Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  CHAPTER XVI

  “LOVE THE GIFT”

  Her answer was altogether astonishing; she leant back in the boat and looked him full in the face. A quick flush tinged her own, and the incomparable eyebrows were raised and arched; but underneath there was an honest tenderness which Olivia was not the girl to conceal.

  “Was that your water-lilies?” said she; but this was not the astonishing speech. He had lured her afloat on impudently false pretences; she had a right to twit him with that.

  “There are no water-lilies,” he confessed; “at least, never mind them if there are. Oh, I was obliged to make some excuse! There was nowhere else where we could talk so well. I tell you again I have the cheek to love you! I can’t help it; I’ve loved you ever since that day in London, and you’ve got to know it for good or bad. If it makes you very angry, I’ll row you back this minute.” He was resting on his oars under cover of the little island; the Towers were out of sight.

  “Why in the world didn’t you speak yesterday?” was Olivia’s extraordinary reply.

  “Yesterday?” faltered Jack.

  “It was such a chance!”

  “Not for me! My tongue was tied. Olivia, I was under a frightful cloud yesterday! You don’t understand — —”

  “What if I do? What if I did at the time?”

  “I don’t see how you could,” said Jack.

  “Instinctively,” replied Olivia, to screen her mother. “I knew something was wrong, and I have since been told what. If only you had spoken then!”

  She dropped her eyes swiftly; the tear ran down her cheek.

  “But why? Why then, better than now?”

  “Because I care, too,” she whispered, so that the words just travelled to his ear.

  “Olivia! My — do you know what you’ve said? Do you mean it?”

  “Of course I care. I mean that much. You are different from everybody else.”

  “Then — —”

  “There must be no ‘then.’”

  “But you said you cared. Tell me — I don’t understand.”

  “I can never marry you,” said Olivia, looking him once more in the face. And her eyes were dry.

  “Why not, if it is true — that you care?”

  “Because you are what you are — and I — oh! how can I say it even to you? I am so ashamed. I have been thrown at your head from the very first — no, I have no right to say that. How I hate everything I say! You must understand; I am sure you do. Well, in the beginning I couldn’t bear to speak to you, because I knew — what was hoped — and I seemed to see and hear it in every look and word. It hurt me more than I ever can tell you. The same sort of thing had happened before, but I had never minded it then. I suppose all mothers are like that; it’s natural enough, when you come to think, and I’m sure I never resented it before. I wouldn’t have minded it in your case either; I wouldn’t have minded anything if I hadn’t — —”

  The words would not come.

  “Hadn’t what?” he said.

  “If I hadn’t liked you — off my own bat!”

  “But if you really do, my glorious girl, surely that fixes it? We have nothing to do with anybody else. What does it matter how they take it?”

  “It matters to my pride.”

  “I don’t see where your pride comes in.”

  “Of course you don’t; you are not behind the scenes. And I can’t make you see. I’m not going to give my own people away to that extent, not even to you. But — I can just picture my mother’s face if we went in this very minute and told her we were engaged! She would fall upon both our necks!”

  “That wouldn’t matter,” said Jack stolidly. “That would be all right.”

  “It would be dreadful — dreadful. I couldn’t bear it when I know that yesterday — —”

  She checked herself firmly.

  “Well, what of yesterday?”

  “It would have been quite a different thing.”

  “What! if I’d spoken then?”

  “I — think so.”

  “You would have said — —”

  “I should have found out what your trouble was. You would have told me everything. And then — and then — —”

  He leant still further forward.

  “If you had wanted me very much — —”

  “I do want you very much.”

  “I should have found it easier to say ‘yes’” — the word was hardly audible— “than I ever shall now!”

  “But why, Olivia? Tell me why!”

  “You force it from me, word by word,” complained the girl.

  “Then let me see. I think I begin to see. You like me in myself almost well enough to marry me. Well, thank God for that much! But you don’t want to marry the Duke of St. Osmund’s, because you’re mortally afraid of what people will say. You think they’ll say you’re doing it for the main chance. And so they will — and so they may! They wouldn’t say it, and you wouldn’t think it, of any other man in my position; no, it’s because I’m not fit for my billet, that’s how it is! Not fit for it, and not fit for you; so they’d naturally think you were marrying me for what I’d got, and that you couldn’t bear. Ah, yes, I see hard enough; it’s as plain as a pikestaff now!”

  The girl saw, too; with the unconscious bluntness of a singularly direct nature, he had stripped her scruples bare, and their littleness horrified Olivia. The moral cowardice of her hesitation came home to her with an insupportable pang, and her mind was made up before his last sentences put her face in flames.

  “You are wrong,” she could only murmur; “oh, you are dreadfully wrong!”

  “I am right,” he answered bitterly, “and you are right. No wonder you dread the hard things that would be said of you! Take away the name and the money, and what am I? A back-block larrikin — a common stockman!”

  “The man for me,” said Olivia hoarsely.

  “Ah, yes, if I were not such a public match!”

  “Whatever you are — whatever you may be — if you want me still — —”

  “Want you! I have wanted you from the first. I shall want you till the last!”

  Her reply was indistinct; her tears were falling fast; he took her two white hands, but even them he did not touch with his lips. A great silence held them both, and all the world; the island willows kissed the stream; in the sheet of gold beyond, a fish leapt, and the ripple reached the boat in one long thin fold. The girl spoke first.

  “We need not be in a hurry to tell everybody,” she began; but the words were retracted in the same breath. “What am I saying? Of course we will tell. Oh, what a contempt you must have for me!”

  “I love you,” he answered simply. “I am too happy to live. It’s all too good to be true. Me of all men — the old bushman!”

  She looked lovingly on his bearded and sunburnt face, shining as she had never seen it shine before.

  “No; it’s the other way about,” she said. “I am not half good enough for you — you who were so brave yesterday in your trouble — who have been so simple always in your prosperity. It was enough to turn any one’s head, but you — ah, I don’t only love you. I admire you, dear; may God help me to make you happy!”

  They stayed much longer on the lake, finally disembarking on its uttermost shore, because Olivia was curious to see how the hut would look in the first rosy light of her incredible happiness. And when they came to it, the sunlight glinted on the new iron roofing; the pine-trees exhaled their resin in the noon-day heat following the midnight rain; and the shadows were shot with golden shafts, where all was golden to the lovers’ eyes.

  Jack made a diffident swain; it was the girl who slipped her hand into his.

  “You will never pull it down?” she said. “We will use it for a summer-house, and to remind you of your old life. And one day you will take me out to the Riverina, and show me the hut you really lived in, and all your old haunts. Oh, I shouldn’t mind if we had both to go out there for good! A hut would take far less looking
after than the Towers, and I should have you much more to myself. What fun it would be!”

  Jack thought this a pretty speech, but the girl herself was made presently aware of its insincerity. They had retraced their steps, and there in front of them, cool and grey in the mellow August sunshine, with every buttress thrown up by its shadow, and the very spires perfectly reflected in the sleeping lake, stood the stately home which would be theirs for ever. Olivia saw it with a decidedly new thrill. She was looking on her future home, and yet her husband would be this simple fellow! Wealth could not cloy, nor grandeur overpower, with such a mate; that was perhaps the substance of her thought. It simplified itself next moment. What had she done to deserve such happiness? What could she ever do? And a possible tabernacle in the bush entered into neither question, nor engaged her fancy any more.

  CHAPTER XVII

  AN ANTI-TOXINE

  They rowed over, and were in mid-water when the landau drove up to the house. It had been sent in for Mr. Dalrymple early in the forenoon. They saw nothing, however, until they landed, when the equipage was proceeding on its way to the stables, having deposited the guest. At this discovery, the Duke’s excitement knew no bounds, so Olivia urged him to run on and leave her; and he took her advice, chiefly regretting that he had missed the proud moment of welcoming his old boss in the hall.

  Jack regretted this the more when he reached the house. There was Dalrymple of Carara beginning his visit by roundly abusing the butler in the very portico! The guest was in a towering passion, the butler in a palsy of senile agitation; and between them on the step lay Dalrymple’s Gladstone bag.

  “What is the matter?” cried Jack, rushing up with a very blank face. “Stebbings, what’s this? What has he done, Mr. Dalrymple?”

  “Refused to take in my bag! Says it’s the footman’s place!”

  “Then what’s he here for? The man must be drunk. Are you, Stebbings?”

  The butler murmured an inarticulate reply.

  “Get to your pantry, sir!” roared Jack. “You shall hear more of this when you are sober. Old servant or new servant, out you clear!”

  And he took up the bag himself, as Stebbings gave a glassy stare and staggered off without a word.

  “I’m extremely sorry for losing my temper,” said Dalrymple, taking Jack’s arm as they entered the house; “but it always was rather short, as I fear I needn’t remind you. Really, though, your disgraceful old retainer would have provoked a saint. Drunk as fool in the middle of the day; drunk and insolent. Has the man been with you long?”

  “Only fifty years or so with the family,” replied Jack savagely; “but, by the living Lord, he may roll up his swag!”

  “Ah! I wouldn’t be hasty,” said Dalrymple. “One must make allowances for one’s old retainers; they’re a privileged class. How good of you, by the way, to send in for me in such style! It prepared me for much. But I am bound to say it didn’t prepare me for all this. No, I never should have pictured you in such an absolute palace had I not seen it with my own eyes!”

  And now the visitor was so plainly impressed by all he saw, that Jack readily forgave him the liberty he had taken in rating Stebbings on his own account. Still the incident rankled. Dalrymple was the one man in the world before whom the Duke of St. Osmund’s really did desire to play his new part creditably; and what could be said for a peer of the realm who kept a drunken butler to insult his guests? Jack could have shaken the old reprobate until the bones rattled again in his shrivelled skin. Dalrymple, however, seemed to think no more about the matter. He was entirely taken up with the suits of armour here in the hall: indeed Olivia discovered him lecturing Jack on his own trophies in a manner that would have led a stranger to mistake the guest for the host.

  It may be said at once that this was Dalrymple’s manner from first to last. It was that of the school-master to whom the boy who once trembled at his frown is a boy for evermore. And it greatly irritated Jack’s friends, though Jack himself saw nothing to resent.

  The Duke led his guest into the great drawing-room, and introduced him with gusto to Lady Caroline Sellwood and to Claude Lafont. But all his pride was in the visitor, who, with his handsome cynical face, his distinguished bearing, and his faultless summer suit, should show them that at least one “perfect gentleman” could come out of Riverina. Jack waited a moment to enjoy the easy speeches and the quiet assurance of Dalrymple; then he left the squatter to Lady Caroline and to Claude. It was within a few minutes of the luncheon hour. Jack wanted a word with Stebbings alone. The more he thought of it, the less able was he to understand the old butler’s extraordinary outbreak. Could he have been ill instead of drunk? A charitable explanation was just conceivable to Jack until he opened the pantry door; it fell to the ground that moment; for not only did he catch Stebbings in the act of filling a wine-glass with brandy, but the butler’s breath was foul already with the spirit.

  “Very well, my man,” said Jack slowly. “Drink as much as you like! You’ll hear from me when you’re sober. But show so much as the tip of your nose in the dining-room, and I’ll throw you through the window with my own hands!”

  The upshot of the matter was indirect and a little startling; for this was the reason why Dalrymple of Carara took the head of his old hand’s table at luncheon on the day of his arrival; and obviously it was Dalrymple’s temporary occupation of that position, added to his unforgettable past relations with his host, which led him to behave exactly as though the table were his own.

  A difficulty about the carving was the more immediate cause of the transposition. In the ordinary course, this was Stebbings’s business, which he conducted on the sideboard with due skill; in his absence, however, the footmen had placed the dishes on the table; and as these included a brace of cold grouse, and neither Jack nor Claude was an even moderate practitioner with the carving-knife, there was a little hitch. Mr. Sellwood was not present; he took his lunch on the links; and Jack made no secret of his relief when the squatter offered to fill the breach.

  “Capital!” he cried; “you take my place, sir, and I wish you joy of the billet.” And so the thing fell out.

  It had the merit of seating the Duke and Olivia side by side; and the happy pair were made distinctly happier by the mutual discovery that neither had as yet confided in a third soul. At the foot of the table, in the position which Jack had begged her to assume at the outset of her visit, sat Lady Caroline Sellwood. The clever young men were on opposite sides, as usual; nor did they fail to exchange those looks of neglected merit and of intellectual boredom which were another feature of their public appearances. Their visit had not been altogether a success. It was a mystery why they prolonged it. They had been invited, however, to spend a month at Maske Towers, which, after all, was neither an uncomfortable resting-place nor a discreditable temporary address.

  Francis Freke said a Latin grace inaudibly, and then the squatter went to work at the birds. These were a present from afar; there were no moors “on” Maske, as Jack explained, with a proud eye on Dalrymple’s knife. It flashed through the joints as though the bird had been already “boned”; on either side the breast fell away in creamy flakes; and Dalrymple talked as he carved, with the light touch and the easy grace of a many-sided man of the world. At first he seemed to join in everybody’s conversation in turns; but he was only getting his team together; and in a little everybody was listening to him. Yet he talked with such tact that it was possible for all to put in their word; indeed, he would appeal first to one, then to another, so that the general temper of the party rose to a high level. Only Olivia and Claude Lafont felt that this stranger was taking rather much upon himself. Otherwise it was a pleasure to listen to him; he was excellently well informed; before the end of the meal it came out that he had actually read Claude’s poems.

  “And lived to tell the tale!” he added with characteristic familiarity. “I can tell you I felt it a risk after reading that terrible depreciation of you in the Parthenon; you see, I’ve been in Engl
and a few days, and have been getting abreast of things at my hotel while my tailors were making me externally presentable. By the way, I ran across a young Australian journalist who is over here now, and who occasionally scribbles for the Parthenon. I asked him if he knew who had made that scurrilous attack upon you, Mr. Lafont. I was interested, because I knew you must be one of Jack’s relations.”

  “And did you find out?” inquired Claude, with pardonable curiosity.

  “He found out for me. The culprit was a man of your name, Mr. Stubbs; no relation, I hope?”

  “I hope not,” said Stubbs, emptying his glass; and his pallid complexion turned a sicklier yellow, as though his blood were nicotine, and the nicotine had mounted to his face.

  “I should like to hear that name in full,” said Lady Caroline down the length of the table. “I read the article myself. It was a disgrace to journalism. It is only fair to our Mr. Stubbs that we should hear his namesake’s Christian name.”

  “I think I can oblige,” said Dalrymple, producing his pocket-book. “His name was — ah! here it is! His name was Edmund. Edmund Stubbs!”

  Edmund Stubbs was not unequal to the occasion. He looked straight at Jack.

  “Will you kindly make it convenient to send me in to Devenholme in time for the next train?” he said. “If the Australian — gentleman — is going to stay in your house, I, for one, shall trespass no longer on your hospitality.”

  “Nor I, for another!” Llewellyn chimed in.

  And without further ceremony the mordant couple left the table and the room. Jack looked embarrassed, and Claude felt sorry for Jack. As for Olivia, she had felt vaguely indignant with Dalrymple ever since he had taken the head of the table; and this scene put a point to her feelings, while it also revived her first prejudice against the squatter. Lady Caroline, however, congratulated him upon an excellent piece of work.