For Claude had shown him what he was doing. He was producing a set of exceedingly harmless verses, “To Olivia released from Mayfair,” of which the Duke had already heard the rough draft. The fair copy was in the making even now; in the comparatively small room, at one end of the library, that Jack had already christened the Poet’s Corner.
Claude wiped his pen with characteristic care, and then rose readily enough. He followed Jack down the immensely long, galleried, book-lined library, through a cross-fire of coloured lights from the stained-glass windows, and so to the stairs. Overhead there was another long walk, through corridor after corridor, which had always reminded Jack of the hotel in town. But at last, in the newly decorated wing, the Duke took a key from his pocket and put it in a certain door. And now it was Claude who was reminded of the hotel; for a most striking atmospheric change greeted him on the threshold; only this time it was not a gust of heat, but the united perfume of many flowers, that came from within.
The room was fairly flooded with fresh roses. It was as though they had either blown through the open window, or fallen in a miraculous shower from the dainty blue ceiling. They pranked the floor in a fine disorder. They studded the table in tiny vases. They hid the mantelpiece, embedded in moss; from the very grate below, they peeped like fairy flames, breathing fragrance instead of warmth; and some in falling seemed to have caught in the pictures on the walls, so artfully had they been arranged. Only the white narrow bed had escaped the shower. And in the midst of this, his handiwork, stood the Duke, and blushed like the roses themselves.
“Whose room is this?” asked Claude, though he knew so well.
“Olivia’s — I should say Miss Sellwood’s. You see, old man, you were writing these awfully clever verses for her; so I felt I should like to have something ready too.”
“Your poem is the best!” exclaimed Claude, with envious, sparkling eyes. And then he sighed.
“Oh, rot!” said Jack, who was only too thankful for his offering to receive the cachet of Claude’s approval. “All I wanted was to keep my end up, too. Look here. What do you think of this?”
And he took from a vase on the dressing-table an enormous white bouquet, that opened Claude’s eyes wider than before.
“This is for her, too; I wanted to consult you about it,” pursued Jack. “Should I leave it here for her, or should I take it down to the station and present it to her there? Or at dinner to-night? I want to know just what you think.”
“No, not at dinner,” replied Claude; “nor yet at the station.”
“Not at all, you mean! I see it in your face!” cried the Duke so that Claude could not answer him. “But why not?” he added vehemently. “Where does the harm come in? It’s only a blooming nosegay. What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing,” was the reply, “only it might embarrass Olivia.”
“Make her uncomfortable?”
“Well, yes; it would be rather marked, you know. A bouquet like that is only fit for a bride.”
“I don’t see it,” said Jack, much crestfallen; “still, if that’s so, it’s just as well to know it. There was no harm meant. I wasn’t thinking of any rot of that kind. However, we don’t want to make her uncomfortable; that wasn’t the idea at all; so the bouquet’s off — like me. Come and let me tool you as far as the boundary fence. I want to show you how we drive four horses up the bush.”
The exhibition made Claude a little nervous; there was too much shouting at the horses for his taste, and too much cracking of the whip. Jack could crack a whip better than any man in his own stables. But he accepted Claude’s criticism with his usual docility, and dropped him at the gates with his unfailing nod of pure good-humour.
There he sat on the box, in loose rough tweeds of a decent cut, and with the early August sun striking under the brim of a perfectly respectable straw hat, but adding little to the broad light of his own honest, beaming countenance. He waved his whip, and Claude his hand. Then the whip cracked — but only once — and the poet strolled back to his verses, steeped in thought. He had done his best. His soul divined vaguely what the result might mean to him. But his actual thoughts were characteristically permissible; he was merely wondering what Lady Caroline and Olivia Sellwood would say now.
CHAPTER VIII
THE OLD ADAM
Olivia said least. Her mother took Claude by the hand, and thanked him with real tears in her eyes, for after all she was an Irishwoman, who could be as emotional as possible when she chose. As for Mr. Sellwood, he expressed himself as delightfully disappointed in the peer of whom he had heard so much. Jack struck him as being an excellent fellow, although not a golfer, which was a pity, and even apparently disinclined to take up the game — which might signify some recondite flaw in his character. So said the Home Secretary. But Olivia merely asked who had put all those roses in her room; and when Claude told her, she simply nodded and took hardly any notice of the Duke that night. Yet she wore a handful of his flowers at her shapely waist. And she did thank him, in a way.
It was not the sweetest way in the world, as all her ways had been, these many weeks, in Jack’s imagination. He was grieved and disappointed, but still more was he ashamed. He had taken a liberty. He had alienated his friend. Thus he blamed himself, with bitter, wordless thoughts, and would then fall back upon his disappointment. His feelings were a little mixed. One moment she was not all that he had thought her; the next, she was more than all. She was more beautiful. Often he had tried to recall her face, and tried in vain, having seen her but once before, and then only for a few minutes. Now he perceived that his first impression, blurred and yet dear to him as it had been, had done but meagre justice to Olivia. He had forgotten the delicate dark eyebrows, so much darker than the hair. The girl’s radiant colouring had also escaped him. It was like the first faint flush of an Australian dawn. Yet he had missed it in June, just as he had missed the liquid hazel of her eyes; their absolute honesty was what he remembered best; and, by a curious irony, that frank, fine look was the very one which she denied him now.
And so it was from the Friday evening, when the Sellwoods arrived, to the Monday morning when duty recalled the Home Secretary to St. Stephen’s. He obeyed the call in no statesman-like frame of mind. He had spent the Sabbath in open sin upon the new-made links, and had been fitly punished by his own execrable play. The athletic agent had made an example of him; he felt that he might just as well have been in church (or rather in the private chapel attached to the Towers), reading the lessons for his son-in-law, Francis Freke; and in the Saturday’s “foursome,” with the reverend gentleman on his side, the Cabinet Minister had done little better. So he had departed very sorely against the grain, his white hairs bristling with discontent, a broken “driver” hidden away in the depths of his portmanteau. And Olivia, seeing the last of him from amid the tall columns of the portico, felt heavy-hearted, because her father was also her friend.
Jack watched her at a distance. It did not occur to him that the girl’s mother was already pitching him at the girl’s head, daily and almost hourly, until she was weary of the very sound of his name. And though he felt he must have overstepped some mark in the matter of the flowers, he little dreamt how Miss Sellwood’s maid had looked when she saw them, or what disgraceful satisfaction Lady Caroline had exhibited before her daughter on that occasion. He only knew that her Ladyship was treating him with a rather oppressive kindness, and that he would much sooner have had half-a-dozen words from Olivia, such as the first she had ever spoken to him.
And now the girl was unhappy; it was plain enough, even to his untutored eye; and he stepped forward with the determination of improving her spirits, without thinking of his own, which were not a little flat.
“You must find it dull up the country, Miss Sellwood, after London,” began Jack, not perhaps in his most natural manner. “I — I wish to goodness you’d tell us of anything we could do to amuse you!”
“You are very good,” replied Olivia, “but I don’t requir
e to be amused like a child. Thanks all the same. As to finding the country dull, I never appreciate it so much as after a season in town.”
She was not looking at the Duke, but beyond him into the hall. And encountering no other eyes there, her own grew softer, as did her tone, even as she spoke.
“You know this old place off by heart, Miss Sellwood, I expect?” pursued Jack, who had taken off his straw hat in her presence, being in doubt as to whether the portico ranked indoors or out.
“Oh, well, I have stayed here pretty often, you know,” said Olivia. “What do you think of the place?”
“I can’t hardly say. I’ve never seen anything else like it. It’s far too good, though, for a chap like me; it’s all so grand.”
“I have sometimes felt it a little too grand,” the girl ventured to observe.
“So have I!” cried Jack. “You can’t think how glad I am to hear you say that. It’s my own feeling right down to the ground!”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” continued Olivia confidentially, seeing that they were still unobserved, “but I have often felt that I wouldn’t care to live here altogether.”
“No?” said the Duke, in a new tone; he felt vaguely dashed, but his manner was rather one of apologetic sympathy.
“No,” she repeated; “shall you like it?”
“Can’t say. I haven’t weakened on it yet, though it is too fine and large for a fellow. Shall I tell you what I’ve done? I’ve fixed up a little place for myself outside, where I can go whenever I get full up of the homestead here. I wonder — if it isn’t too much to ask — whether you would let me show you the little spot I mean?”
“Where is it?”
“In the pines yonder, on the far side o’ the tank.”
“The tank!”
“We call ‘em tanks in Australia. I meant the lake. I could row you across, Miss Sellwood, in a minute, if only you’d let me!” And he met her doubtful look with one of frank, simple-hearted, irresistible entreaty.
“Come on!” said Olivia suddenly; and as she went, she never looked behind; for she seemed to feel her mother’s eyes upon her from an upper window, and the hot shame of their certain approval made her tingle from head to foot. So she trod the close, fine, sunlit grass as far as possible from her companion’s side. And he, falling back a little, was enabled to watch her all the way.
Olivia was very ordinarily attired. She wore a crisp white blouse, speckled with tiny scarlet spots, and a plain skirt of navy blue, just short enough to give free play to the small brown shoes whose high heels the Duke had admired in the portico. Two scarlet bands, a narrow and a broad, encircled her straw hat and her waist, with much the same circumference: and yet this exceedingly average costume struck Jack as the most delicious thing imaginable of its kind. He corrected another impression before they reached the lake. Olivia was taller than he had thought; she was at least five-feet-six; and she carried her slim, trim figure in a fine upstanding fashion that took some of the roundness out of his own shoulders as he noted it this August morning.
“It’s the back-block bend,” he remarked elliptically, in the boat.
His way with the oars was inelegant enough, without a pretence at feathering; but it was quite effectual; and Olivia, in the stern-sheets, had her back still presented to the Argus-eyes of the Towers. She answered him with a puzzled look, as well she might, for he had done no more than think aloud.
“What is that?” she said. “And what are the back-blocks; and what do you mean?” for her puzzled look had lifted on a smile.
“I was thinking of my round shoulders. You get them through being all your time in the saddle, up in the back-blocks. All the country in Riverina — that is, all the fenced country — is split up into ten-mile blocks. And the back-blocks are the farthest from the rivers and from civilisation. So that’s why they call it the back-block bend; it came into my head through seeing you. I never saw anybody hold themselves so well, Miss Sellwood — if it isn’t too like my cheek to say so!”
The keel grounded as he spoke, and Olivia, as he handed her out, saw the undulating battlements and toppling turrets of the olden pile upside-down in the tremulous mirror of the lake. A moment later the pine-trees had closed around her; and, sure enough, in a distant window, Lady Caroline Sellwood lowered her opera-glasses with a sigh of exceeding great contentment.
“So you haven’t forgotten your old life yet,” said the girl, as they stepped out briskly across the shortening shadows of the pines. “I wish you would tell me something about it! I have heard it said that you lived in ever such a little hut, away by yourself in the wilderness.”
“I did so; and in a clump of pines the dead spit of these here,” said Jack, with a relish. “When I saw these pines you can’t think how glad I was! They were like old friends to me; they made me feel at home. You see, Miss Sellwood, that old life is the only one I ever knew, bar this; often enough it seems the reallest of the two. Most nights I dream I’m out there again; last night, for instance, we were lamb-marking. A nasty job, that; I was covered with blood from head to heels, and I was just counting the poor little beggars’ tails, when one of the dead tails wriggled in my hand, and blowed if it wasn’t Livingstone’s! No, there’s no forgetting the old life; I was at it too long; it’s this one that’s most like a dream.”
“And the hut,” said Olivia, with a rather wry face; “what sort of a place was that?”
“I’ll show you,” replied the Duke, in what struck the other as a superfluously confidential tone. “It was a little bit of a place, all one room, with a galvanised iron roof and mother-earth for floor. It was built with the very pines that had been felled to make a clearing for the hut: so many uprights, and horizontal slabs in between. A great square hearth and chimney were built out at one end, like the far end of a church; and over my bunk I’d got a lot of pictures from the Australasian Sketcher just stuck up anyhow; and if you weren’t looking, you knocked your head against the ration-bags that hung from the cross-beams. You slept inside, but you kept your bucket and basin on a bench — —”
“Good heavens!” cried Olivia. And she stood rooted to the ground before a clearing and a hut which exactly tallied with the Duke’s description. The hut was indeed too new, the maker’s stamp catching the eye on the galvanised roofing; and, in the clearing, the pine-stumps were still white from the axe; but the essentials were the same, even to the tin basin on the bench outside the door, with a bucket of water underneath. As for the wooden chimney, Olivia had never seen such a thing in her life; yet real smoke was leaking out of it into the pale blue sky.
“Is this a joke or a trick?” asked the girl, looking suspiciously on Jack.
“Neither; it’s meant for the dead image of my old hut up the bush; and it’s the little place I’ve fixed up for myself, here on the run, that I wanted to show you.”
“You’ve had it built during these last few weeks?”
“Under my own eye; and bits of it with my own hand. Old Claude thought it sheer cussedness, I know; perhaps you will, too; but come in, and have a look for yourself.”
And unlocking the padlock that secured it, he opened the door and stood aside for the young girl to enter. Olivia did so with alacrity; her first amazement had given way to undiluted interest; and the Duke followed her, straw hat in hand. There was a tantalising insufficiency of light within. Two small windows there were, but both had been filled with opaque folds of sackcloth in lieu of glass; yet the Duke pointed to them, as might his ancestors to the stained-glass lights in chapel and library, with peculiar pride; and, indeed, his strange delight in the hut, who cared so little for the Towers close at hand, made Olivia marvel when she came to think about it. Meanwhile she found everything as she had heard it described in the Australian hut, with one exception: there were no ration-bags to knock one’s head against, because nobody made meals here. Also the pictures over the bunk were from the Illustrated London News, not from the Sketcher, which Jack had been unable to obtain in England; an
d they were somewhat unconvincingly clean and well-arranged. But the bunk itself was all that it might have been in the real bush; for it was covered over with Jack’s own old blanket; whereon lay a purring, yellow ball, like a shabby sand-bank in a sea of faded blue.
“So this is Livingstone!” exclaimed the girl, stooping to scratch that celebrity’s head.
“Yes; and there’s old Tom and Black Maria in front of the fire. I lock them all three up during the day, for it isn’t so like the bush in some ways as it is in others. They might get stolen any day, with so many people about; that’s the worst of the old country; there was no other camp within five miles of me, on Carara.”
“It must have been dreadfully lonely!”
“You get used to it. And then every few months you would tramp into the homestead and — and speak to the boss,” said Jack, changing his mind and his sentence as he remembered how he had once shocked Claude Lafont.
Olivia took notice of the cats, at which Jack stood by beaming. The kitten she had brought down from town in a basket. It lived in Olivia’s room, but she now suggested restoring it to its own people. Jack, however, reminded her that it was hers, in such a tender voice; and proceeded to refer to her kindness at their first meeting, in so embarrassing a fashion; that the girl, seeking a change of subject, found one in the long, low bunk.
“I see,” said she, “that you come here for your afternoon siesta.”
“I come here for my night’s sleep,” he replied.
“Never!”
“Every night in life. You seem surprised. I did ask old Claude not to mention it — and — oh, well, it’s no use keeping the thing a secret, after all. It suits me best — the open country and the solitude. It’s what I’m accustomed to. The wind in the pines all around, I wake up and hear it every night, just like I did in the old hut. It’s almost the same thing as going back to the bush to sleep; there’s not two penn’orth of difference.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 116