Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  Then in a moment his mind was chaos.

  There is nothing more confusing to the brain than memory. Often there is nothing so agonising and unsparing in its torture, when memory preys upon the present, consuming all its peace and promise like some foul vampire. Miles was now in the clutch of memory in its form of monster. His teeth were clenched, his face livid, the veins on his forehead standing out like the spreading roots of an oak. Spots of blood stood under the nails of his clenched fingers.

  The stars blinked high overhead, and the stars deep down in the tranquil water answered them. The voice of the weir seemed nearer and louder. A gentle breeze stirred the line of poplars by the river’s brink in the meadow, and fanned the temples of the motionless man at their feet. A bat passed close over him, lightly touching his hair with its wing. Miles did not stir.

  Slowly — as it were, limb by limb — he was freeing himself from the grip of the hideous past. At last, with a sudden gesture, he flung back his head, and his eyes gazed upward to the zenith. It was an awful gaze: a vision of honour and happiness beyond a narrow neck of crime — a glimpse of heaven across the gulf of hell.

  His tongue articulated the word that had trembled on his lips before: now it embodied a fixed resolve— “To-morrow! to-morrow!”

  Mr. Miles became suddenly aware that his name was being spoken somewhere in the distance by a voice he knew — young Edmonstone’s. A moment later the speaker was with him, and had added:

  “There is someone who wants to speak to you, standing outside the gate.”

  There was a gleam of triumph in the younger man’s eyes that shot out from the misery of his face like lightning from a cloud, throwing that misery into stronger relief. Miles noted this swift gleam, and it struck terror into his heart — at this moment, more than terror. He was as a general who, on the eve of the brilliant stroke that is to leave him conqueror, hears the alarm sounded in his own rearguard. He stared Dick up and down for some moments. When he spoke, it was — to the ear — with perfect coolness:

  “Thanks. I half-expected something of the kind; but it is an infernal nuisance to-night. I must get a coat and hat, for I may have to go up to town at once.” And he strode away.

  Dick watched him out of sight, admiring more than anything he had seen in this man his readiness and resource at this moment. He would have liked to follow Miles, and keep him within reach or sight; but those were not his directions. Instead, he crossed the bridge, at once bore to the left, and crept into the shrubbery. Keeping close to the wall, without stirring a single leaf, he gained a spot within ten paces of the gate, whence he could command most of the drive and a fair slice of the road. In a minute Miles approached at a swinging walk. He passed close to Dick, and so through the gate. At that moment a man emerged from the shadows at the other side of the road; it was the man Dick had discovered in the shrubbery, though he had seen him before — in the Settler’s Hut!

  The two men were now but a few paces apart; with little more than a yard between them, they stopped. A low chuckle escaped one of them; but without another sound they turned — passed slowly down the road, side by side, and so out of sight.

  Dick gasped: it was so very unlike his preconceived notions of arrest!

  XIII

  IN BUSHEY PARK

  “So boss, you know me?”

  “I have not forgotten you, you scoundrel!”

  Such was the interchange of greetings between the man from the Exhibition and Mr. Miles, the Australian. They had halted at a lamp-post some distance down the road, and stood facing each other in the gaslight.

  “That’s right. I’m glad you don’t forget old mates,” said the stout, round-shouldered man. “That’s one good thing, anyway; but it’s a bad’un to go calling them names first set-off, especially when — —”

  “Look here,” interrupted Miles, with an admirable imitation of his ordinary tone; “I haven’t much time to give you, my man. How the deuce did you get here? And what the deuce do you want with me?”

  “Oh, so you’re in a hurry, are you?” sneered the man. “And you want to get back to the music, and the wine, and the women, do you?”

  “Listen!” said Miles smoothly; “do you hear that step in the distance? It’s coming nearer; it’s the policeman, for certain; and if you don’t get your business stated and done with before he reaches us, I’ll give you in charge. Nothing simpler: I know the men on this beat, and they know me.”

  “Not so well as I do, I reckon!” returned the other dryly, and with the quiet insolence of confident security. “And so you’re the fine gentleman now, are you?”

  “If you like — and for all you can prove to the contrary.”

  “The Australian gentleman on a trip home, eh? Good; very good! And your name is Miles!”

  “It’s worth your neck to make it anything else?”

  The other thrust forward his face, and the beady eyes glittered with a malignant fire. “You don’t lose much time about coming to threats, mate,” he snarled. “P’r’aps it’ud be better if you waited a bit; p’r’aps I’m harder to funk than you think! Because I dare prove to the contrary, and I dare give you your right name. Have you forgotten it? Then I’ll remind you; and your friend the bobby shall hear too, now he’s come so close. How’s this, then? — Edward Ryan, otherwise Ned the Ranger; otherwise — and known all over the world, this is — otherwise—”

  Miles stopped him with a rapid, fierce gesture, at the same time quietly sliding his left hand within his overcoat. He felt for his revolver. It was not there. He recalled the circumstance which had compelled him to lay it aside. It seemed like Fate: for months that weapon had never been beyond the reach of his hand; now, for the first time, he required it, and was crippled for want of it. He recovered his composure in a moment, but not before his discomfiture had been noticed, and its cause shrewdly guessed. Laying a heavy hand on the other’s broad, rounded shoulder, he said simply and impressively:

  “Hush!”

  “Then let’s move on.”

  “Where?”

  “Where we can talk.”

  The man pointed across the road to a broad opening directly opposite the lamp-post. It was the beginning of another road; the spot where they stood was indeed the junction of the cross and down-stroke of a capital letter T, of which the cross was the road that ran parallel with the river.

  “Very well,” said Miles, with suspicious alacrity; “but I must go back first to make some excuse, or they will be sending after me.”

  “Then, while you are gone, I shall confide in your friend the policeman.”

  Miles uttered a curse, and led the way across the road and straight on. There were no lamps in the road they entered now — no houses, no lights of any kind — but on the right a tall hedge, and on the left trim posts and rails, with fields beyond. They walked on for some minutes in silence, which was at length broken by Miles’s unwelcome visitor.

  “It’s no sort o’ use you being in a hurry,” said he. “I’ve found you out; why not make the best of it?”

  “What am I to do for you?” asked Miles, as smoothly as though the man by his side were an ordinary highway beggar.

  “You’ll see in good time. Sorry I’ve put you to inconvenience, but if you weren’t passing for what you ain’t you wouldn’t feel it so; so you see, Ned Ryan, playing the gent has its drawbacks. Now, after me having crossed the whole blessed world to speak to you, it would be roughish if you refused me your best ear; now wouldn’t it?”

  “You have just landed, then?” said Miles; and added, after a pause, “I hoped you were dead.”

  “Thanks,” returned the other, in the tone of coarse irony that he had employed from the beginning. “Being one as returns good for evil, I don’t mind saying I was never so glad as when I clapped eyes on you yesterday — alive and safe.”

  “Yesterday! Where?”

  “Never mind where. But I ain’t just landed — Oh, no!”

  Suddenly Miles stopped short in his walk. The
y had entered again the region of lights and houses; the road was no longer dark and lonely; it had intersected the highroad that leads to Kingston, and afterwards bent in curves to the right; now its left boundary was the white picket-fence of the railway, and, a hundred yards beyond, a cluster of bright lights indicated Teddington station.

  “Not a step further,” said Miles.

  “What! not to the station? How can we talk—”

  “You are a greater fool than I took you for,” said Miles scornfully.

  “Yes? Well, anyway, I mean to say what I’ve got to say, wherever it is,” was the dogged reply. “If you came to town to my lodging, not a soul could disturb us. We can’t talk here.”

  Miles hesitated.

  “There is a place, five minutes’ walk from here, that I would trust before any room,” he said presently. “Only be reasonable, my good fellow, and I’ll hear what you have to say there.”

  The man turned his head and glanced sharply in the direction whence they had come. Then he assented.

  Miles led the way over the wooden footbridge that spans the line a little way above the station. In three minutes they walked in the shadow of great trees. The high wall in front of them bent inwards, opening a wide mouth. Here were iron gates and lamps; and beyond, black forms and deep shadows, and the silence of sleeping trees. Without a word they passed through the gates into Bushey Park.

  Miles chose the left side of the avenue, and led on under the spreading branches of the horse-chestnuts. Perhaps a furlong from the gates he stopped short, and confronted his companion.

  “Here I will settle with you,” he said, sternly. “Tell me what you want; or first, if you like, how you found me. For the last thing I remember of you, Jem Pound, is that I sacked you from our little concern — for murder.”

  The man took a short step forward, and hissed back his retort:

  “And the last thing I heard of you — was your sticking up the Mount Clarence bank, and taking five hundred ounces of gold! You were taken; but escaped the same night — with the swag. That’s the last I heard of you — Ned Ryan — Ned the Ranger — Sundown!”

  “I can hang you for that murder,” pursued Miles, as though he had not heard a word of this retort.

  “Not without dragging yourself in after me, for life; which you’d find the worse half of the bargain! Now listen, Ned Ryan; I’ll be plain with you. I can, and mean to, bleed you for that gold — for my fair share of it.”

  “And this is what you want with me?” asked Miles, in a tone so low and yet so fierce that the confidence of Jem Pound was for an instant shaken.

  “I want money; I’m desperate — starving!” he answered, his tone sinking for once into a whine.

  “Starvation doesn’t carry a man half round the world.”

  “I was helped,” said Pound darkly.

  “Who helped you?”

  “All in good time, Sundown, old mate! Come, show me the colour of it first.”

  Miles spread out his arms with a gesture that was candour itself.

  “I have none to give you. I am cleaned out myself.”

  “That’s a lie!” cried Pound, with a savage oath.

  Miles answered with cool contempt:

  “Do you think a man clears out with five hundred ounces in his pockets? Do you think he could carry it ten miles, let alone two hundred?”

  Jem Pound looked hard at the man who had been his captain in a life of crime. A trace of the old admiration and crude respect for a brilliant fearless leader, succeeded though this had been by years of bitter hatred, crept into his voice as he replied:

  “You could! No one else! No other man could have escaped at all as you did. I don’t know the thing you couldn’t do!”

  “Fool!” muttered Miles, half to himself.

  “That’s fool number two,” answered Pound angrily. “Well, maybe I am one, maybe I’m not; anyhow I’ve done what a dozen traps have tried and failed, and I’ll go on failing — until I help them: I’ve run you to earth, Ned Ryan!”

  “Ah! Well, tell me how.”

  “No, I heard a footstep just then; people are about.”

  “A chance passer,” said Miles.

  “You should have come with me. Walls are safe if you whisper; here there are no walls.”

  “You are right. We have stuck to the most public part, though; follow me through here.”

  They had been standing between two noble trees of the main avenue. This avenue, as all the world knows, is composed of nothing but horse chestnuts; but behind the front rank on either side are four lines of limes, forming to right and left of the great artery four minor parallel channels. Miles and his companion, turning inwards, crossed the soft sward of the minor avenues, and emerged on the more or less broken ground that expands southward to Hampton Wick. This tract is patched in places with low bracken, and dotted in others with young trees. It is streaked with converging paths — some worn by the heavy tread of men, others by the light feet of the deer, but all soft and grassy, and no more conspicuous than the delicate veins of a woman’s hand.

  They left the trees behind, and strode on heedlessly into the darkness. Their shins split the dew from the ferns; startled fawns rose in front of them and scampered swiftly out of sight, a momentary patch of grey upon the purple night.

  “This will suit you,” said Miles, still striding aimlessly on. “It is a good deal safer than houses here. Now for your story.”

  He was careful as they walked to keep a few inches in the rear of Pound, who, for his part, never let his right hand stray from a certain sheath that hung from the belt under his coat: the two men had preserved these counter-precautions from the moment they quitted the lighted roads.

  “It is soon told, though it makes me sweat to think of it — all but the end, and that was so mighty neat the rest’s of no account,” Pound began, with a low laugh. “Well, you turned me adrift, and I lived like a hunted dingo for very near a year. If I’d dared to risk it, I’d have blabbed on you quick enough; but there was no bait about Queen’s evidence, and I daren’t let on a word else — you may thank the devil for that, not me! Well, I had no money, but I got some work at the stations, though in such mortal terror that I daren’t stay long in one place, until at last I got a shepherd’s billet, with a hut where no one saw me from week’s end to week’s end. There I was safe, but in hell! I daren’t lay down o’ nights; when I did I couldn’t sleep. I looked out o’ the door twenty times a night to see if they were coming for me. I saw frightful things, and heard hellish sounds; I got the horrors without a drop o’ liquor! You did all this, Ned Ryan — you did it all!”

  Inflamed by the memory of his torments, Pound raised his voice in rage and hate that a single day had exalted from impotency to might. But rage red-hot only aggravates the composure of a cool antagonist, and the reply was cold as death:

  “Blame yourself. If you had kept clean hands, you might have stuck to us to the end; as it was, you would have swung the lot of us in another month. No man can accuse me of spilling blood — nor poor Hickey either, for that matter; but you — I could dangle you to-morrow! Remember that, Jem Pound; and go on.”

  “I’ll remember a bit more — you’ll see!” returned Pound with a stifled gasp. He was silent for the next minute; then added in the tone of one who bides his time to laugh last and loudest: “Go on? Right! Well, then, after a long time I showed my nose in a town, and no harm came of it.”

  “What town?”

  “Townsville.”

  “Why Townsville?” Miles asked quickly.

  “Your good lady was there; I knew she would give me — well, call it assistance.”

  “That was clever of you,” said Miles after a moment’s silence, but his calm utterance was less natural than before.

  “I wanted a ship,” Pound continued; “and could have got one too, through being at sea before at odd times, if I’d dared loaf about the quay by day. Well, one dark night I was casting my eyes over the Torres Straits mail boat, whe
n a big man rushed by me and crept on board like a cat. I knew it was you that moment; I’d heard of your escape. You’d your swag with you; the gold was in it — I knew it! What’s the use of shaking your head? Of course it was. Well, first I pushed forward to speak to you, then I drew back. Why? Because just then you’d have thought no more of knocking me on the head and watching me drown before your eyes than I’d think of — —”

  “Committing another murder! By heaven, I wish I had had the chance!” muttered Miles.

  “Then, if I’d started the hue and cry, it would have meant killing the golden goose — and most likely me with it. I thought of something better: I saw you drop down into the hold — there was too much risk in showing your money for a passage or trying for a fo’c’stle berth; the boat was to sail at daylight. I rushed to your wife and told her; but her cottage was three miles out of the town, worse luck to it! and when I got her to the quay, you were under way and nearly out of sight — half-an-hour late in sailing, and you’d have had a friend among the passengers!”

  “And what then?”

  “Why, then your wife was mad! I soothed her: she told me that she had some money, and I told her if she gave me some of it I might still catch you for her. I showed her how the mail from Sydney, by changing at Brindisi, would land one in England before the Queensland boat. I knew it was an off-chance whether you ever meant to reach England at all, or whether you’d succeed if you tried; but,” said Pound, lowering his voice unaccountably, “I was keen to be quit of the country myself. Here was my chance, and I took it; your wife shelled out, and I lost no time.”

  The man ceased speaking, and looked sharply about him. His eyes were become thoroughly used to the darkness, so that he could see some distance all round with accuracy and ease; but they were eyes no less keen than quick; and so sure-sighted that one glance was at all times enough for them, and corroboration by a second a thing unthought of.