Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “The two!” cried Moya in high excitement. “The two! I keep forgetting there were two of them; you see you never said so when you came to the station.”

  “I wanted to keep it all to myself,” confessed the crest-fallen sergeant. “I only told two living men who I thought it was that I was after. One was my sub — who guessed — and the other was Mr. Rigden.”

  “Were the two men who escaped anything like each other?”

  “Well, they were both old lags from the Success, and both superior men at one time; old particulars who’d been chained together, as you might say, for years; and I suppose that sort of thing does beat a man down into a type. However, their friendship didn’t go for much when they got outside; for Gipsy Marks murdered Captain Bovill as sure as emu’s eggs are emu’s eggs!”

  “Murdered him!” gasped Moya; and her brain reeled to think of the hours she had spent with the murderer. But all was clear to her now, from the way in which Rigden had been imposed upon in the beginning, to the impostor’s obstinate and terrified refusal to own himself as such to the very end.

  “Yes, murdered him on the other side of the Murray; the body’s only just been found; and meanwhile the murderer’s slipped through my fingers,” said the sergeant, sourly; “for if it wasn’t poor old Bovill I was after, at all events it was Gipsy Marks.”

  Moya sprang to her feet.

  “It was,” she cried; “but he hasn’t slipped through your fingers at all, unless he’s dead. He wasn’t when I left him two or three hours ago.”

  “When you left him?”

  “Yes, I found him, and was with him all the morning.”

  “In Blind Man’s Block — with that ruffian?”

  “He took my horse and my water-bag, and left me there to die of thirst; but the dear horse turned the tables on him — poor wretch!”

  “And you never told me!”

  “I am trying to tell you now.”

  And he let her finish.

  But she would not let him go.

  “Dear Sergeant Harkness, I can’t pretend to have an ounce of pity left for that dreadful being in Blind Man’s Block. A murderer, too! At least I have more pity for some one else, and you must let me take him away before you go.”

  “Impossible, my dear young lady — that is, before communicating with Mr. Cross.”

  “About bail?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the amount named this morning?”

  “Fifty pounds.”

  “Give me a sheet of paper and a stamp, and I’ll write a cheque myself.”

  Harkness considered.

  “Certainly that could be done,” he said at length.

  “Then quickly — quickly!”

  Yet even when it was done she detained him; even when he put a big key into her hand.

  “Must this go further — before the magistrates — after you have found him?”

  Harkness hardened.

  “The offence is the same. I’m afraid it must.”

  “It will make it very unpleasant for me,” sighed Moya, “when I come up here. And when I’ve found him for you — and undone anything that was done — though I don’t admit that anything was — I — well, I really think you might!”

  “Might what?”

  “Withdraw the charge!”

  “But those tracks weren’t his. Mr. Rigden made them. He shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Of course he shouldn’t — if he did.”

  “But of course he did, Miss Bethune. I’ve known Mr. Rigden for years; we used to be very good friends. I shouldn’t speak as I do unless I spoke by the book. But — why on earth did he go and do a thing like that?”

  Moya paused.

  “If I tell you will you never tell a soul?”

  “Never,” said the rash sergeant.

  “Then he was imposed upon. The wretch pretended he — had some claim — I cannot tell you what. I can tell you no more.”

  It was provokingly little to have to keep secret for lifetime; yet Harkness was glad to hear even this.

  “It was the only possible sort of explanation,” said he.

  “But it won’t explain enough for the world,” sighed Moya, so meaningly that the sergeant asked her what she did mean.

  “I must really get off,” he added.

  “Then I’ll be plain with you,” cried the girl. “Either you must withdraw this charge, and pretend that those tracks were genuine, or I can never come up here to live!”

  And she looked her loveliest to emphasise the threat.

  “I must see Mr. Rigden about that,” was, however, all that Harkness would vouchsafe.

  “Very well! That’s only fair. Meanwhile — I — trust you, Sergeant Harkness. And I never yet trusted the wrong man!”

  That was Moya’s last word.

  It is therefore a pity that it was not strictly true.

  It was a wonderful ride they had together, that ride between the police-barracks and the station, and from drowsy afternoon into cool sweet night. The crickets chirped their welcome on the very boundary, and the same stars came out that Moya had seen swept away in the morning, one by one again. Then the moon came up with a bound, but hung a little as though caught in some pine-trees on the horizon, that seemed scratched upon its disc. And Moya remarked that they were very near home, with such a wealth of tenderness in the supreme word that a mist came over Rigden’s eyes.

  “Thank God,” said he, “that I have lived to hear you call it so, even if it never is to be.”

  “But it is — it is. Our own dear home!”

  “We shall see.”

  “What do you mean, darling?”

  “I am going to tell Theodore the whole thing.”

  “After I’ve taken such pains to make it certain that none of them need ever know a word?”

  “Yes; he shall know; he can do what he thinks fit about letting it go any further.”

  Moya was silent for a little.

  “You’re right,” she said at last. “I know Theodore. He’ll never breathe it; but he’ll think all the more of you, dearest.”

  “I owe it to him. I owe it to you all, and to myself. I am not naturally a fraud, Moya.”

  “On the other hand, it was very natural not to speak of such a thing.”

  “But it was wrong. I knew it at the time. Only I could not risk — —”

  Moya touched his lips with her switch.

  “Hush, sir! That’s the one part I shall never — quite — forgive.”

  “But you have taught me a lesson. I shall never keep another thing back from you in all my life!”

  “And I will never be horrid to you again, darling! But of course there will be exceptions to both rules; to yours because there are some things which wouldn’t be my business (but this wasn’t one of them); to mine, because — well — we none of us have the tempers of angels.”

  “But you have been my good angel already — and more — so much more!”

  They came to the home-paddock gate. The moon was high above the pines. Underneath there were the lesser lights, the earthly lights, but all else was celestial peace.

  “I hope they’re not looking for me still,” said Moya.

  “If they are I must go and look for them.”

  “I won’t let you. It’s too sweet — the pines — the moonlight — everything.”

  They rode up to the homestead, with each roof beaming to the moon.

  “Not much of a place for the belle of Toorak,” sighed Rigden.

  “Perhaps not. But, of all places, the place for me!”

  “You’re as keen as Ives,” laughed Rigden as he helped her to dismount. “And I was so afraid the place would choke you off!”

  PECCAVI

  First published in 1900 by Richards (London), Peccavi is one of Hornung’s novels noted for exploring a theme of guilt throughout the narrative. The title is Latin for “I have sinned” and the story involves a clergyman that lives his life trying to atone for an earlier crim
e.

  The original title page

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  I

  DUST TO DUST

  Long Stow church lay hidden for the summer amid a million leaves. It had neither tower nor steeple to show above the trees; nor was the scaffolding between nave and chancel an earnest of one or the other to come. It was a simple little church, of no antiquity and few exterior pretensions, and the alterations it was undergoing were of a very practical character. A sandstone upstart in a countryside of flint, it stood aloof from the road, on a green knoll now yellow with buttercups, and shaded all day long by horse-chestnuts and elms. The church formed the eastern extremity of the village of Long Stow.

  It was Midsummer Day, and a Saturday, and the middle of the Saturday afternoon. So all the village was there, though from the road one saw only the idle group about the gate, and on the old flint wall a row of children commanded by the schoolmaster to “keep outside.” Pinafores pressed against the coping, stockinged legs dangling, fidgety hob-nails kicking stray sparks from the flint; anticipation at the gate, fascination on the wall, law and order on the path in the schoolmaster’s person; and in the cool green shade hard by, a couple of planks, a crumbling hillock, an open grave.

  Near his handiwork hovered the sexton, a wizened being, twisted with rheumatism, leaning on his spade, and grinning as usual over the stupendous hallucination of his latter years. He had swallowed a rudimentary frog with some impure water. This frog had reached maturity in the sexton’s body. Many believed it. The man himself could hear it croaking in his breast, where it commanded the pass to his stomach, and intercepted every morsel that he swallowed. Certainly the sexton was very lean, if not starving to death quite as fast as he declared; for he had become a tiresome egotist on the point, who, even now, must hobble to the schoolmaster with the last report of his unique ailment.

  “That croap wuss than ever. Would ‘ee like to listen, Mr. Jones?”

  And the bent man almost straightened for the nonce, protruding his chest with a toothless grin of huge enjoyment.

  “Thank you,” said the schoolmaster. “I’ve something else to do.”

  “Croap, croap, croap!” chuckled the sexton. “That take every mortal thing I eat. An’ doctor can’t do nothun for me — not he!”

  “I should think he couldn’t.”

  “Why, I do declare he be croapun now! That fare to bring me to my own grave afore long. Do you listen, Mr. Jones; that croap like billy-oh this very minute!”

  It took a rough word to get rid of him.

  “You be off, Busby. Can’t you see I’m trying to listen to something else?”

  In the church the rector was reciting the first of the appointed psalms. Every syllable could be heard upon the path. His reading was Mr. Carlton’s least disputed gift, thanks to a fine voice, an unerring sense of the values of words, and a delivery without let or blemish. Yet there was no evidence that the reader felt a word of what he read, for one and all were pitched in the deliberate monotone rarely to be heard outside a church. And just where some voices would have failed, that of the Rector of Long Stow rang clearest and most precise:

  “When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment: every man therefore is but vanity.

  “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling: hold not thy peace at my tears.

  “For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.

  “O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen . . .”

  The sexton was regaling the children on the wall with the ever-popular details of his notorious malady. The schoolmaster still strutted on the path, now peeping in at the porch, now reporting particulars to the curious at the gate: a quaint incarnation of conscious melancholy and unconscious enjoyment.

  “Hardly a dry eye in the church!” he announced after the psalm. “Mr. Carlton and Musk himself are about the only two that fare to hide what they feel.”

  “And what does Mr. Carlton feel?” asked a lout with a rose in his coat. “About as much as my little finger!”

  “Ay,” said another, “he cares for nothing but his Roman candles, and his transcripts and gargles.”

  Transepts and gargoyles.

  “Come,” said the schoolmaster, “you wouldn’t have the parson break down in church, would you? I’m sorry I mentioned him. I was thinking of Jasper Musk. He just stands as though Mr. Carlton had carved him out of stone.”

  “The wonder is that he can stand there at all,” retorted the fellow with the flower, “to hear what he don’t believe read by a man he don’t believe in. A funeral, is it? It’s as well we know — he’d take a weddun in the same voice.”

  The schoolmaster turned away with an ambiguous shrug. It was not his business to defend Mr. Carlton against the disaffected and the undevout. He considered his duty done when he informed the rector who his enemies were, and (if permitted to proceed) what they were saying behind his back. The schoolmaster made a mental mark against the name of one Cubitt, ex-choirman, and, forthwith transferring his attention to the audience on the wall, put a stop to their untimely entertainment before returning softly to the porch.

  In Long Stow churchyard there was shade all day, but in the church it was dusk from that moment in the forenoon when the east window lost the sun. This peculiarity was partly temporary. The church was in a transition stage; it was putting forth transepts north and south; meanwhile there was much boarding within, and a window in eclipse on either side. The surrounding foliage added its own shade; and each time the schoolmaster stole out of the sunlight into the porch, to peer up the nave, it was several moments before he could see anything at all. And then it was but a few high lights in a sea of gloom: first the east window, as yet unstained, its three quatrefoils filled with summer sky, the rest with waving branches; next, the brass lectern, the surplice behind it, the high white forehead above. Then in the chancel something gleamed: that was the coffin, resting on trestles. Then in the choir seats, otherwise deserted, a figure grew out of the shadows, a solitary and a massive figure, that stood even now when everybody else was seated, finely regardless of the fact. It was a man, elderly, but very powerfully built. The hair stood white and thick upon the large strong head, less white and shorter on the broad deep jowl. The head was carried with a certain dignity, rude, savage, indomitable. The eyes gazed fixedly at the opposite wall; not once did they condescend to the thing that gleamed upon the trestles. One great hand was knotted over the knob of a mighty stick, on which the old man leant stiffly. He was dressed in black, not quite as a gentleman, yet as befitted the most substantial man but one in the parish. And that was Jasper Musk.

  The parson finished the lesson, and his white brow bent over the closed book; the face beneath was bearded and much tanned, and in it there burnt an eye that came as a surprise after that formal voice; and the hand that closed the book was sensitive but strong. Stepping from the lectern, the clergyman declared his calibre in an obeisance towards the altar, then led the way slowly down the aisle. Bearers rose from the shades and followed with the coffin; they were almost at the porch before Jasper Musk took notice enough to limp after them with much noise from his stick. The congregation waited for him, swar
ming into the aisle in the big man’s wake. So they came to the grave.

  And there broad daylight revealed a circumstance that came as a shock to most of those who had followed the body from the church, but as an outrage to the officiating clergyman: the coffin bore no plate. Mr. Carlton coloured to the hair, and his deep eye flashed upon the chief mourner; the latter leant upon his stick and replied with a grim glare across the open grave. For a moment the wind washed through the trees, and every sparrow made itself heard; then the rector’s eyes dropped to his book, but his voice rang colder than before. And presently the earth received its own.

  Mr. Carlton had pronounced the benediction, and a solemn hush still held all assembled, when a bicycle bell jarred staccato in the road; a moment later, with a sharp word for some children who had tired of the funeral and strayed across his path, the rider dismounted outside the saddler’s workshop, a tiny cabin next his house and opposite the church. The cyclist was a lad in his teens, dark, handsome, dapper, but small for his age, which was that of high collars and fancy ties; and he rode a fancy bicycle, the high machine of the day, but extravagantly nickelled in all its parts.

  “Well, Fuller,” said he, “who are they burying?”

  Fuller, the saddler, who enjoyed a local monopoly in the exercise of his craft, but whose trade was the mere relaxation of a life spent in reading and disseminating the news of the day, was spelling through the Standard at his bench behind the open window. He dropped his paper and whipped the spectacles from a big dogmatic nose.

  “Gord love yer, Mr. Sidney, do you stand there and tell me you haven’t heard?”

  “How could I hear when I’m only home from Saturdays to Mondays? I’m on my way home now. Old Sally Webb — is it — or one of the old Wilsons?”

  “No, sir,” said the saddler; “that’s no old person. Gord love yer,” he cried again, “I wish that was!”

  “Who is it, Mr. Fuller?”

  “That’s Molly Musk,” said Fuller, slowly; “that’s who that is, Mr. Sidney.”

  The boy had not the average capacity for astonishment; he was not, in fact, the average boy; but at the name his eyebrows shot up and his mouth grew round.