all that he had done. She found herself thinking of Tom instead; and, in sheer depression, turned early homeward, where an unforeseen temptation awaited her.

  A hackney-coach stood at the door; and the entire household was discovered in the hall. Servants in a cluster at the green-baize door; Hannah in her bonnet calmly seated on her box; and Mr. Harding and a policeman in convers
ation in the foreground. The arrival of Claire and her companion on this animated scene was hailed with evident satisfaction, whereupon silence was enjoined by the master of the house.

  “This woman,” said he to Claire, pointing to the complacent Hannah— “this woman, your maid, suddenly announces her intention of leaving my house. She declares that you knew she was going; but the first her fellow-servants hear of it is the intrusion of a hackney-coachman to bring her box downstairs. They demand to have her box examined — it would seem with excellent reason! An officer is sent for, and this is what he finds!”

  Mr. Harding held up a ring, a brooch, a pair of earrings, and a diamond pendant, the former possessions of Claire.

  “She says you gave them to her,” he proceeded. “What have you to say to that?”

  Claire met the culprit’s glittering eyes, and read in them an inflexible intent; she glanced at Daintree, and her great temptation was to tell everything before them all, and so secure her future from she knew not what, but something worse than she had ever foreseen. Now was the moment — here the chance — there would never be such another. The best course — the bold course — sang in her ears as a whisper from her guardian angel’s lips. It was not shrinking from the immediate scene, but rather the dread of righteous wrath to come and be her curse for ever, that decided Claire and made her say, with but a second’s pause, “It is perfectly true! I did give the things to Hannah, and they are hers.”

  “You gave your maid your diamond pendant?”

  “If you come into the library, papa, I will tell you all about it.”

  They were but a minute closeted; then the constable was dismissed with something for himself, the hackney-coachman called in again to take the woman’s box, and the other servants sent about their business through the green-baize door. Claire watched her spy’s departure with as much curiosity as relief. Unwonted colour tinged those pallid cheeks, and some unfathomable meaning softened the jet-black eyes as they gazed into hers for the last time. There was not only gratitude in the look, but (as it seemed to Claire) both the will and the power to show it, given the chance. As it was, she was edging near to speak, when Mr. Harding came between them, and himself hustled the woman out of the house. He then sought out Daintree and took him by the arm.

  “This will show you the kind of girl Claire is,” said Nicholas Harding. “Of course, she had never given the woman a thing; but rather than have her put in prison — you see? Isn’t it incredible?”

  “Not in her!” cried Daintree, devoutly.

  And he posted to the City that afternoon, returning with a beautiful brooch, which he presented to Claire with humility unalloyed.

  “A diamond pendant you would not accept from me; alas, nor yet a ring!” he sighed. “But this trifle I think you will — in memory of this morning.”

  For though he bored her with his poetry, he was very careful not to inflict upon her a second declaration of his love, until his cunning told him that the favourable time was ripe.

  So Claire lost her chance, and sank deeper and deeper yet into the toils.

  One salve her conscience demanded and obtained. She knew now what was coming better than he did. And she tried day and night to forget poor Tom, and to love the man she needs must marry in the end.

  But the end was not yet; for the man had made up his mind to a long, deliberate siege; and he now set about it with all the tenacity and all the ingenuity which were central traits in his complex nature.

  Those were the days of Almack’s, and of a hard-and-fast Society whose pale Nicholas Harding had never quite scaled. To give him, so to speak, a leg up, Daintree went once more among old family friends, and was actually intriguing with one of the six terrible ladies who guarded the doors of Almack’s, in order to secure tickets for one of those historic assemblies at Willis’s Rooms, when the King’s death, on June 20th, put an end to all festivities. Daintree ground his teeth at having to abandon what he had deemed a potent engine of assault. Claire had shown pleasure at the prospect; its destruction seemed a real blow to her, but was actually a relief.

  Genuine sorrow she felt, but it was all for the dead King who had spared Tom’s life while under sentence of death himself.

  Daintree took a place in Scotland for the autumn. Mr. Harding had made other plans, but at Daintree’s nod he threw them to the winds. Only one thing was more remarkable than the sudden ascendency which the younger man had now obtained over the elder: this was the latter’s changed regard for his would-be son-in-law. Not that Mr. Harding had ceased to desire the marriage. His wishes in that matter were made disagreeably plain to Claire, who was only puzzled to hear him speak of Daintree with an oath in her presence, while appearing all smiles to his face. The girl was at a loss to understand this, and yet too absorbed in her own troubles to give her mind to anything else. Only she could not think when the change had come about; she had first noticed it after the trial. It was less remarkable in Scotland, where Daintree was their host; there were seldom any other guests.

  “Hours of Exile” was the Byronic title of his book of verse, which was published during this visit. It was dedicated to Clarinda, which confessedly stood for Claire, and the dedicatory lines were the best in the book. The girl felt committed before the world when she read them. Clarinda’s name occurred again and again in the volume. Yet all that year he never spoke. He had done so before somewhat prematurely, to own the least, and the man of extremes must needs make trebly and quadruply sure before his lips reiterated the love which had raged in his eyes every day and every hour of all these months.

  But with the New Year came ill tidings from Australia: an investment had turned out badly; his interests in general were suffering from his absence. The very next day James Daintree led Claire Harding into her father’s library, and, even with his face in happy flames, struck an attitude before the writing-table.

  “She is mine!” he cried. “She has consented to share the poet’s bays — to divide with Esau his inheritance in the wilderness!”

  It was notable that no consent was asked of Nicholas Harding. He sat back in his chair with a stifled sigh of unspeakable relief. Claire never forgot how his hand felt as he took both of hers and drew her towards him.

  “But you spoke of sailing at once,” said he, cloaking eagerness with an air of extreme deprecation. “It would have to be a very hurried affair!”

  The first cloud crossed Daintree’s face.

  “Ah, no!” said he. “I could not take her at a moment’s notice to a house unfit for her reception. I must go and prepare it for her; that is a stern necessity. But you must bring her out to me yourself in six months’ time.”

  Mr. Harding shook his head. He was a public man.

  “Then Lady Starkie must.”

  Mr. Harding spoke warmly and unselfishly in favour of an immediate marriage. To no purpose, however; they had indeed made up their minds, though the reason was not that which Daintree had given. Vanity forbade him to disclose the real reason. It was her solitary but firm stipulation; and so much for his brave desire to get first to Sydney on Claire’s account.

  He was to sail in seven days.

  Meanwhile the engagement was announced in the Morning Post of January 15th.

  On the 16th Mr. Harding found a note from Sir Emilius at his office: —

  “SIR, — My ‘Morning Post’ informs me that a marriage has been arranged between your daughter and my son. If you care for the young lady’s happiness you will put a stop to this at once.

  “Yours faithfully,

  “EMILIUS DAINTREE.

  “N.B. — I send this word of warning in duplicate, both to your City and to your private address; as I think it hardly likely that you will receive both copies if my son is still with you.”

  Mr. Harding started to his feet. He had not received the copy posted to his house. Was the father a liar or the son something worse? The father’s reputation — stay!

  It was the son.

  He had been down befo
re Mr. Harding that morning; the latter had found him in the dining-room when he entered, and on his own plate were such letters as he had received. Harding seized his hat; then reflected, changed colour and took a pen himself. The note which he subsequently despatched by hand was a model of firmness, tempered by tact. He demanded, however, an immediate explanation of Sir Emilius Daintree’s words, and the messenger was to wait for an answer. The messenger returned without one.

  Then Mr. Harding called in person.

  Sir Emilius was not at home.

  But next morning there was another brief note at the office: —

  “DEAR SIR, — I have been thinking the matter over. You have my sympathy; but I cannot enter into details. I absolutely decline to do so. You know the proverb, and a word should be enough for the wise; or you may go for your explanation to my son, who will tell you it is all my spite. It is for you, as a man of the world, to believe or to disbelieve him on that point.

  “I will say, however, that so far as I know, my son is not insane.

  “I would to Heaven he were!

  “Yours, etc.,

  “EMILIUS DAINTREE.”

  Mr. Harding was now a miserable man. The very sight of the betrothed pair became an hourly agony. Yet he lacked either the courage or the will to interfere. Only four days remained — he called again on Sir Emilius Daintree. But again the baronet was invisible.

  This time Harding left an urgent note; and yet another perfectly civil one awaited him in the City next morning. It was to be the last, however, and said so plainly in the following terms: —

  “MY DEAR SIR, — You must excuse my unwillingness to see you, or to correspond further, upon the little matter of my son and your daughter. You will apprehend that the subject is probably more painful to me than to you — who have your remedy. I have none. My son need never become your son-in-law; but unhappily he will always be my son.